We all had vast circles of varying people playing the game. Much like myself, Arya had her fair share of casual players, serious gamers, and everything in between. She had already been doing well enough that she was the high-level player helping to run friends through acts and donating gear to others that she had either found or had grown out of.
Still, despite it all, Arya and I still ran together a lot in-game. It worked out well, since we tended to be about the same level as each other so it never felt especially imbalanced. Playing a monk, I always had a slight grumbly association with the ranged demon hunters since they would tend to kill everything before you could even get to them. With that in mind, I always found it a little unsatisfying to play with some of my higher level demon hunter friends. With them, it was about charging through the acts, skipping through all the dialogues, putting down the elites, getting the loot, and moving through the act. Sometimes you could just feel like you were always lagging behind.
With Arya, though, the game was a little different. Unlike some of these guys who were also going through re-runs through places they had already been, she and I tended to be seeing a lot of the talks for the first time at about the same time. We never tried to run ahead of each other too much, and for the most part we worked pretty well as a team.
Granted, I was her tank trying to keep the monsters from squishing the glass cannon that she had built. Working as a team was kind of mandatory.
Still, I always felt like that was the other goal while playing Diablo 3 with Arya: keeping her alive. Sure, death is mostly cheap in this game (at least it was before the 1.3 patch, hur hur) and it's not so bad to just revive a downed teammate when the coast was clear. Still, besides the pragmatic answer of "less time down, more DPS out", it just made for a better story.
I remember one of the very first things I ever told her when we first started running together. I threw down the monk's "Inner Sanctuary" ability, explaining that monsters can't enter the gold area now on the ground. I also explained that it had a secondary rune on it that would heal anybody inside the sanctuary area. Arya was quick to figure out that if I threw down Inner Sanctuary, it was worth her while to get in there and keep shooting; on that same note, I was quick to figure out that it was worth my while to pay attention to when she would need Inner Sanctuary thrown down.
I was actually sitting behind her at her place the night she first beat Diablo and Act 4 playing with another friend of ours sitting at the dining table. It took them a few tries and a bit of coach cornering from myself and another fellow, but in the end they took down the big boss. A bit later in the night I logged into my friend's notebook and Arya with her machine-gun crossbow helped me get the finish as well.
Normal difficulty was done. It was on to Nightmare difficulty.
