Diablo 4 Season 4, dubbed Loot Reborn, has overhauled the loot system. This includes a new way to power up your gear in the endgame of Diablo 4 via the new Masterworking system. Masterworking improves the bonuses of every affix an item has, increasing how powerful your build can be. However, getting the materials to masterwork gear requires some grinding.
How to unlock Masterworking
You can masterwork Gear at the blacksmith, but only after unlocking The Pit, a new endgame dungeon, which is the only way to get Masterwork materials. To unlock The Pit, you must first beat a Tier 46 Nightmare Dungeon, which requires you to be on World Tier 4 and features level 100 enemies. The Pit starts at Tier 1, with level 100 enemies, and goes all the way up to Tier 200. To enter The Pit, you need 3 Runeshards, which drop from Whisper Caches, Helltide chests, Legion chests, Nightmare Dungeons, and World Bosses. Once you unlock The Pit, you will need to complete one run to unlock the masterwork menu at the blacksmith.
How Masterworking works
Each item can be masterworked a total of 12 times, with most ranks adding a 5% boost to every Affix an item has. However, ranks 4, 8, and 12 each add a boost of 25% to a single affix at random. Only items that are either Ancestral Legendary with two Tempered Affixes or Ancestral Uniques can be upgraded via masterworking.
Depending on the type of item, you will need some basic crafting materials, like Veiled Crystal or Forgotten Soul, Gold, and one of the three Pit materials, depending on which upgrade rank you are on.
Ranks 1 through 4 require Obducite, 5 through 8 require Ingolith, and 9 through 12 require Neathiron. Obducite is dropped from Tiers 1 to 29 in The Pit, Ingolith Tiers 30 to 59, and Neathiron 60 to 200. You can transmute the higher tier materials into the lower tier versions at the Alchemist, but you can’t turn the lower tier materials into the higher tier.
The Pit itself is relatively simple. Each run has a 15-minute time limit to hit mastery, ending with a significant amount of that tier’s crafting material. Dying in The Pit takes time off the clock, with the first death taking 30 seconds, the second taking 60 seconds, and the third death and every death after taking 90 seconds. To complete The Pit, you need to quickly kill enemies to fill up a meter. Once the meter is filled, a portal takes you to the boss fight. The boss fight is similar to Nightmare Dungeon boss fights, except a shadow of a random enemy also appears in the arena, firing off attacks during the fight. Completing a tier will unlock the next tier, but if you complete it fast, you can unlock up to three tiers in a single run.
If you run a higher tier with a party than you have unlocked, you will unlock the tiers after that tier, but not before it. For example, if your highest tier is 35 and you run a 45 with a friend, you will unlock tier 46, but not tier 36.
It’s important to note that upgrading gear takes a decent amount of materials, especially if you don’t get the rolls on the 25% bonuses you want. You can reset an item’s masterwork ranks back to zero at any point, but it costs money and materials to do so. You also do not get your masterworking materials refunded, so make sure you really want to reset it.
