Diablo II is one of those storied classic PC games that’s pretty much always fun to come back to—so much so that some players have put thousands of hours into the game over more than two decades. Across all those years, though, the game itself has barely changed, becoming something of a familiar, comfortable blanket of hellfire for longtime players.
That makes last week’s introduction of a new playable Warlock class in Diablo II Resurrected’s new “Reign of the Warlock” DLC a pretty big deal. And after playing through a few Acts with the Warlock over the recent holiday weekend, I found the new option to be a great excuse to come back to a game that’s overdue for a shot in the arm.
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How your Warlock build goes depends heavily on which of the three main upgrade branches you choose to go down. Of these, I found the Eldritch branch had been the most interesting and fun to explore. That’s in large part because of a new skill that lets you levitate a powerful two-handed weapon in front of you while still holding a strong shield in your hands. It seems like a small change, but my relief was palpable in this playthrough as I was able to avoid these kinds of tough choices between defense and offense as I juggled my inventory.
Then there’s the Echoing Strike skill, which essentially lets you turn your melee weapons into ranged attacks, using a bit of mana to throw a ghostly “echo” at far-off enemies. I ended up relying heavily on this almost as soon as I got it at Level 14, spamming a long-range copy of my powerful two-handed staff, complete with its fire and poison effects intact. Like weapon levitation, adding an effective ranged attack to what were once exclusively close-quarters combat options is a simple change that opens up a lot of gameplay variety.
Credit: Blizzard Throwing an ethereal copy of your weapon across the void is extremely satisfying. Throwing an ethereal copy of your weapon across the void is extremely satisfying. Credit: Blizzard
The Demon upgrade branch has been much less interesting, in my experience. The basic pattern of summoning monstrous allies to fight alongside you and absorb some enemy attention will be broadly familiar to anyone who has played the Necromancer class. And, to be honest, I found summoning a massive army of fragile skeletons as a Necromancer to be a lot more fun than summoning a singular tank of a Demon as a Warlock early on (summoning multiple demons at once requires a full 10 points of skill tree investment).