Highlights
- Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant introduces the Malignant Heart mechanic, allowing players to encounter Malignant enemies who drop socketable items called Caged Hearts.
- Caged Hearts can be socketed into accessories like Amulets and Rings, granting powerful effects to the player. Players can have up to three Caged Hearts at once but cannot remove them once socketed.
- There are four types of Caged Hearts: Vicious Hearts for offensive abilities, Brutal Hearts for defense, Devious Hearts for utility, and Wrathful Hearts for super effects. Each type offers specific bonuses and trade-offs for players to consider.
One of the biggest new gameplay elements Diablo 4 added in its Season of the Malignant is the Malignant Heart mechanic. This mechanic gives Diablo 4 players the chance to encounter Malignant enemies within Sanctuary's dungeons who drop a new socketable item known as a Caged Heart. These items have the power to grant very useful effects to the player when socketed into an appropriate piece of gear, and there are four different varieties of Caged Hearts that each come with their own specific type of effects.
Once the player acquires a Caged Heart, they will be able to socket it into gear with a corresponding Infested Socket. The special types of sockets can only be found on accessories like Amulets and Rings, meaning players can have up to three Caged Hearts on their character at any time, but they cannot be removed once socketed and must be replaced by a new Caged Heart that will destroy the old one. Infested Sockets can also be added to these equipment types by visiting a Jewelry Vendor in one of Diablo 4's major cities, but doing so costs one of the player's hearts and the type of Infested Socket added is random.
Vicious Heart
Vicious Hearts represent Caged Hearts that grant offensive abilities, and players can identify this type of Malignant Heart in Diablo 4 by its orange appearance. Most of these hearts will feature effects that impact the player's damage output and overall offensive potential, such as the Tempting Fate heart which gives the player a 40-60% damage increase to Critical Strikes, but reduces non-Critical Strike damage by 15-20%. These types of hearts are perfect for players who are looking to optimize their damage output, but don't mind a trade-off since many of these hearts have a negative side effect players will have to watch out for.
Brutal Heart
Brutal Hearts are the defense-oriented Caged Hearts in Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant and can be identified by their blue coloring. Brutal Hearts tend to have effects that help with player survivability, such as the Prudent Heart which grants the player Immunity for 2-4 seconds after losing more than 20% of their Life in a single hit, but can only activate once every 110 seconds. Effects like this have become much more useful after the Season 1 update for Diablo 4 that buffed the power of enemies and made playing as a more frail class like Sorcerer all the more difficult.
Devious Heart
Devious Hearts are the Diablo 4 Caged Hearts that grant players useful utility-based effects and can be identified by their purple appearance. The kinds of effects these types of hearts grant range from aiding in resource management to inflicting status effects and crowd control options, such as the Determination heart which helps reduce resource draining effects by 40-50% and grants 3-8 increased resource generation. This can be a very helpful effect to have when tackling some of Diablo 4's Nightmare Dungeons with affixes that annoyingly drain the player's resources faster than usual as it can mitigate the amount of resources lost.
Wrathful Heart
The final type of heart in Diablo 4 is the Wrathful Heart, which have the potential to be the most powerful of all the Caged Hearts as they offer super effects and are represented by the color green. These hearts all have stronger than normal effects, such as The Malignant Pact heart which allows the player to cycle through a different Malignant Heart bonus every 20 kills. These bonuses include a 20% increase in attack speed, 15% chance to restore resources when using a Core or Basic Skill, and gaining a Barrier that absorbs 85-102 damage every 21 seconds, essentially giving the player the best of what all the types of Caged Hearts have to offer.
Diablo 4 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.