Diablo 4 season 1 is coming and with it the 32 Malignant Hearts. There is obviously a lot to choose from and some of them definitely seen as more useful than others. In the D4 season 1 Malignant Heart tier list, we have the best Malignant Hearts ranked and explained.

Diablo 4 Season 1 Best Malignant Heart - Diablo IV Malignant Heart Tier List

Malignant Hearts allows us to gain lots of extra power in our jewelry socket slots. This works a little bit like the legendary gems and Diablo 3. They have special effects and they replace regular sockets. The way this works is that you can find Malignant monsters they are like some really tough elites and then you repeat them and they drop some of these Hearts. There are four different types of hearts that are offensive, defensive, utility, and superpowers that can roll on this. Check our Diablo IV Malignant Hearts tier list, we are going to see the Malignant Heart that has the best powers.

Read more:

Diablo 4 Malignant Heart Crafting Guide - How To Get & Create Malignant Hearts In D4 Season 1 

S Tier

• Caged Heart of Revenge (General)

This is really powerful at least the way that it works. You have straight-up 20% damage reduction and then you have AOE fire damage explosion that actually seems to roll pretty high values if those are accurate. Just a 20% damage reduction sounds awesome. This is the best Diablo 4 Malignant Hearts season 1 that you can put in every single build.

• Caged Heart of the Prudent Heart (General)

This is also one of the D4 season 1 best Malignant Heart powers which is basically the protecting aspect on crack. You get immunity for four seconds after losing turnips and live in a single hit that seems superb. Especially hardcore players would really want this since it allows you to not get absolutely annihilated in some scenarios where you don't get one shot basically, so that's really strong.

• Caged Heart of Malignant Pact (General)

This is one of those superpowers, it is really good if you can make use of at least two of those effects, the attack speed, and the resource recovery. Most builds will be able to do that and especially when you have the resource recovery effect and you don't really have crazy amounts of resources. This is very powerful on the D4 1.1 Malignant Heart tier list, so definitely worth throwing it on those builds.

• Caged Heart of Creeping Death (General)

This is designed for damage over time builds and this is ridiculous and really powerful. This gives you potentially 100+%-200% or even more multiplicative damage increase. When you stagger bosses you get 134%, this is insane. Poison Rogue and Firewall Sorc can make use of that. It's going to be really nasty and basically, the strongest heart in Diablo 4 after patch 1.1 in terms of the overall power again if you can capitalize on it.

• Caged Heart of the Barber (General)

The Barber actually has the potential to just break the game. Depending on how that works, there's actually an item in Diablo 3 called the Barber that works like this. It stores the damage that erupts onto surrounding enemies. Stored damage is increased by 11%[x] per second. This means that you multiply your damage by the number of targets that can be in this AOE. If you do for example nightmare dungeon pushing on the high tiers and stuff gets really tanky, you have this thing, you can just annihilate packs of monsters, so it's going to be crazy.

• Caged Heart of the Sacrilegious (Necro)

Necromancers in general have pretty good powers. There's one way that automatically casts co-op skills when you walk near corpses that seems really nice so this helps Necro the speed.

• Caged Heart of the Decrepit Aura (Necro) 

The same story with Decrepit Aura where you cast the Decrepify automatically that was cool as well.

• Caged Heart of the Great Feast (Necro)

There's the Great Feast seems also really powerful. If you can somehow figure out your resources, you have an 80% damage multiplier or you play a minion build and you get 80% damage for your minions. Now that's probably not really enough to make minions super crazy good but it can help.

• Caged Heart of Vile Apothecary (Rogue)

Not too impressed with Rogue’s Malignant Hearts, except Vile Apothecary. This one gives you a chance to inflict your imbuements all of them at once and you also don't need to have them on your bar even or anything like that. This is really good so this goes into most builds and you can chill freeze and even get extra damage from the imbuement. There are a lot of options that make it really powerful.

• Caged Heart of Omnipower (Sorc)

This is one of the best Malignant Hearts for season 1 Diablo 4. You launched multiple projectiles multiple core skills at once, so it's going to make it a very mana-hungry build, but there are ways to solve that. This can work with Frozen Orb Sorcerer maybe chain lightning and Fireballs. Those are the builds where this really has an impact. Technically, it also works for Charge Bolts and Ice shards but they already have a lot of projectiles and you just add a few for a very high cost, so it's probably not really worth it there. But for the other core skills, that sounds amazing.

A Tier

• Caged Heart of the Picana (General)
  

This has a lightning-arcing effect when you create enemies. This seems pretty useful especially when you attack many targets at once a fitness can be something that is relatively powerful for some builds that rely on a lot of AOE damage and lots of hits. Potentially you could even open up some synergies for example on the Sorcerer with extra lighting procs, so that is definitely something to look out for.

• Caged Heart of the Dark Dance (General)

This gives you a free skill cast for your core skills every five seconds. That is pretty good as well depending on the build. For example, for a Barbarian with umbrella rage instead of spending 70 furies, you spend zero which sounds pretty good. Every five seconds is blocking often enough for this to be pretty good.

• Caged Heart of Punishing Speed (Barb) 

Punishing Speed gives you a knockdown with a really high chance and it's not a lucky hit. This is really good if this works a double swing, you get two chances maybe, you can basically use it like parallel knock-down stuff. It sounds pretty good.

• Caged Heart of Ignoring Pain (Barb) 

It's less damage taken and then you can get heals on that, so this is a really powerful Diablo IV season 1 heart for Barbarians.

• Caged Heart of the Unconstrained Beast (Druid) 

Grizzly rage just got freshly nerfed, the unstoppable time has been reduced and we can get the unstoppable back. Therefore, that seems really nice especially for the werewolf builds that don't have another source of unstoppable in their grizzly rage setups, so that can be pretty good.

• Caged Heart of Tal’Rasha (Sorc) 

Sorcerer has a pretty good power of Tal’Rasha. This is a 36% extra damage if you can include all three elements. Every Sorc build has teleport, most of them have frost nova which may work with this but maybe not. Then you have usually some burn because of burning synergies. We don't know these two elements are covered and then maybe you have either a cold build like ice shards or frozen orb or use a cold generator or a blizzard, so there are some options to make this work and it's a relatively strong damage buff.

B Tier

• Caged Heart of Retaliation (General)

With Retaliation, you can deal fire damage around you when a crowd control effect is removed from you. That seems awful but maybe something for PvP. He has calculated that after spending 150 resources, you stun enemies for one second. That seems like a really high cost but some builds can generate a lot of resources and can spend a lot of resources. For example, Sorcerers have to only power out that they're going to see soon, so there are definitely some examples. Also Barbs for example can spend a lot of resources very quickly if they want to. This might be a good Malignant Hears in Diablo 1 for a few builds because it has some potential.

• Caged Heart of Resurgent Life (Barb) 

Resurgent Life gives you extra healing when you're low life, especially for iron skin type builds which is kind of nice. On the other hand, when you use iron skin at low life, you kind of heal the full anyway, so it doesn't really matter. It's an all-right power.

• Caged Heart of Inexorable Force (Druid)

Inexorable Force could be very interesting. You can pull in enemies while you have an ultimate active, so that remains to be seen how it works. But if this just pulls in the entire screen or maybe can walk with your ultimate active, then stuff gets pulled to you that sounds really good for any speed bombing.

• Caged Heart of Frozen Terror (Necro) 

With Frozen Terror, so you have a chance to inflict fear and then you chill them and freeze them while they're feared. As long as you Proctor's often enough, you can actually freeze enemies, it sounds fun. But it can be useful in some scenarios, especially for pushing and PvP.

C Tier

• Caged Heart of the Temping Fate (General)

Temping Fate gives you a bit of crit damage. There seems to be additive crit damage and not some other bigger crit damage so it seems quite weak. This can be maybe useful for builds that have near 100 crit chance something like Rapid Fire Rogues or something like that. But out of it, it doesn't really seem that great. Because even though non-crits don't contribute that much, you don't really want to reduce the damage by that much either, you can just have another power.

• Caged Heart of the Moonrage (Barb) 

There's the focused rage that gives you extra crits for your non-basic skills after spending x fury in 2 seconds, kind of conditional. It's only really feasible with double swing but double swing doesn't really want to use other skills. Then there is unveiled rage builds that maybe can include a death blow. It doesn't really seem that great but the 32% extra critical strike chance is nice, so you can play around with it.

• Caged Heart of Cluster Munitions (Rogue)

If you're a whole bunch of stone grenades, you can get frostbitten aspect in there without exposure.

D Tier

• Caged Heart of the Lionheart (General)

Lionheart gives you a barrier generation and some healing seems really terrible.

• Caged Heart of Determination (General)

Determination has a resource effect, it just seems super weak.

• Caged Heart of Moonrage (Druid) 

There's a wolf companion kind of meme item but it's not going to be great.

• Caged Heart of the Agitated Winds (Druid)

This seems atrocious. Automatically casting second armor and knocking everything back the active ability of second armor seems the bad part about your skill.

• Caged Heart of Trickery (Rogue) 

This one gives you a decoy trap that turns enemies, this might be something for pushing or so. But for regular gameplay probably, it's way too slow.

• Caged Heart of the Clipshot (Rogue) 

This also seems quite weak. It has a pretty high chance to knock back, doesn't really matter.

• Caged Heart of Spellbreaking (Sorc) 

Not good.

• Caged Heart of Spite (Sorc) 

With Spite, you can reflect crowd controls. Again this is mostly a PvP thing, this seems to be awful otherwise and it can maybe lead to some kind of funny scenarios in PvE at least.