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.
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. I finished the six-to-eight-hour campaign in one long weekend, which hasn't happened with this game since 2023, and for once the plot felt load-bearing instead of bolted onto the grind underneath it.
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 show up, that mostly means dying in melee range on purpose and calling it a build. Around level 48 it clicked, 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 at once. Paladin, the other new class, is the crowd-pleaser: Auras, 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.”
Skovos is the best region Blizzard has designed for this game, a Mediterranean coastal town under a clear sky twisting into autumn forest and a corrupted volcanic stretch without feeling stitched together. It's the first zone in Diablo IV that made me stop and look at something instead of clicking toward the next waypoint.
War Plans fix a complaint I'd stopped bothering to make: they queue Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, and other endgame activities into one continuous playlist with its own reward track, replacing the every-ten-minutes menu decision about what to grind next. With the cap raised to 70 and Torment stretching to 12, my seasonal character has a reason to keep pushing instead of parking in town.
Barbarian and Sorcerer got thinner tuning passes than the new arrivals, and the launch-era itemization complaints are still sitting in the higher Torments, mostly untouched.
The campaign's back half takes the biggest swing, choices around Skovos's ruling families that carry real weight into the final hours, closer to the branching Blizzard promised years ago than anything the base game delivered. I replayed the last stretch on a second character just to pick the other family. Different final boss arena, different epilogue. That's new for this game.
The Warlock patch will come, the class is too popular to leave broken, and I'm oddly glad I played it before the fix. Suffering through the undertuned version is the closest this game has come to feeling dangerous.