And then I found out that Act 2 was even more terrible. Once again, we all hit a wall of difficulty - some quicker than others. More farming, more resistance building, more ability tweaking, and more hopes to not run into the especially unfair elite mobs. The game wasn't fooling around, and at this point neither were we.
A day came up when a bunch of us were all free, and we all went out for a quick dinner together. Once again, Diablo took up a ton of our conversation. Our other friend who was playing a demon hunter went through his approach, his preferred abilities, and his DPS and such. Arya and him had a fairly similar approach, though partly because Arya had gotten a lot of "advice" from this friend about the game - you know, the sort of advice where the subtle implication is that "if you don't do it this way, then you're an idiot". Yeah, he's that kind of friend. Great guy, but he is a fellow who came out of a WoW guild once as the DPS officer who would encourage guild members to step up their games if they weren't throwing out enough damage during the raids.
I had to joke about "that awkward moment when the kouhai surpasses the senpai" then. I don't know who was really listening, really.
"Oh yeah, I got my resistance up to seventy percent finally!" I said, while we were on the subject of numbers. 70% was the number Arya had quoted me from somewhere, and I wanted to show that my guy was coming along. I wanted to show that I was still going to be able to keep up a little bit. Well... the response I did get wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
"What's your DPS at?" the one friend asked.
"After buffs... about five, six thousand?" I answered.
"Yeah, that's not going to be enough," he said bluntly. He more or less went on along the lines of, "To get through Act 2 you're going to need at least twelve thousand DPS or else you'll still die too quickly before you can finish them..." Arya agreed.
"Yeah, seventy percent is pretty much the bare minimum to get through Act 2," she said, as well as reiterating the need for me to build up my damage per second. Back and forth I took the very solid hint from the both of them. "You can't tank the way you used to be able to in other difficulties. You have to change the way you play."
Later in the night more discussions came up about what was hard and what was easy in the game. Again, since we were playing different classes, we obviously had easier times with some things compared to others. But even then I just felt like I couldn't catch a break. To paraphrase the idea:
"Oh, I hate mortar..."
"I love fighting mortar!"
"Yeah, but you're melee, it just doesn't hit you."
"My defense build has been working well enough so far."
"Yeah, which act, though?"
"...Act 1."
"Yeah, get further into Act 2 and then we'll talk."
I wonder if other people have found this regarding people who play demon hunters. The class by nature is brittle but deadly; they can put out tons of damage but can take none back. It almost feels like they simply accept instant death as a fact of the class, and as such make no apologies for if it happens - they do so much damage that they can overlook that side of things, I guess is the feeling. That night, I just felt like any advantages I had in-game didn't count because that was the nature of my class, while all the disadvantages the demon hunters had didn't matter because it was the nature of their class. Intentional or not, I certainly felt a double standard at play.
The last of the Diablo conversation actually ended with me just giving up, saying "you know what? Don't worry about it, I've got it covered... I'll take care of it..." Kinda goes without saying that I felt all kinds of defeated. I felt like some sort of bumpkin who apparently didn't know how this newfangled game worked. I suddenly felt like over the past two weeks I had actually made zero progress at all and was just falling behind further and further. More than anything, though, I just felt useless.
Yeah. It all comes back to Arya.
