The latest complaint comes from a new thread on the official Diablo IV PC bug report forum, where a player says they own Vessel of Hatred, bought the Ultimate Edition, and still cannot claim the free pet. One reply in the same thread suggests the reward may only be available to players who purchased Vessel of Hatred before it was folded into Lord of Hatred. If that is true, then this is not just a pet issue. It is a wording issue, a claim-flow issue, and a very Blizzard-style “the store and the player expectation are no longer speaking the same language” issue.
This bug has been hanging around for months
What makes this worth covering is that the April 19 thread is not some isolated little one-post confusion bomb. Blizzard’s forums already have older threads from January where players were reporting the same basic problem. In Herald of Hatred Pet not available, players said the pet appeared locked, showed up as free, and still could not be equipped or claimed. In another thread, Herald of Hatred cosmetics not showing up after buying Lord of Hatred Standard Upgrade, players described the same broader problem: the reward looked available, but the actual unlock path broke down.
That longer trail matters because it changes the story from “one player is confused” into something uglier. If the Herald of Hatred reward has been sitting in this half-claimable state for months, then Blizzard is not just dealing with a cosmetic hiccup. It is dealing with an expansion-bonus mess that still does not look clearly communicated or cleanly fixed.
Cosmetics are not “just pixels” when the store is involved
Yes, some players will always roll their eyes and say it is only a pet. That misses the point. The issue is not whether the wolf changes combat. The issue is that Diablo 4 is showing players a free reward tied to expansion ownership and then apparently failing to make the claim rules obvious or the unlock path functional. That is how a cosmetic complaint becomes a trust complaint.
It also lands at a time when Diablo 4 has already been stacking too many stories about rewards and ownership feeling shaky. We recently covered how Season 12 reward complaints were still hitting boss loot, and how Lord of Hatred is already driving fresh speculation around Diablo 4’s next big platform move. Against that backdrop, an expansion-linked pet that still cannot be claimed properly just makes the whole ecosystem look messier than it should.
The pet is small. The signal is not.
To be fair, this is not some game-breaking disaster. Nobody is claiming Herald of Hatred being locked out will destroy a season. But that is not really the standard here. The real issue is that a reward described as free still appears confusing or inaccessible months after earlier players started flagging the same problem. If Blizzard wants expansion bonuses to build goodwill, it probably should not keep turning them into support riddles.
At this point, Diablo 4 does not just need the pet to unlock. It needs the rules around the pet to stop sounding like they were written by two different departments in a dark room.
