My sabbatical from Diablo 4 is over, as I haven’t watched much of the game’s seasons since the Vessel of Hatred expansion. But if nothing else, I’ll always show up for a major new Diablo launch, and well, Hatred’s back. Mephisto is back. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?
This is Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, where we once again face Mephisto, who was essentially the main villain of Diablo 4’s entirety, despite another Prime Evil taking his name in lights. After playing Lord of Hate, it’s easy to see how this tale works as a trilogy, though what, if any, story continues from here is unknown given the definitive nature of this plot.
There are two halves to it, the campaign and of course, the main show: the endgame and the tools within it. I promise I did my best, but despite the maximum of two new classes, it’s hard to get miles deep into a final game of something as expansive as Diablo in a limited review period. But I did play a lot of the new additions, even if they were at Torment levels that would have made my old characters scoff.
I’ve said before that I thought Diablo 4 had the best storytelling I’ve ever seen in the series. This wasn’t a particularly high bar, but that was mostly due to Caroline Faber’s Lilith as the big bad, possibly the best character we’ve seen in Diablo, and coupled with Ralph Ineson’s soft tones as Lorath. Well, guess what? Those two are top stuff this time around, which I’d argue is an upgrade from Neyrelle leading the Vessel of Hatred expansion, which now feels like an in-between, though I liked it too.
It’s hard to get into the story here without major spoilers, but I’ll try. We, surprise, have to stop Mephisto “for good” this time, although, as we learned from Vessel of Hatred, he has now taken over the body of the beloved Akarat, acting as a kind of antichrist on the Skovos islands of the Amazon, where he is briefly worshiped. Lilith is back…in some capacity, but you can figure out how. The game also features some extremely important developments in terms of character additions and removals that you can experience once you play. It’s a great campaign, a rarity in this genre. At about six hours into it, depending on your level of distraction, it also feels pretty meaty.
I played the campaign with the newest class, the Warlock, since the Paladin was available earlier before the expansion (although this new one has upgrades). Warlock is unique enough from sister classes like Sorcerer and Necromancer that it doesn’t feel like a rehash. The name of the game summons many things from hell, be it ethereal chains or demons. you call a lot of demons, though for the most part, they won’t chase you like Necromancy buds. My build consisted of shooting razor blades with ghost hands at people, summoning static demon towers, locking people in AOE chain cages, and then unleashing a piranha-like frenzy of demon swarms to chew through mobs and bosses. Also, a giant ghost worm follows me around and occasionally eats things whole.
What you can do then is take another class and go straight to the endgame, which is what I did with Paladin. You can side-level a second character without some sort of repetitive location farm since the game dumps you XP, and I got to level 70 and got a few dozen points on the factor board in about half a day. My current Paladin build is a bunch of auras and a ricochet shield, but at some point here I’ll have to try the old spinning hammers. He’s a lot of fun and so am I May I like it better than Warlock, but I need to try a bunch more builds for each. I just didn’t have time to collect the legendaries and uniques you would need to make something really crazy.
One of the biggest changes coming to the game across all levels and characters is the diversified skill tree. No more tiny passive nodes, these are saved for the factor array. Instead, each skill now has three upgrade branches with three options each. Two are somewhat minor, the third is a fairly significant change to how the ability works. In Warlock’s case, this can include changing the entire type and function of a move, eg. going from a Demonology skill to Hellfire, meaning you could make an entire Hellfire build without using any basic Hellfire skills at all.
An odd issue here is that while all of these options are neat and will lead to interesting builds, the vast majority of your skill points are kind of a wash. Picking these small nodes is three points each. So you’ll have dozens and dozens left over, where we’re talking 50+ skill points built into your main skills to get them to level 15 each, up from the old max of 5. The builds feel nice, but it’s weird since they didn’t know what to do with the bucket of points left over with the node selection changes.
Paragon Tables I just couldn’t get in too deep. There are more upgrades than we’ve seen before, but I’ll mention a few hundred points when I get a chance to actually do it there.
A new addition is the Talisman system, a new page on your character that allows you to attach different charms to a central seal, giving you bonus stats or patches, and there are also certain sets of charms that when combined, have upgraded effects. While I suppose these get more interesting over time, they have only equal benefits at this point. My complete set currently reduces damage/damage from elites when maxed. Hooray. The whole thing feels like it exists for its own sake and seems unnecessary. At least for now it feels like a few extra factor tiles in a hex.
The most interesting addition is the return of the Horadric Cube, which ranges from assembling new charms and runes to heavily modifying your existing gear. I’ve tried to avoid mentioning Path of Exile at this point, the game I’ve probably sunk 300 hours into since Vessel of Hatred, but it at least offers some level of customization complexity that the game has beyond the previous D4 additions made to the old vendors. But there are too many new coins to keep track of. I look forward to the inevitable “secret” recipes that will be found in this thing.
The main thrust of the endgame now is something called War Plans, a station where you can choose from a number of previous endgame experiences, from Nightmare Dungeons to The Pit in the Undercity to Infernal Hordes to just farming Helltide. Here, however, you can target specific types of rewards (gems, XP, armor) as you progress, and once you’ve completed 3-5 of them in a row, you’ll end up with a huge pile of earnings, in addition to whatever you’ve earned along the way.
The concept becomes more interesting with the new “skill tree” system for each activity. Play enough of each and you’ll earn points to tweak any mode to make it harder and more rewarding. For example, I can take my Nightmare Dungeon on the road to gain the ability to instantly respawn bosses for double rewards, additional treasure goblins that drop treasure keys and goblin land gates, bonus completion chests, elite spawning shrines, and a butcher summoning altar, among other things.
This is definitely better than jumping between endgame activities individually, one dropping this item used in that other and so on, as it gives you a different path to follow, more targeted rewards, and a lot more rewards overall if you do it that way. Although I wouldn’t say this is really “transformed” based on what I’ve experienced, and some could see this as the current endgame just being shuffled around a bit and given some extra boost. I imagine, however, that over time, more and more new modes in seasons and such will be introduced here and made permanent as well. There’s also some new super high, super rare, super profitable event that might appear in the game, but Blizzard warned us that we probably wouldn’t even see it in this review period. I didn’t do it.
I don’t know if Lord of Hatred is enough to make me hopelessly addicted to Diablo 4 again like I was at the beginning, but I was impressed with the campaign story, similar to the original, and I like both these new zones and classes compared to their counterparts in Echo of Hatred. I’m not sure how transformative some of these updates really are, and Cube seems like the most useful, I guess. We feel like we’re stretching the limits of creep power a bit here, but that’s what the new Torment Levels are for, I guess, which trump the old ones. Needless to say, I haven’t made it yet.
Give me another hundred hours (which I’ll probably play) and I’ll give you a full breakdown of the endgame, but for now, I like the package overall, and it’s enough to keep me coming back for a while, to be sure.
Rating: 8.5/10
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