Pushing deeper Pit tiers in Diablo 4 teaches you a hard lesson fast: your "pretty good" gear isn't good anymore. You can have decent stats and still feel like you're tickling elites. The real gains show up once you start shaping your damage on purpose, and that usually begins with Diablo 4 gold in mind for upgrades, rerolls, and the constant material drain that comes with chasing the right lines on your best pieces Diablo 4 gold.
Tempering Is Where Builds Get Teeth
Tempering is the first big fork in the road. It's not just "more damage," it's the right kind of damage for how you actually play. You roll something that feeds your core loop—Weapon Mastery if you want clean, reliable output, or a Finesse-style bonus if your build lives and dies on crit chains. And yeah, it's a gamble. Everyone's had that moment where you've got one charge left and your hands are sweating. Hit the affix and your build wakes up. Miss it and you're staring at a "perfect" item you can't stand to equip.
Masterworking: The Real Min-Max Grind
After you've tempered without ruining the item, Masterworking is the part that eats your time. Ranks 4, 8, and 12 are the checkpoints that matter, because that's where the "crits" land on specific affixes. When it hits the stat you actually need—Cooldown Reduction, a key damage multiplier, resource cost stuff—it feels unreal. When it misses. Back to farming mats, back to resetting, back to telling yourself it's fine. A triple hit on a Greater Affix is basically a season-defining roll, and that rank 12 jump can turn a messy boss fight into a short, ugly melt d4 buy gold.
