In this guide, I want to talk about and explain the so-called Pity Mechanism related to Tempering in Diablo 4 Season 4. I will also try to describe as simply as possible what it means to the average player, and how you can take advantage of it.
The reason I focused on it is that the use of Pity mechanic seems to be limited to the high-end elite player base, because they are used to reading forums and theory articles and the like. And the average person either doesn’t know about it or doesn’t understand it enough to use it to their advantage.
I hope this guide will change that, because if you are not familiar with this, you may ruin some excellent Diablo 4 items for your character.
Tempering Mechanism Explained
So, to understand Pity mechanic, first we have to explain a few things about Tempering.
Tempering is unlocked at level 15, based on finding and learning Temper Manuals, which have Weapons, Offensive, Defensive, Utility, Mobility, and Resource recipe categories. Each item has up to two slots that can hold Tempered Affixes. After each Manual is found and learned, they can be applied to gear repeatedly, infinitely, as long as you have the required materials.
During Tempering process, you can add affixes to an item by randomly selecting them from a pool of affixes.
Often, players want to add one specific affix to an item, while the other possible affixes are useless, or at least less useful. If you get the wrong affix, you have 5 chances to re-roll them, but if at the end of the re-roll you still don’t get the affix you want, you can’t change the wrong affix added to the item. When this happens, we call it “bricking”.
What Does Pity Mechanic Do?
I’ll try to explain this with an example. Let’s say we want to add “Chance for Frozen Orb Projectiles to Cast Twice” affix to our weapon. We Temper the weapon once, twice, and five times, but we still can’t get the desired stat after these rolls.
Now the weapon is unusable, and you can’t remove this new, bad affix from the weapon. It will be stuck there forever. Your weapons are not nearly as powerful as they would be if you rolled the affix you wanted.
However, this is where Pity mechanic comes into play. With Pity mechanic, if you play your cards right, you can increase your chances of adding the affix you want, Tempered, to your items. But only if you know how to exploit it.
It is important to note that Pity mechanic has not yet been confirmed by the developers. It is still just a theory, but more and more evidence is piling up to prove its existence. What this means is that if you don’t get a certain affix on your Tempering roll, the game essentially pities you. To compensate, it increases the chances of that affix appearing the next time you Temper. Now this isn’t a 100% increase, but it is noticeable.
Another important feature of Pity mechanic is that it stacks. Every time you roll an affix other than the one in question, the chances of getting the affix you didn’t roll increase. So if you roll an affix twice that is different from the one you want, your chances of getting that affix on the third roll are greater than if you got it on the second roll.
How Does It Work More Efficiently?
Will this mechanism be complex? Maybe, but let me give you an example again. We want to Temper this weapon with “Chance for Frozen Orb Projectiles to Cast Twice” affix. To maximize our chances, we can start Tempering with another useless weapon.
The goal here is to get any affix except the desired affix. And the point of this operation is that because of Pity mechanism, each time we fail a roll, our chance of getting the desired affix on the next roll will be greater.
So, to be more efficient, we Temper the useless weapon until we miss the desired affix three times in a row. This way, on the next roll, on our actual excellent weapon, the chance of getting the desired affix will increase by 3 times.
Let’s say our average roll chance of the desired affix is 25%, and because of the 3 previous rolls we failed, we increase this chance by 15% each time, so the chance increases by 45%, up to a total of 70%.
Now we don’t know the exact numbers, but this is how Pity mechanism seems to work. Based on all of this data I just explained, when Tempering high-end items for specific affixes, I recommend tempering useless items in the same slot first until you roll 3 times with an affix other than the one you want. Then, proceed to tempering your actual good items. If you do everything right, you should have a much better chance of getting the affix you want.
Of course, I must warn you that this chance is not a guarantee, but this trick should save you from failure and losing a lot of very powerful items.
That’s it! With these tips you’ll be on your way to getting your desired Tempering items in Diablo 4 Season 4 much faster. Hopefully, you’ve learned something from this guide. Good luck!
