Diablo 4’s Second Expansion Is Out — And It Might Actually Be the One That Sticks

Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred launched Monday. Blizzard says it’s the best the game has ever been. Early reviews are sitting at 84 on Metacritic. And somewhere between those two data points is the real story — which is that after three years, two major patches that basically remade the game, and one expansion that partially landed, Blizzard might finally have figured out what Diablo 4 is supposed to be.

I say “might” deliberately. I’ve been burned by this franchise in its current form before, and I suspect most of you have too.

Let’s be honest about where we started. The Diablo 4 launch in June 2023 was a case study in promising too much and shipping the wrong version. The campaign was genuinely good — the cinematics, the atmosphere, Lilith as a villain. That part worked. What came after it was a grindy, under-itemized endgame built around a battle pass and seasonal structure that felt like it was designed by a monetization committee rather than anyone who’d actually played Diablo 2 until 3am in 2001. The backlash was loud. The reviews were decent anyway — 87 on Metacritic — but the player sentiment a month in told a different story.

Blizzard spent the next year doing something they rarely do: actually listening. Patch 2.0 overhauled the skill trees. Itemization got reworked. The game that exists today is materially different from what launched. Vessel of Hatred came out in October 2024 and added the Spiritborn class and a new region, scored the same 84 that Lord of Hatred is pulling right now, and felt like a real step forward — not a total fix, but evidence that the patient might survive.

Lord of Hatred is supposed to be the real landing. It’s bigger than Vessel of Hatred — reports have been consistent on that — and it’s introducing two classes that carry enormous franchise weight.

Blizzard knows this. The pressure on that implementation is real. Either they’ve done the class justice and this becomes one of the cleanest bits of nostalgia bait in the franchise’s history, or they’ve watered it down into something that technically functions but doesn’t feel right, and the D2 community will never let them forget it. The Warlock is the other new addition — darker, more Mephisto-adjacent in the lore — which gives the roster a genuinely different energy than the Necromancer covers.

The new region is Skovos Isles, which is Amazon homeland territory from D2 lore and has never appeared in D4 before. Good sign. The world-building has always been one of D4’s stronger cards, and putting the story in new territory rather than retreading familiar ground suggests this is a proper expansion and not a content patch wearing a price tag.

But here’s what I actually want to talk about: War Plans.

The endgame has been D4’s real problem from day one, and every other criticism flows from it. When your primary loop runs out of steam, players notice. When players notice, they leave. When they leave, the seasonal content feels thin because there’s nobody to play it with. The whole structure of a live-service ARPG lives or dies on whether the endgame is compelling enough to sustain 200 hours of engagement from the kind of player who plays this genre at all.

War Plans is Blizzard’s answer. Instead of a preset endgame loop — here’s your boss rotation, here’s your dungeon tier list, go do it in the order we’ve determined — you build your own path from your favorite activities. Up to five of them, each with their own progression trees and rewards. You’re not following the game’s prescribed route to max power anymore; you’re selecting the activities you actually enjoy and building toward something that feels more personal.

That’s smart design if it works. The ARPG endgame has traditionally been one of two things: a treadmill that loses you the moment you see through it, or a system deep enough that optimization becomes its own game within the game. Path of Exile built an empire on the second version. D4 has been stuck in the first. War Plans looks like an attempt to get to something in between — structured enough to have direction, flexible enough that players feel like they’re making choices. Early impressions from press who played early access are positive. One reviewer called it “a favorite new addition.” That’s enough to make me cautiously interested.

The Metacritic score deserves a quick note: 84 is not a bad number. It’s also the same number Vessel of Hatred got. If you were expecting this to be the expansion that definitively resolves D4’s critical reputation, 84 is not going to read that way. But I’m not sure the score is the right metric here. D4’s audience doesn’t live on review sites — it lives in Discord servers and Reddit threads and that particular strain of ARPG community that has spent three years auditing every patch note like it’s a tax return. That audience’s verdict will land over the next two to four weeks, not on launch day. That’s when we’ll know if War Plans actually works, if the Paladin actually feels right, if the level cap raise to 70 and the expanded Torment Tiers have legs.

What I’ll be watching specifically: how long it takes for the “endgame is fixed” or “endgame is still broken” consensus to form on the D4 subreddit — that community is harsh but not irrational, and their read has generally been accurate. I’ll be watching how the Paladin feels in Torment 8+ play, not in the campaign, because that’s where class identity either holds up or falls apart. And I’ll be watching whether the Skovos Isles zone has the kind of density and side content that makes you want to stay in a region or whether it’s a straight line to the next story beat.

It’s out. Monday, 7pm Eastern. See you in hell.

Sources: GameSpot · Game Informer · PC Gamer · Icy Veins · Metacritic