Blizzard released patch 1.3 in the later half of June. A lot of it involved taking the edge off of the difficulty in Inferno mode as well as balancing out a lot of other things with which people had taken issue. Aside from the difficulty ramping up a little less as more players joined the game, there were higher level item drops available in Act 1 and the crafting NPCs now costed a lot less to build gear and gems - something I sort of groaned about, considering how much money I dumped into all of those pre-patch.
In contrast however, they took away just as much as they gave. High level gear repair now costed excessively more to the point that dying a lot in one section would actually nullify any gold profit you may have made getting through it. Further than that, they tweaked a lot of the classes and their abilities. As a monk, I didn't get hit too hard and in a few ways actually got some benefits from the patch changes. The demon hunters, however... there were a lot of upset demon hunters after the 1.3 patch.
Their attack speed was reduced through a lot of ways, and in turn their DPS had taken a lot of hits. Well, that one friend with the very specific ideal of how to play the game had had enough. According to him, Blizzard had ruined the game and he was not going to play it ever again. He's still working on a demon hunter cosplay, but any mention of Diablo quickly reminds him to remind us of how badly Blizzard had screwed it up forever.
Arya didn't give up, though, and kept playing. As did a handful of us who didn't even really care about the patch. I did know that not dying was even more important than ever before because of the extravagant repair bills, so I knew that my bald, bearded healer/tank may have a place in this new world after all - after buying some new gear in the auction house, anyway.
It kinda didn't matter. Most times I saw Arya online she was still either running in a full group with others or playing her wizard Nymeria. At this point her second character had maybe a fifteen to twenty level gap between hers and mine. That whole thing about running together since we were the closest in level simply wasn't true anymore.
Diablo 3 just wasn't as fun anymore.
