How to upgrade Soul Shards in Diablo 3
Soul Shards don’t have to be scary, they just have to make YOU scary.
Stephanie Roehler 
Image via Blizzard Entertainment
With Season 25 Blizzard has implemented a new feature to make Diablo 3 more exciting: Soul Shards. These socketable items have made boosting your character much easier, and all it takes is a bit of boss-farming to do it. However, since your Soul Shards start off as basic boosts with a lot of question marks in their description boxes (literally), how do you make your Soul Shards even more powerful?
How do Soul Shards work?
Soul Shards are basically just gems with fancy new functions and names. There are seven of them across the game, based on the different Lesser and Prime Evils. You put them into the sockets of your helms, weapons, and other gear to make your character stronger. Much like gems, you can upgrade these Shards to be even stronger. They affect stats like crit chance, cooldown reduction, pets damage, and many others.
Upgrading Soul Shards
Unfortunately, unlike gems, you don’t upgrade Soul Shards by going to Covetous Shen and just combining a bunch of them. Instead, you have to pick up an ingredient called the “Hellforge Embers” and they are what upgrade your Soul Shards. These embers start dropping at level 70 and you use them by right-clicking the ember and then left-clicking the Soul Shard you’d like to upgrade. You can upgrade your Soul Shards up to three times until the item reaches rank 4.
An important note, though, is that you have absolutely no control over what your Shard upgrades into. It could gain any of the random magical attributes of its higher ranks, so you might have to upgrade a lot of Soul Shards before you get to create the perfect one for you. The plus side is that Soul Shards drop from every Act boss, many of which you have to fight for your season rewards anyway, so grinding them out shouldn’t be too difficult. Eventually, you’ll make a Soul Shard that boosts the stats you need.
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