Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's new crafting system will bring back season 11's sanctification and gives bad loot the potential to be legendary

Real item crafting is finally coming to Diablo 4. I say "real" because the way you can modify items right now is so simplistic compared to what's on the way in the Lord of Hatred expansion next month. The two developers I spoke to while visiting Blizzard HQ in January convinced me we won't be looking at loot the same way ever again.

Inspired by Diablo 2's crafting, Diablo 4 will get its own version of the Horadric Cube, which is basically the dark fantasy version of a magical crafting table. You put items into it and better items come out. There will also be a list of recipes for crafting items in different ways, like combining three of the same uniques into a new one.

The biggest change is what's happening to loot in order to support a system like the Horadric Cube. Right now, low-tier items, like commons and magics, disappear from the game once you're leveled up and start ping-ponging between endgame dungeons. In Lord of Hatred, they're coming back, but with one notable change: Any item will be able to drop with a supercharged "greater affix" on it—something only legendary items can have right now. You can then take those items, drop them into the cube, and upgrade them into legendaries.

For a game all about loot, this is a massive change to how you progress your character through the game. Anything could be an upgrade as long as you have the materials to try to craft it into something better. The ground won't be littered with only orange anymore; white, blue, and yellow items can be the lucky drop that transforms your whole build.

This change goes hand-in-hand with the loot filter that's coming in Lord of Hatred. You can set it up so only useful items are visible on the ground. Need more critical strike chance? Tell the filter to highlight items with that specific stat and ignore the rest. Since its release, Diablo 4 has incentivized you to pick up every item and salvage the useless ones for materials, over and over again. Design director of systems Colin Finer told PC Gamer salvaging isn't going away, but it'll matter less and less as you progress through the game.

"We feel like the game just feels a lot more hollow now where you just don't really see anything except orange beams, and then you become accustomed to it, and it just doesn't feel like there's texture to it," he said. "So we felt like, OK, if the problem is that players don't want to salvage and it's not something that they're enjoying then we're just not going to keep moving forward with it. So we really just sort of moved past it, you're going to graduate past it.

"There's still going to be a ton of things that are going to drop that are rare, true items that the cube is going to use [for transmutation]. So it doesn't mean that we've removed all the loot drops from the game. It just means they're more concentrated," he added.

In addition to being able to upgrade items, the cube will also let you turn a common item into a unique of the same type, effectively skipping straight to the most powerful tier of items that give special effects you can't get on legendaries. Whether or not they can become mythics, the rarest items in the game, is a "maybe," Finer said. Some of the recipes and their outcomes are intentionally being kept a secret until players discover them when the expansion is out.

The final step in the crafting process will look familiar to anyone who played season 11. It's called "transfiguration" and it'll work a lot like sanctification did in the last season. Once you've found a usable item, you can stick it into the cube and gamble for a number of bonus effects. They won't be as absurd as season 11's were—mythic items probably won't be able to gain the effects of a second mythic item—but they'll be strong enough to make up for the fact that your item will be unmodifiable afterward.

Just like in season 11, you won't ever have a reason to stop looking at loot. Anything could be an upgrade with enough luck, and you might even craft something that will spark an idea for an entirely new build. Diablo 4 has spent the last three years making its loot more legible and flexible, but the cube seems to be a big step toward making it all more valuable.

"I play a lot each season and the way I typically end a season is I find myself kind of in a rut where I'm just doing the same thing over and over," designer Aislyn Hall said. "I think that pretty much all of these changes we're doing are trying to get you out of those ruts, make you think about the game differently for a longer period of time."