Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Reaper of Souls, released in 2014, is the expansion that fundamentally repaired Diablo III's reputation after the base game's rocky 2012 launch, which struggled with overloaded servers and a widely criticized real-money auction house. It adds a fifth act in which the player confronts Malthael, the former Angel of Wisdom obsessed with eradicating all evil from the world even at the cost of destroying all humanity, and introduces a new playable class – the Crusader, a heavily armored warrior with a giant shield, a war flail, and holy magic who can call down pillars of light and charge into battle on horseback.

Even more important than the new story content was the reworked Loot 2.0 system, which cut down the flood of uninteresting items and focused rewards on rarer but significantly stronger gear tailored to a specific character and build. The expansion also brought Adventure Mode – a game mode without a linear story progression that instead offers randomly generated Nephalem Rifts and bounty quests scattered across the map of Sanctuary. This mode became the backbone of all of Diablo III's endgame content, and the game still uses its foundation today, including seasonal characters, leaderboards, and Greater Rifts for measuring build strength, as well as legendary item sets.

With this expansion, Blizzard essentially defined what modern post-launch support for an action RPG should look like, and many later titles in the genre repeatedly drew inspiration from this model. Reaper of Souls also raised the character level cap and adjusted the difficulty tiers to Torment I through VI, letting players scale the challenge themselves according to their own gear's power instead of the fixed difficulty levels from the base game.

Why play: players who tried Diablo III at launch and walked away disappointed by the thin endgame and the auction house will find in Reaper of Souls a game reworked from the ground up – the same core gameplay, but with content that makes it worth returning to Sanctuary again and again.