Season of the Malignant will come with 32 new powers that are exclusive to the Malignant Heart system. There is a rare fourth color of heart, which players can place in any of the three sockets.

Players can only match like-with-like, so they won’t be able to put a blue heart in a yellow socket. These correlate to different colored heart powers.

For the entirety of Season of the Malignant, all rings and amulets will drop with a festering socket that’s either red, blue, or yellow. Image: Blizzard Entertainment via YouTubeĬaged Hearts come with their own Legendary-level powers - such as the one shown above, which causes critical hits to electrify enemies - and players can socket them into their jewelry items. If players still manage to triumph, the beast will drop a Caged Heart, which you can use to drastically increase your power over the course of the season. Interacting with this heart will respawn the enemy - making them even more difficult to deal with - and summon in a bunch of additional foes. These monsters are extra tough, but drop a special Malignant Heart item when they die. While playing the game normally in season 1, there’s a chance for players to come across a Malignant monster. This, of course, manifests in some powerful new tools for each Diablo class. Cormund wants players to capture corrupted hearts and use them to increase their own power, so they can further purge the blight from the land. At the start of the season, players will receive a summons to the capital city of the Fractured Peaks, Kyovashad, at level 1 to meet Cormund, a new character. After players worked to push back the forces of evil in the main campaign, a new corrupting curse has started to make its way through the rest of the world.

Season of the Malignant takes place after the Diablo 4 campaign and acts as a side story in the world of Sanctuary. Blizzard Entertainment detailed the new seasonal mechanics (alongside the announcement of a new class for Diablo Immortal) during a lengthy livestream on Thursday. Diablo 4’s first season, Season of the Malignant, is coming to the game on July 20 - just a month and a half after D4’s launch.

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