Diablo 4 Season 1 adds Malignant Hearts to buff your build with new, Legendary-style powers

Diablo 4’s first season launches on July 20, and it will be Season of the Malignant, which will include a new story rooted around the appearance of strange Malignant creatures throughout Sanctuary. These creatures have been infested with a terrible power from an as yet unknown source… and they’ll drop new loot for us in the form of Malignant Hearts, an item you can socket into gear like gems.

For players who played Diablo 3 and its themed Seasons you’ll find it a new twist on a familiar kind of meta-game play. The Malignant Hearts will provide us with Legendary-level powers we can use to create new builds, just like Diablo 3. Diablo 4 Seasons will add a story element to the mix, but it all comes back to the Season’s theme: the malignant corruption of Sanctuary.

For everyone looking forward to playing this new Season, we’re going to explain what we know about Season 1’s major gameplay mechanic: the Malignant Hearts. This is what you need to know about getting and using Malignant Hearts.

Collect Malignant Hearts for power

Malignant Hearts are a variation on gems you can equip in your gear, which we’ve already seen in Diablo 4. Unlike the average gems that provide a small bonus like additional armor or extra Thorns damage, Malignant Hearts have powers that are similar to — and perhaps even more powerful than — an actual Legendary aspect.

Season 1 will have 32 different Malignant Heart powers available in the game. We don’t yet exactly what they are, the latest developer livestream mentioned a power that made your weapon strikes electrified for additional damage, so expect effects along those lines. Malignant Hearts will work like gems, though they can only be socketed into special Infested Jewelry, which means you can’t have more than three of these powers on a single character.

Both Malignant Hearts and Infested Jewelry sockets have a color, and you have to match up the appropriate color heart with the appropriate color socket — though one variety of heart can fit any color of socket.

How to get Malignant Hearts

To get a Malignant Heart, you have to find and kill corrupted enemies until you find a Malignant Heart, which you can attempt to cage. This will summon a more powerful fully corrupted monster (with plenty of friends) for you to defeat. If you succeed, you’ll get a random Malignant Heart, ready for you to slap into a socket on your various Infested Jewelry and gain what one could call ludicrous, maybe balanced powers.

Corrupted mobs are random spawns, but you’ll be able to find more of them at locations called Malignant Tunnels, new dungeons which will be scattered across Sanctuary. (Yes, I know how it sounds.) You’ll not only find plenty of Malignant elites to kill here, but you’ll also be able to farm for specific color Malignant Hearts to get exactly what you need to finish out your build.

Like Seasons in previous Diablo games, the Malignant Hearts system will only be in Season 1 content. You’ll only encounter them if you roll a seasonal character when Season 1 starts on July 20… at least unless the developers decide otherwise at some point in the future. But don’t expect to see any corrupted monsters or Malignant Hearts on the non-seasonal Eternal Realms: if this sounds like something you want to do, you need to roll a new character for Season 1.

While the new system is interesting, the devs are concerned that if every Season’s special mechanic ends up in the base game it will end up being too dense and complicated for new players and I get that, so we’ll see how intuitive this new system end up being.

For now, this is all we know about Malignant Hearts, but we’ll add more details to this post when we learn more. It’s not long before Season 1 begins, so we should have a list soon to help us plan the best way to rip the horrible corrupted hearts of monsters out of their chests and stick them in our jewelry.