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Since gear in RPGs tends to determine a player’s strength and survivability, dungeon crawlers like Diablo Immortal are all about loot. While you can improve your existing gear, it’s only a matter of time before you find a superior piece of equipment. So what do you do when you want your character to wear some new shoes but you don’t want to lose all the work they put into their old pair?
Early on in Diablo Immortal, players can upgrade their equipment, which makes those items slightly stronger. As you improve your equipment more and more, those changes have a cumulative effect. More importantly, upgrades become more and more expensive. Finding something even stronger is a matter of “when” rather than “if,” which quickly poses a problem. Do players keep their improved equipment, or do they use their newfound gear and start the costly upgrade process over again?
In Diablo Immortal, the answer is “neither” thanks to the game’s Rank Transfer system. That feature makes sure players never lose any time or money spent on upgrading their favorite weapon just because they found a shiny new sword that summons tornados. Moreover, that system is surprisingly easy to use and the exact opposite of some of the game’s more pay-to-win elements.
Diablo Immortal: What Are Ranks?
The stronger your equipment in Diablo Immortal, the stronger your character becomes. Because rarer items are, by their very nature, more powerful than common loot, they have a natural head start on stats. Even better, those items can be improved over time.
In Diablo Immortal, all equipment higher than “Magic” rarity (i.e., blue items) can be upgraded at the Blacksmith for a nominal fee that consists of Scrap Material, Enchanted Dust, Glowing Shards, Enigmatic Crystals, and/or Gold. Each time an item is upgraded, it goes up in rank. Rare items (i.e., yellow equipment) have a max rank of 5, while Legendary items (orange equipment) have a max rank of 20. The higher the rank, the stronger the item. Unfortunately, higher ranks require more resources. Normally, that would mean needing to earn/hoard a lot of resources to keep upgrading new items. Thankfully, Diablo Immortal cuts you a bit of a break so far as that goes.
Diablo Immortal: How to Transfer Ranks Between Items
In order to fully upgrade one piece of Legendary gear, players need to spend just over 1 million gold and salvage countless items (as well as complete numerous Challenge Rifts). Thankfully, the game’s Rank Transfer system at least allows you to avoid having to complete that process too many times.
Not to be confused with Essence Transfer, Rank Transfer lets players transfer item ranks from one piece of equipment to another. Thankfully, the Rank Transfer process is as idiotproof as it is free. If a player tries to equip a new Rare or Legendary piece of equipment and that equipment will replace a currently upgraded item, the game asks players if they want to transfer that currently equipped item’s Rank and Gems.
If the player says yes, the new gear magically adopts all of the previous item’s upgrades. If players don’t want the new piece of equipment to inherit Ranks just yet (or they find stronger Magic gear and want to save their upgraded gear) they can instead visit a blacksmith and use the Rank Transfer services those NPCs offer. The process is as simple as selecting the currently upgraded item and the new item they want to transfer the upgrades to and then confirming the transfer process. Even when done through a blacksmith, Rank Transfer is free of charge.
While Rank Transfer is a painless process, it is not without limitations. For example, players can only switch Ranks for items that take up the same equipment slot. For instance, two Helmets can swap their upgrades just fine, but the game won’t let you transfer a Helmet’s current Rank to a pair of Pauldrons. Moreover, Rank Transfer only works within the predefined Rank limits of an item. Since Rare items max out at Rank 5, gamers can’t transfer a Legendary item’s Rank 6 upgrades to a Rare item. However, they can give a piece of Legendary equipment a Rare item’s Rank 4 improvements.