Diablo 4 Season 1 Fast Malignant Heart, XP, Gear Farming Guide (Best Spots & Methods)

This is a Diablo 4 Season 1 strategy that you can use to farm XP fast along with the Malignant Hearts and the new seasonal theme item. 

Diablo 4 Season 1 Fast Malignant Heart, XP, Gear Farming Guide

Obviously, you can only do this strategy in season 1, it makes use of the new season content which adds these Malignant tunnels. There are a few of them that are added to the world throughout the map. These malignant tunnels are a deterministic way of hunting for Malignant Hearts. If you farm the Dindai Hollow Malignant tunnel, do that over and over you're going to get a good amount of XP per hour and a good amount of Malignant Hearts per hour as well. So that's the strategy, the rest of this guide we're going to go into a bit more Nuance on the most effective ways to do this, why it's a good idea, and other best practices.

Why Should You Farm for Malignant Hearts?

Malignant hearts are new items just here for the season that you insert into jewelry sockets and there are 32 different hearts and some of them are really powerful, so if you get the right malignant heart for your build you can really empower yourself. 

Malignant Hearts also thanks to the patch around season launch give you armor, so at this point, there's never a reason for you to take a skull over a malignant heart because you're still going to get the armor that you would have gone from the skull anyway. Now a reason that you want a ton of different for Malignant Hearts is because you're going to be breaking them down to craft new ones - more powerful ones, they have an item power on them.

In Kyovashad, Corman has a workbench and from that workbench, you can then craft the Malignant Hearts that you want. So all those extras that you're not going to be using, you're going to break those down for materials. Also, Malignant Hearts come in four different flavors, you have your three standard flavors and then you have your black hearts these are called Wrathful Hearts and these are a lot more challenging to get - they're just a lot rarer. 

So in order to optimize your chances of getting these, you need to just be running as many malignant tunnels as possible. Now at the end of a Malignant tunnel, you're going to find a Malignant Outgrowth - this is like a tumor at the end where you have the choice to select between a black wrathful heart and a different color heart, you can then summon a boss of that color in order to acquire a heart of that color once you beat the boss. But in order to fight that boss, you need to use an Invoker which is something you can craft again at Corman's workbench, but it's basically just a consumable that gives you a key to fight the boss. You have no deterministic way of crafting a black key - you can't make a wrathful key. If you craft an uncertain invoker, you have a chance in order to get a raffle invoker, but because it's just a chance that means you're going to need a lot of materials and you're going to get those materials by blasting these malignant tunnels.

Best Malignant Heart & XP Farm Spot - Malignant Tunnels

Now outside of Malignant tunnels being the source where you're going to get your Malignant Hearts, they're also just good XP. They're shortish dungeons, the density is generally good and they give you elites to fight because it's those elite monsters that are the malignant monsters.

A quick note about the Malignant tunnels, if you're not seeing them appear on your map, it's possible to only unlock after you've started actually engaging with the season journey quest, so go find Corman again you're going to notice him by this little leaf symbol. The game is very good at instructing you towards the seasonal content, so just engage with the quest line along until you get to that point. You might even reach a point where you're bottlenecked by your season journey, so then do the season Journey that you need to do in order to get to the point of unlocking that. 

Best Malignant Tunnel To Farm - Dindai Hollow

And the Dindai Hollow malignant tunnel seems to have the best XP per hour. If you follow the right loop, as you're going around you're going to run into those Champions, once the malignant monsters are dead, they leave a heart behind, you get to click the heart and then you wait several seconds for that monster to spawn, and then you fight it and grab the Caged heart, you can actually put that into your inventory. 

Dindai Hollow Farming Trick

You have to kill the monster twice and again there's that long delay during which they're respawning. Here's the trick:

You click the heart to get the monster to start respawning and then you just bolt, you keep running and you keep clearing and you do that every time. 

Why? Because eventually once you complete your circuit, you're going to do a loop around the dungeon, you don't have to kill every monster along the way once you've killed a sufficient number, the remaining stragglers will teleport to you, including those Malignant monsters that you left behind, since who's got time to wait 10 seconds for a monster to spawn. 

Dindai Hollow Dungeon Reset Trick

Then once you get that completion, rather than rushing over to do the boss you're just going to exit the dungeon, and then you're going to reset. Now you don't have the ability to reset dungeons if you press M and on the lower right here, you can click reset dungeons. 

But what we found was oftentimes it may tell you that you still have a party member in the dungeon and you cannot reset, so we don't know if this is a bug or if they are trying to kill this a run, but in that case just exit Game join back into the game - you're going to be back in the game right where you left off right outside the exit of the tunnel, go back in and it will have reset. 

So you can even just skip the part where you try to reset the dungeon - just leave the dungeon, exit the game, back in the re-run.

Best Malignant Heart & XP Farm Spot & Method 2 - Strongholds

Now if you don't want to just farm the same dungeon over and over, you can go do other Malignant tunnels as well, you can work this as well into your general leveling rotation.

If all you're looking for in fact is the fastest XP farm, then it's actually going to be Strongholds  - Strongholds not all the way through and resetting and doing that over and over. If you can push all the way into World Tier 3, then you can benefit from the enhanced experience from World Tier 3, but even if you're significantly lower level even if you're like then there's no way that you can handle level 55 monsters in an efficient manner. 

Strongholds Farming Tricks: 

Strongholds in World tier 3 are not level 55+, they could actually be lower level, they're just always whatever your level is +2, so normally it's not efficient to be struggling through content to get XP. But if you can be doing it on world tier 3 the amount of extract speed that you get for those strongholds generally makes it worth it. Again you got to be doing this trick where you're effectively just running the baseline of the stronghold, you're not going all the way to the boss, you're just doing an efficient route through killing enemies and density, and then leaving and resetting the stronghold. It is literally the fastest XP per hour.

Best Malignant Heart & XP Farm Spot & Method 3 - Legion Events

You can get another method to farm XP farming - doing Legion Events. A legion event spawns roughly every 30 minutes, you can use a Tracker like on maxwell.gg or on healthtites.com to tell you when it's coming up. The XP from Legion Events is really good, once you're there, you want to arrive or you want to head over there about two and a half minutes before it spawns, because you want to have time to go to the campfire, click the campfire, and then wait, and you're going to build up 15 Stacks Max of an XP buff. If you get there a little late and the event starts, you can still wait near where the fire was. You might not see the fireplace anymore, but it's still there you're going to still see your buff stack count upwards to 15. 

You combine that with an Elixir another 5% buff, you can party up with people that are there as well for more XP buff. And the amount of XP you get while doing a legion event is really good because it's a lot of monsters - it's a high density of monsters in a short amount of time. The only downside of the Legion Events is the time needed to get there. But again it's something you can toss into your rotation if you're looking for a fun and efficient way to level up.