One of the quintessential Diablo experiences is picking up some promising-looking gear, surveying the random affixes and stat ranges it rolled up with, and realizing that it’s a near miss. Once upon a time, that was all there was too it - you sell or drop the offending loot and keep grinding, but in Diablo IV, a near miss might be salvageable via the services of various merchants. One of these services is the ability to Temper gear via a blacksmith, adding new stats to equipment, and this page will discuss how Tempering gear works in Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred.

Page Breakdown¶

A Quick Look into Tempering Items during Vessel of Hatred¶

A blacksmith can add new affixes to your gear via the Tempering service in Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, allowing you to round out your arsenal beyond what natural drops and Enchanting would otherwise allow:

• Only rare and legendary items can be Tempered
• Tempering costs materials and gold
• You must find and read Temper Manuals to learn affixes to add via Tempering
• One of several affixes is randomly applied from the selected affix recipe
• Each affix has a random stat range
• You can reroll unwanted affixes and bad stat rolls
• The number of rerolls allowed are limited
• Rerolling Ancestral gear is very expensive

Upgrading Items via Tempering¶

Visit any blacksmith and peruse their services and you should see the “Tempering” option, a novel way for blacksmiths to upgrade your gear. Gone is the old upgrade system which provided flat stat and Item Power boosts (up to five upgrades per item), replaced now with Masteworking and Tempering. The former is similar to the old upgrading system, boosting an item’s stats in increments at increasing resource costs, while Tempering adds entirely new affixes to an item.

Rules, exceptions, costs and RNG abound, however - if it was a simple process of picking what affixes you wanted and boosting your gear, the entire gameplay loop would be undermined. Rare and legendary items can be Tempered (not normal, magical or unique items) and the former can have one new affix added to them, while the latter can have two. Tempering weapons will consume various resources depending on the type and quality of the item in question, as follows:

Tempering Item Costs¶

Temper Manuals and Tempering Categories¶

Possessing the required materials and an item worth Tempering is a good start, but you’ll also need to acquire the affixes you wish to bestow upon said gear. To do this you’ll need to find Temper Manuals, which are obtained as most other sorts of loot are - as random drops. Kill enemies, open caches from the Tree of Whispers, Helltide chests, run Nightmare Dungeons, etc. Each manual will teach you a set of affixes which can then be selected during Tempering.

For example, you can find a “Plains Augments” Temper Manual that will teach you the following affixes:

• +X% Chance for Rushing Claw to Deal Double Damage
• +X% Chance for Ravager to Extra Hit
• +X to Furnace

These affixes are grouped into six categories: Weapons, Offensive, Defensive, Utility, Mobility and Resource, and certain types of gear can only select affix groups from specific categories, as follows:

Temper Affix Recipes by Item Type¶

The aforementioned “Plains Augments” affixes are in the Weapons category, so they could only be applied to weapons. It’s worth noting that there are quite a lot of different manuals (for the Spiritborn we were testing we counted 37 affix recipes, and Temper Manuals come in varying rarities, so expect to be picking up quite a few of these. On the plus side, old, obsolete recipes will be replaced by superior versions as you find rarer Temper Manuals - just use them from your inventory as you find them.

Adding Affixes to Gear and Rerolling Affixes¶

Once you have accumulated a library of affix recipes via Temper Manuals (something you’ll do as you level up your toon) and acquire materials and gear worth upgrading, you’re ready to visit a blacksmith. Select the item you wish to Temper, and one of the eligible categories for it and you’ll be presented with a list of the affix recipes you’ve acquired. At this point you’ll choose a recipe that contains an affix (or affixes) you want and one of those affixes will randomly be applied to the chosen item. With the “Plains Augments” Temper Manual mentioned earlier that would be one of the three listed affixes.

While some affix recipes have numerous affixes that you might be happy with, others do not, especially when it comes to boosting a specific skill or type of damage. Generally speaking, the more powerful and refined your build becomes, the harder it will be to get the exact affix you want. Fortunately you can spend more resources to reroll the affix applied by Tempering. Unfortunately, you only have a limited number of rerolls per item. It’s also worth noting that the affixes added via Tempering aren’t just randomly selected, but they also tend to have a stat range they can apply, so even if you get what you want, you may end up with a minimum roll that you may wish to reroll.

Simply put, adding 1-2 affixes per item with a random chance to get the affix you want with a sufficiently high roll is a resource sink, and you’ll likely end up spending no small amount of materials and gold to get the exact affixes you want.