After 2024’s Vessel of Hatred expansion left me dangling off a narrative cliff like a hapless Sanctuary peasant, Lord of Hatred had quite a lot riding on its ability to deliver on that momentum and give me a reason to become hopelessly lost in its loot-filled grind once again. The good news is that it’s done exactly that thanks to a tight, satisfying campaign, two new classes that I’ve already spent dozens of hours experimenting with and min-maxing builds for, and an endgame that’s so loaded with things to do that I occasionally forgot some of the systems even existed. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to dive back into Diablo 4’s particular brand of misery, Lord of Hatred has plenty of compelling reasons to do so.
As a proper end to the demonic battle that’s been building since 2023, Lord of Hatred’s cutscenes are unsurprisingly jaw dropping, but it’s the writing and pacing of this short and sweet 8ish hour campaign that stands as some of Blizzard’s best work yet. It had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end with all sorts of twists, turns, and tragedies, references to deep Diablo lore, and motivations for even its most irredeemable characters that had me debating demon philosophy with my friends in party chat as we smashed our way through gobs of imps. Sure, the campaign is only a tiny part of the inevitable hundreds of hours that will be spent mindlessly exploding loot goblins into sparkly treasures, but part of the reason I’m so attached to this depressing and violent world is precisely because of the mysteries, drama, and unforgettable characters that occupy it. Lord of Hatred takes full advantage of all of those things, making it easily one of my favorite Diablo campaigns to date.
That campaign primarily takes place in Sanctuary’s latest locale, Skovos, a mediterranean-style island that plays an especially interesting role in Diablo’s lore as the birthplace of humanity. This new region has many of the things we’ve come to expect from the series, like an incredibly alarming human-to-horrifying-monster ratio and destroyed places that are covered in disgusting fleshy blisters (and whatever the heck a “corpse clot” is). But plenty of things here are a breath of fresh air, too – namely, beautiful and not-yet-destroyed areas that reflect the fact that this ancient place has been spared the worst of the horrors the mainland has faced all these years. The region has also got lots of diversity to it, from Lovecraftian-coded foggy shorelines to volcanic hellscapes, each adding new reasons to keep on trekking around in search of loot. Skovos isn’t nearly as densely filled with new dungeons, but the stuff that is there, especially the new Strongholds to conquer, are all well worth doing.
Aside from the finale to the story and some new places to explore, Lord of Hatred also introduces two very cool character classes to shake things up. The returning Paladin is about what you’d expect if you journeyed across Sanctuary as one in Diablo 2, with loads of protection abilities and ridiculously powerful build options like the aura build my co-op mate designed so he could just walk around destroying everything in his path without even having to lift a finger. The Warlock, on the other hand, is completely new to the series (not counting Diablo 2 having recently retroactively added it in for the 30th anniversary, of course), which has you claiming Hell’s power as your own in a wide variety of diverse builds. That ranges from the Necromancer-like Legion options that are all about summoning demons to do your fighting for you, to the Vanguard build that turns you into a demon yourself, for those who prefer a more personal touch to their wanton destruction. The Paladin is pure nostalgic comfort food that I’m glad to have added to the roster, but I prefer the new hotness of the Warlock, especially just how diverse you can get with it by going down each of the four disciplines or by mixing and matching them together to create something unexpected.
What’s even bigger than these two new skill trees, though, is that the six already available have been completely reworked. The changes are mostly centered around the fact that, instead of having a bunch of highly attractive passive perks that did simple yet incredibly efficient things like increasing the damage you deal or the attacks you can withstand, they’re now built around making more meaningful choices. For example, in the Warlock tree you can pick between making your defensive wall of demons encircle your enemy, trapping them within, or breaking apart into a pack of vicious sluggers after a period. As the Sorceress, you can now decide to take your fire hydro snakes and turn them into ice snakes instead if that elemental effect is more your speed, or if it works better with whatever mad scientist build you’re concocting.
These changes are really awesome, as they push you away from picking the boring, passive upgrades and instead help your character feel much more unique, even when playing alongside those using your same character class. Still, there’s also plenty of fat to cut, like how skills now allow you to sink up to 15 points into them versus the previous five. After you’ve picked your base skills and modified them to your liking, the rest of the leveling experience is pretty much just deciding which ones to focus your points into, recreating a lot of the same uninteresting decisions we were making with the previous trees. I still like the changes they’ve made here, especially the added freedom to augment how these powers work in more meaningful ways, but I do wish they’d have gone a bit further in that direction.
Once you’ve bested the campaign and maxed out your character level, you’ll quickly find yourself in the all-important endgame loop, which involves navigating an absolutely staggering number of upgrade mechanics, the gathering materials you’ll need to farm for them, as well as scooping up the best gear you can find and obsessing over every little stat they rolled. This is the crux of the Diablo experience, and Lord of Hatred is its most dense, meticulously customizable version yet. That means you’ll have to contend with truly some of the most obscenely complicated menus around, which have only grown more cumbersome over the years, but you’re in for a relentlessly rewarding ride if you go through the trouble of learning it all.
Having been along for the ride from the start, I love obsessing over every little detail and finding tons of ways to maximize my lethality. Finally finding a piece of gear that perfectly fits your build or saving up enough materials to re-roll a stat that gives you that extra DPS you need to break through to the next world tier is exactly what chunky ARPGs like this one are all about. Rolling into an endgame activity to watch all your careful preparation and planning turn into you absolutely stomping all over enemies and melting the boss in half a second is downright awesome, and knowing that there’s plenty of runway with 12 tiers of endgame difficulty (up from just four previously) is just insane.
The latest addition to that min-maxing meta is the Talisman system, which allows you to collect magical runes that slot into yet another loadout menu. Practically speaking, this is a clever way of offering set bonuses that are usually found on specific armor sets, except here you can use whatever armor you want while Talismans stand on their own. It took me a while to wrap my head around it honestly, just because I’m so used to the entire idea of a set bonus being a reward for collecting and sporting armor pieces that belong together, but decoupling the need to use specific pieces of equipment ends up being a pretty smart move – though it does add another thing to optimize and obsess over, and frankly Diablo 4 already has so many of those that I sometimes forgot about Talismans altogether. Still, they’re a neat addition and I’m glad they exist, especially since it gave me another thing to squeeze a few extra stats out. That’s always welcome!
There’s also the Horadric Cube, a nifty magical device that does everything from turning common items into uniques(!) to adding yet another stat boost to your best masterworked gear, at the cost of locking it out of any and all future augmentation. After spending hours tinkering around with this thing, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with all it can do – but it’s already quite the game changer, offering numerous new ways to squeeze even more power out of all that grinding you did. Combined with the loot filter, which allows you to target specific items with specific affixes as you continue your climb toward ever-greater power, the endgame journey has fewer annoyances than ever before. Now you can create rules to automatically filter through the loot you earn down to the most minute details, removing the need to sift through all the junk you don’t need (so long as you have the strength of will to figure out how to configure those rules to your exact specifications).
Speaking of the endgame grind, Lord of Hatred takes yet another stab at providing a more compelling laundry list of activities to engage with while you carry out that search for loot. To be fair, I also praised Diablo 4’s vanilla endgame based on my pre-release review time with it, but the benefit of hindsight and a couple more weeks of playtime on the live servers ultimately saw it wear pretty thin shortly thereafter, so it’s hard to say for sure whether or not this attempt will fare any better after a few months. What I can say is that the system Blizzard built in this version has the least friction and the greatest variety of things to do so far, and the dozens of hours I’ve spent with it have been really enjoyable.
The main tool Lord of Hatred uses to get you into that long road of grinding is called War Plans, which works like a curated playlist of activities that you’re directed to one after another, all of which offer compelling rewards. The best part of this is just how easy it is to jump from activity to activity, since you no longer need to hunt for Nightmare Dungeon keys or manually walk over to Helltide events – you can now teleport to the next activity on your playlist in a matter of seconds and keep the good times rolling. One moment you’ll be blasting your way through the Pit, the next you’ll jump over to go stomp out a lair boss, before returning to the war table to collect a batch of rewards. As you progress, these trees will offer more branching paths for you to pick from and will start offering modified versions of these events that target specific rewards. Even cooler are the new perk trees associated with each of the endgame activities included in War Plans, which allow you to modify how these events work and lets you customize your loot for doing so. Again, it’s still hard to say whether or not this will have legs after we’ve been running War Plans for a few seasons, but I like their chances of keeping my attention – or at least not annoying me with weird barriers to entry just to run these activities.
That said, though the premise of the entire War Plans system seems to be reducing the headache of accessing endgame content, it has a pretty fatal flaw in how it works when you’re playing with friends. Since your War Plans playlist is randomized each time you run it, and your friends each have their own specific things to tackle in their own orders that are unlikely to align with yours, if you’re tagging along with a buddy to run through them, you’ll almost instantly feel like a second-class citizen when you see a fragment of the rewards they get. You still get “credit” for tackling these activities, including loot at the end of each bested challenge and some XP to go towards your various War Plans skill trees, but your actual progress toward your own War Plan will only advance if your next activity just so happens to align with theirs. When I wasn’t the party leader picking the next activity, I felt like I was wasting my time and playing inefficiently by not making progress on my own playlist, and when I was the party leader making the picks, I felt guilty that my co-op buddies weren’t seeing the same level of progress as me. It’s one of those small details that completely undermines an otherwise good thing, and weirdly disincentivizes even doing War Plans in co-op altogether, since it’s more efficient to just work on your own playlists in parallel. Truly, a massive oversight that will hopefully get corrected in short order.
The other major endgame activity is Echoing Hatred, effectively a horde mode that throws every enemy it can find at you and asks you to withstand the onslaught for as long as you’re able. It starts out at the lowest world tier difficulty, then climbs as you push through waves of enemies until it inevitably reaches absurd levels of challenge that lead to your inevitable loss and rewards you relative to how well you performed. Interestingly, access to this activity is locked behind a fairly rare (at least in my experience) consumable drop you’ll need to get every time you want to test your mettle, but this mindless, brutally challenging marathon is exactly the type of activity I love in ARPGs, and I also found it pretty useful as a way of gauging which world tier your current build is ready to withstand. It is a bit weird that so much of the endgame (specifically the War Plans system) is about removing barriers to getting back into the endgame action, while Echoing Hatred appears to be a super fun mode you’ll only get to play every once in a blue moon for whatever reason.
Finally, Lord of Hatred adds the feature we’ve all been asking for: Fishing. Don’t be fooled by the tidal wave of apocalyptic monstrosities that surround you – Diablo 4 is a cozy game now. In between killing demon lords and being driven to the brink of madness by the horrors you’ve been forced to witness, you can pull out a fishing rod and just chill out, my friend. Frankly, there really isn’t much to this bizarre minigame, as you kinda just fish for a bit in each region to complete your collection and then have no reason to ever fish again. But it’s kinda hilarious that they bothered to add this in at all, and as someone who loves dense ARPGs and relaxing cozy games in equal measure, it speaks to me personally. Here’s hoping they add dating mechanics next (Blizzard, feel free to call me about this – I have suggestions).
