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Equipment & Gear Overview

Last Updated: January 7th 2024

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Your primary goal in Diablo 4 is acquiring incredibly powerful gear and equipment. The loot you grab from your adventures account for the majority of your character's overall power, kill speed and survivability. Each gear slot can roll with specific stats with a thematic connection. Weapons increase your damage bonuses, Chest Armors increase your survivability, Boots increase your speed etc. Upgrading your gear is very important for min-maxing your stats. Eventually, you get Legendary Aspects that go even further to cement your build identity. For players who only care about looking super cool, collecting different items allows you to transmog your kit to fit style.

Equipment Stats Overview

Each Gear slot rolls from a certain pools of stats. This is overwhelming at first, but as you collect more equipment, the general themes of each item type starts to come together. In addition to the generic affixes you can find on each slot, they also have unique stats that are important to prioritize.

Armor Pieces (Helm, Chest, Gloves, Pants, Boots) generally grant you defensive and utility stats. For more details, check out our Defenses for Beginners overview. These affixes can include +x Max Life, +x to Primary Stats, +x to Skill Ranks and Movement Speed.

Jewelry Pieces (Ring, Amulet) grant you damage, utility stats and resistances. The damage affixes can be specific to a particular element type your class deals. The resistances decrease your damage taken from Elemental sources like Fire and Shadow.

Weapon Pieces (1-Handed, 2-Handed, Focus) determine your Damage per Second. This stat directly affects your skill damage as well as the speed you're able to do many of your attacks. These gear pieces also give direct access to damage multipliers, such as Basic/Core Skill Damage, Critical Strike Damage and Damage Over Time. Some Weapons may have Lucky Hit affixes. These give special procs that trigger when your skill's Lucky Hit Chance roll is successful. Check out Damage for Beginners for a deeper dive!

You can also Socket and insert Gems into many of your gear-slots for added Stats. See our Jeweler guide for more information!

Example equipment from the Twisting Blade Rogue Build

Item Rarities

The item rarities in order are common, magic, rare, legendary and unique. They generally follow your character's level progression, with common and magic items dropping less often than rare and legendary as you level up. Unique items are incredibly rare, and are said to be some of the Best-in-Slot options that you may never find in a Season.

Common items don't have additional affixes and magic items only have a single affix. Rare items begin with 3 affixes and legendary items can have 4 affixes. Lower rarity items are tradable but legendary and unique items are bound to your account.

An item needs to be rare or legendary rarity to have a Legendary Aspect imprinted onto them. Imprinting a rare item changes its rarity to legendary and binds it to your account. Legendary items you pick up as loot always roll a Legendary Aspect. Unique items are... unique, in that they have special effects that cannot be modified or overwritten.

Item Power

Item Power of equipment determines the range of stats that roll on the gear. As your Character level increases, the Item Power on gear you loot or receive from quests increases as well. The affixes on your gear have ranges that increase as Item Power increases. A Helm with 292 Item Power could roll between 7-12 for a Strength affix. That same helm at 441 Item Power can roll between 12-18. Luckily, the Item Power of gear that you loot can be increased at the Blacksmith. Read up on our Blacksmith upgrading post for more in-depth information.

Upgrading a piece of gear raises its Item Power by 5 per upgrade. Since low-level rares can be upgraded 3 times, that means you can add 15 Item Power to them. Legendary items can be upgraded up to 5 times, so you can add 25 Item Power. Every time you increase the Item Power of your gear, you increase their base stats (Armor for armor pieces, and Damage for weapons), as well as their affix ranges and implicit stats. Legendary Aspect values appear to be unaffected by increasing an item's Power via upgrading.

A Legendary Ring with 188 Item Power

Item Power Scaling and Breakpoints

Item power levels were adjusted in Season 2 to make the loot chase more exciting. Every monster level above 55 adds 2 item power to both the minimum and maximum possible values. This means over time you will consistently upgrade your gear. When monsters reach over level 100, only the minimum value increases by 1, giving us a maximum dropped item power level of 925 in World Tier 4. Here are some examples:

World Tier 3

Monster Level 55: 625 - 700
Monster Level 56: 627 - 702
Monster Level 70: 655 - 730

World Tier 4

Monster Level 75: 780 - 855 (Notice the higher range from upgrading to WT4)
Monster Level 76: 782 - 857
Monster Level 100: 830 - 925
Monster Level 101: 831 - 925 (Notice that above mlvl 100, you only increase the min by 1)

Transmog / Wardrobe

As you acquire more and more gear, you may notice that certain weapons and armor pieces having cooler aesthetics than others. For some people, looking cool is more important than getting an upgrade. If you want to keep the awesome look of an epic sword, but also want to upgrade to a better base, just go salvage your old gear!

Salvaging a piece of gear permanently captures its visual appearance for you to use in the Wardrobe to transmog your new gear. Transmogging your gear only changes the look of the gear piece. It does not transfer any of the item's stats or powers. While this may seem unimportant to some, no one likes putting down their cool early-level flaming sword from an epic quest reward, to use a strictly better, but lame looking weapon.

My Golden Lion Barbarian from the Beta.

Video

Summary

  • Getting your hands on high Item Power gear is one of the most important activities in Diablo 4. The higher the Item Power, the stronger the stats and benefits you get from equipping gear.
  • Each gear slot can roll from certain pools of affixes. Boots can give you Movement Speed, Weapons give you damage modifiers, and Jewelry gives you massive Resistances.
  • Upgrading your gear at the Blacksmith and Jeweler increases the Item Power and the stats that you have on those gear pieces.
  • Items fall into different rarity categories. Common, magic, rare, legendary and unique. As your character levels up, you're more likely to find items with higher rarity.
  • If you love the look of a particular gear piece, you can salvage it at the Blacksmith and transmog your new gear with the old look!

Credits

Written by MacroBioBoi
Reviewed by wudijo

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