A month after the release of Diablo 4, Blizzard is now ready to dive into its live service ambitions with season 1, which we now know is called Season of the Malignant.
In a 90 minute developer chat, we learned a whole lot of things about the season, including its release date. Well, there’s a tiny bit of a split here. We have:
Season 1 Prerelease Date: July 18 – This is when a patch will hit the game featuring balance changes, quality of life changes and even new Legendaries and Uniques added in the season that will be able to start dropping in the Eternal Realm. But you cannot make a seasonal character yet and actually start the season.
Season 1 Release Date: July 20 – This is the “real” release date when Season of the Malignant actually launches. You will then create a seasonal character that can play the new storyline, utilize the new seasonal mechanic and make your way through the paid and free battle pass.
So, what did we learn about the season itself? I’ll go into the details, but one thing seems clear that my current Destiny readership may be interested it. The seasonal character creation and new story and mechanics are all free. The only paid thing here is the paid track of the seasonal pass which features a lot of cosmetics, and whatever new cosmetics are added to the store. But you can play the actual meat of the season for free. Here’s everything else:
Story – There is a new character named Corman (Cormond?) who requests our help with a new Malignant plague spreading across the land which infects monsters and supercharges them with gross blights and tentacles and stuff. You will start the new story immediately in Kyovashad if you have already beaten the campaign (you should probably beat the campaign before this season hits).
Enemies – In the world, Malignant enemies will appear, get infected, then spawn super Elite versions of themselves with supporting mobs. These will drop a Caged Heart. There is also one new boss being added to the game, Varshan the Consumed.
Caged Hearts – This is the seasonal mechanic. Caged Hearts work like gems except if gems had strong legendary powers (a bit like Diablo Immortal, but they’re free). There are three colors of Hearts that will go into three colors of “corrupted” sockets on your armor and give you wild new “stupidly broken builds” that will work throughout the season. A fourth “powerful” heart can go in any socket, and they are rare. You can farm hearts from random enemies or later, “Malignant Tunnel” dungeons which will have some level of colored heart target farming. There are 32 Caged Heart powers in total.
Battle Pass – A 100 Tier battle pass as you might expect. It can only be progressed with seasonal characters both with monster kills but also seasonal challenges that ask you to do specific things and give you things like aspect rewards but also loads of battle pass progress. This is free.
There are 27 free tiers in the battle pass itself which you can move through if you spend nothing. These include some boosts to gameplay like extra gold or heart drop chance. The rest are paid tiers, and they are purely cosmetic. There are a few free cosmetics, but they are pretty basic compared to the wild paid armor (they showed like, a red shirt). I’m still not clear on the price of the paid battle pass by itself, and the link on the Blizzard site doesn’t work.
Preparing – One weird thing Blizzard is having you do is starting July 18 after the patch, you should log in with your character that has the most overall progress, the most map cleared, the most Lilith statues found. This will then translate that progress to all your other characters, eternal and seasonal, forever. This was their admittedly janky workaround to not have to have everyone re-do everything when a season starts.
More to talk about soon, but this all sounds pretty great to me. Looking forward to starting my Necro in two weeks. Well, my second Necro after they killed my review build one. RIP.
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