Diablo 4’s Season of the Malignant is adding new builds on July 20th

diablo 4‘s first season Season of Evilcomes to the game on July 20 – just a month and a half later D4′s start. Blizzard Entertainment has detailed the new seasonal mechanics (along with announcing a new class for ). Diablo Immortal) during one long live stream on Thursday.

Season of the malignant takes place after the diablo 4 campaign and acts as a side story in the world of Sanctuary. After players work to push back the forces of evil in the main campaign, a new deadly curse begins to make its way through the rest of the world. At the beginning of the season, players at level 1 will be summoned to the capital of the Fractured Peaks, Kyovashad, to meet Cormund, a new character. Cormund wants players to capture corrupted hearts and use them to increase their own power so they can further rid the land of the plague.

Of course, this manifests itself in some powerful new tools for each Diablo class. While playing the game normally in Season 1, players have a chance to encounter an evil monster. These monsters are particularly tough, but drop a special item, Malefic Heart, when they die. Interacting with this heart will cause the enemy to respawn – making them even more difficult to deal with – and summon a bunch of additional enemies. If players still manage to triumph, the Beast will drop a cage heart, which can be used to drastically increase your power throughout the season.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via YouTube

Caged Hearts come with their own Legendary-level powers – like the one shown above, which electrifies enemies on critical hits – and players can incorporate them into their trinkets. Throughout the Season of Evil, all rings and amulets will drop with a festering setting that is either red, blue, or yellow. These correlate with differently colored heart forces. Players can only match like with like, so they can’t put a blue heart in a yellow socket. There is a rare fourth suit of hearts that players can slot into any of the three sockets.

Season of the Malignant will include 32 new powers exclusive to the Malignant Heart system. Tim Ismay – the main producer for seasons in diablo 4

If players are looking for a specific evil heart, they can disassemble existing hearts they find in the world and receive a special crafting currency. Once they’ve collected enough, they can take the currency into a vicious tunnel – a new area of ​​activity full of vicious monsters – and end up spawning a special enemy guaranteed to drop a vicious heart of their chosen color.

Blizzard developers have also announced that Season of the Malignant will feature some new story content (unrelated to the main plot of ). diablo 4), a new boss monster, new legendary powers, and new unique items.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

The new powers and items will also make their way to the Eternal Realm, where all non-seasonal characters live diablo 4. In order to play any of the Season of the Malignant specific content or increase their Season Pass level, players will need to create a new Seasonal character from scratch on July 20th.

However, Blizzard reiterated that all seasonal purchases are purely cosmetic and that players will never be able to purchase in-game power with real money diablo 4 – a big deviation from Diablo Immortal.

The last few minutes of the live stream covered aspects of the Seasons that the developers talked about in their last live stream: the Season Journey, the new Seasonal Boons mechanic, and more. The studio has also revealed all that diablo 4 Seasons will last at least 12 weeks and the Season of the Malignant patch is the largest diablo 4 patch yet.

Finally, assistant game director Joe Piepiora and Ismay promised that patches will be available at a more regulated pace later in the year diablo 4seasons. The studio transitioned to nerfing overpowered builds and items very quickly in the early days of diablo 4The launch of ‘s frustrates some players. However, barring major emergencies or game-changing issues, Blizzard plans to keep nerfs and buffs to a minimum each season.

Players only have two weeks to prepare for the new season, and there’s still a lot to do between completing the campaign and finding all of the Altars of Lilith.