Diablo 3 1.0.7 update to add dueling, extra gems, rare crafting recipes and more

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."

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."

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 .