Lord of Hatred pairs two genuinely distinct classes with the best story Blizzard has told in this game, even if some of the older systems underneath still show their age.
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 it's the strongest opening this game has given a story since launch. Blizzard finally figured out how to make an expansion's plot feel load-bearing instead of bolted onto the endgame grind underneath it, and the six-to-eight-hour campaign here earns every hour of that runtime.
The two new classes are the headline, and they're built to feel like opposites on purpose. Paladin returns from Diablo II with Auras and a new Oath system layered on top, holy light and melee combat that rewards standing in the middle of a fight rather than kiting around it. Warlock goes the other direction, binding demons and trading your own health for spells that get meaner the closer you let a fight get, and the two classes rarely feel like they're playing the same game even standing next to each other in a party.
“It's the first zone in Diablo IV that made me stop and just look at something instead of clicking toward the next waypoint.”
Skovos itself is the best region Blizzard has designed for this game. It opens as a Mediterranean coastal town under a clear sky, then twists through an autumn forest, a corrupted volcanic stretch, and a tropical shoreline that all somehow belong to the same island chain without feeling stitched together. It's the first zone in Diablo IV that made me stop and just look at something instead of clicking toward the next waypoint.
The endgame got a real rework alongside the story content. War Plans let you queue up a run of Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, and other activities as one continuous playlist with its own reward track, instead of manually hopping between menus every ten minutes to decide what to grind next. Pairing that with a level cap raised to 70 and Torment Tiers now stretching to 12 gives returning characters a real reason to keep pushing instead of parking a max-level build in town.
None of it fixes everything. Skill trees for the two returning core classes, Barbarian and Sorcerer, got smaller tuning passes than the new arrivals, and by the time you're deep into the higher Torment Tiers, some of the old itemization complaints from launch are still sitting there mostly untouched. Warlock especially needs a patch or two before its health-trading playstyle stops punishing anyone who isn't already deep in the class's specific gear loop.
The campaign's back half is where Blizzard takes the biggest swing, and it mostly lands. Without spoiling where it goes, the choices around Skovos's ruling families carry real weight into how the last few hours play out, closer to the branching Blizzard talked about years ago than anything the base game actually delivered.
I went in expecting another solid but familiar expansion and came out having finished the campaign in one long weekend, which hasn't happened with this game since it launched. If you bounced off Diablo IV early on, Lord of Hatred is the version worth coming back for. If you never left, it's the best reason yet to still be here.