Should you salvage or sell gear in Diablo 4?

If there's one inevitability in Diablo 4, it's that you’ll collect a ton of gear. While you can hold a small array of gems and equipment in your inventory, a single dungeon run can single-handedly fill your inventory to maximum capacity. You’ll need to offload all this excess gear somehow, but how?

At the outset, Diablo 4 provides two ways to turn your loot into something useful. The most obvious option is to sell your items, which will give you a small sum of gold. However, you can also choose to visit the smithy, who will salvage your gear and turn it into various materials. You’ll of course want the best possible returns on your equipment, but it's hard to tell which resource is more valuable when you’re still progressing the main campaign. Between gold and materials, which should you want?

The correct answer will ultimately depend on what you need most. However, if you don't know how to answer that question yet, you can follow a few rules of thumb that will better prepare you by the time you reach high-level content. In fact, sometimes you won't want to sell or salvage your gear! Here's what you need to know.

While Diablo 4 infamously contains cosmetic microtransactions, it does provide tools to customize your character's appearance for free. The transmog system allows you to swap out your armor's appearance with any piece you’ve discovered… as long as you’ve salvaged it as some point.

Before you sell a piece of gear, look at the text above the Sell Value in the item window. If you see the text "Unlocks new look on salvage," I’d recommend throwing it in the salvage once you’re finished with it. You might want to do something else with especially valuable Legendary gear, but we’ll get into that in a moment.

As a rule of thumb, salvaging gear in Diablo 4 will reward you with a random spread of materials. However, the rarer the loot you salvage, the wider your spread of possible finds. For example, Veiled Crystals can only be salvaged from rare-tier gear. Since you’ll need many resources like these once you get into high-end content, they can become a choke point if you aren't careful.

In other words, I highly recommend salvaging rare or legendary gear while selling common or magic equipment. This will give you an even stream of materials and money, both of which are valuable in Diablo 4. This can of course be adjusted, since you may wind up with more Veiled Crystals than you need past a certain point. But to start your quest, this approach will set you up well for later.

Sometimes, you’ll come across a piece of legendary gear with such an incredibly powerful effect that you don't want to let it go. If that's the case, congratulations! Fortunately, there's a way to preserve a bit of that gear you love.

Later in your adventure, you will unlock the Occultist. Among the many functions that comes with this, you can use Extract Aspect to break down your legendary gear in a unique way. You’ll lose your original equipment, but you’ll gain an Aspect that can apply the unique effect of what you lost to a new piece of gear. I’d highly recommend using this if you find something that synergizes with your build.

If all else fails, you can always throw a piece of equipment into storage. That way, you’ll clear up your inventory without necessarily needing to make a permanent decision. There's no wrong answer on what to do with your equipment, so take all these factors into consideration and decide what fits your needs best.

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