Diablo 3 is kind of hilarious in that it's essentially designed to be played through four times in increasing difficulties from Normal to "Inferno". Really, Inferno difficulty is one of those "not even remotely fair" difficulties (and was even nerfed in a later patch - ever so slightly), and in all understanding it's only there for people who are really up to the challenge. Either way, Inferno difficulty was far, far away and we only had to worry about Nightmare for now.
Well, the difficulty certainly ramped up, but for the most part it wasn't anything terrible. We were gathering new gear and new abilities regularly enough, and we were sharing equipment back and forth as we found it to help each other out.
Again, more often than not I would find myself playing the game with Arya well into the nights finishing our sessions with "it's waaaaay past bedtime!" or "right, I have morning shift tomorrow." I know on my end the whole thing was becoming slightly notorious. One girl at work told me how ridiculous we were, staying up so late every night playing the game. Another girl once messaged my "set to busy" profile in the early morning, more or less saying "hey! Stop playing Diablo with (Arya) and go to sleep!"
I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't kinda ridiculous; we both work full time and we're not as young as we used to be - we tire much more easily now, y'know.
Also, in-game, we also died much more easily. A section of Act 2 forever became "that place of which we don't speak". Myself, I found it nice to know there was a sense of understanding that we were going through a terrible experience getting exploded by spinning purple lasers, and that someone else knew how that felt right there with you. We also seemed to have sort of an understanding that we would try not to push ahead too far from each other in our progress through the game; oftentimes we would message each other with things like "I'll give you time to catch up" or "I'll try not to get too far ahead". Again, it was an understanding.
As May pulled on, more and more of our respective friends started playing, and we had a much more diverse pool of people to play with. I feel like for me, I tended to be the lower-level guy running with the people from my side. For her, though, it seemed like she was now the top shot. Of her friends who weren't already level 60 and off into universes us lowly level 40-somethings couldn't comprehend, she was the one leading the parties, dolling out equipment, and otherwise helping her lower-end peers through the difficult parts of the game.
The two of us got into Act 4 of Nightmare, the final act, at about the same time but with different people. During a conversation around then I remembered us more or less figuring out where we were in relation to each other. She had talked about her concern that she was "too squishy to beat Diablo alone", and I had talked about how she was the "Diablo senpai" helping her underling friends through the game. Specifically, I joked that pretty soon she wasn't going to have time to play with me anymore. And y'know, I'll never forget how stupidly goofy I smiled when she replied back. After reminding me that we were still closest in level and thus was still beneficial for us to keep playing together, this is what she said:
"I still need you to tank for me through hell."
Sure, the rasberry-blowing emote after it took the edge off a bit, but still. Can't help but feel good reading something like that.
Within the week we had killed the Nightmare-difficulty Diablo and had once again saved the world of Sanctuary. We were now ready for Hell-difficulty. There was going to be tons of death to come, but I was ready and willing for it.
If nothing else, I would have good company as the stupid spinning purple lasers cut us to pieces.
