Season of the Malignant has introduced a new type of item that can be slotted into certain Jewelry to provide you with Season of the Malignant bonuses.
These come in 4 different types which focus mainly on defensive, utility, offensive, and super modifiers to enhance your builds.
Caged Hearts act as a replacement for Gems and instead of providing you with stats, they have certain functions that can be game-changing.
Types of Caged Hearts
All Caged Hearts provide you with armor along with certain modifiers that can affect your skills and provide you with certain bonuses.
- Brutal (Blue) – Provides you with defensive modifiers
- Devious (Purple) – Provides you with utility modifiers
- Vicious (Orange) – Provides you with offensive modifiers
- Wrathful (Gray) – Provides you with powerful or ultimate modifiers
How To Get Caged Hearts?
Caged Hearts are obtained in several ways, which mainly include capturing Malignant Hearts but there are other ways as well such as through Malignant Outgrowths and crafting.
1) Capturing Malignant Hearts
The most common way to obtain Caged Hearts, which is introduced when you first start with the Season Quests is by capturing Malignant Hearts.
This is done by fighting a Malignant Elite, which is a powerful variant, and they will drop a Malignant Heart when they are slain.
Interacting with the Malignant Heart will cause them to come back to life where you need to defeat them once more to capture its heart, which drops a Caged Heart.
2) Malignant Outgrowths
Another way to obtain Caged Hearts is to interact with Outgrowths, which can be found in Malignant Tunnels, which are dungeons that were introduced during Season of the Malignant.
Before you can interact with an Outgrowth, you will need to bring a Malignant Invoker, which can be crafted at Cormond’s Workbench or looted from defeated monsters.
You can check which Malignant Invoker you will need (Devious, Vicious, Brutal) by viewing the Malignant Tunnel on your map to make sure you bring the right one.
3) Crafting Caged Hearts
Aside from defeating Malignant Elites and obtaining Caged Hearts from Outgrowths, you can always craft them at Cormond’s Workbench.
This will require that you have different types of Malignant Ichor, which can be Vicious, Devious, or Brutal variants that drop from the Malignant or can be obtained by salvaging other Caged Hearts.
You can craft Caged Hearts by opening Cormond’s Workbench and selecting the Caged Heart that you want to craft, which will give you a random one based on the variant you choose.
Verdict
Caged Hearts are an amazing addition to Diablo 4 and there are different ones that you can get during the Season of the Malignant.
When equipped with your Jewelry, you can modify your builds or provide your characters with more efficiency when it comes to taking out enemies in Sanctuary.
Replacing these will often be necessary as you obtain newer ones or swap them to better gear and the better the Caged Heart, the better the benefits they provide.
