Season 14 launched less than a week ago, but people have already found a lot of issues with the game’s complete overhaul of Mythic Uniques. This season’s Mythics 3.0 promise more diversity in endgame items, by allowing almost any Unique to roll as a Mythic, with max stats and an increased item effect in the process.
We’ve also gotten a powerful new Horadric Cube recipe, that allows players to craft their own Mythics – by putting a Unique item into the Cube, it will use a special seasonal currency to convert it into a coveted Mythic Unique. This implementation has already been the source of some controversy online, since people expected this recipe to upgrade the item they put inside the Cube into its Mythic variant, but that’s not how this system works.
The Cube recipe will take a random Unique you put into it, and give you a Mythic Unique of the same item type. That’s it. So just because you put a Banished Lord’s Talisman inside the Cube, does not mean that you will receive an upgrade for it. This implementation was even worse during the PTR for Season 14, where the upgrade recipe didn’t even respect the item slot, which thankfully never made it to the live game.
Before You Craft Your First Mythic
Here are some good practices of getting the best out of this conversion mechanic: you can put any Unique that’s at least item level 850. This means that the input item does not have to be Ancestral. This is a good way to save up on Ancestral items and use them for something else. If you’re missing Uniques for the item slot that you’re going after – Obol gambling is a good source of items for any item type. Then, simply use the Cube to strip down the item’s affixes and convert it into a non-ancestral Unique.
Make sure not to spend your resources masterworking or tempering your input item – all of those will be lost in the process anyway.
The Crafted Item Drama
Devs have clearly spent a lot of time rebalancing Mythic drop rates, making sure that they remain hard to find. And since they don’t want people to simply craft every single Mythic that their build needs, they limited the number of crafted Mythic items that you can wear to just one. For that purpose, Season 14 introduced a new Crafted item tag. Any time you use an NPC to create an item, it is considered Crafted.
The main problem with Crafted item tag is that it is not limited to just Cube crafting. There are two other ways of crafting a Mythic Unique, legacy systems that remained in the game post-expansion. These are either the jeweler or the blacksmith
By consuming three Resplendent Sparks, and some required runes, the jeweler will give you a Mythic item based on your chosen item type. This method changed a bit in Season 14, since this used to be a reliable way of targeting exactly which Mythic Unique we wanted to craft.
The blacksmith on the other hand went unchanged. Pay with two Resplendent Sparks and get a random old Mythic items, which are now called Iconic items.
Since all of these ways are technically crafting an item, the end result is an item with an appropriate Crafted tag.
This resulted in a bit of drama and confusion on social media. One Reddit user made a post about this issue, which ended up in a heated debate about the nature of crafted vs purchased items from NPC vendors.
The Resplendent Spark Issue
While many of these new game mechanics have left a lot of players confused, the biggest uncertainty still pertains to Resplendent Sparks. A staple of Diablo 4’s crafting, Resplendent Sparks have been the most coveted material in the game for years. And the reason is simple: 2 Sparks get you a Mythic. And if you salvage a Mythic Unique, you get one Spark back. It’s a simple system that worked well.
But the new Crafted item tag creates a big problem – what good is having Resplendent Sparks, when you have nothing to use them on? Of course, you can still craft your items with them, and the above-mentioned blacksmith and jeweler still use them for that purpose. But even with Mythic drop nerfs, there will come a point in the season where players have dozens of Resplendent Sparks just lying around anyway.
And once you finally manage to craft the Mythic Unique that you wanted, the rest of your Sparks will just gather dust in your materials section, because you will no longer be able to use them for another item.
Some ways around this issue would be to give Resplendent Sparks another use, or make a difference between Mythics crafted with the Cube and those crafted otherwise. Either way, new seasonal mechanics lead to a very confusing state of the game right now, and it is clear that the current Mythic crafting system may need to be revisited, whether in a future season or a Season 14 hotfix.
