Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Lord of Destruction from 2001 is the only official expansion to Diablo II, and it fundamentally transformed the game that Blizzard North had released a year earlier. It adds a fifth act set in the snowy mountains of Arreat, where the player joins the barbarian mountain tribes to face Baal, the last of the three Prime Evils, who is trying to reach the Worldstone and corrupt it. Alongside the new act come two completely new playable classes - the Assassin, who fights with a combination of combat traps and fast hand and foot strikes, and the Druid, who can shapeshift into animals and summon nature's elements and animal companions into battle.

The biggest impact on the game's longevity, however, came from a systemic expansion: rune words made it possible to combine powerful properties by inserting combinations of runes into sockets in ordinary items, the Horadric Cube gained dozens of new recipes for crafting and upgrading gear, and mercenaries could for the first time wear their own equipment and use abilities the player chose already when hiring them. A further difficulty tier arrived in the form of later Uber content with bosses like Diablo Clone, along with an expanded online ladder-season system on Battle.net that motivated players to repeatedly start the game over with a new character from scratch.

These changes made Lord of Destruction the de facto definitive version of Diablo II - hardly anyone plays the game without the expansion today, and even two decades later, community projects like Project Diablo 2 build on its foundations, as does the official remaster Diablo II: Resurrected, which includes the expansion's content directly as a standard part of the game. The expansion also raised the maximum character level and brought new enemy types and unique bosses to the earlier four acts, so it was worth replaying from the start even with characters created before the expansion's release.

Why play it: anyone who wants to experience Diablo II in the form that shaped the entire loot-slasher genre for the next decade cannot avoid the rune words, mercenaries with their own skills, and the fifth act against Baal.