Lord of Hatred pairs two sharply distinct classes with the best story Blizzard has told in this game, even if some of the older systems underneath still show their age.
I quit Diablo IV twice, once in 2023 and once during a season whose name I've forgotten entirely, and came back for this because two people I trust told me the story was worth it. Lord of Hatred opens with Sanctuary's first invitation to Skovos, a cluster of islands the Cathedral of Light spent centuries pretending didn't exist, and I finished the six-to-eight-hour campaign across one long weekend, which hasn't happened with this game since launch. Skovos is also the best region Blizzard has designed here, a Mediterranean coastal town under a clear sky twisting into autumn forest and then a corrupted volcanic stretch without ever feeling stitched together, and it's the first zone in this game that made me stop and look at something instead of clicking toward the next waypoint.
I rolled a Warlock, and I need to be honest about the two days I spent regretting it. The class trades your own health for spells that get meaner the closer you let a fight get, and until the pieces of its gear loop turn up that mostly means dying in melee range on purpose and calling it a build. Around level 48 it clicked, when a chest piece turned my health drain into a shield timed to my curses, and the whole class inverted from self-harm into rhythm. It's the most interesting Blizzard has let this game feel and it badly needs a tuning patch, both of those at the same time. Paladin, the other new class, is the crowd-pleaser, with Auras and an Oath system and a melee kit that rewards standing in the middle of a pull, which this game has punished since launch. My party's Paladin outlived me all weekend and had a fraction of the fun.
“It's the first zone in Diablo IV that made me stop and just look at something instead of clicking toward the next waypoint.”
War Plans fix a complaint I'd stopped bothering to make, queueing Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides and the rest of the endgame into one continuous playlist with its own reward track, in place of the decision every ten minutes about what to go and grind next. With the cap raised to 70 and Torment stretching out to 12, my seasonal character has a reason to keep pushing rather than parking in town. Barbarian and Sorcerer got noticeably thinner tuning passes than the new arrivals did, and the launch-era itemization complaints are still sitting up in the higher Torments, mostly untouched, which is now three years of the same conversation.
The campaign's back half takes the biggest swing, with choices around Skovos's ruling families that carry real weight into the final hours and land closer to the branching Blizzard promised years ago than anything in the base game did. I replayed the last stretch on a second character purely to pick the other family, and got a different final boss arena and a different epilogue out of it. I couldn't tell you whether the Warlock's tuning is deliberate or something nobody caught, because Blizzard has said only that they're watching the data, and the class is far too popular to leave in this state for long. I'm oddly glad I played it broken, and I've been putting off leveling the alt I made in case the patch lands first, which is definately not a normal way to play this game.