For a long time I was masterworking my endgame equipment and getting disappointed at the 4,8, and if the item is good enough, 12 point upgrade points because at each of those points one of your stats is chosen and upgraded to a much higher level than it would have been previously. The problem is you cannot CHOOSE which of them you want to upgrade and sometimes it is going to upgrade a stat that you do not use and do not care about when perhaps you wanted something that it didn't choose.
In the past I always just dealt with it and moved on or perhaps moved on to another piece of gear after the failed upgrades but as it turns out, there is a system in place where you can reset your gear and perhaps it always has been there. The reason why most people don't know about this, especially on Playstation systems, is because there is no on-screen indication that this option even exists, which is very strange.
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I don't know if the Smith always had this function or if it was added in a patch somewhere along the line but the important thing to note is that it exists now and anyone can perform this anytime they feel like it. The amount of materials required to reset an item is very minimal and it is kind of a joke outside of gold, but I think that most people are sitting on so much gold these days that whatever that cost is it is rather irrelevant. For example I have just over 100 hours of gametime with 3 level 60 characters and I have over 300 million gold in the bank so when they want to charge me 5 million for a reset I just laugh at the idea.
So if you are upgrading your gear, especially if this gear happens to be unique or ancestral legendaries that drop very regularly (almost all of them do) the cost you will incur to take an item from level 4 to 8 in the hopes that the one particular stat you really want to be randomly upgraded actually is, this process is FAR more expensive than simply resetting the one you are currently on and having another go at the rank 4 upgrade boost from 0.
The main limiting factor is Obducite and going from level 0 to 4 (first upgrade on stats) is a total of 100 Obducite. To take an item from 4 to 8 to have "another go" at potentially getting the upgrade you are hoping for, costs 840 Obducite. You don't have to be a math wizard to realize that you could upgrade 8 items to level 4 for the same cost as leveling one item from levels 4-8
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For example, if you have this rather rare Mystic helmet and you were really hoping for the upgrade to core skills and at level 4 instead it upgraded your Movement Speed and you don't really care about that, some might be tempted to just grind for Obducite to get to 8 and then 12 but still not get the core skill upgrade perk and the journey to have a go at all upgrades including the last one at 12 that feels like your "last chance" to get that upgrade perk will cost you 5890 Obducite as well as a bunch of other materials that most people have in such great abundance that they aren't even worth mentioning.
So for me, and i did this recently on a piece of gear that I had multiple of, it was more worthwhile to simply reset the gear over and over again until that first lucky chance on the first upgrade landed on the stat that I wanted.
Fantastic!: So where do I do this?
I was getting to that. It is available to everyone in the game at all times at every single blackmsmith in the game but again, it is very strange that this option and the button you need to press to make it happen isn't on screen at all on PS versions of the game.
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I've been told that on PC there is a little icon next to the item placement box on PC that looks like this in the Masterworking section at the blacksmith. On PS there is nothing at all. No worries intrepid traveler! I got you covered. Once the item is places in the item section at the blacksmith simply press the triangle button and a new interface comes up displaying the reset masterwork ranks interface. It costs you 5 million gold per try but basically everyone has hundreds of millions of gold sitting around since there doesn't seem to be a great use for it anywhere else in the game.
So in summary
- Go to blacksmith
- open masterworking tab
- place item in masterworking box
- press triangle to bring up the option to reset
- spend 5 million gold
Then boom... you have a blank slate to have a try at getting the upgrades that you actually want.
This helped me a lot and boosted my stats a great deal. It also saved me a ton of time running Nightmare dungeons with the 1/50th the amount of cost associated with it. I hope this helps some people out there.