Legendary vs Rare Items

General Discussion
1

When playing D3, should you always keep legendary armor and weapons even if rare items have better stats? If not, what is the advantage of acquiring legendary weapons or armor?

2

Legendary items with legendary power > rare items in D3.

You can extract legendary item’s power later. So even if you have legendary items with weaker stat than rare items, you can keep those legendary items until you unlocked the ability to extract legendary power.

Rare items are only good when you are leveling a new character.

Also, you can upgrade any rare items, whether it has a good or bad stats to legendary items later.

3

Legendary items tends to roll higher stat range than a rare (yellow) even if it has no legendary power attached to it.

4

If you’re leveling you keep using a gear who provides more damage, then more survival, unless you actually use the bonus from the legendary item like:
Pox faulds (does nice damage when there is 3 mobs around you)
Certain bracers,belts, helms and shoulders.
Certain weapons(if you are dual wield and one of the weapons improve some skill like ambo’s pride). Or off-hand if you have nice bonus in a skill that you use.

If you’re already lvl 70. Farm death breaths, do the weekly challenges and some bounties and extract useful affixes for kanai. Remember with this patch some legendaries equipped on follower buffs you, you only receive benefit from one “instance” of the legendary item and you can get bonus from weapon/off-hand, any kind of armor and jewelry at same time(3 slots through kanai).

So if you have a leoric crown equipped and leoric crown on kanai, the benefit won’t stack, you will receive the benefit from the highest value(often from kanai, that has static max value). So the ideal way to manage your legendaries after reaching lvl 70:

  • If you can equip the item on follower and receive the synergy(emanate), do it (unless you don’t have any kind of item with better stat for that slot, either yellow, blue or legendary).
  • If you have better rolls in the current legendary or have more than one from the same legendary. Consider extract the weakest one on kanai (with lower value on the legendary afix). You can save the best one from them to use if you need down the road the item. You can activate on kanai the legendary effect that you extracted to get the maximum benefit and swap the equipped when you find a better one or keep the item equipped and extract the new item you got if the stats are really low and replace the active effect on kanai. Extracting several items helps you complete seasonal journey, so can be useful if you think that item has a legendary effect that can help you but has bad stats.
  • Try to separate items that can have gold find to later create a build with gold find based, to replicate similar build than your current one. Having a version viable to t16 when you gonna go farm keys and bounties you get a bit more gold. That gold can be really useful for later mystic rerolls, pay for empower gr and level up your “normal” gems. Having extra chance each gr can be really handy, personally I always do empowered gr, If I complete it it’s a extra chance to level up a legendary gem, helps a lot to start having more damage, survival and also level up gems for later augments.
  • Upgrade rare item and kanai recipes are really nice ways to improve your gear without much effort. If you have several gems and don’t need level up, try to craft some yellow rings(lvl70) on jeweler to get rings and savage those rings for yellow mats. Yellow mats are really costly and you spend a lot each time you roll a non-crafted legendary item(lvl 70).

So the idea it’s for mats and purpose:

  • For roll affixes: keep a ratio of 100 reusable parts for each 500 arcane dust and 1000-1500 veiled crystals.
  • For upgrade rare: keep the ratio something similar to 500-1000 reusable, 1000-1500 arcane dust and 1500-3000 veiled crystals, because if you get the item most likely you would need to reroll it
  • Keep in mind what kind of gem your rings and amulet uses to convert most of your gems for gems that you could actually spend on those rerolls but also keeping a “nice amount” to craft rings. Worst case scenario craft amulets(but the cost it’s 3 gems from different types instead of 2 gems from 2 types). If you need to convert a gem you can buy the powder on little girl on act 2(by 500k) will convert 9 gems from one type to another one.
  • If you need reusable parts you always can pick gear from your follower(even on a new character) and use the recipe to converte either arcane dust or veiled crystal. For personal recomendation most of the time arcane dust it’s the best choice if you really need reusable parts.
  • If you need arcane dust often choose reusable parts as material to convert, using the same process as the previous one, but instead of white item you can buy a blue item on npc/vendor.
  • If you need veiled crystal choose the reusable parts as material to convert, using the same process as the previous one, but instead of blue item you use yellow items bough also from npc/vendor.

The farm mats:

  • If you go on rifts most of your mats will be death breaths, yellows, legendaries and some blues. Focus on legendaries and death breaths, pick the yellows from the type of item you wanna spend on upgrade rare and spend your kadala shards on the most important piece of gear(at price of 25) or if you want to farm a class set, focus on the lowest pool of items for your class(check kadala item calculator), them roll the piece for another piece using “convert set item”. Or take the route of rolling gear that “haedrig’s gift” would give you later to make you get your set sooner.
  • If you go on bounties most of your mats will be white, but also a item related from the act(on bounty cache). The bounty cache provides mats from the 3 types but you often will spend around 5 arcane dust and 10-15 veiled crystal on gear rolls, so after some “rerolls” your highest mat would be reusable parts.
  • If you go on GR, most of your mats will be yellow, some blues and several legendaries(based on gr you’re doing). You get forgotten souls from breaking legendaries, yellow and blues from breaking gambles on kadala. So your lowest resource would be reusable parts and death breaths.

In the end, most folks will keep doing several GR. So having a nice pool of reusable parts can be handy to reroll items as you get them. That’s why I strongly don’t recommend spend much of your arcane dust and veiled crystal for reusable parts. Because you will consume a ton of yellow and several blues, but really few reusable parts through the endgame content.

1 Like
5

I have 6 characters, 3 of them are in the mid 50s range and 1 is level 44. So, should I keep any legendary items I get before level 70 in my bank/stash?

6

If the legendary item improves a skill or add some damage in some way, you should keep it. Some will improve survivability but most of them until 70 will not do much because the perks associated with them. As general rule, I suggest you keep the legendaries with some kind affix on stash until you can extract the effect and put on kanai, because in the future they could become useful. While the ones who improves damage, skill or does some kind damage effect equipped for better overall damage. The game becomes tricker on 60sh range so those items could improve a lot the leveling process.

7

Only those that have a legendary power affix (text at the bottom of the item that states a skill being granted/rune etc, or a modification to a skill, an example would be Sever, at the bottom in orange text it says “Slain enemies rest in pieces” that’s a legendary power you can extract later)

Otherwise the advice giving you the breakdown on items and priority of power is spot on but I want to offer a simple summary.

  1. Nothing matters until you are 70, period.
  2. Only leg items with powers pre 70 are worth saving
  3. If you’re worrying about gearing issues before 70, you’re just wasting time, because once you’re 70, you’ll be replacing all gear anyway.
  4. Get to 70, then worry about anything else. The game barely even starts at 70.

If you need help getting a 70 fast, make use of the community chat channels to request help, many are helpful and power leveling you to 70 from 1 is a half hour or less depending on skill of the PL’er.

If you still can’t get help, send me a message or reply to me here and i’ll smash you up to 70 on your toons fast just to get you going. This offer only applies to characters on the Americas servers.

Good luck!