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Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant has introduced powerful hearts for players to chase. Acting similarly to gems, Malignant Hearts may be socketed in jewelry items to greatly boost the effectiveness of your character. These hearts are comparable to Legendary Aspects or even Uniques, offering powerful boons or build-enabling effects to your character.
You can only use three in any given build, so you'll want to equip the best hearts possible. This list will showcase the ten best Malignant Hearts you can use during Season of the Malignant. Out of the 32 hearts available this season, these ten hearts are the best of the bunch.
10 The Calculated
The Calculated (Devious): After spending 150-200 of your primary resource, your next attack stuns enemies hit for 2 seconds.
The Calculated allows you to reliably stun enemies with any of your skills solely by spending your primary resource. While that doesn't sound powerful on its own, this Malignant Heart becomes much stronger when paired with multi-hit abilities and stun synergies.
For example, Sorcerers using a Ball Lightning build can run the Calculated to force every hit from their Ball Lightning to stun, rapidly damaging a boss' stagger meter while stunlocking most fodder enemies. You can also pair this Malignant Heart with the Umbral Aspect for easy resource sustain, regardless of your class or build.
9 Focused Rage
Focused Rage (Vicious, Barbarian): After spending 100-60 fury within 2 seconds, your next non-basic skill's critical strike chance is increased by 20-30%.
Barbarians looking to increase their damage while leveling should consider using the Focused Rage heart. While socketed into your jewelry, you'll gain a powerful critical chance buff for your next non-basic attack after spending a large sum of fury. This can help make skills like Hammer of the Ancients feel much stronger while leveling.
Unfortunately, there are numerous bugs tied to this heart that prevent it from truly shining. Performing any non-basic action will consume this buff, including dashing, drinking potions, or using your mount. But even with these downsides, the added critical chance is great for leveling and WT3 content. Just don't expect this Malignant Heart to see much use in endgame builds that already have high critical chance modifiers.
8 Tal'Rasha
Tal'Rasha (Vicious, Sorcerer): For each unique element you deal damage with, you deal 7-12% increased damage for 3-10 seconds.
Despite the major nerfs to Sorcerer at the start of Season of the Malignant, their damage output is still more than respectable if you use the right hearts. One noteworthy heart is Tal'Rasha, providing a temporary damage bonus that scales with each unique elemental damage type you use. If you can inflict cold, fire, and lightning with your build, this Malignant Heart provides a 36% damage buff—further increased with item power.
That type of damage buff is typically reserved for perfectly-rolled Legendary Aspects, so obtaining a damage bonus that large in a jewelry socket is nothing to scoff at. Damaging targets with all three elemental types is easier than one might think. The Fire Bolt enchantment is used by most Sorcerer builds and deals fire damage. The Picana heart can be used to inflict lightning on any build, and Teleport also deals lightning damage. Cold is the hardest element to fit into a non-Ice Shards build. But if you can find a way to fit all three damage types into your build, expect a massive DPS increase.
7 The Malignant Pact
The Malignant Pact (Wrathful): Cycle through a Malignant bonus every 20 kills. Vicious grants 20% attack speed. Devious gives your core and basic skills a 15% chance to fully restore your primary resource, and Brutal grants Barrier every 21 seconds.
The Malignant Pact provides three devastating buffs that rotate every 20 kills. These buffs are the following:
- Vicious: 20% attack speed
- Devious: Core and basic skills have a 15% chance to fully restore your primary resource.
- Brutal: Gain a Barrier every 21 seconds.
Brutal is a fairly weak bonus, but Vicious and Devious are both fantastic for virtually every build. If you can line up these buffs just before fighting a tough Elite or boss, your damage will skyrocket. Conversely, if there are few enemies to kill, you might be stuck with a less ideal boon. So long as you're willing to micromanage your kills, Malignant Pact is easily one of this season's strongest Malignant Hearts.
6 Inexorable Force
Inexorable Force (Devious, Druid): Up to 30-50 distant enemies are pulled toward you while you have an ultimate skill active.
Inexorable Force is a great quality-of-life improvement for most Druid builds. When you activate any ultimate skill, distant enemies will be pulled towards you until you've pulled a set number of targets or the skill ends, whichever happens first. Just about every Druid build can benefit from this heart, improving the clearspeed of builds using Landslide or similar AoE attacks.
5 The Vile Apothecary
The Vile Apothecary (Wrathful, Rogue): Your attacks have a 5-15% chance to apply all imbuement effects at 40-50% of normal potency.
Imbuements are a major source of damage for most Rogue builds, yet you can only benefit from one imbuement at a time. That's where Vile Apothecary comes in. This heart gives your attacks a small chance to benefit from every imbuement at once, albeit at the cost of imbuement potency.
Not only will your skills benefit from shadow, poison, and cold imbuements, but they'll also gain the benefits of all imbuement passives and skill augments as well. Inflict chill, poison, and shadow damage all at once while benefiting from nearly every imbuement passive the Rogue has to offer. If you get a good roll on this heart, you'll clear the hardest content Diablo 4 has to offer with little issue.
4 Tempting Fate
Tempting Fate (Vicious): You gain 40-60% critical strike damage, but your non-critical strikes deal 20-15% less damage.
Tempting Fate is an S-tier heart for virtually every endgame build in Diablo 4. This Malignant Heart provides a large critical damage bonus at the cost of reduced damage with non-critical hits. That penalty is hardly impactful once you scale your critical chance stat, so the end result is a heart that gives you a ton of critical damage for free. It's not mechanically interesting, but the damage bonus this heart provides cannot be understated.
3 The Sacrilegious
The Sacrilegious (Vicious, Necromancer): Walking near a corpse automatically activates an equipped corpse skill every second, dealing 40-30% less damage.
Similar to Inexorable Force, the Sacrilegious heart for Necromancers is a major quality-of-life improvement for nearly every build. Walking near a corpse will automatically consume it, triggering a corpse skill on your hotbar. If that skill deals damage, it'll deal less damage. That's not a major penalty since this heart works best with utility corpse skills.
If you have minions on your hotbar, you'll automatically resummon any slain skeletons by walking near corpses. If you have Corpse Tendrils, you'll automatically cast it without triggering its cooldown, albeit the heart seems to have an internal cooldown between Corpse Tendril activations. Sacrilegious lets you group enemies together, chain Corpse Explosion, or resummon slain minions without any input. That's nothing short of S-tier for just about every Necromancer build.
2 The Barber
The Barber (Wrathful): Critical strikes and all subsequent damage within 2-4 seconds is absorbed by your target. Afterward, the absorbed damage erupts onto surrounding enemies. Stored damage is increased by 10% per second.
The Barber returns from Diablo 3, this time acting as a global modifier to your skills rather than the Witch Doctor's Spirit Barrage skill. While equipped, landing a critical strike will cause all subsequent damage for the new few seconds to accumulate on the target. Once that timer expires, the target will explode, dealing all accumulated damage over a small area.
Storing your damage this way might seem unhelpful at first glance, but this accumulated damage scales each second, acting as a separate damage bucket. This allows the Barber to dish out millions of damage per hit if you can hit an enemy quickly enough, easily achievable if that target is being attacked by multiple players. It does come at the cost of clearspeed, but it's undeniable that the Barber is easily the strongest damage-boosting heart this season.
1 The Decrepit Aura
The Decrepit Aura (Brutal, Necromancer): When at least 5 enemies are near you, gain an aura that automatically curses surrounding enemies with Decrepitly for 5-15 seconds.
The Decrepit Aura is arguably the most build-enabling Malignant Heart added this season. In essence, this heart will automatically cast the Decrepify curse when enough enemies get near you, benefiting from any curse bonuses allocated on your skill tree. That includes Abhorrent Decrepitly.
With a perfect roll on this heart, it's possible to trigger this effect when no enemies are near you, permanently surrounding your character in a Decrepify aura. And since Abhorrent Decrepify reduces skill cooldowns with lucky hits, you can greatly reduce the cooldowns of every skill on your build. Spam ultimate skills, use the Umbral Aspect to achieve near-infinite Essence, maintain permanent Blood Mist, or pair it with the Sacrilegious heart to create a walking autobomber playstyle. Simply put, the Decrepit is the best Malignant Heart you can use on a Necromancer.