For most of Diablo 4, the gearing process is pretty standard. The campaign will take you through World Tier 1 or 2 (I would recommend 2 for most), where you’re simply replacing most gear as you go, given how fast you’re leveling, and by the end you will probably have a halfway decent collection of legendaries to take on Lilith.
World Tier 3 is also a bit more straightforward. Enough legendaries drop where you can swap your Aspects around, and create a more coherent build. You level up, get a little ways into your paragon board and somewhere between 60 and 70 and take on Elias in the Capstone Dungeon to get to World Tier 4.
That’s…where things start to get a little tricky, and the loot chase becomes quite a bit different from the past three tiers.
I have seen a lot of people wondering why their build is rapidly falling apart as they get even a little ways into World Tier 4, and complaining that the Ancestral Legendaries they’d assumed would start dropping are far too scarce. Many players may already know this, but I know many don’t. So here we are:
- A main component of World Tier 4 gearing is farming rare items. Specifically Ancestral Rares. Yellows. Yes, the kind the drop everywhere.
- You are going to see roughly 30-50x more Ancestral Rare drops than you will Sacred or Ancestral Legendaries in World Tier 4. So if you are simply waiting around for a perfect Ancestral Legendary to drop in your lap, you are going to be waiting a while, and your build will suffer because of it.
- What you want to do is find an Ancestral Rare with the type of affixes that will synergize with your build. For instance on my Twisting Blades Rogue, Vulnerable Damage, Critical Hit Damage, Damage to Close Enemies, Damage to Slowed Enemies on a weapon. From there, you then find the Legendary Aspect you want, which can be from your old Sacred gear, unless it was previously imprinted, and then put it the Ancestral Rare.
- Voila, you have just created your own Ancestral Legendary without needing to wait for one to drop. Sacred and Ancestral Aspects are often close to the same numbers, so most of the time you can use a Sacred as you wait for an Ancestral. But sometimes you’ll never even need to do that.
The gearing process is essentially repeating this for each slot you have, making sure you replace all Sacred gear with Ancestral Rares you turn into Ancestral Legendaries, unless you get crazy lucky with drops. And of course any Unique you’re using will have a better Ancestral version out there, but you cannot build those, unlike the Legendaries.
What I do is pick up essentially every Ancestral Rare I see, check their affixes, then salvage or sell the ones I don’t want. Which is almost all of them. If I find a great one and I have the Aspect I want to put in it, I spend the cash and do that. If I’m still waiting for the Aspect, or a good roll of the Aspect, the Rare goes into the vault for later.
Once I’ve finished doing this for all slots, I’m now going back through say, my level 80 Barbarian and replacing lower ilevel gear (low to mid 700s) with higher, more robust ilevel gear (high 700s to low 800s, max is 820). This is just min-maxing at this point, but whatever.
This is only one piece of the puzzle, as your Paragon Board is a hugely important part of doing big damage, but that’s something I’ve already covered before. I hope this helps with your World Tier 4 adventures.
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