Diablo 4 Baleful Fragments and how to use them
It's all about the Legendaries
The Diablo 4 Baleful Fragments crafting items are essential for getting the most out of your Legendary gear, and you’ll need quite a few pieces of high-quality Legendary gear as you approach the endgame and seasonal content.
The problem is that you need Legendary gear to get Baleful Fragments in the first place.
Farming Legendaries is something you won’t really be able to do until you reach World Tier 3, so if you aren’t there yet, just focus on completing the campaign first.
Diablo 4 Baleful Fragments
How to get Diablo 4 Baleful Fragments
Baleful Fragments only appear when you salvage Legendary items at a blacksmith. There’s no hard data showing which gear types or power levels have a higher chance of dropping Baleful Fragments, if any have a higher chance. However, some players say they only get Baleful Fragments when they salvage Legendary gear with a power level of 400 or higher.
As with any gear that you salvage, what you get is random. You might salvage five pieces of Legendary gear and end up with one Baleful Fragment. If you’re wanting to improve several pieces of your favorite Legendary items, it’s going to take a while.
You have a decent chance of getting Legendary gear at World Tier 3 and higher from world events and bosses, but your best bet is running and resetting dungeons to farm equipment. With a bit of luck and rather a larger amount of patience, you’ll end up with plenty of gear to salvage.
What do you use Diablo 4 Baleful Fragments for?
You need Baleful Fragments for two things. One is to fully upgrade Legendary equipment, and given the rarity of Baleful Fragments, we recommend thinking carefully before deciding to upgrade a piece of Legendary gear. Make sure the piece of gear is one that fits with your endgame build so it’s actually useful for long periods of time.
The second use is tied more closely to your endgame builds. You need Baleful Fragments to imprint aspects from your Codex of Power onto certain pieces of gear. Aspects make very specific tweaks to certain abilities and push you down a certain build path – a bleed Barbarian, for example, or a frost Sorcerer – and while you won’t need every Aspect, you’ll need Baleful Fragments to make any of them worthwhile.
If you're keen on starting with a new character to experiment with different builds, check out our Diablo 4 tier list to see which class might be right for you and our Necromancer and Sorceror builds for how to get the most out of the two top classes.