Learn how Item Power and breakpoints affect your Diablo 4 characters
So you’ve read the item power breakpoints and are wondering how they affect your characters. Item level, or Item Power, influences the base armor rating or attack value of weapons, armor, and jewelry items. While its influence extends beyond your characters’ stats and includes affixes like cooldown reduction and lucky hit chance, we’ll primarily be focusing on demonstrates its effects on your DPS.
Diablo 4 Item Power scales from 52 to 725+, and is often referred to in-game as Item Power to distinguish it from the item level of World of Warcraft, another Blizzard game which uses the term. To give you a better sense of how Item Power influences your gear, we’ve provided a breakpoint explanation, as well as specific comparisons of affix ranges with the advanced tooltips setting enabled. Advanced tooltips displays information about the ranges of affix values for the Paragon indicators at the bottom of the interface. Comparing these ranges with the affix values that your items have reveals just how much Item Power impacts your character’s strength.
Diablo 4 Item Power breakpoints
In general, higher Item Power results in stronger items, with higher stat ranges on affixes. Comparing affixes before and after Item Power breakpoints with affix values in perfect affix ranges helps visualize the differences in power that your character sees in battle.
While visiting the Devil is series of databases, you’ll see a section for Diablo 4 Armor. Armor is a general term for ‘non-weapon’ items like armor, helmets, gauntlets, and boots. These items and two other categories, weapons and jewelry, uses a specified breakpoint system to determine how the affix magnitudes of their affixes increase with Item Power. Comparing these magnitudes also reveals the strength of specific affixes, like cooldown reduction, that affect your DPS.
The affix values for these armor, helmet, gauntlets, and boot items are affected by Item Power breakpoints for all but Legendary Aspects and Unique-exclusive modifiers. Armor, helmets, gauntlets, and boots all have 35 breakpoint intervals that affect their affix values. Weapons, however, have no such breakpoints, so their affix values more directly correlate to the Item Power rating of a particular piece of gear, including weapons’ DPS.
In general, the highest affix rolls are found on Item Power 725+ Ancestral items, specifically DPS armor, helmets, gauntlets, and boots, as shown in the image above. While Sacred gear in World Tier 3 tends to drop around the last three breakpoint thresholds, which leads to significant power spikes, Ancestral gear in World Tier 4 has the strongest immediately attainable item skills and lasts well into endgame, especially once you unlock World Tier 5 and the World Pursuit: Ominous Outskirts act.
The base DPS or Armor rating of your character’s items does not increase via breakpoints. Rather, these base stats scale linearly with Item Power and do not suffer any changes to their magnitudes based on item power. This also means that comparing your base stats to those of a friend’s should reveal no differences as long as you compare items of equivalent Item Power.
Your best bet for obtaining items with higher Item Power ratings is by increasing the World Tier of a Greater Rift in the paragon leveling system, specifically World Tier 4. World Tiers track four aspects of gear drops: item quality, item power, item tier, and World Experience Bonus. Importantly, some of your primary gear drops, specifically weapons, armors, and jewelry, require improved World Tier levels to unlock their best affixes, making World Tier upgrades perhaps the most impactful.
At a Blacksmith or Jeweler, you can upgrade gear, providing additional stat and affixes perks as previously mentioned. Each upgrade increases the magnitude of all affixes, enhancing your character’s DPS and survivability. The trade-off is that each upgrade increases the difficulty of the Greater Rift by one level, making it more likely that you will fail to complete it. However, the increase in difficulty is a fraction of the difference between your previous gear and the upgraded item, meaning that upgrading an item to hit a breakpoint results in a reroll of all its affixes, often resulting in a significant boost to their stat values.
Another important factor in obtaining gear that reaches previous breakpoint intervals is to keep items at Item Power 700 with perfect affixes. If you can keep a gear item at item power 700 with perfect affixes, you can raise it to the final breakpoint through upgrades.
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