This was a pleasant surprise, wasn’t it? Diablo II was a game I played as a teenager, which unfortunately means that it was originally released 25 whole years ago. It’s not very often you get an expansion for a game of this vintage, but here comes Blizzard with Diablo II: Reign of the Warlock, adding a new class, and making end-game changes and some quality of life improvements along the way. But can modern Blizzard even make something new that fits into the old school grim-dark aesthetic of Diablo II? Well, yes, they can actually.
Reign of the Warlock is admittedly fairly constrained in scope. There is no additional campaign to play through here, it’s just the added class. The closest to new campaign content is a is a new, ultra difficult boss fight that you can play in the end-game if you really want to test your build. Outside of that, you’ll get some new items and act-wide terror zones – these see more powerful demons will take over an act, bringing with them some nicer loot to compensate.
You’ll also get some much needed quality of life features. This includes a loot filter, so you can finally stop having to sift through common items yourself, and new stash pages where you can actually stack gems and runes, finally doing away with having pages and pages of gems in your stash! On top of those, there’s the Chronicle, which will keep track of all the loot you’ve found, as well as where and when you found it, and hand you cosmetics as rewards.
Of course, the main attraction here is the actual Warlock. The class functions like a combination of a melee fighter, a summoner, and a caster. The Warlock uses melee weapons by levitating them and The Eldritch skill tree allows you to unlock abilities the enhance this. Skills that allows you to hit multiple enemies with wide swings, imbue your weapons with magics that cause them to deal more damage or make enemies explode when hit.
The Demon skill tree, meanwhile, allows you to summon Demons to fight for you. Specifically, there are skills to summon Goatmen, Tainted, and Defilers, as well as some skills to upgrade and improve your summons, naturally. Lastly, Chaos is most fire and magic damage, allowing you to shoot bolts of miasma, create a damaging tether between you and an enemy, or summon a giant pentagram of fire.
These all combine into a class that fits really quite well into Diablo 2. It’s a little bit necromancer, a little bit sorceress, and a little bit Amazon, all at once. As someone who likes all of these playstyles, a combination where I can summon helpers whilst shooting fireballs and slicing with a sword is a welcome addition to just about any game I can think of – imagine that in Gran Turismo, what a game that would be. The Warlock even fits in aesthetically, incredibly grim every time they say anything, just like all the other characters in the game. Literally everyone is sad in this game, it’s great for some reason.
My only real criticism of the class is that it’s too powerful. It pretty clearly outplays the other classes immediately, making the first Act specifically significantly easier. It’s a lot of fun, summoning demons and tethering enemies to death, but some balance updates certainly wouldn’t go amiss so the field is a bit for level for anyone that doesn’t want to dispense with the other seven classes entirely.
If you don’t care for the Warlock life and just want the other features, those are also part of the expansion as opposed to being in an update alongside. This can be partly justified by the age and legacy of this game. The Diablo 2 client now lets you choose to play in Classic mode, Resurrected for the 2021 remake, and Reign of the Warlock for this latest enhancement. You can port characters from Classic to Resurrected and from Resurrected to Reign of the Warlock, but with the changes each era has brought, there’s no crossover in the other direction.
The nagging issue is that this feels too expensive. There is no real new campaign content here, though some may think it’s worth it to experience Diablo 2 with a new class for the first time in decades. In that case you’ll be quite happy I imagine, but it’s definitely a bit on the pricey side at £22.
