Watch On
Nobody could’ve guessed that Diablo 2: Resurrected would get a surprise expansion drop with a new class in the year 2026, but here we are. That also means the 26-year-old game will have to deal with a major shake-up to its meta, with the warlocks taking over as not only the new flavor of the month, but the new, most powerful flavor of the month.
The Diablo 2 remaster has had seasonal meta changes before, but none of them have been as big as this one. Warlocks—and some of the new endgame challenges added in the expansion—have given players a ton of new toys to play with in a game whose best practices have been more-or-less set for decades. Early reports from Diablo YouTubers, like Macrobioboi, say the new demon-summoner class is easily one of the best.
One build in particular sits above all the rest when it comes to crushing the hardest enemies in the game: the Echoing Strike warlock. This build doesn’t even rely on commanding your pet demons around; it’s purely based on the raw power of the Echoing Strike skill, which basically lets you shoot your weapons at enemies like a shotgun.
There are pet demons involved for supplemental buffs to your damage, but the build is largely about flinging ghostly purple weapons at anything that enters your screen. And because Diablo 2 has monsters who are immune to certain types of elemental damage, Echoing Strike’s basic physical damage lets you largely ignore that problem, unlike many other skills in the game.
The Echoing Strike build seems to have a high gear requirement to get going, so you probably won’t be able to jump right into it when the new ladder season starts today. But it won’t take long to get to that point because warlocks also happen to have some of the fastest leveling builds as well. Blizzard made a new class that can’t really go wrong with any skill as long as you know what you’re doing.
Surprisingly, the gap between warlocks and the older classes isn’t as huge as Diablo 4’s new classes tend to be when they’re fresh out of the oven. Sorceresses and paladins remain competitive, so if being an aged scholar of demons isn’t your thing, you can still blast through the game and see the expansion’s new terror zones and uber boss fight as the other classes. But after 25 years of playing the same stuff, I imagine most people are going to try the new guy and see how far they can push him.
Blizzard hasn’t touched warlocks with any balance changes since the launch of the expansion. By the looks of it, there isn’t anything so egregiously broken that needs to be fixed, which is impressive for a class that was designed so long after the others. The worst offender is this immortal build by Coooley, but it sacrifices so much damage output for the gimmick that it probably won’t ruin anything.
I’ll be curious to see what kind of balance tweaks Blizzard does eventually make. There’s a world where nothing changes and Diablo 2 players just have to get used to warlocks taking the throne as the top class. I think it’s more likely that Blizzard will knock them down a peg after some of the excitement has died down so it’s not playing whack-a-mole trying to balance a game that wasn’t meant to operate like a live-service joint. Blizzard has said that future expansions aren’t off the table though, so Diablo 2 might be headed for a future where it doesn’t feel so retro after all.
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