This launched on Monday, 7PM EST, and at 6:55PM EST, you needed to download 142Gb of patch wonder. The servers naturally melted, with 120minute queues, but this is frankly expected. Curious how this fits in the larger landscape of ARPGs… Anyhow, to the meat of it.

Lord of Hatred caps the story of Diablo 4 – I say that as the last cinematic has no cliffhanger, so what you see here is effectively all you’re gonna get until (if?) Diablo 5 comes around in 10 years, give or take. No meaningful spoilers here, the story hits the beats Blizzard tends to hit, and I’d argue it’s a full-circle type of bit at the end. I did enjoy the mechanics of a few of the bosses, including the last one. You’ll see that once, and if you only play the new campaign, you should end up near level 45 or so when done. Then you’re unlikely to replay the campaign again, which is frankly unfortunate as Blizzard has some really decent cutscenes here that should be seen more than once.

Mechanically there are quite a few changes here, some good, some questionable.

• Skill trees have removed all passive benefits and added more ranks to skills as a result. e.g. no longer +to armor from a selection, but instead you get armor if you use a particular skill. This is pretty much a nerf all around, shifting the benefits to the Paragon system.
• Legendaries don’t have fixed stat pools, but are as random as any other piece. Related, you can upgrade rare/magic items to legendary. This is mixed. The upper stats of a character are now higher, but it also means that farming legendaries is much less meaningful as in most cases the stat rolls are not what you want. This will extend the loot grind further. I expect the math here to be tweaked based on data.
• +dmg has been shifted to %multipliers instead. This raises the overall stats of characters, but will take a bit to math out.
• Talisman sets are powerful. The stats themselves are random but the set boosts are not. I have not seen build-defining set boosts yet, though I gather they are somewhere.
• There are 12 Torment levels now, which means there’s very little difference between them and you’re unlikely to know which one you should be in. D3 had this issue, but D4 is mostly a solo affair so not really sure it matters much.
• The Horadric Cube works generally like you’d expect. Put 3 of something to get 1 of another. These are all functions the Occulist should’ve had, very strange.
• There’s a mechanic that remains from the pre-LoH that is explicitly removed in the main storyline. Still confused about this.
• War Plans … more in a bit.
• Much too early to talk about class balance.
• Still no reason to be in a guild other than a chat channel, which is a good reason to be in a guild.

The net result of these mechanical/stat/drop changes means it will take you forever to gear up as compared to what was there before, and that the majority of your legendary gear will be acquired through crafting rather than drops. Point of fact, that’s about the only way you’re going to get the necessary aspects to have a functional build.

War Plans

I think this particular item deserves a considerable amount of discussion. Mechanically, War Plans are a randomized list of activities that you perform in a certain order, which has a semi-meta set of boosts and a chest of rewards at the end. If you don’t like the set of events you can re-roll them, up to a certain limit.

Often in game design there are solutions presented without understanding the problems at hand. I think War Plans is such a case. The core issue is that the endgame activities are individually designed with specific purposes. Lairs are meant to target certain drops. Helltides mostly for experience and early gearing. Infernal for… I don’t really know. Nightmare Dungeons to get materials to do boss lairs. The Pit for glyphs, and for character pushing. Kurast for materials (and the best ratio of legendaries per hour). Once you know what you are aiming for, you pick the appropriate activity.

I’ll pick on Nightmare Dungeons for a second. These are often very poorly designed with dead ends or poor mechanics (kill all enemies is quite bad), with very poor rewards. Prior, you could pick a Nightmare Dungeon with specific affixes, like more experience or obols. Dungeons you didn’t like, you’d burn the keys. You can still use keys, but given you are running more dungeons, you’ll run out of “good keys” quickly, and then it’s just a normal dungeon run. And normal runs nearly always are a worse option than any other end-game activity.

The meta progression for War Plans is ok, in giving some smaller rewards if you run a lot of them. Maybe you get extra material chests at the end, maybe you increase monster difficulty. Sadly, these are bound to the character and not the account, and gaining levels here is very grindy. Having to repeat this for any alts is frankly bonkers. This really should be integrated into the Paragon system.

Also of important note is that War Plans are single player only. You can team up with people, but only the party leader’s plans actually progress and all other team members get no benefits. D4 already had some grouping challenges before, this is going all-in for a solo-experience as the shining feature of the expansion.

Dollars to donuts player feedback here is going to be very vocal on what works and doesn’t for War Plans, so I’d expect some minor + major tweaks as a result. At the minimum, the meta progression needs to be across the account. I will say that if the heat maps show that players have avoided certain activities, the way to address that is NOT by forcing them to run it. The concept here is cool, the implementation can use some tweaking.

Quick Summary

First thoughts is that LoH is in many respects a significant improvement over VoH and vanilla. It will take a couple weeks for the balance to sort out, and a couple months (likely the entire season) to patch what needs to be patched. Now, is it worth the price of admission if you haven’t been playing D4 for a while? Hell no. You’d pay 1/3rd the price for Windrose and get way more out of it, or any other game in your library. If you are actively playing ARPGs though, then yeah, this is about as smooth an experience as possible – very accessible to anyone. This does not appear to be RoS-level, if only because the gap that expansion covered was much larger than needed here. My gut here is that the game is going to need 4-8 weeks of patches (if not a full season) to get where it needs to be.