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This guide will serve as a complete all in one guide to both Lord of Hatred and Season 13, acting as an introduction to the new class Warlock, all the new endgame systems, and every other new change coming.
Lord of Hatred launches on April 27th at 7pm EDT, and a number of our Mobalytics team will be streaming the launch, so make sure to check out their content at the end of this article for more Diablo 4 Content.
With Lord of Hatred comes arguably the biggest character launch to date - the Warlock. Make sure to check out our Tier List and Leveling Builds for all the latest Warlock meta.
If you are new to Warlock, we have a dedicated introduction guide to the Warlock class you can check out here.
War Plans fundamentally change the way you play the endgame, granting the player customizable challenges and bonuses that can blend different types of content together.
The first step to War Plans is to set up your Plan by selecting 4 different activities that you can chain together with customizable loot and challenges. Once you complete an activity, the player is able to teleport to the next activity in the chain with no downtime. Below are a list of current selectable activities:
Completing your chosen War Plan will reward players with Activity Skill Points which can be used to level up the Command Table. Each activity will have a specialized Skill Tree associated with it that can be leveled up using these Activity Skill Points to increase the difficulty and customize rewards.
The Tree of Whispers is a special exception, being able to be simultaneously run alongside other activities instead of being offered as a node on the War Plan list.
The Druid and Necromancer class have additional wider scope changes outlined below
Echoing Hatred offers a long requested gameplay experience - an endless horde of monsters to kill similar to the Hordes Game Mode, but one that scales indefinitely in difficulty per wave. Players can find a new rare item called Trace of Echoes to unlock a run of Echoing Hatred which will endlessly spawn enemies, scaling up in difficulty and intensity until the player is finally killed. This acts as the ultimate test for any build to push their character to their absolute limits.
During the Lord of Hatred campaign, players will unlock the Horadric Cube which is a new crafting system added into Diablo 4. With it players can create gear, consumables, Talisman objects, socketable items, and transmute gear and customize existing gear.
The Horadric Cube does this by being able to add, remove, and reroll affixes, reroll items of the same quality into a new random item, upgrade all types of items, craft Unique Charms, and transmute items for upgrades and other interesting outcomes.
It can also create upgraded gems beyond the capabilities of the Jeweler, reroll Set Charms, and even add powerful affixes like the Sanctification system during Season 11 but with even more options and a chance for less risk.
The Horadric Cube also gives much better control over Rune transformations, allowing you to create specific Legendary Runes for Runewords and Mythic Unique crafting.
To do all of this, players can find Horadric Cube recipes by completing War Plans, Undercity Tributes, Whisper Caches, and as a drop from Elite monsters.
The Talisman is a new item system that uses Seals and Charms to add new Affixes and powers with powerful Set Bonuses to unlock.
To use the Talisman, first apply a Seal to unlock up to 6 Charm slots. The more powerful the Seal, the greater the number of affixes and the more Charm slots become available to use. Simply drop Charms into open slots and change them around whenever you wish. Inserting multiple non-Unique Charms with the same affixes will stack their bonuses to unlock their Set Bonus. Set bonuses range from class specific to generic effects for all classes.
Likewise, the effects of Unique gear can also be found as charms, giving players the ability to customize their build with Unique gear effects without having to slot them into your gear, similar to the Chaos Armor effects during Season 10.
Using the Horadric Cube, Common, Magic, and Rare items can be used as crafting bases. Using these item bases you can add affixes to them and upgrade their rarity to create new endgame gear.
To add more depth into the crafting system, Common, Magic, and Rare items will now have a chance to be Ancestral and roll Affixes with Greater Affixes to be used as Crafting bases for more powerful items.
As a result, Common, Magic, and Rare items will now continue to drop even into Torment Tiers.
Damage Affixes on gear have been reworked away from Additive sources of damage, and instead offer various multiplicative damage bonuses. This when combined with crafting gives players access to much better gear to chase after and create.
Uniques are seeing in overhaul in their design, not only receiving direct reworks/ buffs to their effects in most cases, but also changing the way affixes are rolled on them. Uniques now will not roll with guaranteed affixes, instead they can roll from a pool of affixes just like all other gear. This creates more opportunity to craft and farm incredible Uniques as apart of the endgame journey.
On top of that, Uniques can now be Tempered just like regular gear to make players feel less punished for having to run Uniques on their build.
As the last piece of gear itemization changes, Aspects are getting adjusted all across the board. Some are moving to players Skill Trees directly, others are seeing balance changes, and some are even getting removed from the game entirely. While we do not have a full list, we can guarantee the Mobalytics builders will be updated after launch to reflect these changes, so make sure to check in after the season goes live to see what has changed.
Gems have also been completely rebalanced and, like gear, offer strong multiplicative bonuses instead of the old additive bonusses. There are also two new tiers of Gems - Horadric, and Flawless Horadric. These are created using the Amalgamation Recipe in the Horadric Cube.
Lair bosses have seen a sizeable quality of life rework to empower players to hunt the gear they are looking for.
Lair bosses will now have a stricter dedicated pool of Unique items to allow players better access to target farming specific Uniques.
To go along with this change, there will now be two two types of boss keys; Lair Keys and Greater Lair Keys. What this means is now instead of every boss having their own type of boss key, players can now chose which bosses to spend their Lair Keys at, with Ladder Bosses being unlocked with Lair Keys and all Greater Lair Bosses unlocked with Greater Lair Keys.
Lastly Bartuc, the Horde boss, and Astaroth, the boss found in Escalating Nightmare Dungeons, have now been added to the Lair Boss system with the Butcher Boss being added to the Greater Lair Bosses.
Torment Tiers have expanded in scope, going up to Torment 12 instead of 4. This will help decrease the difficulty spikes between Torment Tiers by offering a more streamline experience as you climb up.
With this change, the level cap has also been increased from 60 to 70.
Season 13 brings with it a new Seasonal Rank that is bigger than ever with more goals and rewards. Below are a list of rewards from the new Seasonal Rank:
Some tasks need the Lord of Hatred expansion, so some rewards may be locked behind the new expansion.
To go along with these rewards, we also have the seasonal specific bonuses you unlock using Smoldering Ashes:
To add to the endgame changes that are coming, the Pit has been completely reimagined. Below is a full outline of what is to come:
The Tower now offers milestone rewards to encourage people to push their hardest and unlock deeper levels to claim new Treasures of the Artificer Caches. These new Caches include Lore Books and items with guaranteed Greater Affixes for guaranteed powerful loot.
The Tower has seen a number of balance changes, with additional environments, monsters, and Bosses. Additionally, the Tower Leaderboards has been announced for April 30th, so players looking to leave their mark will have time to prepare.
The Build Viewer also sees changes, now snapshotting the build that was used during completion rather than just a link to their profile.
Players can now chose to use the new Map Overlay feature over the traditional Minimap. Players are able to set their zoom and opacity levels in Options > Gameplay, as well as customize the map overlays color. For quick access, go to Options > Controls to set up keyboard shortcuts to toggle between Map Overlay and Minimap.
Players will also be able to toggle on Pathfiner, which will lay a row of dots for players to follow to find their destination. This combined with Map Toggle aim to give players more freedom when exploring the map.
To go along with the new crafting system, a Loot Filter is being added into Diablo 4. This filter can hide, show, or color-code gear items that drop or exist in your inventory, stash, or on vendors. Loot filters do not affect non-gear items such as Temper manuals, reagents, gems, or currency.
To find your Loot Filter, go to Options > Gameplay. To set up your Loot Filter, follow the following steps:
Fishing is a new activity coming with Lord of Hatred, offering players the ability to fish at any beach or large body of water. Fish are meant to be a collectable item, with various fish found in different locations that can be traded between players as the ultimate low intensity collector gameplay.
If you are hungry for even more Diablo 4 content, the Mobalytics team will be streaming the release of Lord of Hatred expansion live on Twitch.
If you want to follow along, learn faster, or just see how different players approach their respective classes, you can catch each of their content here:
