Season of Blood

After the first season, Season of the Malignant, Diablo 4 strikes again with season 2 : The Season of Blood! Similar to late Diablo 3 seasons, each Diablo 4 season delivers a special theme which let players a new mechanic to discover and play around.

Season of Blood Overview

An army of vampires are terrorizing Sanctuary, gathering the blood of innocents for their dark master. Only you can wield the enemy’s blood magic against them, infusing your own armor and gaining enough power to put a stop to their sinister plans.

With a Season character, we meet Erys, a professionnal Vampire Hunter to fight Lord Zir and his army of Vampires.

Vampiric Power Information

These Powers are the main content of Season 2. During the seasonal questline, we will be assisted by Erys in our adventures. Lilith's Blood protects us from the infliction that has taken so many before us. In the end, we'll go after and take out the leader of this threat, Lord Zir.

To help us, we will be able to obtain Vampiric Powers from many different sources. These powers can bolster your damage or defensive abilities. Similarly, they can add large amounts of Utility and even interact with the new (Seasonal) ability - Vampiric Curse. We'll touch on that a little later.

Obtaining Vampiric Powers

Vampiric Powers are not a "set it and forget it" type system. There are several steps involving other components to unlock these Powers and upgrade them to their max potential.

Hunter's Acclaim and Blood Harvest Event

You get Vampiric Powers through two main methods during the season. The first is through the new season only progression system - Hunter's Acclaim. Hunter's Acclaim is tied to events and actions you do during the Blood Harvest Event. Per the official blog post:

Blood Harvest will be crucial to getting some Vampiric Powers so take advantage when these Blood Harvest Events. They will always be active in the world, appearing in different zones of the world. It should not be too difficult to grind these areas out as you can start at Level 1, too.

Potent Blood and the Sanguine Circle

The second method is simpler and just a good old grind. You grind out a new component for the season called Potent Blood. This allows to you spend a certain amount to randomly unlock one Vampiric Power at a time in the Sanguine Circle UI on your Character screen. You may get lucky, or you may not. The RNG Gods be with you.

To get Potent Blood, travel the open world and kill the new Shadow Vampires (Lord Zir's minions). The new Blood Harvest Event is going to be your best and easiest source for this component. In addition, you can farm Blood Lures, that can be used to start a mini-event to summon Blood Seekers. After defeating the Blood Seekers, they can drop Seeker Keys that open Seeker Caches (inside a Blood Harvest Event) which sometimes rewards Potent Blood. Potent Blood is critical to not only gaining Vampiric powers but also upgrading them, so don't neglect farming it up.

Preparing for Vampiric Powers

Now that we know what Vampiric Powers are and where to get them, let's talk about the last part before we bring it home. We need to farm Pact Armor and get our Pacts in order to activate our Powers to use!

During the course of the season, while killing Shadow Vampirers, taking part in the Blood Harvest Event, or climbing the Hunter's Acclaim reward tiers, you can get a piece of Armor with Pacts on it. There are three different types of Pacts you will need to keep track of:

• Ferocity Pacts have a Crown icon.
• Divinity Pacts have a Chalice icon.
• Eternity Pacts have a Skull icon.

Lastly, Pacts can only roll or be applied to Armor (Helm, Chest Armor, Gloves, Pants, Boots) not Weapons or Jewelry. Helms & Boots can have up to 3 Pacts, Pants can have up to 4, Chest & Gloves can have up to 5. This gives you 20 Pacts max! You can swap Pacts around to activate as many Vampiric Powers as possible.

If a piece of Pact Armor is well rolled, but doesn't have the correct Pacts you need, there is a way to fix this! Cleansing Acid can be used to wipe away ALL Pacts on a piece of Pact Armor.

This allows you to then place Pacts on that piece of Pact Armor to make it suit your needs. If you don't have an abundance of spare Pacts or just need to replace one type for another, the Alchemists has your back.

You can go to them to augment the Cleansing Acid to only wipe away one Pact type. This is more of the scalpel approach as compared to the meat cleaver method above. Cleansing Acid will be very useful, as you CAN NOT simply override a Pact by applying another over it!

Activating and Upgrading Vampiric Powers

We're here, it's time to select our desired Vampiric Powers and get our Pacts in order.

Depending on the Class and Build you want to play, select the Vampiric Powers you would like to use. These powers come in two variations: Minor (requires 1-3 Pacts) and Major (requires 6 Pacts). Keep this in mind when planning out which ones you want to take due to the natural 25 Pacts gear limit! See below all the Vampiric Powers you can choose from:

Minor Vampiric Powers (1–3 Pacts Required):

• Anticipation (1 Divinity): Your Ultimate Skills gain 20% Cooldown Reduction. Your Ultimate Skills gain 12% increased damage for each nearby enemy affected by your Damage Over Time effects.
• Coven’s Fangs (2 Divinity): Your Conjuration, Companion, Minion, and Bat Familiar attacks deal 52% increased damage to Crowd Controlled enemies.
  • Lucky Hit: Your Conjuration, Companion, Minion, and Bat Familiar have up to a 30% chance to inflict Vampiric Curse when hitting enemies.
• Domination (1 Ferocity): You deal 24% increased damage to enemies who are Stunned, Immobilized, Frozen, or Feared. If they're also Injured and not an Elite, they're instantly killed.
• Feed the Coven (1 Eternity): Lucky Hit: Conjuration, Companion, Minion and Bat Familiar attacks have up to a 60% chance to restore 10 Primary Resource to you and increase your Damage by 10% for 4 seconds.
• Hectic (3 Divinity): For every 5 Basic Skills you cast, one of your active Cooldowns is reduced by 2 seconds.
• Hemomancy (3 Eternity): Your attacks deal 80% of your Maximum Life as Physical damage to nearby enemies.
  • This can only occur once every 4 seconds. You heal for 1% of your Maximum Life for each enemy damaged this way.
• Infection (1 Ferocity): Hitting enemies with direct damage infects them with Pox.
  • Inflicting Pox 8 times on an enemy expunges their infection, dealing 70% Poison damage.
• Jagged Spikes (1 Ferocity, 1 Divinity): Thorns have a 10% chance to deal 300% increased damage and Chill enemies for 8%.
• Prey on the Weak (2 Ferocity): You deal 16% increased damage to Vulnerable enemies. Enemies are Vulnerable while affected by a Vampiric Curse from your other Vampiric Powers.
• Rampart (1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): After not moving for 3 seconds, you gain a Barrier for 40% of your Maximum Life for 6 seconds. This effect can occur once every 20 seconds.
• Ravenous (3 Ferocity): Lucky Hit: Up to a 20% chance to increase your Attack Speed by 40% of your Total Movement Speed for 6 seconds.
• Resilience (2 Eternity): You gain 1% Damage Reduction for each 2% Life you are missing.
• Sanguine Brace (1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): When you kill an enemy, Fortify for 6% of your Base Life. While you have more Fortify than half of your Maximum Life, you gain 8% Critical Strike Chance.
• Terror (1 Ferocity, 1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): When struck, you have a 14% chance to Fear nearby enemies and Slow them by 80% for 2 seconds. You are guaranteed to Critically Strike enemies who are Feared.
• Undying (1 Eternity): Casting Skills heals you for 3% Life. Double this bonus while below 50% Life.

Major Vampiric Powers (6 Pacts Required):

• Accursed Touch (6 Divinity): Lucky Hit: Up to a 44% chance to inflict Vampiric Curse on enemies.
  • Enemies with the Vampiric Curse have a 15% chance to spread it to other surrounding enemies.
  • Accursed Souls deal 200% increased damage.
• Bathe in Blood (3 Divinity, 3 Eternity): While Channeling a Skill, you form a pool of blood beneath you.
  • While channeling a skill in a pool, your Channeled Skills deal 40% increased damage and you gain 30% Damage Reduction. A pool can only form once every 8 seconds.
• Blood Boil (6 Eternity): When your Core Skills Overpower an enemy, you spawn 3 Volatile Blood Drops.
  • Collecting a Volatile Blood Drop causes it to explode, dealing 60% Physical damage around you. Every 20 seconds, your next Skill is guaranteed to Overpower.
• Call Familiar (3 Ferocity, 3 Divinity): Casting a Mastery, Weapon Mastery, Macabre, Wrath, or Imbuement Skill calls a bat ally to attack nearby enemies, dealing 80% Physical damage with a 30% chance to Stun.
• Flowing Veins (2 Ferocity, 2 Divinity, 2 Eternity): You deal 60% increased Damage Over Time to enemies that are moving or affected by a Vampiric Curse.
• Metamorphosis (2 Ferocity, 2 Divinity, 2 Eternity): When you Evade you turn into a cloud of bats, becoming Unstoppable for 4 seconds.
  • Enemies along your path take 160% Physical damage and are inflicted with Vampiric Curse.
• Moonrise (6 Ferocity): Hitting an enemy with a Basic Skill grants you 4% Attack Speed for 10 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.
  • Upon reaching maximum stacks, you enter a Vampiric Bloodrage, gaining 160% Basic Skill damage and 15% Movement Speed for 10 seconds.

Vampiric Curse, you may have seen that keyword while reading some of these Powers. Vampiric Curse is a general ability that each class gains, a general "ability" that trigeers when using certain Skill types. Per the official blog post:

This Curse is the infliction put upon us at the beginning of the seasonal questline. While the proc chance for it is not known, we can assume it won't be too hard to get it to work.

With all that out of the way, select and place your chosen Vampiric Powers into the Sanguine Circle UI to activate them. At this point you are pretty much done. Continue to farm Potent Blood to upgrade your powers from Level 1 up to Level 3 to get the maximum effect from them. Keep spare Pacts around for when you upgrade a piece of Pact Armor and need to re-align your Pacts to maintian the Powers you have, using Cleansing Acid to do so.

Seasonal Questline

Similarly to the Season of the Malignant where a questline with Cormond was guiding plyers through the season story and mechanics, the Season of the Blood offers a questline with Erys the Vampire Hunter. This seasonal questline is made of 8 quests that you will unlock through your adventures in Sanctuary :

The quest A Serpent Concerned will be the final major quest where you will have to enter City of the Ancients and fight your way through the dungeon, slaying two different mini bosses before facing the infamous Lord Zir. To learn more about the fight and its uber version, you can read our dedicated boss guide.

Video Guide

Summary

• Season 2 introduces a special theme and mechanic for players to discover.
• Vampiric Powers are only available in seasonal mode and grant special powers to your character.
• Vampiric Powers will disappear once Season 2 ends.

Credits

Written by Chewingnom & Dredscythe
Reviewed by Dredscythe