Diablo 4: Vessel Of Hatred Has A Crafting Materials Problem

I’ve been having a great time with Diablo 4’s Vessel of Hatred expansion, now on my second Spiritborn after my first one was erased after the review period. RIP.

But one thing I have noticed is something that we as a Vessel of Hatred reviewing group lamented about while playing, that there was a serious material shortage when it comes to upgrading your gear, whether that’s rerolling, tempering or masterworking mainly.

The problem is not with rare or legendary materials, where with any amount of normally gameplay and salvaging, you come by frequently. But with common materials, namely Iron Chunks and especially Rawhide Leathers.

You will need dozens of these materials per upgrade a lot of the time. Even starting my second round of masterworking is now charging me 90 Rawhide Leathers for my fifth upgrade (out of 12). The problem is that these common materials are not common enough. Given that most players are only saving legendaries, dismantling those gives more rare and legendary materials than they do common materials, on the whole. But while you might be charged 1-2 legendary materials per upgrade there are…90 leathers, and then some.

There is one hotfix that just went live to boost another material, Angelbreath, where players were at max level 60 but still a few tiers of potions behind because Angelbreath rarely drops. But as you move into endgame that is a far less important problem than what’s going on with common materials.

The solutions here are…not ideal. Yes, Blizzard has herded players into other forms of material gathering rather than dismantling, namely the Tree of Whispers, but even doing a full stack of that, I only got 110 Rawhide Leathers in total, which is just not enough at my level. You can also get materials from other activity choices, but again, they skew heavily toward higher tier ones. The system is not working right now.

Trust me when I say this was even worse during the review period. We were so starved for these same resources it could actually act like a brick wall for progress, and ultimately it’s what led me to throw in the towel after Torment 2. We were told that there would be a nerf of those requirements for launch, and there was, but as you can see, it’s still not where it needs to be.

So if you are always short on these allegedly common materials, you are not alone, and with enough complaining, I would in fact think that a hotfix is coming soon, if they could fix the Angelbreath shortage this quickly.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.