How to make gold in Diablo 4

Gold is the most basic currency in Diablo 4, and one that has many purposes. If you’re the kind of player who likes to experiment with your build, or to fully optimize your gear, gold is something you’ll need to have — and depending on how you play, it’s something you might find yourself lacking.

But fear not, aspiring gold maker, for we’re about to explain not only what you need gold for — there might be more things than you first imagined — but also how to ensure you always have a healthy amount saved up for all your needs.

What is gold used for in Diablo 4?

Gold has many uses in Diablo 4, though some of those can be more obvious than others. Among its main uses, we can list:

• “Re-specing” (changing your talents or Paragon points). This use usually comes up more if you like to experiment with different talents, or a new build. But even in the endgame, you might need to find a new path around your Paragon board, and refunding those points also costs gold.
• Repairing your gear. How much this one will be on your mind depends on how often you find yourself dying.
  
• Upgrading gems. This one is necessary once you reach higher levels and start getting better and better gems to put into your gear sockets.
• Upgrading your gear. This one only really shows up once you hit the endgame, and finally find yourself some pieces of gear that are good enough that you know you won’t be replacing them any time soon.
• Extracting and Imprinting Legendary Powers (Aspects). Another endgame use for gold, though this one can be one of the most frequent ones. The ability to extract and imprint Aspects is extremely useful once you start replacing your endgame gear.
• Buying gear (sometimes). It’s not very common for you to find gear you want to buy on vendors in towns, but every once in a while you do stumble upon a perfectly itemized ring that is worth buying and tacking an Aspect on to use.

Now that you’re aware of why gold is useful, let’s get to how to best obtain it — and save it, as well.

How to make gold in Diablo 4

The most important tip for gold-making is this one: don’t salvage all your gear! Resist the urge to simply dump your inventory at the local blacksmith for a lot of crafting materials. The truth is that you don’t need that many materials, and that vendoring some of the gear you find is your main source of gold in this game.

I have set a certain rule of thumb for myself, in which I end up vendoring about 60% of the items I find, and salvaging the remaining 40%. This is usually divided as such:

• Salvage any items that will unlock a new appearance. This is especially true for players who care about transmog, of course.
• Salvage any Legendaries you don’t need — neither to equip nor to extract an Aspect from. The crafting materials you get from Legendaries are not as easy to come by, so they’re useful to get.
• Salvage yellow (rare) items sometimes. In many of my visits to the vendors in town, I’ll ask the blacksmith to salvage all rare items. But every once in a while I change things up and sell those items instead. Try to aim for a 50/50, but feel free to skew that ratio towards “vendoring more often than salvaging” whenever you’re wanting for gold.
• Vendor blue and white items. Those usually don’t get salvaged. I’ve never found myself in a situation where I was lacking for materials and the only source for those materials was salvaging white or blue items, so it’s safe to turn them into gold instead.

In time, you’ll begin to figure out when to salvage and when to sell items, and you’ll notice that you’ll still have a healthy amount of materials while also earning a lot of extra gold from the process.

Another important tip is: don’t upgrade all your gems! Only upgrade them as you need them to actually socket into your gear. Upgrading every gem you find ends up eating a lot of gold — and it prevents your low level alts (if you have any) from using those gems, since higher-level gems have level requirements. So it’s smart to keep gems in your stash, exactly as you found them, and only upgrade them as required. Trust me, this will also save you a lot of gold.

Do you have any other gold-making tips in Diablo 4? Feel free to share your best observations and practices!