You’ve killed all the bosses, you’ve slain every demon you can find, you found the loot, and you’ve finally got your hands on the weapon you’ve been looking for. Time to enhance it but there’s a problem, you’re too poor. In Diablo 4 that’s all too common a problem with the new masterworking mechanic, but a patch has just dropped which should make it all a little cheaper.
In Diablo 4, masterworking is an endgame crafting option that allows you to increasingly buff your gear over a series of levels. Each of these costs an increasing amount of gold and resources to buy. It’s the gold that’s been a problem in this action RPG, with higher levels costing economy-crashing amounts. In today’s patch, those gold requirements have been slashed from rank five onwards. For example, rank five now costs 400,000 gold down from 450,000 and rank 12 costs 2,500,000 gold down from 10,000,000. It’s a big price cut, with Blizzard stating that its reasoning is it wants players to focus on resource gathering, not gold hoarding.
There’s plenty else to chew over in this update too. Another formerly scarce material, Scattered Prisms, has just had its drop rate buffed. Treasure Goblins, World Bosses, and even the Butcher will now either have a greater or certain chance to drop them, making adding sockets to your gear a less time-consuming pastime than before.
The game’s UI has been clarified in a few regards as well. The Armor cap is now visible in tooltips for armor items, stat comparisons have been cleaned up making the information more parseable, and there’s plenty more.
In addition to all that, there’s the usual raft of bug fixes, issue resolutions, and tweaks. A couple of these have far-ranging effects, meaning other changes have been introduced as well. Surge damage from Sorcerer’s Enhanced Charged bolts has been buffed to counterbalance a reduction in surge occurrences. Whisper bounty requirements have been reduced for defeating Hellborne, down from three to one, in response to a correction about what counts as Hellborne for the bounty.
If you’d like to read the full patch notes, you can head over to the Diablo 4 site for the full rundown on what’s new and what’s changed.
You can get a helping hand in your adventures with our guides to the different Diablo 4 classes and the best Diablo 4 builds, making sure you bring the pain while being armed with knowledge.
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