Are you spending a lot of time farming Restless Rot and Fugitive Heads, fellow wanderers? Yes, these are indeed the items that need to be grinded in Diablo 4 Season 7, but if you think about it, you will find that the real grinding in Season of Witchcraft is Gem Fragments.
Because unlike previous seasons, Gem Fragments are really hard to get in Season 7, and they play a pretty important role in this season. So here, we want to show you a few ways to quickly farm Gem Fragments in D4S7 to help you find the right one for you!
Why Do You Need To Farm Gem Fragments?
In the previous seasons of Diablo 4, Gem Fragments have always been important to improve the attributes of our characters, but this season they are more important and valuable than ever because you can’t actually make Occult Gems unless you collect a lot of Gem Fragments. These new gems introduced in Season 7 can provide significant stat bonuses to your gear, and once you have Occult Gems in all your gear slots, you can maximize the potential of your character build.
3 Best Places To Farm Gem Fragments
Currently, there are 3 places to farm Gem Fragments in Diablo 4 Season of Witchcraft, these are Infernal Hordes, Nightmare Dungeons, and the new Headhunt Zones.
We tried farming in all of these places, recorded the initial and final number of Gem Fragments obtained after spending a certain amount of time on each activity, and added a column to calculate the total number of Gem Fragments obtained in these activities. With this comparison, you can intuitively understand which location to choose to farm Gem Fragments is the most efficient.
Infernal Hordes
Let’s start with Infernal Hordes. What I did was run 10 waves of Infernal Hordes, which took a total of 15 minutes to complete. Consider though, we’re not currently using the best speed farming build, so this somewhat affected the amount of Burning Aether we could collect and the time it took us to get it, but thankfully it wasn’t that bad in the end.
In the end, we managed to get 706 Aether in Infernal Hordes. We chose Hellborne option primarily, and after defeating Fell Council, we skipped all loot rewards and Diablo 4 Gold, instead exchanging all Aether for Obducite and Gem Fragments. Infernal Hordes ended up giving us a total of 29,700 Gem Fragments.
Nightmare Dungeons
Next we tried Nightmare Dungeons. As you know, Nightmare Dungeons vary a lot from each other, so some dungeons only take 3 to 4 minutes to complete, like Ancient’s Lament, then medium-sized dungeons take an average of 6 to 8 minutes to complete, and last but not least, some dungeons are very large, like the new dungeon in Nahantu, which usually takes more than 8 minutes to complete.
During this test, we ran all 3 types of dungeons to get accurate results. But be aware that in the end you have to take into account that there are many factors that change how many Gem Fragments you can get, such as whether you participated in an event, whether you found Treasure Goblins, how many enemies you killed, whether you found a Butcher, etc.
In short, after comparing, we found that the best Nightmare Dungeon was a medium-sized dungeon, such as Calibel’s Mine, where we got a total of 12,300 Gem Fragments in 7 minutes. This means that, in theory, if we run another similar dungeon, I will also get similar numbers. This also means that we will be able to collect around 25,000 Gem Fragments in the same amount of time as Infernal Hordes. So, you can see that running Infernal Hordes is still the better choice.
By the way, we got 8,500 Gem Fragments when running the small dungeon, while when I ran the large dungeon in Nahantu, Forge of Malice, we only got 6,700. This is definitely a very bad run considering the time it took us to clear these dungeons, as it was close to 10 minutes and it had the lowest number of Gem Fragments.
Likewise, Nightmare Dungeons are very different from each other, but overall you can see that they are not as effective as Infernal Hordes.
Headhunt Zones
Let’s take a look at the last contender, Headhunt Zones. These zones are amazing and we were really shocked by the amount of Gem Fragments that can be collected. You will see right away that these zones are a must-go.
Our first run took 15 minutes, and we stayed in the same zone the whole time. We killed Fugitive Heads and completed as many Whisper bounties as possible, which got me 3 Whispers of the Dead caches, one of which was a Chaos cache. In addition, we activated a Cleansing Pyres, defeated 9 bosses, and got 3 Fugitive Heads. All in all, this run got us 43,300 Gem Fragments.
On the second try, we decided to jump between Headhunt areas, which meant that once we killed a Fugitive, we collected as many orange cocoons as possible and then entered a new area a few minutes later. No luck here, though, we didn’t find Cleansing Pyres and only got 3 Whispers of the Dead caches, killing the same number of bosses and getting 2 Heads. In the end, we got 40,000 Gem Fragments.
On the last try, we also switched areas after a few minutes, but this time we were lucky and found a total of 5 Cleansing Pyres. These are great because they spawn more enemies and you can almost hear Gem Fragments dropping. On top of that, we also got 1 Whispers of the Dead cache and I got 2 regular caches, but killed fewer bosses, 7 in total, and didn’t get any Fugitive Heads. However, this run gave us 61,600 Gem Fragments.
You can clearly see that the worst run in Headhunt Zones gave me 10,000 more Gem Fragments than Infernal Hordes in the same amount of time, but the best one even doubled the amount I got in Infernal Hordes.
Final Conclusion
The above is why I came to the conclusion, there is no doubt that Headhunt Zones is definitely the better choice for you to farm Gem Fragments, and on top of that you can also collect Restless Rot and if you are lucky, you can also find some Fugitive Heads, all of which add up to the best ticket to the endgame!
What’s more, we didn’t even use Draught of Whisper during this testing, so imagine how much better things would be if you used Elixir!
