Ancient Items were added into the game in Patch 2.1.2 after extensive testing on the PTR. These are level 70 Legendary Items with a special "Ancient" designation which grants higher values to most of the affixes on the item, including the damage roll on weapons. Ancient Legendary Items can be big upgrades over non-Ancient versions of the same item since they will have higher values to most affixes, but ancient items are not guaranteed to be better since they might not roll with ideal affixes for a specific character or build.
Contents
Appearance
Ancient items look identical when the drop; there is no way to tell if an item has rolled ancient until it is ID'ed. Once identified, Ancient items have an orange border (green for set items) around the outside of the item tooltip, and say "Ancient" in the item name.
Frequency
A small % of level 70 legendary items from all sources found on Torment 1 or higher will spawn as Ancient.
- Ancient items can come from all sources; monster or chest drops, gambling, Horadric Caches, or crafting. (Crafting can produce Ancient, including an Ancient Hellfire Ring or Hellfire Amulet.)
- The odds increase on higher levels of Torment, from around 1.5% on Torment 1 up to 10% on Torment 6 (from monster drops).
- It's not yet known how the odds of an item being ancient are set for Gambling or Crafting, since if they were tied to difficulty level, players would just create Torment 6 games to do their gambling and crafting.
Affix Values
Not all affixes are affected by Ancient. Those that are will always roll with higher numbers on an Ancient item. Examples:
- Mainstat or vitality rolls at 500-750 on normal legendary gloves and 751-1000 on Ancient legendary gloves.
- Mainstat or vitality rolls at 416-500 to normal legendary rings and 501-600 on an Ancient legendary ring.
- ResAll rolls 80-100 on normal armor and rings, and 101-120 on Ancient armor and rings.
Not Ancient Boosted
Some affixes are not boosted by occurring on an Ancient item, and these include many of the most powerful affixes in the game. Affixes not affected by Ancient include:
- Critical hit Chance
- Critical hit Damage
- Attack Speed
- +Elemental Damage % to a single element.
- +Damage to Elites
- Socketed (There are not additional sockets nor better odds for an ancient item to be socketed.)
- All special Legendary Affixes are unchanged by Ancient items.
Value by Item Type
One major point of debate concerning Ancient Items during their PTR testing was the varying utility by item slot. An ancient item of the same type with good affixes was always a big upgrade, but since Ancient items are as random as all other items, in the game, they were more or less likely to be useful depending on the item slot.
Ancient weapons were the most useful, with guaranteed much higher damage than on any non-Ancient item.
Ancient Armor was sometimes a big upgrade, with potentially much higher rolls to mainstat and vitality and resistance, but with so many potential affixes on armor it's quite rare to find an ancient piece with bonuses to the properties a character requires. For instance, a typical build would require shoulders with +mainstat, +vitality, +res all, and +%damage to a specific skill. A non-ancient item with all of those would never be improved upon by an ancient version of the same item with only 2 or 3 of those properties.
Ancient Jewelry is the least improved by Ancient, since most of the best modifiers on jewelry, including crit hit, crit chance, +elemental damage, attack speed, and socket, are unaffected by Ancient. The only likely boost on top end jewelry is to the +mainstat, which is nice to increase with Ancient, but is only worth a couple of hundred points to stat, and thus never worth using at the expense of any of the other affixes. Few players on the PTR testing of patch 2.1.2 were able to find ancient versions of jewelry that were upgrades over non-ancient jewelry, since players found at least 10x more non-ancient legendary jewelry items and it usually takes dozens of pieces of jewelry to find one with close to ideal stats.