Diablo 4 Vampiric Powers Guide

This guide breaks down Vampiric Powers in-depth: how to get them, what they do, how to use them, and what builds work with them!

What are Vampiric Powers

Vampiric Powers are the Seasonal “Power System” for Diablo 4’s second season, the Season of Blood. They offer additional character power beyond your Skill Tree and Paragon Boards, similar to the Malignant Hearts of the previous season.

In total, there are 22 Vampiric Powers, separated into Minor Powers and Major Powers. None of these effects are class-specific, so you can mix and match them to your build’s needs.

You’ll acquire most of these directly from the Sanguine Circle, but others are locked behind the Seasonal Storyline and Hunters’ Acclaim rewards.

Major Vampiric Power List

Below is the full list of the available Major Vampiric Powers. These cost a total of 6 Pacts, varying from power to power.

The values listed below are at their Maximum Level (Level 3), they will be weaker when first obtaining them.

Minor Vampiric Power List

Below is a full list of the Minor Vampiric Powers. Similar to the Major Vampiric Powers, these also cost pacts, but are much cheaper only requiring up to 3 pacts with some only requiring a single pact.

The values listed below are at their Maximum Level (Level 3), they will be weaker when first obtaining them.

Vampiric Power Ranking

Here’s a quick rundown of which powers are great at which stages of the game. We’ll give them a quick ranking for Early, Mid, and Lategame. These rankings will be from D (Niche/Weak) to S (Strong), based on how well they work.

This list is subject to change as the season progresses and more testing is done. Powers that only fit one playstyle are rated for that playstyle and are marked with an asterisk ( * ).

To round off the ranking section, we’ll highlight a few that are worth some discussion, starting with Hemomancy.

Hemomancy is exceptionally strong early on, as it’s a near-screen-wide attack that can go off every 4 seconds. More importantly, it’ll cast when you cast any skill, including those that don’t have a cooldown or resource cost. It also add a good amount of AoE to skills that otherwise lack it, which allows it to fit many builds.

Next are Jagged Spikes and Rampart. Both of these effects have their niche, but really don’t hold their own compared to other power options. Rampart feels like it is made to support channeled skills but lacks uptime to provide meaningful defense for them. Jagged Spikes are kind of at the mercy of both Thorns being weak and the RNG behind it, and its best-case scenario seems to be Thorns Minion Necro which is exceptionally weak but can offset the RNG with minion count.

Terror is ultra-niche, but It could definitely see some use when paired with the Butcher’s Cleaver Unique. That allows for you to potentially chain-fear an enemy and have 100% Crit Rate against them. However, it’ll be limited to skills that can more easily sustain the resource.

Metamorphosis is the opposite of niche, giving every class and build reliable access to the powerful Tibault’s Will Unique Pants. These can easily offset any Resource issues while also granting damage. In addition to that, you get near permanent Unstoppable letting you ignore all Crowd Control effects.

Finally, there’s Moonrise. This makes it worthwhile and viable to experiment with Basic Skill-focused builds. There were already a few skills that were viable without this, like Arc Lash Sorc. It’s the main reason Hectic is also rated highly, as without Moonrise it’d be a very weak position as most builds try to drop Basic Skills when possible.

Equipping and Upgrading Vampiric Powers

Which Vampiric Powers you can use and activate are determined by two things: Pact Armor and the Sanguine Ciricle.

Pacts and Pact Armor

During the Season of Blood, Armor will drop with pacts on them. The Pacts on your Armor act as a soft cap to which combination of powers you can use, though its very flexible due to the cost of the powers. In World Tier 2, you’ll end up with a maximum of ~16 Pacts, or ~3 per item. This increases in each world tier, with World Tier 4 offering ~21 Maximum Pacts, or an average of 4 per item.

In addition to appearing on armor naturally, you’ll also be able to find Pacts as consumable items which will allow you to add specific pacts to any piece of armor. Adding pacts in this way cannot exceed the maximum allowed on gear.

Cleansing Acids are an additional consumable which removes Pacts of a specific type on any piece of gear but can also completely remove all Pacts.

With careful use of Pacts and Cleansing Acids, you’ll be able to fine-tune your Pact distribution to allow you to use any combination of Vampiric Powers.

It’s worth making a note that you cannot add more than 2 of any given pact type on any piece of armor. This means you’ll be forced into a 2/2/1 split, so plan accordingly!

Sanguine Circle

Equipping Vampiric Powers is handled by the new Sanguine Circle feature of the Character page. This UI displays your Total Pacts across all of your armor and allows you to equip up to 5 Vampiric Powers of your choosing so long as you meet their Pact Requirements.

Along the top of this UI your currently available and required pacts are shown. This gives you a quick and easy readout to help determine which Vampiric Power you can easily use.

The center of the UI shows your gear alongside the Sanguine Circle with your currently equipped powers. Here you’ll be able to quickly remove equipped powers by interacting with them or dragging them down to the power list.

Below this is the Vampiric Power list, which allows you to see which Vampiric Powers you currently have available. You can interact with the powers here to easily equip or unequip them from the Sanguine Circle.

Finally, there’s the Potent Blood button. For 25 Potent Blood, you’re given a random selection of 3 powers out of your currently available options. You’ll then be able to choose just one power to unlock or upgrade.

It costs just the initial 25 Potent Blood to unlock Level 1, an additional 125 invested into the power to get Level 2, and a further 250 invested to max it out at level 3. Due to the random nature of the system, It’s good to focus on the powers you want to use for your build when they come up, as they might not pop up again for a while when starting out.

Where to Find Potent Blood

With Potent Blood being used to acquire and upgrade Vampiric Powers, where can we find it? The most common way to acquire Potent Blood is by participating in Blood Harvests. Additionally, we can acquire them from Seasonal World Events in addition to the Hunters’ Acclaim System tied to the Blood Harvests themselves.

Blood Harvests are a Helltide-like event that takes over an entire region of the map. This populates it with new foes, events, and rewards to earn. These World Events have you taking on Lord Zir’s army of Blood Seekers and Shadow Vampires. You’ll also be more likely to find Pacts, Pact Armor, and Potent Blood in these Blood Harvest Zones.

Participating in Blood Harvests will build up your Reputation with the Hunters’ Acclaim, a secondary reward system for Blood Harvest. This offers many of the same rewards, in addition to Vampiric Powers and other unique rewards.

You’ll also come across Blood Lures in Blood Harvest, which allow you to lure Blood Seekers to you, providing you a high amount of Potent Blood and a chance at obtaining Seeker Keys. Seeker keys can be used to free prisoners taken by Lord Zir’s army or on Seeker Caches found in Blood Harvest for additional rewards like Pact Armor, Pact Consumables, and Potent Blood.

We have a full guide to the Blood Harvests and Hunters’ Acclaim events!

Not all of the new World Events are restricted to Blood Harvest Zones though. They’ll also be found in the Open World as well as dungeons. While they won’t provide nearly as much Potent Blood as participating in Blood Harvests, you’re not forced into doing them constantly either.

Building Around Vampiric Powers

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive a little deeper and use a build from here on Vulkk as an example of ways to combine them to great effect.

Where to Start

For the Vampiric Power System, it’s going to work best to plan around the late-game where we’ll have access to the full ~25 Pacts on Armor. Then we’ll determine from there which Pacts to prioritize based on what skills the build uses often.

We’ll want to start by looking at Major Vampiric Powers first, seeing which of them are the most relevant to the build. After which we’ll look at the Minor Powers and do the same to fill the remaining Pacts.

Sorcerer Example

For this example, we’ll use the more recently created Sparking Blaze Sorcerer, a Spark and Meteor Build, as the example for this. We’ve chosen this one as it has a ton of way to interact with Vampiric Powers, and most notably some of the more interesting Vampiric Powers

So to determine the Pacts we’ll want for this build, let’s briefly list the mechanics the build can interact with. Its main damage comes from Basic Skills and Mastery Skills, makes use of Damage over Time via Fire Bolt Enchantment, uses multiple Defensive Skills, makes use of high Lucky Hit Chance, and has access to multiple Crowd Control effects. However, it doesn’t use an Ultimate that deals direct damage itself.

So for Major Powers, that makes Moonrise and Accursed Touch the biggest standouts for what they offer to the build.

Moonrise synergizes well offering plenty of damage and the higher Attack Speed also increases the overall frequency of Lucky Hits. The Attack Speed alone is great for the build, but the high damage boost that comes with Vampiric Blood Rage is amazing. We’ll be able to keep this effect up very easily as Spark hits multiple times.

Accursed Touch allows us to benefit from the new Vampiric Curse Status thanks to our high Lucky Hit Chance, which in turn gives us another option for frontloaded damage. This also opens the option of using Prey on the Weak as a Minor Power for more consistent Vulnerable applications in extended encounters and bossing.

Metamorphosis is also another one to include if we really want to, as the build lacks a really reliable option to gain Unstoppable. This is more of a utility and safety thing that can be played around, which makes it a lower priority.

This means we’re looking at 12-18 depending on if we opt to include Metamorphosis. For this example though, we’ll say no to it and use just the 12 pacts for the other two.

Moving to the Minor Powers, the standout options here are Undying, Prey on the Weak, Infection, Hectic, Domination, and Anticipation. We have 3 slots on the Sanguine Circle and 13 Pacts left, so we’re good to use any three we want.

Since the build uses Basic Skills and stacks a lot of Attack Speed across the gear, Undying offers a huge boost of sustain, while Hectic allows us to actively lower the cooldowns of our Defensive skills. This makes both of these worth including over the other options. Hectic in particular would also allow us to move some skill points around, and get a different active instead of Ice Blades.

As for the remaining options, Prey on the Weak combined with Accursed Touch allows us another means of applying Vulnerable, making us less reliant on a cooldown for it. It can potentially even replace the skill we use for it normally freeing up additional skill points.

Spark hits enemies multiple times per cast, making Infection an interesting choice. It’ll trigger bonus damage on every other cast of Spark, adding some consistent damage. While we can’t really enhance Poison damage as Sorcerer, the consistency does make it valuable.

Domination works well with the build, as we can apply Stuns, Freeze, and Immobilize. Since Spark has rather low damage the bonus damage and execution on non-Elites is welcomed. It’s a lower priority though as all of these effects are mostly chanced based on the build.

Finally, there’s Anticipation, which while we don’t benefit from the bonus damage, the extra Cooldown Reduction would increase the frequency at which we can use Unstable Currents for burst damage.

So alongside Hectic and Undying, we’d likely want to take Anticipation. While having a consistent Vulnerable application would be great, we also don’t scale it a ton which makes it a bit less useful. In comparison at higher levels of gearing, where the extra cooldown for our Ultimate allows us to use it more consistently.