Aside from purchased and equipped skills, nothing influences your build more than gear, and no gear moreso than legendary gear. Since Diablo 4 is a loot grind ARPG, finding the ideal legendary drops for your build is a major gameplay goal, if not the primary reason for playing the game. Not to overstate matters, but farming legendary drops is kind of a big deal, and this page will cover what makes legendary gear special, and how to farm legendary gear in Diablo 4.
Legendary gear has more modifiers and higher stats than more common items. They also possess a random legendary modifier.
What Does Legendary Gear Do in Diablo 4?¶
There are several tiers of gear in Diablo 4, common, magical, rare and legendary. These are covered in detail in the linked Item Rarity Differences page, but generally speaking, the rarer the gear, the higher its stats (Attack Power, Armor and Resistances) and the more mods it will have. Mods on gear do a variety of things, but these generally boost various stat parameters like Life, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Willpower, Cooldowns, Mana Cost Reduction, Life on Kill, Life Regeneration, and give Skill Bonuses, to name a few. Gear quality scales to your level, and while higher-level, more common drops may be more powerful than lower-level, rarer ones, rarer gear is usually stronger, all else being equal… of course, the individual stats each gear modifies matters, too, depending on your build - no use having bonuses to skills you don’t use, for example.
Legendary gear in Diablo 4 are basically “super rares” as opposed to truly being unique items with set names and functions, as they were in previous games. As opposed to more common gear and assuming a similar level, legendary gear will have more mods and higher stats. More than this, however, legendary gear also has a legendary modifier that can significantly alter how skills and basic gameplay mechanics function. What legendary modifier any particular legendary item spawns with is random, and their effects generally do not stack - if two legendary items with the same legendary modifier are equipped, the most powerful effect will be retained and the other will be grayed out, indicating that its effects are not being applied. Like many things in Diablo, randomness reigns supreme - not only are the actual mods (legendary or otherwise) on a legendary item random, but the potency of their effects are as well, so while getting a legendary is a promising development, there’s a lot of quality variation between legendary gear. Some example of legendary mods that can spawn on gear follows:
- of Control: You deal 30-40% more damage to Immobilized, Stunned or Frozen enemies. [Sorcerer Only]
- of Disobedience: You gain 0.25-0.5% increased armor for 4 seconds when you deal any form of damage, stacking up to 25-50%.
- Eluding: Becoming Injured while Crowd Controlled grans you Unstoppable for 4 seconds. This effect has a 40-20 second Cooldown.
- of Engulfing Flames: While enemies are affected by more Damage Over Time than their total Life, you deal 30=40% increased Burning damage to them. [Sorcerer Only]
- Frostblitz: Frost Nova gains an additional Charge, but the Cooldown per Charge is increased by 40-30%. [Sorcerer Only]
- Incendiary: Lucky Hit: Burning Damage has up to a 5-10% chance to restore 10 Mana. [Sorcerer Only]
- of Frozen Orbit: Frozen Orb stays in place after reaching its destination and explodes 2 additional times for 20-30% of its damage. [Sorcerer Only]
- of Inner Calm: Deal 3-10% increased damage for each second you stand still, up to 30%.
- of Might: Basic Skills grant 25% Damage Reduction for 4-8 seconds.
- of Shared Misery: Lucky Hit: When you hit a Crowd Controlled enemy, there is up to a 30-50% chance for that Crowd Control effect to spread to another unaffected enemy.
As you can probably surmise, legendary gear is the substance from which builds are crafted, secondary only to what skills you have purchased. Seeking out legendary items with legendary mods that enhance your preferred skills and are complementary with each other is a key gameplay goal in Diablo 4, and fussing over the more mundane mods that spawn on this gear is an important tertiary consideration that’ll help flesh out builds and differentiate the strong from the elite.
How to Farm Legendary Gear in Diablo 4¶
With a firmer understand of what legendary gear is and why it’s special in Diablo 4, let’s discuss ways to stockpile these items. As you probably guessed, getting a legendary drop is all well and good, but the ultimate goal is to get legendary gear with the correct mods - legendary or otherwise - that suits your playstyle and build. There are going to be a lot of duds during this process, and even otherwise good legendaries can simply roll up on the wrong piece of equipment, conflicting with what you already have - there’s no room for redundancy here. That being the case, you’re going to need to find a LOT of legendary items over the course of the your time with Diablo 4 to obtain those special ten that actually end up equipped long-term.
The key to everything in Diablo 4 is getting drops, and almost every combat scenario results in drops with varying frequency. Running around snuffing out trash mobs is, unfortunately, one of the least efficient ways to farm, and yes, we’ll all get something interesting by looting a random tree stump and splattering some mundane 
Fallen, but for volume farming you’ll want to look elsewhere.
Defeating World Bosses will earn you several legendaries.
How to Farm Legendaries - World Bosses¶
Perhaps the best way to get legendaries is to defeat bosses - the rarer and more powerful, the better. Diablo 4’s World Bosses are particularly lucrative, but most players (if not all - covering for the inevitable broken solo builds that arise) will need help downing this overpowering entities, and even then, they may not spawn regularly enough to be more than a welcome, but ultimately supplemental source of legendaries. That said, Diablo 4’s Ashava dropped 4-5 legendaries per kill in the beta, and often yielded a cache that awarded another several legendaries when defeated. Getting 8+ legendary drops from a few minutes of fighting is rather unprecedented, so exploit this source of wealth when and if you can. We recommend taking a look at our Diablo 4 tier list, because, it’s certainly possible for come builds to solo it.
Dungeons runs are fair way to farm for legendaries, albeit a less focused, more long-form method.
How to Farm Legendaries - Dungeons¶
For a more regular source of legendaries, you’ll want to look to [Dungeons] and [Events], which may not be quite as lucrative as killing world bosses, but are easier to do solo and less time-gated. Dungeons are marked by gate symbols on the map, and are typically self-contained areas separate from the world map, full of enemies that need slaying, usually consisting of several objectives that must be completed… which in turn usually are just fancy ways of killing enemies. You’ll often find a few resplendent chests in each dungeon, and many dungeons have a dungeon boss that also has a higher-than-average drop rate.
The chests you can loot after completing events can yield legendaries.
How to Farm Legendaries - Events¶
Events are activities that can be found in static locations on the world map, and while the places where events spawn don’t change, the exact type of event varies, usually following a timed rotation where the same event will repeat for a while before rolling over to something new. Your objective during events is usually to kill a bunch of enemies in a set amount of time, but there are some exceptions. Your competence will, however, be tested in some way, and if you complete an event’s “mastery” conditions (again, usually killing enemies fast enough) you’ll get a greater reward. Every time you complete an event you’ll get a reward chest, even if you don’t complete the mastery objective. This will reward you with several magical item drops (magical drops being a bit of a fuzzy word - the quality of the drops will vary based on RNG, but will usually be at least magical), gold, and Murmuring Obols. Events, once completed, will take a few minutes to respawn, but there’s nothing stopping you from just running between event spawn locations and completing them as often as you wish. Events themselves are a fine way of getting drops, but the aforementioned Murmuring Obols presents another opportunity…
Should event chests prove less generous than you’d like, the Murmuring Obols you get from events can be used to gamble - another fine way to farm legendaries.
How to Farm Legendaries - Gambling¶
Every time you clear an event you’ll earn Murmuring Obols - completing the mastery objective will get you more, but you can expect 20-40 Obols per event, however well you perform. You can spend these Obols gambling via the “Purveyor of Curiosities” that can be found in various towns. This is covered in greater detail on the How to Gamble page, but the takeaway is that gambling is a great way to score legendaries. You seem to have roughly a 1-in-6 chance of gambling a legendary every time you try, and while the cost to gamble varies on the exact type of gear chosen, the odds are you’ll get around one legendary per 120-300 Obols, which means in addition to whatever legendaries you’ll get from events themselves, you can expect another one from gambling every 3-7 events.
Gambling makes events our favored source of grinding for legendaries, taking breaks to pick on world bosses whenever possible, of course. Especially since you can pick the exact type of item you want to gamble for.
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