Blizzard reveals major cost increase for Diablo Season 4’s Masterworking mechanic

Blizzard has revealed some big changes to the cost of Diablo 4 Season 4’s Masterworking mechanics with material costs increasing by a massive amount.

Diablo 4 Season 4 has received the moniker Loot Reborn and with good reason. It completely overhauls the game’s itemization with a number of new features. These were initially trialed in the game’s first-ever Public Test Realm (PTR).

After some tweaking from Blizzard, the final changes were revealed in the Diablo 4 Season 4 patch but in some cases, details were a little vague. The patch did mention changes to the highly-anticipated Masterworking mechanic but exact values weren’t given.

Thanks to a recent video posted on the Diablo 4 YouTube channel, we’ve been able to glean what some of the Masterworking changes are. They are quite substantial with certain increases to Masterworking costs exceeding their originals by up to ten times.

Masterworking is a new endgame crafting mechanic that allows players to customize their gear in minute detail for more intricate buildcrafting. It relies on gathering rare materials from The Pit, a new inclusion in Diablo 4 Season 4. Players can Masterwork a piece of gear from rank one through twelve.

During the PTR, Masterworking an item was quite cheap in terms of material cost but there was a likelihood that when you attempted it, you would lose all your materials in the process with no increase to your gear’s effectiveness.

To offset the new increase in the cost of Masterworking when Diablo 4 Season 4 goes live, the developers have removed that small chance of failure when using the mechanic.

While the cost for every Masterworking level has not been revealed, the new changes show a pretty dramatic increase in cost. The known increases are as follows with the new values highlighted in bold:

Masterworking Rank 1:

100% Success Chance 5 Obducite > 10 Obducite 10 Rawhide / 10 Iron Chunk 3 Veiled Crystal 40,000 Gold > 100,000 Gold

Masterworking Rank 5:

70% Success Chance > 100% Success Chance 10 Ingolith > 20 Ingolith 20 Rawhide / 20 Iron Chunk > 25 Rawhide / 25 Iron Chunk 6 Veiled Crystal 100,000 Gold > 450,000 Gold

Master Working Rank 9:

30% Success Chance > 100% Success Chance 15 Neathiron > 50 Neathiron 2 Abstruse Sigil / 2 Baleful Fragment / 2 Coiling Ward > 10 Abstruse Sigil / 10 Baleful Fragment / 10 Coiling Ward 9 Veiled Crystal > 20 Veiled Crystal 1 Forgotten Soul > 3 Forgotten Soul 300,000 Gold > 2,000,000 Gold

Masterworking Rank 12:

20% Success Chance > 100% Success Chance 30 Neathiron > 250 Neathiron 2 Abstruse Sigil / 2 Baleful Fragment / 2 Coiling Ward > 20 Abstruse Sigil / 20 Baleful Fragment / 20 Coiling Ward 12 Veiled Crystal > 50 Veiled Crystal 1 Forgotten Soul > 10 Forgotten Soul 525,000 Gold > 10,000,000 Gold

Blizzard Entertainment Masterworking increases a random Affix on your weapon or armor.

General consensus from discussions within the Diablo 4 community is that despite the significant increase in cost, the removal of failure chance from Masterworking makes up for it. It will still require significant grinding to achieve Rank 12 but given that this is an endgame mechanic, that makes sense to most players.

(Originally posted by Ethan Dean)