All updates

loot-mechanics · October 25, 2026

S to D: How Stat Verdict Grades Diablo 4 Loot

S means best-in-slot, D means salvage. Learn how we grade every affix — then scan your gear free at statverdict.com.

Every item you pick up in Diablo 4 asks the same question: keep it, upgrade around it, or break it down for materials? Stat Verdict answers that with a single letter — S, A, B, C, or D — plus a verdict tailored to your build. But a letter only helps if you know what it means and why your item earned it. Here's exactly how the grading works, and what's changed for Season of Hell's Legacy.

The Five-Letter Scale, Top to Bottom

There are five grades, no more. No E, no F — D is the floor, and it already means salvage. Here's the full ladder:

That's the whole scale. If you're ever expecting a sixth tier below D, there isn't one — D already tells you to salvage. And if an item gets no grade at all, that's a separate thing entirely, which we'll get to at the end.

Why Greater Affixes and Build-Fit Beat Big Numbers

The single most common mistake when grading your own gear is trusting the biggest number on the tooltip. A large magnitude feels like a great roll — but numbers lie, because the game inflates them in ways that have nothing to do with the base quality of the affix.

Masterworking is the culprit most people forget. Rank 25 adds +25% to every affix on the item, and the Capstone adds +50% to one affix on top of that — and that stacks with a Greater Affix's own +25% bonus. So a line that reads enormous might just be an ordinary roll that's been pumped up by upgrades and a GA stamp. Magnitude alone is not merit.

What actually matters is Greater Affixes and build-fit. A Greater Affix is a genuinely superior roll baked into the item. And build-fit decides whether an affix is even working for you. The trap here is resource affixes: they print their resource by name, and that name is the only thing on the tooltip saying which class the roll serves. "+X Maximum Spirit" looks useful — but Spirit is the Druid's resource. On a Spiritborn, who spends Vigor, that same line does absolutely nothing. A grade that ignored build-fit would credit that dead affix as if it were live. Stat Verdict doesn't.

Season 15's Grading Shifts

Two changes this season move grades in ways that would catch out a player still thinking in last-season terms.

Single Resistance is now worth ~7x All Resistance

This one reverses an old default. All Resistance used to be strictly better than a single element — same stat, broader coverage, no reason to prefer one. Not anymore. Single Resistance affixes on equipment, Charms, and Tempering recipes are now 7 times the value of an All Resistance affix. All Resistance is no longer automatically the smart pick; it's a genuine trade-off. An item with a fat single-element resistance line that you'd have shrugged off before can now be carrying serious weight — and a grade that scaled resistance by last season's math would argue that line down instead of rewarding it.

Strong-GA items with weak base rolls are recoverable now

This is the bigger shift for your salvage pile. The Horadric Cube's Affix Value Reroll recipe rerolls an item's base affixes while protecting its Greater Affixes, Enchanted affixes, Tempers, and Transfigurations. So an item with two strong GAs and a garbage base roll isn't dead — it's a project. You reroll the weak base affixes and keep the parts that made it worth looking at.

And the net just got wider. A fix shipped in the current patch, 3.2.3, makes four affixes that the Cube previously couldn't touch rerollable: Impairment Reduction, Barrier Generation, +Healing, and Critical Strike Damage. If one of those was the weak base roll dragging your item down, it's now salvageable through the same recipe. (That fix still stands as of 3.2.3.) The upshot: a grade that says SALVAGE on a strong-GA item would have been right last season and is wrong now. These items get graded as the recoverable candidates they are.

Before you salvage an item with strong Greater Affixes, check whether its weak base roll is one you can reroll.

There's a related point worth knowing: Magic and Rare items with a Greater Affix are crafting candidates, not junk. Never salvage one of those on sight. And since 3.2.1 — still live under 3.2.3 — Unique items and Unique Charms can have their powers rerolled in the Cube too, which widens what counts as a keep even further.

What "No Grade" Means

Sometimes you'll upload a screenshot and get no letter back at all. That is deliberate, and it is never a low grade in disguise.

If an item can't be read clearly — a cropped tooltip, a blurry capture, affixes cut off at the edge — it gets no grade rather than a bad one. Guessing would be worse than useless: an item graded D because half its stats weren't visible would send you to salvage something that might have been best-in-slot. So when the read isn't clean, you get told the read isn't clean. The fix is usually a better screenshot — full tooltip, in focus, nothing clipped. Re-scan and you'll get your letter.

This is the same discipline behind the whole system. A live affix mistaken for a dead one can destroy a genuinely good item; the reverse just leaves a mediocre piece in your stash. When the grade isn't certain, the safe direction is the one that doesn't cost you the item.

The Bottom Line

S means keep it forever, D means break it down, and the three letters between are a progression ladder from "near-perfect" to "replace it soon." But the letter is only the headline. The real value is why — whether your Greater Affixes carry the item past an inflated number, whether that resource line actually serves your class, whether a weak base roll is rerollable rather than fatal, and whether a single-element resistance is quietly doing seven times the work you'd expect. Every grade comes with a build-specific verdict that spells out exactly which of those made the call. Upload a screenshot, read the reasoning, and stop second-guessing your stash.