Season 14 of Diablo 4 has received a less than stellar response from the community. Diablo 4’s itemization has undergone major changes in nearly every season, and the latest overhaul has once again sparked significant criticism.
The complete rework of Diablo 4’s Mythic Uniques, dubbed Mythics 3.0, was intended to extend the longevity of the Season, by allowing almost any Unique item in the game to become a Mythic. This system, however, was met with significant controversy, as the implementation left numerous players frustrated, and unable to make meaningful upgrades to their characters.
We’ve covered this subject in previous articles, but the core issue of the new system is that many of the new Mythic Uniques simply aren’t compelling enough to justify becoming Mythics. Since every class in the game has around 50 available Unique items, there will always be some that are either too weak, or too situational to be worthy of becoming a Mythic.
Major changes to Mythic item crafting made the entire situation worse, and the new Horadric Cube recipe introduced in S14 left many players confused due to a very misleading name, with social media full of people who accidentally ruined their items.
Scarcity of Mythic Uniques
Season 14 introduced the Crafted tag – every item in the game crafted by the Cube, the Jeweler or the Blacksmith is marked as crafted. This distinction is irrelevant for most items, but for Mythics it serves as a restriction, since the game no longer allows players to wear more than a single crafted Mythic.
The intention behind this is appears to be clear: the devs don’t want players to craft all of their Mythic items and want to encourage playing the game instead. There are several issues with this approach, however.
RNG mechanics in the ARPG genre are nothing new, but for many players, Season 14 feels more like an elaborate slot machine. Much of the progression now depends on multiple layers of RNG. First, every single source of Mythic Uniques has been heavily nerfed. Just getting a Mythic to drop in the first place can require killing hundreds of Lair Bosses. And speaking of Lair Bosses, Lair Key drops have been heavily nerfed as well.
Once you do get a Mythic, things don’t get much easier. Season 14 flooded the existing item pool with hundreds of new Mythic Uniques, and it is highly unlikely that you will get an item that your build can actually use. And if you actually do get it, Season 14 made half of the affixes random, so your Mythic Amulet can roll with Armor and All Resistances, for example.
Issues With the New Horadric Cube Recipe
Season 14 introduced a new crafting recipe for the Horadric Cube called Upgrade to Mythic. Due to the crafting restrictions, it might seem like it’s much easier to craft your desired item, but that’s not the case either.
While the recipe is called an upgrade, it is actually anything but. The Cube recipe converts any of your Unique items, including non-Ancestral ones, into a random Mythic Unique of the same item slot. In other words, the end result is completely arbitrary and random. While the Cube will respect the item type of the input item (you put in an amulet, you get an amulet back), you have no real control over the outcome.
During the Season 14 PTR, this mechanic was actually even worse, as the recipe didn’t even respect the type of the item that you put in, meaning that you could have gotten a Mythic dagger even though you put in a ring.
Understandably, this turned out to be a major source of confusion and frustration for Diablo fans. While the tooltip for the Cube recipe is clear about what it does – giving players a random Mythic that is unrelated to their input item, plenty of players still reported how this recipe ruined their items. And it’s clear why.
The recipe itself is very counterintuitive and goes against conventional logic. If something is called an upgrade, the expectations are quite clear. You expect the same thing to come back, but better. Especially because the Cube already has another upgrade feature, Upgrade to Legendary, which works exactly like that. You put in a Rare item, and it turns into a Legendary. Same stats, same affixes, same properties.
Because of this major disconnect between what the recipe is called, and what it actually does, we’ve seen posts on social media like Reddit on a daily basis, with players livid because they’ve accidentally ruined some great items. They took their Unique items with several Greater Affixes, fully upgraded at the Blacksmith and put them into the Cube thinking that this recipe would upgrade it. But they only received a different random item.
In one of the most popular Reddit posts of this kind, user u/StepmaniaGod was very vocal about their dissatisfaction over the new system, as their valuable item essentially got destroyed. There are many other cases like this.
This was also heavily criticized by Rhykker in his Season 14 review video, where he stated that words have meaning, and that you can’t call something an upgrade if it doesn’t actually upgrade. Changing the wording around this recipe would help prevent a lot of people from making this mistake again.
We’ve just received the first Season 14 patch on Tuesday, July 14, that did make some quality-of-life changes to Diablo 4, especially when it came to rebalancing Pandemonium Fragments, a new resource used for the Cube recipe.
Given the amount of community feedback surrounding the recipe, many players expected Blizzard to address the wording in the first Season 14 patch. However, the update did not include any changes, meaning Upgrade to Mythic remains unchanged for now.
