Want some devilishly unique Player Housing Decor for WoW? Better preorder the Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred expansion!

In addition to giving us the Paladin class as an immediate reward for pre-ordering the second expansion for Diablo 4, pre-ordering the Lord of Hatred also brings a cross-promotion which rewards Player Housing decor for World of Warcraft. The decor rewards are available with any of the license options for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, and are available for use immediately (mostly).

The items themselves definitely lean more towards the Diablo 4 aesthetic than the traditional World of Warcraft art style. Some players may find them out of place for use in a Warcraft setting, but it gives us a hint of how future cross-promotional events will be handled.

So what’s in the box? The first three items are all Common quality and automatically added to your Housing Catalog.

Given the expansion title seems to be a big bond to Mephisto, it’s hardly surprising that the first reward is the pelt of that irascible old wolf himself. Called Hatred’s Wolfpelt Rug, this item could give you nightmares if you encountered it without warning.

The next object is both a common Warcraft object, and yet also ‘wrong’.

Known as the Prime Evil’s Chest, this artefact would possibly be less scary if mimic existed in Warcraft, but they don’t and this cursed item would be creepy even in Maldraxxus.

Next is a chess board. We don’t entirely know what the link between Diablo and chess is, but maybe we will find out soon.

Called Sanctuary’s Chess Board, eagle eyed players have noted that the board has been rotated 90 degrees. A traditional tournament chess board has the white square appearing in the left hand corner of the bottom rank.

How do we know it’s rotated? There’s a secondary version of the board with pieces.

Named Sanctuary’s Chess Match, this object is reported as being interactable, allowing you to move the pieces on the board.

There is also a set of 12 individual chess pieces that should be available. The use of ‘should’ here is because a number of players did not receive the interactable board and pieces if they purchased the expansion on the first day it was available. Because these items were of Uncommon quality granting XP when learned, they were supposed to go into the bag of the first character you logged into, and if you had no room in your bags they would be mailed to you.

From comments on the support forums, the common thread among people who did not receive these items is, it appears that the first character they logged in after purchasing the expansion was a Timerunner. Because Timerunners can’t receive external items from the Warband bank or by mail, these items appear to have evaporated.

Four weeks in and most of the impacted players have still not received the promised items. A hotfix a fortnight ago restored the objects to a small number of players, but the majority are still outstanding. Curiously, in a blue comment on the forums, there was a mention of another object, a “Game in progress sign” which has not appeared in the housing catalog preview, the datamining, or any of the promotional images. Possibly it was an item that was removed prior to release, the Blue poster mis-spoke, or it was meant otherwise be a super-sekrit reward.

The last official post about the issue was form before Christmas and said that it was unlikely to be resolved before the end of the holidays, many of us were hoping to see something with this week’s reset, but no joy.

I had been thinking of maybe doing something Blue Prince related using the individual chess pieces. Hopefully with next week’s reset.