Diablo 3: Upcoming Changes to Blood Shards from Rift Guardians

Gambling for items with Blood Shards in Diablo 3’s new Adventure Mode can be a cruel experience. Rarely are you rewarded with legendary items, and worse still, the blood shards that drop when you kill a Rift Guardian while in a Rift are exceedingly scarce—you get about 50 per kill regardless of what difficulty you’re playing the game on.

This is all about to change, Blizzard has announced, as players are set to receive much higher amounts of Blood Shards for killing the Rift Guardian while on difficulties above Torment I.

Here’s what Blizzard community manager Grimiku wrote on the official forums:


Well, since you brought it up let's talk a little about that. 😉 We're also planning on changing Rift Guardians so that they drop more Blood Shards for each level of Torment past the first (i.e. in Torment II+). For clarity, this means Rift Guardians would drop the same amount of Blood Shards as they currently do in Torment I, but starting in Torment II they would drop additional Blood Shards per each Torment slider tick.

The patch does not yet have an ETA, but it’s scheduled to come out with a host of other fixes and changes for the game that were greatly requested by the community, such as the reduction in unsocketing gem prices—among other things.