Diablo 3 Season 25 Soul Shards Mechanics Guide

Thanks to the release of Public Test Realm we know all the details about the upcoming Diablo 3 Season 25. In this post, you will learn how new mechanics work and how to use and upgrade Soul Shards in Diablo 3.

The main idea of D3 Season 25 is to make your builds more interesting and diverse with new powerful legendary gems called Soul Shards. There are 7 base types of Soul Shards: 3 for helm and 4 four for a weapon. You can wear only two Soul Shards at once 1 in the helmet and 1 in the weapon. So you will choose 1 from 3 for the helmet and 1 from 4 for the weapon.

Each base of soul shards has its own set of properties. You will not see all of them at once as every soul shard has 3 ranks. You will get only bases that have rank 0 and one active property. This property is always the same for the relevant base of the soul shard. Also, note that the first property has downsides and upsides. For example, you deal less damage but if you kill an elite pack of monsters you receive a powerful upgrade. Below you can see the list of all Diablo 3 Season 25 Soul Shards stats of their bases.

Diablo 3 Souls Shards that can be inserted into weapons with sockets:

• Dregs of Lies
  • Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. Your pets deal 25% increased damage.
  • Additional Powers:
    • Killing an elite enemy reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds.
    • On receiving fatal damage, spawn a shadow that prevents your death, restores your health to 35%, and grants +225 All Resist to all party members while it is active. The shadow only lasts 15 seconds.
    • Each time your pet hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 0.5% for 5 seconds. This stacks up to 100 times. When you reach 100 stacks, the stacks quickly reset to 0.
• Essence of Anguish
  • Base Power: Every time you deal poison damage to an enemy you increase your cooldown reduction and movement speed by 2.5% while your damage received is increased by 5% for 10 seconds. Max 10 stacks.
  • Additional Powers:
    • Your movement speed and cooldown reduction can be increased up to 15 times by dealing poison damage to an enemy.
    • When you deal poison damage to an enemy they receive 50% increased poison damage from all sources for 10 seconds.
    • Killing an enemy deals the damage done by the death blow to all enemies within 25 yards.
• Stain of Sin
  • Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. When you kill 50 enemies, you spawn a pool of blood that increases the damage done to elite enemies by 150% and lasts 15 seconds.
  • Additional Powers:
    • The pool of blood now negates Elite affixes within its area.
    • You gain an additional Rift Progress Orb when you kill and elite pack.
    • The pool of blood now collects Rift Progress Orbs.
• Remnant of Pain
  • Base Power: Your Critical Hit Chance is reduced by 15%. Attacks against Incapacitated enemies are automatically critical hits.
  • Additional Powers:
    • Hitting enemies with cold damage has a 50% chance to freeze them. Cold skill damage is increased to frozen targets by 20%.
    • Gain passability while your movement speed bonus is over 50%. When you move through enemies you knock them back and stun them for 2 seconds.
    • When you critically hit an enemy you increase the attack speed all players by 5% for 5 seconds. Max 10 stacks.

Diablo 3 Souls Shards that can be inserted into helms with sockets:

• Shard of Hatred
  • Base Power: You deal 15% reduced damage while you have 3 or fewer enemies within 25 yards. If more than 3 enemies are within the same distance, you deal 5% increased damage per enemy (to a maximum of 50%).
  • Additional Powers:
    • Killing an elite enemy pulls all enemies within 40 yards to where the elite died.
    • Your Movement speed is increased by 50%. Each enemy within 25 yards reduces your movement speed by 10% up to 70%.
    • You now deal 10% increased damage for every enemy instead of 5% (to a maximum of 100%).
• Sliver of Terror
  • Base Power: Your cooldowns are increased by 25%. For every skill on cooldown, you take 12.5% reduced damage and deal 12.5% increased damage.
  • Additional Powers:
    • Your attack speed and critical hit chance are increased by 5% for each skill on cooldown.
    • You cast a devastating Ring of Fire after killing 100 enemies.
    • If three or more skills are on cooldown, your lightning and fire skill damage are increased by 50%.
• Fragment of Destruction
  • Base Power: You move unhindered through enemies. Each enemy you pass through receives Mark of Destruction for 7 seconds. Each marked enemy that dies removes 1 second from one of your skills on cooldown. If the Mark of Destruction expires before the enemies die you lose 2% of your maximum health as damage. Marks are not applied if you are below 35% health.
  • Additional Powers:
    • You have a 25% Chance to restore 5% health when an enemy dies with Mark of Destruction active.
    • When you apply Mark of Destruction to an enemy, you increase your movement speed by 5% for 7 seconds. Max 10 Stacks.
    • You now leave a trail of fire in your wake that slays enemies with the Mark of Destruction and are below 10% health.

As you can see we divided them into two groups – for a helmet and for a weapon. Also, you can see all these Souls Shards in the pictures above (click on the image to see them better).

How to upgrade Soul Shards?

On every base, you will see three hidden properties. Each base type has its own set of possible properties. When you upgrade a soul shard they will randomly generate on your soul shard. If it is the one for the helmet it will have defensive properties like armour or additional HP. While soul shards for the weapon will have offensive properties like extra damage, crit chance, life per hit etc.

To upgrade a should shard you will need the Hell Forge Ember item. It drops anywhere but with a very rare chance. When you obtain the Hell Forge Ember just use it on any Soul Shard to get 1 more rank. Note that you cannot reroll or modify the properties that you get on the soul shard after you upgrade it. So if you get some unnecessary bonuses you will farm a soul shard base and the Hell Forge Ember once again.

Every new rank will unlock a new set of properties. You can see how it works on the screenshots below. Every new usage of the Hell Forge Ember unlocks one rank set of properties. On the last rank, you will unlock a new passive skill that is linked to the soul shard base. Each base has three different passive skills you get one of them randomly.

Of course, soul shards that made for helms will unlock defensive properties. For example, you can see the base and the 3rd rank of Sliver of Terror the shard that can be inserted into a helm.

To use any of these souls shards you need to insert them in a helm or a weapon with a socket. You can roll sockets on items at Mystic in any town.

How to get Soul Shards in Diablo 3?

In general, it is easy. You just need to play the game. Soul Shards as well as the Hell Forge Ember drop anywhere in the game. But its drop rate is very low. So to increase your chances to obtain a Soul Shard you will need to farm high-level content and upgrade your Paragon level to increase rarity of items found mod.

Above you can see how the souls shard drops. You will not miss it for sure as ther are a lot of red essences are flying around the item all the time. Also, there is a big icon on the mini map displays the place where the soul shard was droped.

We hope that this Diablo 3 Season 25 Soul Shards Mechanics Guide was useful for you. But the best info is about to come when we share new builds for D3 using Soul Shards.