Diablo 4: All About Season 1

Nearly two months since release, Diablo 4 is set to start its first season. The new season comes with quests, dungeons, weapons, and much more. Regardless of how far you’re into Diablo 4 already, you might still need to prepare for Season of the Malignant.

That’s why we’re here to prepare you before it starts. Let’s first talk about everything we know about Diablo 4 season 1.

Everything We Know About Diablo 4: Season of the Malignant

Diablo 4: Season of the Malignant will start on July 20. If you’re eager to jump into the action immediately, we highly suggest going to this official page from Blizzard as it has a countdown for the start of the season. Each season lasts 3 months so expect season 2 to arrive in October.

There’s a pre-release patch launching today that will ready your game for the next season. Additionally, there’ll be a handful of quality-of-life changes, loot, and more, included in the update.

If you’ve already saved Sanctuary from the hands of Lilith, then you’re probably excited to get into more story content for Diablo 4. The first season will feature new story content focusing on a Malignant plague that’s spreading across the land. You can start this new questline by visiting Kyovashad.

The Malignant plague isn’t just a story element though. It will transform some enemies into new varied forms to offer tougher fights. Of them all, the most dangerous is a new boss called Varshan the Consumed.

Blizzard promised players some “stupidly broken builds” in the first season. If you want some of that action, you’ll need to farm them from new dungeons called Malignant Tunnels.

Perhaps most interestingly, the season will introduce the first Diablo 4 battle pass. This battle pass comes with 100 tiers, 27 of which are free. The rest are locked behind a paywall but Blizzard is yet to announce how much the premium battle pass will cost.

The battle pass will include cosmetic items which Blizzard notes as ‘class agnostic,’ which means you unlock these for all of your classes.

How Do Seasons Work in Diablo 4?

Every season in Diablo 4 will introduce new quests, mechanics, and more. However, everything that’s introduced in a season will become inaccessible when the season ends.

You can view new quest lines through the Journey feature coming with the update. This makes progressing through the content more streamlined.

Once Season of the Malignant arrives, your account will be split into two - characters in the Eternal Realm (your base Diablo 4 experience) and your characters in the current season. When the season ends, your seasonal characters will become available in the Eternal Realm too.

You’ll need to create a new character every time a new season drops.

With that out of the way, you still have a few days to prepare for the first season. Here’s what you need to focus on doing first.

Preparing For Diablo 4: Season of the Malignant

Finish The Campaign

The most important thing you need to do is finish the campaign first. Completing the campaign takes around 35 hours to complete without any side quests. If you’ve been playing the game since launch, you’re probably through with Lilith. Going through the campaign most likely helped you increase your character’s level to 50 too.

By beating the campaign, you get to unlock the ability to skip the campaign on other characters you create, including seasonal characters.

This means you can jump right into the new story quest next season, and you can focus on grinding for your character too.

Grab Your Horse

Sanctuary is large and exploring it from end to end will take a long time on your feet. If you don’t have the time to beat the campaign before the next season, you should at least grab your horse from Donan.

You can unlock your horse at the beginning of Act IV. You’ll immediately unlock the side quest, Mount: Donan’s Favor after a few cutscenes. From here, you’ll just need to talk to the stable master in Kyovashad and you’ll get your trusty steed.

Once you unlock your horse, you unlock it for all of the characters you create, making exploration a lot easier.

Explore The Entire Map And Unlock All Waypoints

Speaking of exploration, make sure to explore every inch of the map and unlock all waypoints before the next season begins.

Previously, map progress doesn’t carry over between your characters so you need to re-explore Sanctuary each time you create a new class. With the new season, your progress now carries over between your characters and your seasonal characters. This makes exploration A LOT easier.

You should focus on unlocking all waypoints first so that you can easily fast travel to various parts of the map. Here are the locations of all waypoints.

Grab Every Altar of Lilith

There are exactly 160 Altars of Lilith to collect around Sanctuary. Grabbing one will give you either a +2 to one of your primary stats or a Paragon point. Altar of Lilith progression doesn’t carry over right now but that’s going to change with the new season.

Once Season of the Malignant launches, all of the Altar of Lilith bonuses that you’ve accrued will carry over to the rest of the characters in your account. If you’re looking to grind those XP dungeons early on in the game, then you’re going to want to take advantage of the stat bonuses that the altars can give you. Here’s what you get in total for collecting all of them.

Grabbing all Altars of Lilith is going to take up hours. Doing it without a guide will take you days considering how well-hidden some are. If you want an easy time collecting them, check out this optimized route to collect all Altars from World Stone.

Increase Your Renown And Get Your Rewards

Doing this can give you a huge boost in your upcoming characters as well. Getting at least the level 3 Renown rewards on all regions will bag you 5 potion slots and 10+ skill points for every character that you own. 

Your seasonal characters are going to start the game with these and with the Altar of Lilith bonuses, that’s going to help you plow through those XP farms early on.

Increasing rewards is done by unlocking waypoints, collecting Altars of Lilith, completing side quests, beating dungeons, and destroying Strongholds.

This can be a slog but completing all altars, Strongholds, waypoints, and exploring the entire map should be enough to get to the level 3 rewards.

The level 4 and 5 rewards can only be unlocked once on World Tier 3 and above. Getting to level 5 bags you 4 Paragon points per region for a total of 20!

Select A Character

Last but not least, you should start thinking about what your next class will be. Planning your character and their build can be quite taxing. There aren’t major changes to the skills of each class so you can begin planning your build as early as now.

Remember, the battle pass cosmetics are shared across all classes so this shouldn’t be something you need to worry yourself with. You can pick a class that you love and are comfortable with.

Or, you can try a new playstyle and choose a class you’ve never chosen before. 

Just A Few More Days Before The First Season Drops

You’re probably very excited for Diablo 4 season 1 but hopefully, you still get the chance to do these things above. One of the toughest parts in the game is speeding through the early levels but the bonuses you get from the tasks above are going to speed up the process further.