Items

Every guide to Diablo Immortal's currencies splits them into currencies and crafting materials, which tells you almost nothing, because the game does not treat those as different things. What actually separates our sixteen item pages is how far each one sits from a corpse. Gold falls out of an enemy. Scrap Material takes one destroyed piece of gear. A Legendary Gem takes a Crest, a rift run, a pile of Runes, a Platinum payment and, if you want it ranked up, other Legendary Gems fed into it.

So this guide counts the hops. Each section is one step further from the drop, and the further you go, the more of the game you have had to dismantle to get there. It is a more honest picture of the economy than a glossary, because it shows the thing the glossaries hide: this is a destructive economy. Almost nothing here is found. It is made out of something else you no longer have.

The chain at a glance

Zero hops: it fell on the floor

Gold is the only genuinely abundant thing in the game and the page is right to call it farmable in a way the others are not. It comes off anything you kill, which makes dungeons the most lucrative route, and it comes off bounties, where the harder ones pay the most. It goes back out through gear upgrades, through the gambling vendor, which the page fairly describes as a sinkhole for anyone with more gold than sense, and through founding a clan.

Set Items are the other thing that simply drops, and they carry the most useful rule in the bucket. There are eight sets of six pieces, forty-eight in all, spread across the game's eight endgame dungeons, and the difficulty each piece needs is decided entirely by which slot it goes in. Belts and boots begin dropping at Hell 1, necklaces and gloves at Hell 2, and no ring anywhere shows up below Hell 4. Not one of the forty-eight breaks that pattern, so a third of the collection stays unreachable until Hell 4 is clearable, and the slot alone tells you the tier without any lookup. Our dungeons guide takes the same table from the other direction.

The Horadric Legacy set is the odd one out in the entire bucket, and worth a paragraph precisely because it breaks the pattern. It was a pre-registration giveaway, claimed from the Events menu and collected through your mail, available for thirty days after launch and redeemable on exactly one character. It is cosmetic, it converts into nothing, and nothing converts into it. It is the only item on this page you neither farm nor spend.

One hop: the salvage byproducts

Three materials come out of the same act, which is walking to a blacksmith and destroying gear you were wearing an hour ago. They are the reason salvaging is not optional.

Scrap Material is the plainest of the three: salvage gear, get Scrap, spend it on primary and secondary upgrades, or trade it toward Enchanted Dust. Enchanted Dust has the widest set of sources, coming from salvage, zone events, chests, ordinary monster loot, Shadow and Immortal events and smithing vendors, and the reason it needs all of them is that upgrades want it in bulk. If you are short, the Hilts Trader sells it at fifteen Hilts, which is the cheapest thing on that stall and the right purchase when a gear rank is one material away.

Glowing Shards are the same idea with a gate on it. Scrap and Dust take an item to rank 5 and then stop, and everything past that needs Shards on top. They come from dungeons, from the free daily rewards chest, from Immortal and Shadow events, and specifically from salvaging legendary items rather than ordinary ones, which is the detail that makes them scarcer than the other two. That scarcity is also why they are the first material with a second use: a Smithing Materials Vendor will trade Shards for Enigmatic Crystals, which is the bridge to the next section.

Two hops: made out of something already made

Enigmatic Crystals are where the chain starts to bite. All three ways of earning them run through Challenge Rifts, and only one of them is realistic: the first clear of each Rift level pays out, while the other two routes are a top-ten monthly leaderboard place and being first on your entire server to clear all five tiers. In other words the sensible supply is finite by design, because you can only clear a level for the first time once. They go into secondary slots and take Set Items to rank 10, which is why the page's advice to hoard them rather than spend them on levelling gear is the correct call, and why the Glowing Shards trade matters as the only renewable tap.

Scoria is a two-step of a different kind: you collect it from daily Battle Pass quests at one a day and from Helliquary raid bosses at ten a kill, then refine it into Hellfire Scoria at a blacksmith before it does anything. What it does is raise the Helliquary, and what the Helliquary gives back is Combat Rating, so Scoria is the material that most directly buys you entry to the next raid tier.

Charms are the most self-consuming item in the game, and they deserve reading in full before you salvage anything. A Charm occupies a thirteenth gear slot from level 56, arrives at rank 1 with one skill bonus and can reach rank 5 with five. You get one a day for finishing all your bounties, or buy them at a hundred Hilts, or take them from the Battle Pass. From there it turns inward. Salvaging a Charm gives Alchemical Powder on a clean ladder, ten for a rank 1 and ten more per rank to fifty at rank 5, and Alchemical Powder is what upgrades other Charms, at ten for the first rank and rising to fifty for the last. So the cost of a rank 5 Charm is, roughly, other Charms. The alternative is extraction: five hundred Platinum turns a maxed Charm into a Skill Stone, and the Stone imbues one chosen skill into another Charm, replacing a random skill rather than one you pick, with a twenty percent chance of the transfer landing on the skill you wanted. Bonuses do not stack when they land, they overwrite.

Three hops and beyond: the gem chain

The deepest chain in Diablo Immortal ends at a Legendary Gem, and every link in it is worth naming because the length is the point.

It starts at a Crest. Fading Embers come from exactly one source, an Elder Rift empowered with a Rare or Legendary Crest, paying one Ember for a Rare and five for a Legendary. You may only run three empowered rifts a day for Embers, which is the hard ceiling on the whole economy below. The one way to widen it is other people: four players in a rift can each stack a Crest, and a full party all running Legendary Crests returns sixty Embers from a single run. You then spend Embers at the Fading Ember Trader in Westmarch on Runes and Legendary Gems.

Runes are the next link, dropping from Elder Rifts directly or bought with those Embers, and they exist to be spent: the Ati and Fa runes are the crafting stock, and each Legendary Gem recipe wants a particular combination of them plus Platinum. Legendary Gems are the end of it, and even arriving there does not finish the job, because ranking a gem up means combining it with other Legendary Gems plus Gem Power, and Gem Power comes from salvaging Legendary Gems you decided not to keep. The last link in the chain eats itself.

One thing worth knowing before you start that chain: count the gems named across the twenty-five builds our classes pages recommend and the same few keep reappearing. Blood-Soaked Jade leads at eight builds, wanted by every class but one. Behind it, on six builds apiece, sit Chip of Stoned Flesh and then Pain of Subjugation. Whatever you rolled, your first three gems are unlikely to be wasted, and that matters when each one costs a Crest.

Aspirant's Keys run a shorter version of the same shape. They come from the Hilts Trader, from Legacy of Horadrim, from Battlegrounds and from raids, and up to four a day drop free from the enemies inside Iben Fahd's Sanctum, though those have to be picked up by hand because they will not auto-loot. They open the Sanctum's chests, where one is free each day and twenty-one is the ceiling if you have the keys or the Platinum for the rest.

Outside the chain: the two wallets

Two currencies do not sit anywhere on the ladder, because they are not made out of anything. They are the two ends of the question our free-to-play page is really about.

Platinum is the semi-premium layer. You buy it with Eternal Orbs, earn a trickle from daily activities, or raise it by listing your spare Skill Stones and gems, legendary ones included, for other players on the Market. It buys Crests and Echo Crystals, pays for Charm extraction and settles the Platinum half of every Legendary Gem recipe. It is the shortcut past most of the sections above.

Hilts are the interesting one, and the single most quietly important fact in this bucket is on that page: you cannot buy Hilts. Microtransactions will sell you nearly everything else in Diablo Immortal, and the closest they come here is an Empowered Battle Pass that ranks you up faster so you earn Hilts more quickly. The currency itself has to be earned: from Challenge Rifts, from that first kill you make each day, from placing on the solo or group leaderboards, from faction quests, from the Battle Pass and from Codex achievements. Its stall runs on daily, weekly and monthly limits, and the standing advice is to spend on the Legendary Crest first, since it is the one item there that a month has to hand you. A Rare Crest is three hundred Hilts, Enchanted Dust is fifteen, a Charm is a hundred.

The Sigil of Dominance is the smallest currency here and belongs beside Hilts rather than in the chain, because it buys position rather than power. It comes from Immortal daily tasks or from Lieutenant Fizriah for Hilts, and it raises your standing inside the Immortals, a faction that only five hundred players per server can hold at once.

Frequently asked questions

What is the fastest way to get Legendary Gems? Crest-empowered Elder Rifts, and there is no way around the Crest. Three empowered rifts a day is the cap, a Legendary Crest returns five Fading Embers against a Rare Crest's one, and a full party stacking Legendary Crests turns one run into sixty Embers.

Can I buy Hilts with real money? No. Hilts are the one currency in the game with no purchase route. The Empowered Battle Pass speeds up how fast you earn them, which is not the same thing.

Why can I not upgrade my gear past rank 5? Because Scrap Material and Enchanted Dust stop being enough there. Every rank after 5 also wants Glowing Shards, which come mainly from dungeons and from salvaging legendaries rather than ordinary drops.

Should I salvage spare Charms or extract them? Salvage, unless you have a specific skill worth chasing. Salvaging is free and returns Alchemical Powder on a clean ten-per-rank ladder; extraction costs five hundred Platinum and the resulting Skill Stone only lands the skill you wanted one time in five.

Which Set Item pieces can I actually get right now? Look at the slot, not the set. A waist or a pair of boots will drop for you at Hell 1; necks and hands wait until Hell 2; rings, in all eight sets, want Hell 4.