Season 4 introduced some new features to Diablo 4. One of these is the Hardening and Completion crafting systems. These are actually great, but if you upgrade items in the wrong order, you’re pretty much literally throwing away gold.
These systems are about:
Here you can find an overview of all the changes and content of Season 4.
This is the error: When you find a powerful item, your first impulse may be to run straight to the Occultist and re-roll one of the stats you don’t like – or imprint a legendary affix to make the item fit into your build.
However, in many cases this is a mistake, because both cost an enormous amount of gold and gold is an extremely scarce resource in Season 4 anyway. With a bit of bad luck, an item will cost you several million here:
If you only then harden an item, you will face a problem because the function is limited. You cannot harden an item as often as you like, but only as often as the potential is present. In concrete terms, this means: If, in the worst case scenario, you roll the same affix 5 times that you don’t need, the item is almost gone, even though you have already invested several million.
Worse doesn’t mean unusable
The user TryBeingCool gives the tip on Reddit: If you find a good item, harden it first. Then you can enchant it, because you can do this as often as you like. But at least you have something in your hand that makes the investment worth it.
If you don’t get the affixes you want, you can save the gold instead. TryBeingCool received thanks from hundreds of players for the simple tip.
An item that is not perfect does not have to be useless, as other users note. Just because it doesn’t have 5 perfect values on it, it can still be an upgrade. You should just think carefully about how much you want to invest:
This is a very useful note, but I would like to add that I see a lot of posts here where people describe such items as being unusable by hardening. It’s not useless because you can still use it the same way you did before hardening, it just has a useless stat.
Bingtastic007 on Reddit
The community often takes the position that everything that isn’t perfect belongs straight in the trash. However, this only applies if you want to get the last few percent out of the character and really optimize every setting screw: “Use the item if it is good and farm a new one for hardening.”
In any case, enchantment and completion are only really necessary and advisable when you have reached the absolute endgame and are trying to conquer the pit. Beforehand, you should get far enough with hardening and imprinting to get through the content properly. If you still need help with which stats, affixes and builds are actually worth it, take a look at our Tier List: Diablo 4 Season 4 Tier List: The best builds for all classes in the endgame