Diablo 4 Tempering Guide: Affixes, Limits and GA Tempers

Neviriah

Senior Editor

Published Sep 19, 2026

Tempering is how you add a new affix to your gear. It is not an upgrade, and not a reroll of an existing affix. It is the main way to apply an affix on your item that was not there before, which means it should be the first step you do on a newly found item that is worth keeping. It currently applies to almost all gear: Rare, Legendary items, Uniques, even Mythic Uniques can all carry one tempered affix.

Here is how the whole system works, including how a tempered affix can become a Greater Affix on Ancestral items.

How Tempering Works

Take a piece of gear to the Blacksmith, and you will see the temper option in the tabs up right. What you can add on the item depends on which Temper Manuals you have found and learned so far. Manuals drop throughout leveling and early endgame. You can right-click one to register its recipes permanently in the Tempering tab of your Codex of Power. Each manual teaches a recipe containing 3 to 5 affixes.

The Codex sorts Temper recipes into six categories, and each gear slot only accepts certain categories. If a recipe is not showing up on your item, it is almost always a slot or class restriction, not a bug.

Since the Season 11 rework, you choose the exact tempering affix you want, not just the recipe. The only random part is the value, which rolls within the affix range. An item only holds one tempered affix. You can also temper the same affix the item already holds.

Tempering will cost you the usual crafting materials (Iron Chunk and Veiled Crystal for non Ancestral gear, and Forgotten Soul for Ancestrals).

Temper Charges are Limited

Every item has tempering charges: 3 as the baseline, and one extra charge per Greater Affix on the item, so a perfect 4 GA piece has up to 7.

Applying or rerolling the temper costs a charge, and a reroll never lets you keep the previous result, so you should only reroll a good value if you can live with losing it.

Run out of charges and the current tempered affix is locked in place. Players call this bricking, and it can be quite frustrating.

However, there is an item to help you sort out this blocker.

Scroll of Restoration

Rare Crafting Material

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Used by the Blacksmith to restore 1 Tempering Charge on an item.

Frequently found in Torment difficulties from:

Infernal Hordes

Dark Citadel

Rarely found in Torment difficulties from:

Pit of the Artificer

Nightmare Dungeons

Undercity of Kurast

The Scroll of Restoration restores 1 temper charge on your item. Scrolls drop at the end of Infernal Hordes, and can be purchased at the Dark Citadel. They can also drop from Lair Bosses hoard chests or in Pit, Nightmare or Undercity runs, but these sources are more RNG. There is no limit to how many you can use on one item.

Scrolls are also consumed automatically in the tempering window at the Blacksmith, so there is no separate step other than clicking on the “add charge” icon as many times as you want to add a temper charge.

The Greater Affix Temper Loop

On Ancestral items, a tempered affix has a chance to become a Greater Affix every time you apply or reroll it. A temper GA is a 1.5x more powerful version of the affix, and is displayed with a starburst icon in front of the affix.

There is no button for it and no guarantee for a GA. You roll, and if the temper is not a GA, you roll again. Run out of charges, use a Scroll of Restoration, and keep going.

The fact that the gear has to be Ancestral is what is important. GA tempers require 900 item power. Gear at 850, which starts dropping frequently once you pass level 70, cannot roll a Greater Affix temper no matter how many Scrolls you burn, so check the item power before you start the loop.

On the right item, though, getting a GA is a big power gain right now, and GA tempers happen more often than most players assume.

It is important to remember, tempering cannot turn an item's dropped affixes into Greater Affixes (only the tempered affix is affected), and Scrolls do not modify anything except temper charges.

Tempering and Masterworking

If you masterwork an item and later reroll its temper, the new tempered affix automatically picks up the same Masterworking rank the old one had. You do not lose masterwork progress by re-tempering, which is what makes the GA temper loop even possible on finished gear.

Careful, if you transfigured your item and it is not modifiable anymore, then you will not be able to change the temper anymore.

The order is still important when it comes to your materials though: do your temper first, masterwork after. The full reasoning is in the gear upgrade order guide.

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