Lord of Hatred is a really good Diablo 4 expansion, adding mechanics, tweaking things around where it was sorely needed, and slapping another part of the Wanderer’s story that picks right up after the events of the previous expansion. I had a very good time with Lord of Hatred and I probably would’ve sunk more hours into it if I didn’t want to play other games and if the endgame was a little bit different for me - I’m not a huge fan of season tracks and battle passes and what not!
After only a few minutes of connectivity issues, I was thrown with my new character (a paladin) at the third act of a story that started in the base game, where you, the Wanderer, fought against Lilith, and then fought to try and defeat Mephisto in the first DLC. Now, the prime evil is back and you have to navigate to a new land and try to save the world with the help of the amazons. There are a lot of twists and turns, but Diablo’s stories never deal too much with subtlety so you move from setpiece to setpiece, defeating demons, corrupted humans, rejoin old friends, lose some allies (the usual) until you finally defeat the Big Bad for good. It was competently told and I enjoyed it, which is the most I can ask for a story in an ARPG.
On the mechanical side, there is a lot that changed in Lord of Hatred; The skill tree is now entirely made up of active skills and their upgrades feel more meaningful than before, with two smaller choices and a big change for your skills that you unlock as you level up, giving the player something powerful to look forward to almost every level… up to a point, you’ll spend a lot of the back half of your 70 levels just numerically increasing values like the old system used to be and I wish they had spread it out differently to just offer these important choices along the way. You have a new system to equip runes which can give bonuses but also act as “sets”, with powerful build-defining effects if you manage to get most of them on your character. There’s the Horadric Cube… but it felt too complicated to be interesting for me.
The end game is also pretty revamped, you have a war table and you plan a bunch of activities that you’ll complete back to back to gain rewards, level up the table and unlock points in a few customization trees for these activities. This combines nightmare dungeons, kurast undercity runs, helltide invasions and other endgame content so you have a straightforward list of activities to do. It’s pretty streamlined! The two new classes - paladin and warlock - are also pretty fun with a bunch of unique mechanics, I really wish I could’ve tried all the various builds, but...
Ultimately where the game somehow failed to keep my interest while creating multiple characters was the account-wide progress of many endgame systems. I wish I could kept the challenges and paragon levels separate so that I would’ve started from scratch. I’m not a big fan of creating a new character and already have a bunch of points to spend and a bunch of challenges already completed. It’s not a big gripe, but it kinda lessened my enjoyment of tying multiple characters.
Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred was a fun time and it shakes up some of the core mechanics loose in a good way. Maybe when a new season rolls around I’ll go back to D4, it changes and adds enough to make the game more interesting and I still haven’t tried all the new builds. Food for thought when I’m looking for something to play!
