An easy Diablo 4 Horadric Cube trick lets you protect your best rolls while crafting

One of the best additions in Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred is the Horadric Cube, which acts as a key piece of Blizzard’s new-look, more in-depth crafting systems. After several years of little more than tempering and masterworking, the expansion has been a breath of fresh air when it comes to building your own best-in-slot items. It’s easy to mess up and brick a strong gear piece if you aren’t careful, however, but players have found one cunning way to preserve your most important affixes through the crafting process.

While this trick will work at any point after you unlock the Horadric Cube during the Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred campaign, it really comes into its own when you hit the action RPG’s endgame proper and start gathering up items with one or more greater affixes. These indicate particularly strong values for the stat in question, and if you get one that is essential to your build, you’ll want to ensure that you don’t accidentally reroll it while trying to further hone the other modifiers.

Diablo 4 streamer Max ‘Wudijo’ shares some advice to ensure this doesn’t happen, seen in the video below. It’s a simple trick – all you need to do to ensure that you don’t lose the stat is reroll it yourself first. That sounds counterintuitive, but let me explain. If you take the item to the Occultist and use enchanting to reroll the stat you want to keep, you are always given the ability to stick with its current form rather than accept one of the random new options.

By ‘rerolling’ and selecting to keep your favorite greater affix the same as it was, it’ll be locked in place and won’t be removed during the Horadric Cube crafting process. Once you’ve done this, you’re free to return to the Horadric Cube and start stripping off affixes you don’t want, then using tools like Focused Reroll to seek out those that you do. The value of starting with even one or two perfect rolls is high enough that people are paying big sums of gold for the tastiest drops, so keeping them secure is essential.

Technically you can only preserve one of your rolls this way, because the Occultist limits you to modifying just one of the affixes on a given time. If you study the various categories (such as offensive or defensive) for gear stats, however, you can theoretically keep others safe. If two greater affixes you like are in separate groups, you can just ensure you only use the Focused Reroll option on the category containing the affix you’ve locked in place.

With that knowledge in my back pocket, I’m now feeling much more free to start tweaking items that I might previously have been too scared to touch, lest I accidentally tear off their most useful stat. Of course, this method extends to other affixes, not just greater ones, and also includes those you’ve obtained through the reroll process. Hopefully I can now get my build perfected in the coming weeks before the next Path of Exile 2 league pulls me away.