Here, we’re gonna go over Season 1, the Malignant. We’re gonna learn all about the Caged Hearts and the new questline, and, of course, some tips and tricks from me on how to dominate. 

Cormand & The Malignant

Our adventure begins right away by the waypoint in the starting town, Kyovashad, where we quickly learn that Malignance has spread across Sanctuary. 

Shortly after, we find our hero, Cormond, and his wagon, just south of the Ked Bardu waypoint in the Dry Steppes, to aid us. 

He teaches us a ritual to capture these corrupted enemies’ Hearts, which we ultimately socket into our jewelry to become far more powerful. 

Malignant Hearts

There are four different Heart types that correspond with specific socket colors. 

The blue Brutal Hearts provide defense, which is critical for the endgame content and Hardcore players. 

The Vicious orange Hearts grant you offensive powers to slay your enemies. 

The red Devious Hearts provide utility, increasing your quality of life in different ways. 

And finally, the most powerful of them all, the gray Wrathful Hearts can be socketed into any-color socket and provide extreme powers that completely transform your character. 

It’s also important that these Hearts increase in power as you climb to higher World Tiers, and they provide you armor to keep you alive. So, essentially, you’ll always be hunting for better Hearts along your journey, until you find the perfect combination for your build. 

I have found a lot of these Caged Hearts so far in my journey, but I want to show you a few of them that I’ve really enjoyed. 

So, the first one is this Vicious Heart (Caged Heart of the Dark Dance), which has an offensive power. When you’re above 60% life, you occasionally charge life instead of resources for your skills in order to do significantly more damage. It’s a nice way to deal way more damage if you have the appropriate defenses. 

Caged Heart of Revenge is an incredible defensive Brutal Heart. It’s gonna suppress a lot of the damage that you get, and then it’s eventually going to explode and detonate a bunch of fire damage whenever you use a defensive skill against your enemies. 

And finally, seeing one of the Wrathful Hearts (Caged Heart of Creeping Death). This is something that I’m absolutely planning to use against Uber Lilith. Because against Unstoppable monsters and Staggered bosses, they’re going to take 130% more damage from your damages over time. Poison her down with Poison Imbuement and hopefully watch her health bar just erode away. 

Maligant Tunnels

The next thing we want to talk about is: where do we find these Malignant monsters and these Caged Hearts to get the powers that you need? 

First of all, you’re gonna find them in a lot of your regular activities. For example, when you get into the endgame, you can find these Malignant monsters in your Nightmare Dungeons. And as you climb to the higher World Tiers, you can even find the Wrathful ones. 

But there’s also a way to target-farm them, and that is with Malignant Tunnels. So, if you check your map and zoom in, you will find these little gates with the little green leaves at the top, and these are Malignant Tunnels that you can run through. They are very quick and you can reset them very easily. For example, the Dindai Hollow, the Ravening Pit, and the Den of the Blighted. 

And another thing to understand at the end of these is if you have Invokers, you can actually activate a final Malignant monster of your choosing at the end. So, I’m using the Imbuement powers here to absolutely destroy. 

This is World Tier 4 on Hardcore, by the way, and absolutely destroying everything. What we’re looking for in these Malignant Tunnels are the Elites. 

When you run through these Malignant Tunnels, there’s an Elite marked with a skull. And after he dies, you’re gonna see he’s gonna drop his Heart. You will randomly pick up a Wrathful Heart, a Caged Heart or other rarer hearts. It all depends on your luck.

Elites are more powerful enemies that can randomly spawn anywhere you encounter regular monsters in Diablo 4. KIll them when you come across them. This way you can randomly pick up some Hearts again. 

And after these Elites dies, if you don’t have any Invokers (the Diablo 4 Items you can craft), the strategy here is you can escape and Leave Dungeon, and then, once you’re outside of the dungeon, hit J and then reset it. You can come right back in. 

But if you have an Invoker, you can press forward. Now you have two choices. If you have a Wrathful Invoker, which is the best thing that you can get, you can click this and spawn a Wrathful monster. I don’t have one, which is too bad, but I do think I have a Brutal one. 

So, if I click this, it’s going to allow me to target-farm may be a Brutal defensive power that I really want. His Heart is gonna drop on the ground. Only had to kill him once. This is making it easy on me. And there we go, we got the Lionheart power. 

Also Read: How To Quickly Level Up Necromancer Build In Diablo 4 Season 1?

Crafting Hearts

Now, we are back in Kyovashad, just to the left of the waypoint at Cormond’s Workbench, to talk about the final topic, crafting. Of course, no matter what you craft, you need to spend a certain amount of Diablo 4 Gold.

So, if you open up the workbench, you have a couple of options. 

First, you can craft the Caged Hearts individually. And when you pick up the Ichors by doing battle, this will let you come here and craft whatever you’re specifically looking for. 

You can also craft the Invokers. Remember at the end, when we clicked one of the two little growths to activate the Heart? What you’re looking for is the Wrathful stuff, which makes the last part exciting, the Uncertain one, because the Uncertain one has a chance to craft a Wrathful Heart, and this one has a chance to craft a Wrathful Invoker. 

So we’re gonna Yolo it here. I’m gonna spend all my resources. Can we get a Wrathful one, one time? Never lucky.