Why you should level a character in Diablo 4 by playing through the campaign

With the Lord of Hatred expansion, I think it’s fair to say that Diablo 4 finally has a story that feels complete. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more expansions, but the conclusion of this Mephisto-focused trilogy leaves the game on solid narrative footing. To experience the story in full, I decided to see how it felt to play Diablo 4 by playing the campaign again, from the original story campaign, through Vessel of Hatred and Nahantu, and finally Lord of Hatred and Skovos.

It’s not the most efficient way to play the game, and if you do this you’ll level and gear more slowly than if you just started with Lord of Hatred (which you can do even if you’ve never played Vessel of Hatred). While the original campaign is rich with story, playing through it feels slow, and spending your first ten levels doing nothing but being fed blood petals and then dragged into chasing Lilith feels somewhat antiquated in terms of pacing and scope. The Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred expansions are both more direct than the original hunt for Lilith, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Here’s my look at what it’s like to level through the Diablo 4 campaign, start to finish — and why you might want to give it a try.

Playing through the original Diablo 4 campaign in 2026

The opening three acts of Diablo 4 and the way they introduce you to Lorath, Neyrelle, and Donan manage to feel both tense and expansive. There’s an urgency to these storylines that constantly propels you forward, inevitably ending with an emotional gutpunch and the sense that even your successes have made things worse. I am never going to forget how Scosglen ends, or the way Neyrelle goes from a kid trying to save her mother to a young woman fighting to save all of Sanctuary (sometimes ill-advisedly, you could argue). I came to like Donan, Lorath, and Neyrelle as my fellow travelers.

Even after two expansions of development, the original Lilith campaign still holds up. Lilith herself stands out as the first sympathetic antagonist in the history of the Diablo franchise, while Elias is odious and arrogant even in death, and you can understand why he’d break the particular way he did while still very much wanting to kill him.

The story and the characters work. The original Diablo 4 campaign still feels great to play.

Heading into Vessel of Hatred

But from the original campaign, you move on to Vessel of Hatred, which doesn’t stand on its own very well — or at least it didn’t on launch. The middle of a trilogy is a narrative challenge for any story, and Vessel didn’t quite rise to that challenge. The abrupt ending felt like the story came to a halt just as it was picking up speed, and it was an awkward spot to leave the game at for a year and a half.

But the expansion feels more complete when you can immediately start Lord of Hatred when you finish it. Chasing after Neyrelle, then hunting for the Tomb of Akarat, dealing with the Cathedral of Light forces under Urivar, seeing Eru’s short-sighted betrayal, and finally Mephisto’s victory as he claims the entombed body of the long dead prophet — it all makes sense when it’s being used to set up the story of Skovos in Lord of Hatred. Looking at the story now, you can see Urivar as a herald of the exact same kind of fanaticism Mephisto has long known how to create and nurture. It makes this whole part of the campaign feel both more important and more terrifying, when Urivar initially felt like a misplaced side story.

As part of a trilogy, Vessel works well now that the trilogy is complete.

Onward to Skovos in Lord of Hatred

Lord of Hatred is a satisfying final chapter to Mephisto and Lilith’s stories. But even going into it directly after playing Vessel of Hatred lessens but does not alleviate one of my big issues with Lord of Hatred: the early expansion death of a major character (spoilers). While there are probably a lot of reasons why the Diablo team made this decision, I didn’t like how it felt — but having it happen immediately after leaving Nahantu makes it less bothersome for me (and a bit more narratively coherent). But I still don’t like it.

With Lilith returning for Lord of Hatred, we get some really great character moments that don’t soften her, which I was afraid of when I realized Lilith would be returning as a semi-ally. She’s still not nice and she’s still not friendly, so she still feels like herself.

From there, the story that plays out is great, and a satisfying wrap-up to the hours you spend playing to get here.

What’s gameplay like when playing the original campaign?

I’ve only talked about the narrative so far — what about the gameplay? How does it feel to play the game while going through the original campaign? It seems obvious that the developers don’t intend for you to level in Diablo 4 through the campaign, and some gameplay mechanics feel disjointed when you do. Here are some oddities that stood out when I tried leveling this way:

• Leveling is much quicker in the Lord of Hatred era, and you really feel it when you’re playing through the campaign. You’ll find yourself hitting max level before you’ve finished the campaign, even though you can’t access a lot of end-game systems until after you finish the campaign. I hit level 70 late in the original game campaign.
• There are some odd progression speed bumps if you level this way, because I was getting ilevel 850 legendaries (due to my level) well before I got to Skovos, even though these expansion-level items couldn’t be equipped yet. It’s possible that issues like this will have been fixed in the latest patch (or will be in a future one).
• The Season Journey was designed for people who are already on Skovos, so there are a lot of objectives you just can’t complete while playing through the campaign. That means that I was way behind and still playing catchup on the seasonal content when I reached Skovos, even though my character was well-geared and advanced enough to play on Torment 9.
• You don’t get access to the Horadric Cube until fairly late in the Lord of Hatred campaign. Getting access to the Horadric Cube as late as you do leveling from 1 to 70 by playing all three campaigns hurts.

In the end, I enjoyed doing 1 to 70 starting in the Fractured Peaks but I can imagine a lot of players — the ones who don’t obsess over every little lore fragment like I do — would prefer just getting to max level ASAP and starting on endgame. If you want to see the game’s story from start to a nice complete stopping point, I can recommend just starting a level 1 and rolling through all three campaigns… just be aware that it will stall your progression. But I’m in it for the lore, and if you’ve read this far there’s a good chance you are too.