Before the release of Lord of Hatred, it seemed there was no doubt about which class would be the strongest in Season 13. Almost everyone assumed that the Warlock would be just as overpowered as the Paladin was during the last two seasons, if not more so. But now, less than a week after launch, it appears that almost everyone may have been wrong.
At least for now.
The season is young. Players are still leveling, gearing, testing, and tweaking their builds. The gear, glyphs and gems used by top players on the Tower leaderboard are available for anyone to see in-game, and if you do take a look, you’ll see that even the absolute best clear at this point was completed with a mix of Grand and Royal Gems, no maxed-out Glyphs and absolutely zero Transfigured items.
There’s clearly a lot of build optimization still to come. In addition to that, Blizzard has already deployed a number of hotfixes to address broken interactions and damage scaling issues. The possibility of more patches must also be considered before carving a Season 13 tier list into stone.
With all that being said, early Pit and Tower leaderboards must be acknowledged, and they’re currently showing some surprising results.
Tower Leaderboards
Based on the in-game Tower leaderboard at the time of writing, the highest clears from each class are:
- Rogue — 148
- Sorcerer — 145
- Barbarian — 144
- Necromancer — 129
- Warlock — 127
- Spiritborn — 125
- Druid — 125
- Paladin — 121
That puts Rogue, Barbarian and Sorcerer well ahead of the pack, with Warlock sitting a full 21 Tower tiers from the top.
To be clear, the Warlock isn’t bad. It’s still extremely powerful and crushing all endgame content. It’s just not as disgustingly busted as most of us expected, or as much as some of the Diablo devs hinted it might be.
Pit Leaderboards
Comparing the Tower leaderboard to the highest verified Pit clears on Helltides makes compiling a clear class tier list even more difficult. There, Sorcerers dominate. Five of the top ten runs were Sorcs — including the top four runs. Three were Barbs. There’s also a single Necro, and a Warlock sneaks in at number nine.
Oddly absent from the top ten are any Rogues. In fact, the highest-ranked Rogue is at number 17 on the list with a tier 120 Pit clear — a large discrepancy in power for the Rogue between Pit and Tower leaderboards.
In terms of actual builds, the current front-runners appear to be:
While these builds are making the most noise at the moment, it’s possible that this could change very quickly.
Blizzard has already been moving quickly to address broken or unintended interactions. Hotfix 3 fixed an issue where Sorcerer’s 
Blizzard scaled far more than intended with skill point investment. It also fixed an issue where Cowl of the Nameless caused 
Poison Imbuement to deal far higher damage than intended.
Barbarian’s Limitless Rage affix was also temporarily disabled after it began scaling damage near infinitely with 
Melted Heart of Selig and 
Endurant Faith.
The Umbracrux and its charm version were also temporarily disabled due to another unintended interaction.
So, yes, Rogue, Barbarian, and Sorcerer are currently putting up the most impressive numbers. But during the first week of a massive new expansion, some builds are strong because they are well-optimized, and some builds are strong because something under the hood is not quite working as intended.
We have, in fact, already seen how quickly things can change. Three days after Lord of Hatred launched, the top two clears on the Helltides Season 13 Pit leaderboard were both by Spiritborn players, and they’d both cleared a tier 150 Pit. Those entries have since been removed, possibly because they used 
Armored Hide‘s Trampled Under Foot variant, which was temporarily disabled due to unintended interactions in Hotfix 3.
Other top-performing builds may also rise, fall, or vanish entirely as Blizzard continues roll out patches over the next couple of weeks.
For now, though, this is one of the most interesting early stories of Lord of Hatred. The Warlock was expected to dominate Diablo 4’s endgame, but in the first few days of serious pushing, it’s Barbarian, Sorcerer, and the long-neglected Rogue stealing the spotlight.
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