To equip Diablo 4 Vampiric Powers to your character, you need to make sure you've got some powers unlocked with Potent Blood and have the right Pacts to activate them. It's a pretty confusing process that involves a new currency, requires you to get the right RNG-based Pacts from armor drops, and is buried in an inventory menu that's not easy to spot. There are 22 of these powers to unlock over the course of Diablo 4 Season 2 and slot into your new Sanguine Circle, so here's what you need to know about unlocking and equipping Vampiric Powers.
How to use Diablo 4 Vampiric Powers
Vampiric Powers is a new upgrade system for Season of Blood in Diablo 4. Essentially, you can equip and activate up to five of these powers to add all sorts of passive abilities to your character – they're not like Skills that you need to unlock and manually activate with button presses.
Obviously, you need to make sure you've even got access to the powers in the first place, by using a new character and playing in the Seasonal Realm. Complete the Season of Blood quest titled "The Hunter's Chase" where you meet Erys for the first time to get access to Vampiric Powers. With that, here's how you equip them:
- Open the Character menu.
- Open the Vampiric Powers seasonal inventory tab. If you're playing with a controller, you need to use the triggers to navigate across to this menu. See the image below.
- From the grid of 22 Vampiric Powers, select up to five of the ones you've unlocked to add them to your Sanguine Circle – the Undying power is unlocked by default, but you can unlock new powers or upgrade existing ones by spending more Potent Blood at the bottom of the menu.
- Now make sure you've got the right Pacts on your armor to activate your Vampiric Powers, otherwise your equipped powers do nothing. Check the top of your Sanguine Circle to see your total Pact availability and cost, but I've laid out more on how Pacts work below.
So, if you've unlocked some Vampiric Powers with Potent Blood (or through challenges such as the Diablo 4 Accursed Touch power) , slotted up to five in your Sanguine Circle, and have the right Pacts on your armor, your Vampiric Powers should be activated and ready to go. However, if your Sanguine Circle says you that you've got inactive powers, that means you've not met the Pact cost.
Diablo 4 Pacts for Vampiric Powers
The Diablo 4 Potent Vows objective in this season's Journey is a bit buggy and might not be working for you
Pact armor pieces, which regularly drop during Season of Blood (Diablo 4 Silent Chests are a good way of getting armor), are required to activate your Diablo 4 Vampiric Powers. Each piece of Pact armor holds a random selection of three or more Pacts – Ferocity (spiky thing), Divinity (chalice), and Eternity (skull) – and each Vampiric Power has its own activation cost. If the cost is not met, the power is not active. Therefore, you need to make sure that you’re the total of all your armor Pacts meets or exceeds the total Pact cost of all the Vampiric Powers in your Sanguine Circle.
For example, if you've got the Undying, Prey on the Weak, and Bathe in Blood Vampiric Powers equipped in your Sanguine Circle, your total armor Pacts need to meet or exceed a total Pact cost of two Ferocity, three Divinity, and four Eternity. You can see all Pact cost and availability information around your Sanguine Circle.
Early on, you'll need to keep swapping armor to get the right arrangement of Pacts to suit your chosen Diablo 4 Vampiric Powers, but later you'll get standalone Pacts and Cleansing Acids from Season of Blood activities and enemies. These can be used to add or remove specific Pacts from armor respectively. Higher rarity armor also offers more Pact slots, so it becomes easier to meet all five Vampiric Power Pact costs in your Sanguine Circle.
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