Diablo 3: How to upgrade a Legendary item, and what does it do?

Earlier in Diablo 3’s life cycle, the ability to upgrade a Legendary item into a Primal Legendary was added. This is done through a relatively new crafting system called Kanai’s Cube, using one of its built-in recipes. However, to do this, you’re going to need to sacrifice some Primal Legendaries you’ve already found — which takes time and patience.

You can upgrade any Legendary in Diablo 3, so you could even upgrade the Reaper’s Wraps into a Primal if you really wanted to. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend that — if you’re going to do this, it needs to be a key item in your build — something useful.

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How to upgrade a Legendary item in Diablo 3 into a Primal

To upgrade a Legendary item in Diablo 3, you need access to Kanai’s Cube in your main base. You also need two ingredients — a Legendary item that you wish to upgrade, and 100 Primordial Ashes. You only use Primordial Ashes here, so don’t worry about accidentally wasting them.

Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of Primordial Ashes (Image via Blizzard Entertainment)

Every time you salvage a Primal Legendary, you’ll receive 55 Primordial Ashes — so you need to salvage at least two. Once you have a stock of Primordial Ashes and the desired equipment, click on Kanai’s Cube, and then click the little book icon. This pulls up the recipes, and you have to jump to page 11, Curiosity of Lorath Nahr.

Drag the legendary item in question into the cube, click Fill, and then click Transmute. That’s all you have to do when you want to upgrade a Legendary item in Diablo 3. However, it’s worth noting that you can only wear one Primal at a time, so keep this in mind.

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What does upgrading a Legendary item in Diablo 3 do?

Sometimes you get lucky....sometimes you don't (Image via Blizzard Entertainment/@AnomalyFade)

When you upgrade a Legendary item this way in Diablo 3, the item completely re-rolls. You have no guarantees on it getting any kind of sockets, your followers can’t equip them, and you can only have one equipped at a time.

There’s also no guarantee that you’ll get the same stats you had before — but in my experience, they tend to roll pretty decently. The values do tend to go up at least by a bit, but you aren’t guaranteed the correct stats, or even for it to be Ancient.

This is why it’s worth it to stockpile a great amount of Primordial Ashes and copies of the item you’re trying to perfect. At least that way, you can salvage the failed items into more Primordial Ashes to try again!

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