You DO NOT Understand Diablo 4 Items

all right I've got a quiz for all of you Diablo for veterans out there these questions aren't general trivia questions that I would necessarily expect everybody to know but they were designed to test how solid your understanding is when it comes to specific elements of Diablo 4's itemization system I'm hoping that many of these questions will challenge your understanding of many elements of the game systems that are very commonly misunderstood and I'm hoping that they will put into perspective how much or how little you actually understand about d4's items let's get right into it question number one we have two items item a is a set of sacred rare chest armor Item B is a set of ancestral rare pants which of these items could have an item power of 692. you can pause the video if you need a moment to think [Music] the correct answer is C both A and B could have an item power 692. in this case it's Item B the set of ancestral rare pants question number two the sword on the left is an ancestral legendary with a base item power of 741 and it happens to have a Max role of the damage to close enemies affix the sword on the right is a sacred legendary with a base item power of 714 that has 5 out of 5 upgrades which of the following options is a possible affix that this sword on the right could have and note there is only one possible correct answer in this case the correct answer is a 30.8 damage to close enemies with a range of 24.8 to 35.3 question number three on the left we have a pair of 789 item power ancestral rare gloves looking at its attack speed affix we can see that it has a role of six percent between the range of 4.4 and 10. now consider these 700 item power sacred rare gloves taking into consideration enchanting at the occultist upgrading it to blacksmith or any other services or systems currently available in the game what is the highest value for an attack speed affix that these gloves could ever possibly Attain the answer is C 15 percent question number four looking back at the original gloves from the previous question if we take these gloves and upgrade them at the blacksmith five times which of the following is a possible affix that these gloves could have note there is only one correct answer the answer is D plus four ranks of Whirlwind with a range of three to four question number five continuing to use the same gloves as an example these gloves are sacred rare gloves with a total item power of 725 and a required character level of 77. this ancestral legendary aspect has an item power of 778 and a required character level of 85. if I imprint this legendary aspect onto these gloves what will their item quality item power and required character level be once I'm done [Music] the answer is d will end up with a pair of gloves that are ancestral legendary gloves with the total item power of 725 and a required character level of 85. question number six which of the following are the three highest item power break points correct answer is a 460 625 and 725 on to the final question number seven true or false because each of these six legendary items that are shown on screen have aspects with stats that are flat number of values rather than percentage values that means that these stats have different Behavior than percent based aspects when it comes to how they scale relative to item power the correct answer is false even though none of the aspects shown include percent based stats only three of them have behavior that differs from percent based stats when it comes to scaling Behavior [Music] oh stop and that was the first 10 and a half million hit holy [ __ ] some of you might be skeptical of some of the answers or might disagree with one of more things that I said or showed and if that's the case give me a chance to explain the how and why behind everything and hopefully change your mind if you've got all of those questions correct [ __ ] you probably don't need to watch the rest of this video now if you've got one or more of them wrong obviously I don't blame you most of these systems are confusing and misleading many of them give us mixed signals or tell us nothing at all about how they work and some seem a lot simpler than they actually are which is exactly why very few people really understand all of the elements of these systems that they think they do after you're done watching this video answering these kinds of questions in the future will be insanely easy for you I'm also hoping to change a few people's opinions about what gear is worth picking up and what gear isn't and I'm going to be making the case that I think the majority of D4 players are massively hindering their chances of finding better gear leaving potentially God to your items sitting on the ground because of a number of preconceived notions or misconceptions the most common problem that I see with players struggling to become as powerful as they'd like is that they simply Place far too much importance on item power and quality in my experience the kind of folks that say they were told to never pick up sacred items because they're trash and that their main goal is to get all of their items to at least 800 item power are the same people who are confused at why my level 77 Barbarian does literally 10 times the damage of their level 90 barbarian when we're supposedly running the same build while at the same time half of my barbarian's gear began as lower item power sacred items they would have never considered picking up with that in mind a good starting point would be for us to get a handle on what exactly item power is and how it works as well as gain an understanding of the real differences between sacred and ancestral items now very often the item power is mistakenly described as if it's some sort of numerical score indicating how powerful the item is and the different item qualities are thought to be clear and unambiguous labels for distinct tiers of items where one is always more powerful than the other neither of which are accurate representations of either system item power is responsible for two things first it's used to calculate the primary stat of each item and second it's used to determine which of the six item tiers the item belongs to now let's make sure we understand both of these Concepts starting first with item tiers there are effectively six tiers of items each tier corresponding to a specific range of item power values with the item power value between each tier referred to as breakpoints every affix in the game has a specific range of possible values for each corresponding tier this is simply hard-coded by the developers probably in some spreadsheet somewhere take this helmet for example it has an item power of 765 and one of the affixes it has is the plus to all stats the item itself tells us that the stat has a range from 10 to 18. now if we had picked up a helmet with the plus to all stats affix on it really early in the game when the item power was I don't know let's say 100 then the range for this affix would have been between three and four and maybe an hour later after I've leveled up a few levels I might find another slightly more powerful version of that helmet with an item power of 175 in which case the range would be four to six now note that in both cases a valid value within each range would be four to plus all skills of course meaning that they both could have the same bonus to all skills while having different item power values now take a look at the fourth and fifth item power tiers here in this example and you'll see that one ranges from six to ten and the next ranges from 8 to 14. now what this of course implies is that you could pick up a helmet with an item power of 460 that has plus 10 to all stats and then pick up a nearly identical helmet with an item power of 724 that has Plus 8 to all stats the first item is 264 item power less than the second and yet has a better value for at least one of its affixes this is why I want to emphasize that you need to look at items in their entirety before determining which is better quote unquote than any of the other options as item power alone only really serves as an indication of its potential power when it comes to the affixes not its actual power the power determines the range for the stat and then RNG will determine the role which is exactly how you can have items with really high item powers that ultimately have lower stats than identical items with a lower item Power number there are a few final things that need to be said to address some of the biggest misconceptions that folks have on the topic of item tiers and affixes first there are three different kinds of behaviors that we see affixes exhibiting the vast majority of affixes on items fall into the first category which I'll refer to as normal affixes just for the sake of Simplicity the second kind of affixes are the plus ranks to skills affixes the Third Kind of affixes are what I'll call scalable affixes and I'll put a list of all of them on screen right now alright sorry for the interruption this is editing Veritas from the future I just want to jump in and say that I was planning on covering a few additional things including now these scalable affixes work and a lot of the details around how the plus ranks to skills affixes work but this video already ended up being longer than I anticipated and honestly I kind of decided I might be better off waiting until after season 1 starts just in case they change any more of these details if you have any questions about this or maybe some of the other topics that I might have alluded to that maybe I didn't go into detail on feel free to leave a comment or drop by my stream anytime and I'd be happy to answer them for you okay back to the show what I'm about to say is extremely important and applies only to the first two kinds of affixes every single item in the game with a total item power over 725 that is to save all items in the highest item tier whether they drop that way or whether they end up there after upgrading they will always have the same exact range for every single stat whether they have 725 item power 850 item power or any value in between and for those that doubt this and are going to go check for yourselves make sure that you double check you're not looking at one of the scalable affixes I showed earlier and also make sure that you're comparing like with like when it comes to how many times the item has been upgraded but another way whether you have a pair of sacred 725 item power pants or ancestral 840 item power pants as long as you're comparing like with like they will always have exactly the same stat ranges past 725 all of these ranges are identical meaning that those 725 item power sacred items are equally as likely to have Max roles for all of these stats as 840 item power ancestral items the item power and item quality does not have any effect on these stats once you hit 725 this is why when you look at Rex's Max role guide for Hoda barbs and see the two-handed sword he's got listed and then you look at my two-handed sword that I've got as my stat stick a sword that originally dropped as a sacred rare item with 700 item power a sword that I haven't been able to find an improvement on in nearly 20 levels the stat range is shown here for some of the most important stats Critical Strike damage vulnerable damage and strength are exactly the same ranges as the perfect example item he's showing in his guide that has an item power of 825 there's no slightly better odds of getting higher rolls you don't have higher ranges for possible values any differences in quality or item power have zero effect on the value of the stats for the affixes which means that in the context of the vast majority of affixes in the game the properties that are responsible for a massive portion of Any Given item's actual Effectiveness 7 125 item power is exactly as good as any item power higher than it the last thing to mention on this subject that's a bit more well known than some of the other Concepts but nevertheless leads to a ton of confusion and frustration has to do with what happens when items are upgraded past a break point into a new item tier there's also a few Pro tips that I can give related to this that I'm sure a lot of people don't know or haven't considered whenever an item is upgraded at the blacksmith and it crosses over one of those item power thresholds into a new tier the first thing that happens is the range for that affix is updated to the new range that corresponds with the appropriate item tier then the next step is the game actually completely re-rolls all of the affix values for that item within the new ranges not including legendary aspects ultimately giving you a completely new set of stats now while this is always exciting at least it is for me because of everything we just covered that you should Now understand new stat roles inside new ranges have the potential to be better the same or worse than what you started with although in my experience at least the resulting item that we end up with even after rerolls is almost always significantly better than what we started with now just keep in mind that you can actually see what the resulting stats after the re-roll will be if you hover over the item and look at the preview before upgrading just in case the resulting item is going to have completely trash stats it's not worth spending the money on upgrading and then you can just sell it to the fender or Salvage it now the interesting thing to consider here is that this can actually add even more potential candidate items into your pool of stuff worth keeping as you can now consider holding on to items that dropped with the right collection of affixes even if they have terrible roles as you get to re-roll them anyway so you actually have the chance of turning a dud into something really good if you're lucky okay now on to those Pro tips I first started I struggled for a long time comparing the item that my character was currently using one that was almost always fully upgraded five times to a new base item that I just grabbed off the ground that of course has no upgrades I had no idea what this item was gonna look like after it was fully upgraded so I had a really hard time gauging if this item was a viable Contender for a replacement or not now we just learned what happens when you upgrade an item into a new tier but this particular tidbit of information is relevant only to the normal cases where upgrades are done within an item tier and for the sake of brevity Let's ignore what happens with the plus ranks and scalable affixes so this video doesn't end up being an hour long upgrading follows a really simple rule that once understood can be easily extrapolated to be able to exactly predict what the stats of Any Given base item will be once fully upgraded and this fact is actually the key to answering at least one of the intro questions that we had before and when you upgrade an item for the first time you'll see in the little preview that the stats are all going up by roughly 10 percent now this value whatever the 10 of the base item value is that's what's going to be applied to all subsequent upgrades meaning 10 of the base value is added every time across five upgrades which leads to a 50 increase in all of the normal affix values and the values in their ranges now all you need to do to predict what a base item stats are going to be after upgrading is to take all the numbers and multiply by 1.5 the stat values for the four affixes are 8 10.2 42 and 10.5 now let's multiply each by 1.5 that leaves us with 12 15.3 63 and 15.75 which will get rounded up for display purposes to 15.8 and for good measure let's do the same thing to the first stats range values as well the range 7 to 14 multiplied by 1.5 ends up giving us 10.5 to 21 and we can see after all five upgrades that we were exactly right now this comes in handy all the time when quickly evaluating items and hopefully it'll help you out too also one last thing don't get confused if sometimes the numbers change slightly back and forth between upgrades that happens because under the covers the game is using much more precise decimal values but then rounds those for more convenient display purposes for example looking back at the 10.5 percent Ace affix from before ten percent of 10.5 is 1.05 but the game only shows one decimal place so what is it going to show 1.0 or 1.1 well both the first time it shows 1.0 and then the next time it shows 1.1 and then 1.0 and then 1.1 and finally 1.0 more or less averaging out to be the correct value once it's done with each step along the way alternating back and forth between rounding up and rounding down okay the final Pro tip here real quick anybody who's ever used the enchanting feature at the occultist to re-roll a stat will know how absurdly expensive it can get when you're hunting for a high roll of just the right stat obviously getting the perfect role on the perfect stat is pretty rare but if you happen to be re-rolling a stat on an item that you'll eventually be upgrading into a new item tier you can effectively get a free re-roll of that stat if you happen to get unlucky and roll low let's say you spent a few million gold and finally got a low roll on the stat that you wanted that's actually the best case in this situation as you can head over to the blacksmith Smith and upgrade it into that new item tier and have the potential of rolling that low stat into a higher stat in this case you're spending considerably less money to try to roll a high value on a stat that you already have as opposed to continuing to spend a lot more money trying to roll both the right stat and a high value had that item not been one that you were able to upgrade into a new item tier now of course as with all things like this it's a gamble so naturally it's not guaranteed just keep this in mind when you go through the considerations as it might be a good idea it might be a bad idea it sucks if you roll a perfect role of the occultist beforehand and then need to risk ruin it with the blacksmith re-roll but simply knowing this exists is another tool in your toolbox that you can use to your advantage should the situation arise now let's make sure we don't get it twisted I'm not saying item power doesn't matter at all I'm just trying to get us to fully understand what it affects and what it doesn't and to what extent which brings us to the second thing that item power is responsible for and that's each item's primary stat I was originally going to go into much more detail on this but at this point it's not a beginner's guide anymore so I'm not really sure a lot of The Details Matter allow me to summarize the important parts looking at weapons of all types with how important base damage is to your character's overall potential damage output and the way that item power and damage scale together roughly in the ballpark of something like an increase of around 450 DPS per hand for every 100 item power you're going to be wanting every additional point of item power that you can get here Primary Weapons are one of the few items that I'm very much looking to maximize as much as possible as soon as possible while of course being reasonable and keeping in mind that when comparing two potential Primary Weapons it's not always worth maximizing every point of DPS you have to use reasonable judgment when it comes to the choice between sacrificing one or more very good affixes for some amount of Base DPS because those affixes themselves could potentially be boosting your damage considerably more under the covers than a few points of damage and when it comes to all of the armor related items the relationship between armor points and item power or is slightly less straightforward looking at chest armor for every 100 points of item power we get 175 points of armor the relationship here between item power and armor points is 1 to 1.75 now as we look at the remaining pieces of armor this ratio begins to get worse and worse diminishing the value of every additional point of item power that we can get for every 100 points of item power helmets receive 125 points of armor pants receive 100 points of armor and finally gloves and boots only receive 50 points of armor so in general with these ratios in mind I personally Place far more importance on Min maxing item power for my chest with slightly less importance on the helmet and legs and honestly very little importance on boots and gloves now this is not only because the chest helmet and legs account for 80 of the overall armor but just in general I consider these three items to be far more defensive first and foremost than the other two even though boots and gloves have armor I don't personally see them as defensive items when you look at how their armor stats scales and the kind of affixes that they have it's kind of clear that they're intended as utility items improving your Mobility offensive capabilities and things like resource gen rather than for their defensive capabilities so I simply don't prioritize Min maxing item power in these cases when we actually visualize the distribution of armor between the different item slots and then consider what we're really talking about here when it comes to Min maxing item power is the ultimate difference in perceived value of having boots and gloves each with 725 item power versus 825 item power is the loss of 100 points of armor so all that is to say if you can get more item power on your boots and gloves of course you take it just don't stress out over a few item power points on these items if you can get a better collection of affixes because you're pretty much always going to be better off with the affixes rather than the Armor let all of the other more defensive items do the heavy lifting there now let's move on to jewelry this one is a lot more complicated and honestly I don't want to spend very much time on it because I'm hoping the way it is right now will be changing pretty soon the tldr for how the game is right now and like I said this very well might change in a week when season one comes out is that resistances effectively don't matter and not only that but they also scale horribly as item power increases so these two things combined give me even more compelling reasons to completely ignore item power on all jewelry unless of course I'm going for one of those scaling stats like plus to Max Health that I mentioned earlier just as long as the base item has at least 700 item power so after fully upgrading it it'll be at the 725 breakpoint now let's take a step back here and think about what we've covered so far some combination of item power and RNG determine every single item's primary stat as well as the ranges and ultimately the values for each of the item's affixes I would argue that covers just about everything relevant to how powerful an item is so then you have to ask yourself what's the deal with sacred and ancestral for all intents and purposes all of the things being equal functionally there's no difference between sacred items and ancestral items we can see this clear as day when we imprint a sacred or even normal item with an ancestral legendary aspect as we did earlier during the quiz and notice that literally nothing about the item stats change in any way the only thing that changed was that the word sacred changed to ancestral so ancestral items serve no functional purpose that sacred items cannot equally fulfill but there's two practical differences between these two qualities that are worth mentioning the first is pricing but this is a double-edged sword while you generally get more from selling ancestral items to vendors than you would be selling the same items if they were sacred in some cases some of the services related to extracting legendary aspects or re-rolling stats on ancestral items can be quite a bit more expensive than their sacred counterparts while once again having no functional differences between the two the second major difference which I suspect is not only the most meaningful one but is also at the heart of most people's reasoning for being so heavily biased towards ancestral items versus sacred items is its utility as a simple loot filter a massive portion of the player base is convinced that there is a clear separation between sacred and ancestral items but of course we know that that isn't the case in fact there's quite a bit of overlap between the two that most people aren't aware of which I believe is the heart of the problem I have a ton of ideas on how they could improve the itemization but I'll save that for another day that really doesn't matter here what's most important for this discussion is to ensure that everybody watching understands that if you're a high level character in the end game you know you're level 80 90 100 as long as you're in World tier four there's almost nothing meaningful that you can tell about an item that drops simply by looking at the Quality label all you can say with any amount of confidence is ancestral items are more likely to have a higher item power than sacred items on average the problem is that's not how many people see it they treat it as if item quality is a clear delineation between items that are endgame viable and items that are not and I think that's an unfortunate perspective for anybody who's excited by the prospect of finding those god-tier items with 4 out of four stats and perfect roles on each because ultimately all you're doing by avoiding sacred items is reducing your odds now you might argue that it's wasted time and effort filling up your inventory with all of that extra junk and that's a subjective call that only you can make for yourself but I'm willing to bet there's some threshold where you'd have your mind changed on that what if for instance I told you that picking up sacred jewelry gloves and boots along with all of the other ancestral stuff that you grabbed had the potential to double your chances of finding endgame viable gear would that be compelling enough for you to invest the time and inventory slots again I'm not here to convince anybody to do anything I'm simply trying to challenge your assumptions and to maybe give you information and perspectives that you might not have otherwise had or don't have exact numbers on this but what I can say is that I've personally seen sacred items drop with item powers above 720 and ancestral items drop with item Powers as low as around 680. because of that ever important break point the cutoff for endgame viable items begins at 700 base item power a range that includes both sacred and ancestral items as discussed I wouldn't consider a 700 item Power sword chest armor pants or helmet to be viable end game options capable of doing things like high tier nightmare dungeon runs or fighting Uber Lilith but I would argue that boots gloves and rings with these lower item Powers regardless of whether or not they're sacred or ancestral are more than capable of being best in slot items performing at effectively the same level as 800 plus item power gear remember when we're comparing a 700 base item power ring or pair of boots or whatever to their otherwise identical 800 item power counterparts we're talking about a couple percentages on resistances and 50 points of armor I promise you you will never notice the difference something else I'll promise is that if you were one of those folks who never loots any sacred items once you get to world tier 4. if you start picking up sacred boots gloves rings and amulets you will find upgrades considerably more often than you otherwise would I mean that of course goes without saying right are you more likely to win the lottery if you buy one lottery ticket or 10 lottery tickets now I've had this discussion with some friends and Associates a few times and one or more of the common ideas I hear is how unlikely it is that you'll actually find endgame viable sacred items with others arguing that to the extent that it's unlikely it's not worth all of the time and effort spent going through the additional junk all I can say in response is sure it's incredibly unlikely any of us are going to get a god-tier drop that ends up being sacred but let's be real the problem with that sentence is that it was exactly five words too long you could have saved yourself the time and said that it was incredibly unlikely any of us will get that God tear drop period a massive part of the draw of games like this is that they're numbers games every time an item drops we're playing the lottery that's most of the excitement the way that I see it ancestral items are like scratch tickets where you have a six percent chance to win 10 bucks and sacred items are like scratch tickets where we have a four percent chance to win 10 bucks if you're interested in scratching scratch tickets and somebody drops a bunch on the table in front of you and says scratch as many as you want who the hell is gonna pick out the ones with slightly lower odds and not bother scratching them at all and more often than not it seems like people are treating those sacred items like scratch tickets that couldn't possibly be winners while at the same time acting as if scratching the tickets isn't the whole [ __ ] point of the game anyway you know listen everybody spends their time differently everybody plays games how they want I'm not here to judge all I can say is that it seems like so many people are so [ __ ] caught up in needing to min max every little thing that they're willing to kneecap their own enjoyment for the sake of efficiency and Perfection all the while remaining willfully ignorant about the game's core systems that are fundamental to their success in that Min maxing process a few content creators make some guides about how to maximize XP per hour and everybody starts playing the game as if their grandmother's pacemaker is going to fail if they don't hit 100 on their hardcore necro by the end of the week it's no wonder that so many people are frustrated that there's nothing to do in the end game and that it's not fun when they rush to 100 making sure they didn't waste any time picking up any sub-optimal gear when in reality they suck their own fun out of it by treating their inventory like it was an Amazon fulfill element Center and without drop rates and statistics around stat roles and all of that stuff nobody can say for certain what is or isn't worth it that's ultimately your own personal decision and nobody can say that you're wrong but what I can say is that my experience has been entirely the opposite my Hoda Barb is doing pretty well hitting for a respectable 10 million damage at level 80 with no survivability issues running far higher tier nightmare dungeons than I need to for optimal XP gains and yet 5 out of 12 of the items that I have on my character right now started off as low power sacred items now none of these are god tier by any means but I'd be willing to bet that if I covered up the item power and show these items to people with Hoda barbs at my level a massive number of them would say that these would be upgrades over their items that likely started off as ancestral items with higher item Powers I genuinely wonder how many people that say that sacred items aren't worth it would consider all of the items that I picked up that were sacred items upgrades to their gear now I don't know how statistically significant any of this truly is but I did a fair amount of cursory analysis on the drop rates and distribution of sacred and ancestral items and their item powers and with a modest sample size in the hundreds of items dropped and checked between nightmare dungeons hell Tides World boss caches and tree of Whispers rewards ignoring whites and blues of course about one quarter of the items that dropped were sacred with the other three quarters 75 percent being ancestral and yet if you look at all of the items I found that I consider to be endgame viable that is to say they have three desirable stats and an item power above 700. almost exactly half of them were sacred items in my limited anecdotal testing it seems as though if I hadn't picked up those sacred items I would have cut my chances at finding viable items in half who knows if my findings would translate into the thousands of items how drop rates are going to change in the future or what your experience is going to be like if you try this out all I can really say in closing here is that if I hadn't started picking up sacred gloves boots and jewelry after learning that they have the same potential as ancestral items nearly half of my equipment would simply be worse than it is now my character would be noticeably less powerful and I would have missed out on all of the extra excitement and enjoyment that I get from seeing all of those sacred rings and amulets drop and thinking is this the god drop after all this I have to ask you're one of those folks who never picks up sacred items knowing what you know now the next time you kill that pack of Elites and see a sacred ring drop are you really going to be able to walk away from it without that nagging feeling in the back of your mind asking yourself if maybe just maybe that could have been the one either way I hope you enjoyed the video and that you came away learning something new if you have any questions or want to talk about any of the things I talked about in this video come by my stream I'm live basically every day if you want to see more Diablo 4 videos like this debunking myths testing theories and breaking down complex topics into a format that anyone can understand go ahead and sub to the channel and leave a comment with what you want me to cover next if you happen to be Aspen gold I'm one of those poor souls that had the unfortunate luck of working with artesian in the past and I'm now looking for a new pc sponsor just saying for everyone else good luck with season one we'll see out there [Music] thank you

Channel: Veritas

Views: 230,648

Keywords: diablo 4, d4, ancestral items, legendary items, sacred items, ancestral vs sacred, item power, item power explained, diablo tips and tricks, diablo guide, diablo items

Id: PZzKEuMDFY8

Length: 31min 51sec (1911 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023