by Hotstreak - 8 years ago     show comments

A lot of new cool features were announced to be coming with Patch 2.4 during the Diablo Panel yesterday, so if you haven’t had the chance to catch up you can do so right here. One of these new features is coming in the form of a new Kanai’s Cube recipe, Caldesann’s Despair. This recipe allows you to sacrifice a Legendary Gem and three Flawless Royal Gems to give an Ancient item of your choice a boost to your main stat. This is definitely one of the more interesting recipes and should add depth to end game progression but, it doesn’t come without limitations or restrictions.

Each item type has a different minimum Legendary Gem rank requirement that needs to be met in order to use this recipe.

• Weapons require a rank 30 Legendary Gem
• Jewelry requires a rank 40 Legendary Gem
• Armor requires a rank 50 Legendary Gem

Legendary Gem ranks also determine how much more of your main stat that you’re going to get out of this recipe. You will get +5 points to your main stat on the augmented item for every rank on the Legendary Gem that you choose to consume. As you can see above, a rank 50 Gem will get you an additional 250 points to your main stat. You also can’t double up the effect by augmenting twice, if you augment the same item a second time, it will replace the current augmentation with the new one.

The fact that this can only be done on Ancient Legendary items shows that they are really trying to push set-less build viability and make the hunt for Ancient items have more incentive. Which could turn out to be very good for the game, because I don’t feel like builds that are based on item sets should be the only viable option at end game. The reworked Legacy of Nightmares ring set is looking very promising in that regard too, but we will have see how this all works out come the start of the PTR next week.

EDIT: Senior Game Designer,Wyatt Cheng clarified that you can also augment Ancient set items as well, so this recipe works on any kind of Ancient item. (this was a misunderstanding on my part!)

All in all this is an interesting addition to end game player progression that should add some more depth and give you something else to do. This also gives players a reason to level up Legendary Gems that they otherwise wouldn’t bother with which is a lot better than just having a bunch of unused gems in your stash.

So how do you guys feel about augmenting items? Is this something that you’ll be interested in doing? Or do you not really care too much about min/maxing? Let us know in the comments below!