February 17, 2016 - diablo 3, guides

Crafting with Kanai's Cube

Useful Recipes

Don't use the recipes to convert gems and crafting materials unless you are desparate because you should accumulate those items as you play the game and there are better ways to spend your Death's Breaths.

Most of your time will be spent upgrading yellow items to legendary items and reforging legendary items to get ancient items. Extremely high greater rift progression (GR75+) will require augmenting your items with additional stats.

Archive of Tal Rasha (Extract Legendary Power)

Extracting a legendary power from an item is the most important recipe the cube has to offer.

Skull of Nilfur (Convert set item)

Only use this recipe early in your character becuase there is no chance the newly converted item will be ancient.

Hope of Cain (Upgrade rare to legendary)

This recipe is often overlooked, especially on class specific gear, because there is a chance that the newly created item can be ancient. Get your yellow items from gambling with Kadala, then convert those yellow items to fill out your gear. Almost all of your class specific ancient gear should come from this recipe unless the gear is dropped during rifts.

Law of Kulle (Reforge legendary)

One of the more useful, but more expensive, recipes later in the game, this one allows you to reroll all of the stats on a legendary or set item and more importantly has a chance to roll ancient items (very important for Legacy of Nightmare build).

Caldesann's Dispair (Augments legendary item with bonus stats)

A new recipe introduced in this season's patch, you can now add additional stats to legendary items. The stat's value is dependant on the legendary gem that you sacrifice to the cube. Only use this recipe on items that you don't plan on replacing soon because it's a very time intensive recipe (each augment requires 7.5+ greater rift runs).

Other Recipes

Most of these recipes have little to no use to them except in extreme circumstances. You should rarely, if ever, use these recipes.

Darkness of Radament (Convert gem type)

This recipe is somewhat useless (although much more useful with Caldesann's Dispair's gem requirement), but can come in handy if you are short on a particular gem from gearing up alternate characters. Make sure to roll the gem up to flawless royal before you convert the gems; it will save you a lot of Death's Breath.

Anger of Iben Fahd (Convert Crafting Materials)

Useful only for converting excess materials into materials you need, this recipe can get somewhat expensive. Finding an item of said type isn't too bad and one Death's Breath isn't too bad until you need to convert lots of materials (and only really useful for converting Reusable Parts to Veiled Crystals).

Work of Cathan (Remove level requirement from item)

Another somewhat useless recipe, although handy for leveling characters (especially in hardcore) if you can't find a power level. Normally a Gem of Ease socketed into your weapon is enough to get to the high 50s in softcore, this recipe provides more protection when leveling hardcore toons.

Farming Materials

Farming bounties is the best thing you can do to get materials. Bounty caches drop everything you need: reusable parts, arcane dust, veiled crystal, bounty materials, gems, legendary items, and Deaths' Breaths. Spend your downtime from doing greater rifts in public games doing bounty runs and you will rarely be short on materials.

However, if you find yourself short on a particular material, here are some of the better ways to farm that material.

Gold

Open a portal to the vault by putting a Puzzle Ring in Kanai's Cube. Once you have Boon of the Horder, level the gem and put it on your character while farming T10 rifts and bounties (not only does it provide you with a good movement speed boost at level 25, you will get lots of gold).

Marquise/Imperial Gems

Open caches or do vault runs while wearing or cubing a Broken Crown; you equip the Broken Crown before killing gem goblins during bounties or rifts if you keep a Broken Crown in your inventory as well.

Death's Breath

Nemesis Bracers and/or wearing the Sage's Journey set goes a long way to farming Death's Breath (farming T7+ also helps, where drops are guarenteed).

Not the Cow Level has a particular high density of shrines that help Nemesis Bracers shine and even though the Sage's set can hurt your damage quite a bit, running rifts in a group or at slightly lower difficulties (T7 vs T10) can offer some dramatic results.

Reusable Parts

Running bounties is my first choice for reusable parts, but if you need reusable parts and reusable parts only, Battlefield of Eternity in Act 5 or Halls of Agony in Act 1 have a lot of weapon/armor stands that tend to drop a lot of white items.

Arcane Dust & Veiled Crystal

Again, bounties are the best choice. Otherwise, farm reusable parts (see above) then convert those materials into the correct material using bloodshards with Kadala to get the appropriate item type.

Forgotten Souls

Speed farm T7-T10 rifts or speed farm greater rifts in under 5 minutes. Bounty caches tend to drop 1-3 legendaries per cache, so that tends to be 15 or so Forgotten Souls in 15 minutes.

Blood Shards

Greater Rifts only. Figure out what level you can complete in roughly 5 minutes and keep repeating that level (if you are completing rifts faster than that, you are spending too much time running and if you are over five minutes, you are fighting more than you are running).

Infernal Machines

Best off farming these with bounties (again, shocking... I know). Farming machines by creating new games in adventure mode with highly mobile characters can be done, but it's pretty boring and somewhat inefficient. Just do bounties. Seriously.