Diablo 2 Warlock review: something truly new for a 26-year-old game

You can quibble about the cost of the expansion, but this is a unique achievement

On the face of it, Reign of the Warlock is a stunt for Diablo’s 30th anniversary celebrations as well as an extravagant bit of marketing for Diablo 4, which also gets a Warlock class in its next expansion, Lord of Hatred, in April. Mobile game Diablo Immortal will get its own version of the Warlock later this year. (Pity poor Diablo 3 players, who get absolutely nothing for the 30th anniversary — except the satisfaction of knowing that they’re playing the secret best Diablo game, of course.)

Reign of the Warlock represents a lot of work for a promotional stunt, though. It doesn’t go as far as adding a new act to the game’s storyline — controversially, considering its $25 price tag. But it’s a whole new class, with fresh skill trees and new, bespoke itemization, voice lines, and visual effects. From what we’ve seen, it’s quite distinct in its design from the Warlocks in Immortal and 4. And it comes packaged with new endgame mechanics, interface updates, and quality-of-life improvements. Whether or not it’s worth $25, this is an honest-to-goodness expansion for a 26-year-old game, and its release, which somehow remained unspoiled, has left the Diablo 2 community completely stunned.

Why did Blizzard go to the trouble? I suspect the answer is hiding in plain sight: During the Diablo 30th Anniversary Spotlight video, developers mentioned (twice, for emphasis) that Diablo 2 has “millions” of players and that if the response to Reign of the Warlock is good, further major updates are on the table. Simply put, the game seems popular enough to be a going concern — and it also provides Blizzard with a line of defense against Path of Exile and other action-RPGs that tried to keep the spirit of Diablo 2 alive while Blizzard modernized the series in its sequels.

But this puts Diablo 2: Resurrected in the odd position of moving the game forward when its original mission was to preserve a beloved classic as it was. (“We don’t want to mess up the Mona Lisa,” lead producer Matthew Cederquist told Eurogamer.) Fortunately, Blizzard has experience in exactly this area: World of Warcraft Classic maintains multiple “eras” of the game so you can play it as it was at launch, on two separate expansion progress tracks, or in novel remix modes like Hardcore and Season of Discovery. Following this model, Reign of the Warlock exists as a siloed “era” of Diablo 2, so purists can still experience the game without such modern bastardizations as stackable gems or a loot filter if they want to. (This cuts both ways — the Reign of the Warlock era doesn’t allow you to switch back to Diablo 2’s original graphics, as the base era of Resurrected does.)

The most extraordinary thing about Reign of the Warlock is the Warlock himself, though. As the name suggests, the Warlock is an eldritch demon-summoner, but the Diablo 2 conception of this archetype twists it in unique ways to fit the game’s gritty, physical, grounded vibe. It’s also the first step in what amounts to a retcon of Diablo lore, showing the early stages of Warlocks’ exploration of forbidden, dark magics that will be developed through Immortal (which is set between Diablo 2 and 3) and then climax in a wild, unrestrained vision of the class in Diablo 4.

In service of these ideas, the Diablo 2: Resurrected team has arrived at a class with a unique flavor. The reveal focused on the Warlock as a summoner who binds demons to his will, but in reality that’s just one of the class’ three paths: Chaos turns him into a fiery spellcaster, and Eldritch into something like a battle mage, a fairly robust melee fighter who wields levitated weapons, curses enemies, and can fortify himself with armor spells.

In the short time I’ve played the class, I naturally gravitated toward the Demon tree with its summoning spells. But after a while, I started putting points into Eldritch, too, finding that I enjoyed getting into the scrum alongside my enslaved Goatmen and Tainted and making more use of Diablo 2’s many tasty and impactful weapon drops. In my (nascent and probably far from optimal) build, the Diablo 2 Warlock plays like nothing else I’ve encountered before.

It would probably be impossible to create a Diablo 2 class in 2026 that feels completely authentic to the game. In a video commenting on Reign of the Warlock, Chris Wilson, founder of Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear Games, noted that the main reason the Warlock doesn’t quite resemble an OG Diablo 2 class is that it doesn’t have any bad skills. And his supposition that the class was reverse-engineered from a desire to put Warlocks in Diablo 4, rather than grown organically out of what would be right for Diablo 2, has the ring of truth about it.

All the same, Diablo 2: Resurrected’s designers have achieved something unique and remarkable. The Warlock is neither a throwback nor an anachronism. It exists in Diablo’s past — not just in terms of the story canon, but in terms of game design, too. The class is shaped around design precepts that endure but that nobody, not even Grinding Gear Games or the many other action-RPG originalists, would implement in exactly this way in the here and now. Yet within that context, it’s thrillingly new, with an originality and an interesting friction to it that stem from the design team’s imagination as well as from the weird circumstances of the class’ making.

Will Blizzard extend this fascinating experiment into its logical next phase: creating a new story Act for Diablo 2? That would really be something. But the Warlock is a rare treasure as it is.