If you’ve been playing Diablo 4 before Season 4, even casually, you may end up with a few legacy items. They aren’t a new category of items, like legendary, Uber Uniques, or rare, but rather a piece of the game’s history. Do legacy items serve a purpose in Diablo 4? If so, are they useful? Should you hold onto your legacy items, for that matter? Ask, and you will receive!
D4: What Are Legacy Items? Explained
With the start of Loot Reborn, many items have been reworked entirely or slightly changed, not to mention a bunch of affixes just gutted completely. Rather than retroactively replace items that were altered, there will now be two versions: the original variant (now a legacy item) and its reworked variant.
Go check your storage on one of your Eternal Realm characters. You probably have some right now! They’re marked with a skull as well as a little “Legacy Item” tag just below the name. I now have five tabs full of legacy items to sift through, as I’m sure you will as well.
That begs the question: Do legacy items serve a purpose? Absolutely! Legacy items still function as they did before; if, for example, it’s a Legendary legacy item, the unique affix will also work as intended, too.
Now, you might be thinking legacy items are obsolete, but because they’re still functionally useful, it puts them in a unique position—at least for your Eternal Realm characters. It means you can use those items to immediately start tackling new endgame content, such as The Pit. And if you don’t have anything particularly good, you can at least farm high-level Helltides until you do.
With that said, I wouldn’t hold onto that many legacy items in Diablo 4. However, be on the lookout for ones with a lot of resistance and damage reduction. Those stats are incredibly important for endgame content like Uber bosses. And lastly, legacy items cannot be upgraded via Tempering and Masterworking. What you see is what you get!