With the expansion almost here, a new Blizzard forum thread has players discussing cases where the pre-release download for Lord of Hatred is stuck at 0%. That is not exactly the kind of hell portal anyone wants to open before launch. Demons are one thing. A frozen Battle.net launcher is just rude.
The pre-load is live, but not everyone is gliding through
Blizzard officially made the Lord of Hatred pre-download available on April 23 for Battle.net, Xbox, and PlayStation. The same update also lets players pre-download patch 3.0.0 even if they have not purchased the expansion, which makes sense: nobody wants half the player base trying to eat a massive update at the exact moment Mephisto kicks the door in.
For many players, the download seems to have worked normally. Several replies in the forum thread say their pre-load completed days ago or installed in minutes. That makes this look less like a universal outage and more like a messy launcher-side issue hitting some users. Annoying, yes. Apocalyptic, not yet.
The 0% problem is the ugly part
The original report says the pre-LOH download had been stuck at 0% for hours, with other players chiming in about pre-update data throttling, disk checks, and the usual “try restarting everything before sacrificing a goat” troubleshooting dance.
One reply suggests checking whether Battle.net is actively using disk resources, because the launcher may be scanning existing files before downloading anything new. Another points toward download throttling settings. These are player suggestions, not an official Blizzard fix, so treat them as practical community troubleshooting rather than gospel carved into a cursed cathedral wall.
This is exactly why pre-loads exist
The good news is that these issues are appearing before launch, not after. That is the entire point of a pre-load window: let the problems crawl out of the cellar while there is still time to kick them back down.
Diabloz already covered the broader Lord of Hatred pre-download and launch times, but this is the less glamorous follow-up: yes, pre-loading is live, and yes, some players are already wrestling the launcher instead of demons.
Check it before launch night gets crowded
If you are planning to jump into Lord of Hatred the moment the gates open, now is the time to check your install, storage space, launcher settings, and update status. Not later. Not five minutes before launch. Not while staring at a 0% bar like it personally betrayed your bloodline.
For now, this does not look like a massive Diablo 4 meltdown. It does look like the usual pre-launch technical smoke rising from Sanctuary’s floorboards. Still, if your download is stuck, that smoke probably feels very real.
