I wonder how many people there are still playing Diablo 3. And I wonder how many people there are who haven’t played it for ages, but fancy getting back into it. As persuading factors go, the ability to drop a meteor on your co-op partners’ heads might just tip some over the edge. Player vs. player dueling will be added in patch 1.0.7, detailed in a new post on the Diablo 3 site.
The patch is due to hit the Public Test Realm shortly. It’ll add a dueling arena called the Scorched Chapel, a new tier of gems for high level players, ability balances for the Monk and the Wizard, and a few “quality of life†changes, including the removal of incrementally increasing respawn timers in non-hardcore play. Woohoo.
The Scorched Chapel will be accessible via Nek The Brawler in the New Tristram Bar. The Chapel has four areas: “the church, the graveyard, the river, and the lake.†Up to four players can participate in free-for-all brawls. As previously mentioned, team deathmatch has been shelved.
Blizzard say “our intent is to provide players a safe, opt-in location where they can fight one another for bragging rights (or maybe science) without the potential for griefing as it existed in Diablo II.â€
There won’t be any score-keeping or achievements, and Blizzard admit that “Some matchups may be one-sided, and we don’t expect that battles will be necessarily balanced,†but “we know that even without rewards and objectives, some players just want to beat each other up.â€
The patch will also add new crafting recipes for account-bound items like the Infernal Machine’s Hellfire Ring reward. These rare recipes will let players craft new gloves, pants, wrists, a chest piece and an amulet. For full details, and more on the precise balance and XP tweaks, check out the patch post on Battle.net.
