What was more important now was that - after Arya helped me take down Diablo in Hell - we were now in the infamous Inferno difficulty. True to the stories, Inferno is not even remotely fair. You think you're okay for a while, and then you hit an elite mob with just the right attributes. They have "mortar" so you die if you're a bit far away, they have "molten" so they set the ground on fire if you're close, and then maybe they'll also have "frozen" so every now and then they'll explode balls that freeze you for a few seconds. And then you die. And then you try again and you die. And then you fight them for long enough that an enrage timer runs up and now you essentially die automatically because the game has deemed that you suck.
Yeah, the world of Sanctuary is painful in Inferno difficulty. As more and more of us reached Inferno over the following couple weeks, more and more of us also happened to lose interest in Diablo. They either started playing other characters or just straight up gave up on the game altogether. I can't blame anyone here. The Inferno difficulty was designed so that only the most serious, most dedicated players would be able to take it down. In a lot of ways, it's now about the near-impossible task. Unless beating that goal, the dozens of deaths notwithstanding, is fun for players, Inferno simply makes the game less fun than it once was.
It was the big discussion topic of the month: how do you survive Inferno? Messageboards and forums were overflowing about it; guys at work were talking about it; one group of my friends put together a dedicated What's App conversation just for talking about the game. Do you work to dump as many stats into your resistances and defense as you can so you can soak up a few more shots before dying? Do you just dump all of your numbers into your attack because you're going to die in one hit anyway? Well, depending on the player and on the class, they could all work in theory - though with some people you'd maybe never expect that.
Arya had been playing a lot with her other "further along" friends more ever since she hit 60. Now that she had caught up, they were more than happy to have the extra DPS on hand. Arya was happy to hear their thoughts on builds and strategies, and in no time at all she was through with Act 1. Again, I couldn't help the feeling that I was falling behind again, so I was more than ready to hear about what she had learned about not dying in Inferno. Probably the first time we (very briefly) played in Inferno together, she mentioned all the gear she had bought in the auction house to up different stats. Watching how quickly I was dying, she also suggested that I should work on building up my resistances.
Well, I was a tanking class and I was no longer able to "stand and trade" with monsters the same way I used to be able to, so I thought it was a pretty good idea. So I spent the better part of the next week or so farming for gold so I could buy new equipment to bring up my resistances. I farmed a lot, and I died a lot. In the end, I did actually build up a fairly decent fellow - still died a lot, but he could at least trade a bit longer with the tough ones than before. Soon enough I was done with The Butcher and with Act 1 myself.
