I had another friend who played a monk (and at the time of writing this had actually beat Inferno) who had an approach I really took to heart. He dumped everything he had into his defenses and took much more of a support role with his friends; he also had terrible, terrible damage per second. Up until Inferno I had more or less built my monk with the same mindset. If I wasn't going to be the 40,000dps arrow, I could at least be the shield.
And once you're told that being the shield wasn't going to cut it, you kinda feel like hell. You can't help but imagine all kinds of silly, paranoid things when you log into the game and see your running buddy through three difficulty levels is now past halfway in Act 2 with a full party of players. You can't help but feel a little bit replaced.
And that's not really fair to anyone. It's not like I had some sort of special exclusivity to the girl and her Diablo 3 or anything, and it's not like I didn't have other people I could have been playing with...
...Actually, that's not completely true. At this point in the game I was actually running out of level 60 friends who were willing to run in Inferno with me. But that really wasn't the point.
I remember logging into the game after that evening of hearing how much of my time and energy I had wasted, going straight back to farming Act 1 feeling all kinds of grumpy and malcontent. As expected, Arya was logged in playing Act 2 with some other folks. Fine, whatever. I was just going to work on getting gold to pay for new gear...
Well into the night, Arya actually jumped into my game to run with me a bit. It's actually kinda embarrassing to think about it now, but as we played I was messaging her in all kinds of passive-aggressive ways about how I just had to slog through for better gear "since I was apparently playing the game wrong".
Arya immediately reminded me she never said that to me; I answered back that it was pretty much the same difference. She popped her character over to mine and inspected my numbers.
"That's not bad," she said, "you're definitely on the right track." All I could think was why she couldn't have bothered to say something like that earlier in the night. Arya clarified that her advice for me to really work on my DPS was for when I play the game solo, so I can get through the game by myself.
I reminded her that I had built my monk with the intention of keeping other, squishier party members alive.
In the end, that's all it really boiled down to. More than anything else, I was just unhappy that we never got to play together anymore. I missed my running buddy. Diablo 3 isn't a bad game at all, but you get the most out of it when you're running with friends. I actually told her straight up: there were nights where if I didn't see her online, I just wouldn't play. I had the most fun playing the game when I was playing with her.
I'd like to think Arya understood that well enough. Again, I know she has a ton of people also looking for her to play with them, either as an extra big gun or as the veteran running the newbies through the acts. We would just have to see how the schedules lined up and such. To her credit, she did run with me all the way through to the end of Act 1 and let me say everything I wanted to say that night. I felt like we were in a pretty good place then, and when we logged off I remember telling her, "don't be too surprised that for some reason I think playing this game with you is pretty fun."
