Diablo 4’s first season adds ‘stupid’ powerful new builds for each class

Diablo 4the first season, Season of the Evilcomes to the game on July 20 – just a month and a half later D4′s launch. Blizzard Entertainment detailed the new season mechanics (in addition to announcing a new class for Diablo Immortal) during a long live stream on Thursday.

Season of the Evil takes place after the Diablo 4 campaign and acts as a side story in the world of Sanctuary. After players have worked in the main campaign to push back the forces of evil, a new corrupting curse begins to make its way through the rest of the world. At the start of the season, players will receive a call to head to the capital of the Fractured Peaks, Kyovashad, on Level 1 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 remove the plague from the land.

This, of course, manifests itself in some powerful new tools for each Diablo class. While playing the game normally in Season 1, there is a chance that players will encounter an evil monster. These monsters are extra strong, but drop a special evil heart item when they die. Interacting with this heart will respawn the enemy – making them even harder to deal with – and summon a bunch of extra enemies. If players still manage to prevail, the beast will drop a Caged Heart, which you can use to dramatically increase your power over the course of the season.

Caged Hearts have their own Legend-level powers, like the one shown above, which cause critical hits to electrify enemies. Players can put them in their jewelry. Throughout the season of the evil one, all rings and amulets will fall with a purulent bowl that is red, blue or yellow. These correlate with different colored heart forces. Players can only match like-with-like, so they can’t put a blue heart in a yellow tube. There is a rare fourth heart suit, which players can place in one of three sockets.

Season of the Malignant comes with 32 new powers that are exclusive to the Malignant Heart system. Tim Ismay – the lead producer for seasons in Diablo 4 – said in the livestream that these new powers are “stupidly broken” and will enable many new and interesting builds during Season 1.

If players are looking for a specific evil heart, they can break down existing hearts they find in the world for a special crafting currency. Once they’ve collected enough, they can take the currency into an evil tunnel – a new activity room full of evil monsters – and spawn a special enemy at the end that is guaranteed to drop an evil heart in their chosen color.

The Blizzard developers also revealed that Season of the Malignant will come with 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 come to the Eternal Realm, where all non-seasonal characters live Diablo 4. To play specific Season of the Malignant content or increase their Season Pass level, players will need to create a new Season Character on July 20.

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

The last few minutes of the livestream focused on aspects of Seasons that the developers talked about in their latest livestream: the Season Journey, the new Seasonal Blessing mechanic, and more. The studio revealed all that too Diablo 4 seasons will last at least 12 weeks, and that the patch for Season of the Malignant will be the largest Diablo 4 not patching yet.

Finally, associate game director Joe Piepiora and Ismay promised that patches will come at a more regulated rate Diablo 4the seasons. The studio moved very quickly to overpowered builds and items in the early days of Diablo 4‘s launch, frustrating for some players. But barring major emergencies or ground breaking issues, Blizzard said it plans to keep nerfs and buffs to a minimum each season.

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