When Diablo IV first came out its economy felt hopelessly broken. Incrementally better but mostly worthless gear was incredibly expensive to buy during the main campaign, while gold was so tangential to the end-game grind that players quickly amassed Scrooge McDuck-like fortunes with nothing really worthwhile to spend it on. No longer.
The season 4 update has changed all that and made players so poor Blizzard is in emergency mode, monitoring whether Sanctuary needs some quantitative easing to keep its economy moving. For example, while the Loot Reborn overhaul made Aspects permanent unlocks, applying them to new gear can still cost a lot in addition to the usual fees associated with repairs and rerolling items at the Occultist. But the biggest culprit has been post-campaign masterworking, a new system for slowly levelling up the stat affixes on a piece of gear.
Only available at World Tier 4, each new rank costs additional crafting resources and a ton of gold. While the first few levels will only run a couple hundred thousand, the gold costs quickly ramp up into the millions , especially if you’re aiming for a fully masterworked set of gear across every equipment slot. And because of the RNG involved, hardcore players will often find themselves resetting and starting over, which alone costs 5 million gold.
It was creating a huge bottleneck as players farmed the new Pit of the Artificer boss rush mode for crafting materials, only to find themselves short on gold. 99 trillion.
