Diablo 4: List of all Malignant Heart effects, powers, and types in Season 1

Everything you need to know about Diablo 4 Season 1’s new unique mechanic.

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Each of Diablo 4’s live service seasons will shake up its gameplay with a temporary new addition or system, as Blizzard wants to ensure that the popular ARPG feels consistently fresh to play throughout the months and years to come. At the core of its first season, Season of the Malignant, are Malignant Hearts — unique items that give players valuable bonuses when equipped. With these, players are able to augment and fine tune their builds even more than they could during Diablo 4’s “preseason” launch period.

Here’s a full breakdown of everything you need to know about Malignant Hearts while battling your way through Sanctuary inDiablo 4 Season 1. This includes a detailed explanation on what they are and how they work, all the different ways you can get them, and a complete overview of each Malignant Heart type and bonus effect.

Diablo 4: How to get and craft Malignant Hearts

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As long as you’ve completed Diablo 4’s campaign at least once before or during Season of the Malignant, you will have access to a new questline with Season 1’s new NPC, Cormond. By speaking with him, you’ll learn about how a deadly corruption is spreading throughout Sanctuary, infecting everything and everyone with a fearsome Malignance that mutates and empowers its victims.At this point, you’ll be able to encounter Partly Corrupted versions of Elite monsters randomly throughout the world.

When killed,Partly Corrupted enemies drop a Malignant Heart that you can attempt capture using the Cage of Binding quest item given to you by Cormond. This respawns the monster as an even more powerful Fully Corrupted foe, but if you’re able to slay them again, their Malignant Heart will be yours. These hearts can then be slotted into pieces of Jewelry in place of regular Gems, providing you with Legendary Aspect-like bonuses (albeit less potent).

This is the main way you’ll be getting Malignant Hearts inDiablo 4, but there are a few other methods you can use to acquire them as well. For example, you can craft specific types of Malignant Hearts by using a resource called Ichor that’s obtained by killing lesser Malignant foes and salvaging hearts you don’t want.In total, you’ll need 35 of the Ichor types thatdon’tmatch the type of Malignant Heart you’re crafting in order to make one(more on heart types below). Note that these crafted Malignant Hearts will always be for your specific class or class-agnostic.

There are also six Malignant Tunnels in Sanctuary, which are alternative versions of dungeons filled with lesser Malignant enemies. At the end of Malignant Tunnels, you’ll find two Outgrowths for specific Malignant Heart types that you can use Malignant Invokers — items craftable at Cormond’s wagon — on.This is guaranteed to spawn a Fully Corrupted enemy that drops the type of Malignant Heart that corresponds to the Outgrowth you interacted with, effectively allowing you to target farm.

Are Malignant Hearts in the Eternal Realm?

While all of the bug fixes and balance changes in theDiablo 4 Season 1 patch noteshave made it into the game’s Eternal Realm,Season of the Malignant’s seasonal content is exclusive to the Seasonal Realm for now. That includes Malignant enemies and Malignant Hearts, meaning that you won’t be able to get or use them with any preseason characters.

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It’s important to note, though, that this may not be the case forever.Blizzard has previously indicated that it will consider adding content from seasons to the Eternal Realm once those seasons have ended, so it’s possible that we’ll see Malignant Hearts there in the future.

Diablo 4: All Malignant Heart types and sockets

There are four distinct categories of Malignant Hearts, with each one giving players a different type of bonus when socketed into pieces of Jewelry. We’ve listed each of these below:

Malignant Monsters have a glow that matches the colors of these Malignant Heart types, making it easy to tell which heart they will drop when defeated.Also, you can only slot Malignant Hearts into pieces of Jewelry with a matching socket color. To make it easier to acquire Jewelry pieces with the sockets you want, Blizzard has enabled trade of these items between players.

DIablo 4: All Malignant Heart effects and powers

In total,there are 32 different Malignant Hearts available for players to acquire, with each one sporting a unique effect. All of these hearts fall into the aforementioned four categories,though some of them can also only be used by one class or are exclusive to specificDiablo 4 World Tiers.

Below, we’ve put together a full list of every Malignant Heart in the game, along with each one’s type, restrictions, and special power.

More potent versions of these Malignant Hearts will drop as you level your seasonal character up and progress through endgame content likeNightmare Dungeons, ensuring that their effectiveness scales with your own. It’s highly recommended to salvage low-level Malignant Hearts for Ichor that you can use to craft new ones, as they’ll be much more effective.

Diablo 4 is out now and is available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One consoles, Windows PC, PS5, and PS4. It’s one of thebest Xbox gamesfor fans of dungeon crawlers and hack-and-slash combat, and we’ve been having an absolute blast with it.

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Brendan Lowry is a Windows Central writer and Oakland University graduate with a burning passion for video games, of which he’s been an avid fan since childhood. He’s been writing for Team WC since the summer of 2017, and you’ll find him doing news, editorials, reviews, and general coverage on everything gaming, Xbox, and Windows PC. His favorite game of all time is probably NieR: Automata, though Elden Ring, Fallout: New Vegas, and Team Fortress 2 are in the running, too. When he’s not writing or gaming, there’s a good chance he’s either watching an interesting new movie or TV show or actually going outside for once.Follow him on X(Twitter).