Patch 1.0.7: PvP Brawling and New Crafted Items

With Patch 1.0.7, released February 12, 2013, the long-awaited player versus player finally arrives in Diablo III – albeit in a far more stripped-down form than originally planned. The patch is much more than a PvP update: it adds craftable endgame gear, a reworked Hellfire Ring, and meaningful class tuning that shifts the balance between the hero classes. Coming eight months after the May 2012 launch, it was one of the most content-rich patches of the vanilla era and a key turning point on the road from a rocky start toward the fully overhauled game of Reaper of Souls.

The Long History of the PvP Promise

To understand why 1.0.7 mattered, you have to look back. As early as BlizzCon 2010, Blizzard demonstrated an arena-based team deathmatch system complete with rankings and rewards. Lead designer Jay Wilson showcased an ambitious 3-vs-3 format that was meant to ship with the base game. But internally the PvP never felt balanced enough. In March 2012 – just two months before launch – Blizzard announced that the PvP system would be pulled from the main game and delivered in a later patch, so as not to delay the release any further.

The community waited nearly a year. When the promised team deathmatch still failed to meet Blizzard's quality bar, the studio made a pragmatic call: rather than keep fans waiting for full competitive PvP, it shipped a lean, no-frills mode with 1.0.7. And so the grandly announced "Dueling" ultimately became the more modest "Brawling".

Brawling in the Scorched Chapel

The new Brawling mode lets two to four players face off in a free-for-all inside the purpose-built Scorched Chapel arena. Access is granted by speaking with Nek the Brawler, an NPC found in the town hubs of all four Acts. A brawl begins when every party member joins through Nek; the whole group is then teleported into the arena together.

The arena itself spans four connected areas that offer tactical variety:

• the church as a tight central area for melee skirmishes
• the graveyard with cover and line-of-sight breaks
• the river, which forces players into open movement lanes
• the lake as a sprawling zone, ideal for kiting ranged builds

Crucially, death in Brawling is not permanent – not even for Hardcore heroes – and combat deals no durability damage to gear. After dying, you respawn at the edge of the arena following a brief delay and dive straight back into the fray. Brawling was designed to be risk-free from the ground up: even losing a precious Hardcore character was impossible, which dramatically lowered the barrier to jumping in.

Balance Mechanics Inside the Arena

To smooth out the notoriously tricky class balance in PvP, Blizzard built in hidden scaling values. Ranged classes – Demon Hunter, Witch Doctor and Wizard – receive a flat damage reduction inside the chapel, while melee classes Barbarian and Monk get an additional bonus to offset their range disadvantage. These arena-specific modifiers were an admission that PvE builds behave completely differently in direct player duels: a glass-cannon Wizard who shreds bosses in PvE would, without this protection, drop in seconds during PvP.

Deliberately Minimalist

There is no scoring, no rewards, and no matchmaking – just fun and bragging rights. No statistics are tracked, no ranks are awarded, and no exclusive items drop. Blizzard stressed explicitly that Brawling was only a first step, to be expanded with scoring systems and rewards in future patches.

"We see Brawling as a beginning, not the end of our PvP plans" – the recurring message in Blizzard's official communication in early 2013.

But that promise was never kept. The scored team deathmatch mode once on the roadmap, complete with rewards, was never realized. Brawling remained Diablo III's only official PvP mode – through Reaper of Souls and every subsequent season. Diablo III settled definitively into being an almost purely PvE co-op game, where competition plays out through Greater Nephalem Rifts and the seasonal leaderboards rather than in direct player duels.

Craftable iLvl 63 Items: Crafting Becomes Endgame-Relevant

For loot hunters, 1.0.7 was arguably even more significant than for PvP fans. The patch introduced new craftable items at item level 63 – then the highest item tier in the game. The Blacksmith gained recipes for weapons and armor pieces with random affixes capable of rivaling the best dropped loot. Until then, crafting had been largely pointless: forged pieces fell statistically short of what you could farm or buy on the auction house. With 1.0.7, that changed fundamentally:

• Multiple random affixes per item instead of fixed stats – every roll was unique
• Competitive with dropped iLvl 63 loot, and in some cases superior
• Requires the new material Demonic Essence, which drops from elite enemies on higher Monster Power difficulties

The crafted pieces are account-bound, easing pressure on the market while offering a reliable gearing path for characters that drops never blessed. This binding was a deliberate move against the dominance of the much-criticized auction house: if you wanted a top-tier crafted piece, you had to earn it yourself rather than buy it.

The Gambling Appeal of the Reroll System

The random affixes turned crafting into an addictive gamble. Players forged the same recipe dozens, sometimes hundreds of times, chasing the perfect combination of main stat, Vitality, Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage. This "reroll loop" foreshadowed what Blizzard would later expand into a central pillar of the endgame with the Kanai's Cube and the Mystic (introduced in Reaper of Souls). 1.0.7 was thus the first real harbinger of Diablo III's modern itemization.

Upgraded Hellfire Ring

The Hellfire Ring also got a significant upgrade: it could now be forged with higher base stats and a stronger experience bonus. This made the already popular leveling and twinking ring even more attractive and gave players another reason to farm the Keywardens across the Acts for the key fragments needed for the recipe. The ring remained the go-to companion for leveling new characters and rapidly building up Paragon points across several patches.

Class Balance: Monk and Wizard Catch Up

Patch 1.0.7 additionally delivered notable class tuning. At the time of the patch, Barbarians and Demon Hunters dominated the Inferno endgame, while the Monk and Wizard were considered markedly weaker. Blizzard responded with targeted buffs:

• The Monk received improvements to several spirit generators and defensive abilities to boost survivability at higher difficulties.
• The Wizard got tuning to damage values and resource management that raised its competitiveness against the top classes.
• Several abilities of both classes were adjusted so that previously unused builds suddenly became viable.

These tuning passes were part of Blizzard's iterative approach to gradually smoothing out the class design that many felt was unbalanced in the vanilla era – a process that only reached its first major peak with the sweeping Loot 2.0 update in Patch 2.0.1.

Context and Legacy

All told, Patch 1.0.7 meaningfully rounded out the vanilla-era endgame. It served PvP fans, collectors and build-focused players alike. Even though many felt Brawling was disappointingly unambitious, the craftable iLvl 63 items and the reroll system delivered lasting engagement and conceptually laid the groundwork for the itemization philosophy that still defines Diablo III today. 1.0.7 is therefore remembered as an important milestone – not for the PvP it delivered, but for the crafting revolution it quietly set in motion.