Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred Review
After 2024’s Vessel of Hatred growth left me dangling off a story cliff like a hapless Sanctuary peasant, Lord of Hatred had quite a bit driving on its means to ship on that momentum and provides me a cause to turn into hopelessly misplaced in its loot-filled grind as soon as once more. The excellent news is that it’s achieved precisely that because of a decent, satisfying marketing campaign, two new lessons that I’ve already spent dozens of hours experimenting with and min-maxing builds for, and an endgame that’s so loaded with issues to try this I sometimes forgot some of the programs even existed. If you’ve been ready for a cause to dive again into Diablo 4’s specific model of distress, Lord of Hatred has a lot of compelling causes to take action.
As a correct finish to the demonic battle that’s been constructing since 2023, Lord of Hatred’s cutscenes are unsurprisingly jaw dropping, however it’s the writing and pacing of this quick and candy 8ish hour marketing campaign that stands as some of Blizzard’s greatest work but. It had me on the sting of my seat from starting to finish with all kinds 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 pals in celebration chat as we smashed our method by way of gobs of imps. Sure, the marketing campaign is simply a tiny half of the inevitable a whole bunch of hours that will probably be spent mindlessly exploding loot goblins into sparkly treasures, however half of the rationale I’m so connected to this miserable and violent world is exactly as a result of of the mysteries, drama, and unforgettable characters that occupy it. Lord of Hatred takes full benefit of all of these issues, making it simply one of my favourite Diablo campaigns to this point.
That marketing campaign primarily takes place in Sanctuary’s newest locale, Skovos, a mediterranean-style island that performs an particularly attention-grabbing position in Diablo’s lore because the birthplace of humanity. This new area has many of the issues we’ve come to anticipate from the sequence, like an extremely alarming human-to-horrifying-monster ratio and destroyed locations which can be coated in disgusting fleshy blisters (and regardless of the heck a “corpse clot” is). But a lot of issues listed below are a breath of recent air, too – specifically, stunning and not-yet-destroyed areas that replicate the truth that this historic place has been spared the worst of the horrors the mainland has confronted all these years. The area has additionally obtained heaps of variety to it, from Lovecraftian-coded foggy shorelines to volcanic hellscapes, every including new causes to maintain on trekking round in search of loot. Skovos isn’t practically as densely full of new dungeons, however the stuff that’s there, particularly the brand new Strongholds to beat, are all properly price doing.
Aside from the finale to the story and a few new locations to discover, Lord of Hatred additionally introduces two very cool character lessons to shake issues up. The returning Paladin is about what you’d anticipate in case you journeyed throughout Sanctuary as one in Diablo 2, with hundreds of safety skills and ridiculously highly effective construct choices just like the aura construct my co-op mate designed so he might simply stroll round destroying the whole lot in his path with out even having to carry a finger. The Warlock, alternatively, is totally new to the sequence (not counting Diablo 2 having recently retroactively added it in for the 30th anniversary, of course), which has you claiming Hell’s energy as your individual in all kinds of numerous builds. That ranges from the Necromancer-like Legion choices which can be all about summoning demons to do your combating for you, to the Vanguard construct that turns you right into a demon your self, for many who favor a extra private contact to their wanton destruction. The Paladin is pure nostalgic consolation meals that I’m glad to have added to the roster, however I favor the brand new hotness of the Warlock, particularly simply how numerous you will get with it by happening every of the 4 disciplines or by mixing and matching them collectively to create one thing surprising.
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 actions, together with loot on the finish of every bested problem and a few XP to go in the direction of your varied War Plans ability bushes, however your precise progress towards your individual War Plan will solely advance in case your subsequent exercise simply so occurs to align with theirs. When I wasn’t the celebration chief choosing the subsequent exercise, I felt like I used to be losing my time and enjoying inefficiently by not making progress by myself playlist, and after I was the celebration chief making the picks, I felt responsible that my co-op buddies weren’t seeing the identical degree of progress as me. It’s one of these small particulars that utterly undermines an in any other case good factor, and weirdly disincentivizes even doing War Plans in co-op altogether, because it’s extra environment friendly to simply work by yourself playlists in parallel. Truly, a large oversight that can hopefully get corrected briefly order.
The different main endgame exercise is Echoing Hatred, successfully a horde mode that throws each enemy it may possibly discover at you and asks you to resist the onslaught for so long as you’re ready. It begins out on the lowest world tier problem, then climbs as you push by way of waves of enemies till it inevitably reaches absurd ranges of problem that result in your inevitable loss and rewards you relative to how properly you carried out. Interestingly, entry to this exercise is locked behind a reasonably uncommon (a minimum of in my expertise) consumable drop you’ll have to get each time you wish to take a look at your mettle, however this senseless, brutally difficult marathon is precisely the kind of exercise I like in ARPGs, and I additionally discovered it fairly helpful as a method of gauging which world tier your present construct is able to stand up to. It is a bit bizarre that a lot of the endgame (particularly the War Plans system) is about eradicating obstacles to getting again into the endgame motion, whereas Echoing Hatred seems to be an excellent enjoyable mode you’ll solely get to play each as soon as in a blue moon for no matter cause.
Finally, Lord of Hatred provides the function we’ve all been asking for: Fishing. Don’t be fooled by the tidal wave of apocalyptic monstrosities that encompass you – Diablo 4 is a comfy sport now. In between killing demon lords and being pushed to the brink of insanity by the horrors you’ve been compelled to witness, you’ll be able to pull out a fishing rod and simply sit back, my good friend. Frankly, there actually isn’t a lot to this weird minigame, as you kinda simply fish for a bit in every area to finish your assortment after which don’t have any cause to ever fish once more. But it’s kinda hilarious that they bothered so as to add this in in any respect, and as somebody who loves dense ARPGs and stress-free cozy video games in equal measure, it speaks to me personally. Here’s hoping they add relationship mechanics subsequent (Blizzard, be at liberty to name me about this – I’ve solutions).
