New Ascendancy Trials are fantastic

Sanctum is a breeze if you play minions, or ranged with evasion.
As a melee class buildt around being tanky, it's a nightmare.

The trials hardlock some builds into near impossible scenarios, while others can breeze by.
It's absurd and stupid.
Horrible game design.

I hate lab with a passion, but ultimatum in the current state is absolutely unplayable for a lot of builds.

It's also massively frustrating for some builds that they have to engage with sanctum mechanics when they are tanks or regen based builds.

It's a really really poor decision, as much as I hate lab at least it was somewhat fair?

Lots of questionable design decisions in the game right now to be honest.

So far, completed on Warrior, Grenades merc, shotgun merc, Witch, Sorc, Ranger, Monk.

All weapon-based builds have very spike-ey damage, requiring you farm up for a good weapon to have an easy time in the trials. All mages have a more consistent power curve. Absolutely great content, love it a ton. Brought back this old PoE vet from 10 years of wrong decisions, finally GGG created a game for me as the target audience.

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Kaboinglefop#0955 wrote:

So far, completed on Warrior, Grenades merc, shotgun merc, Witch, Sorc, Ranger, Monk.

All weapon-based builds have very spike-ey damage, requiring you farm up for a good weapon to have an easy time in the trials. All mages have a more consistent power curve. Absolutely great content, love it a ton. Brought back this old PoE vet from 10 years of wrong decisions, finally GGG created a game for me as the target audience.

So just to be clear. In 68 hours, you have been able to run 7 chars to end of act 3?

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blombaklats#5298 wrote:

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Kaboinglefop#0955 wrote:

So far, completed on Warrior, Grenades merc, shotgun merc, Witch, Sorc, Ranger, Monk.

All weapon-based builds have very spike-ey damage, requiring you farm up for a good weapon to have an easy time in the trials. All mages have a more consistent power curve. Absolutely great content, love it a ton. Brought back this old PoE vet from 10 years of wrong decisions, finally GGG created a game for me as the target audience.

So just to be clear. In 68 hours, you have been able to run 7 chars to end of act 3?

I am giving the feedback of the guild and myself. I have one endgame char working on 2nd. We are all ruthless/d2 players, I reached out to all level 60+ end of A6 after seeing the overwhelming negative feedback.

The only complaint around ascendancy is that it's not clearly communicated ingame for the last two ascendancies, so you put in a 2-floor trial stone and beat it and get no points because you need the 3-floor one.

Hilarious how anyone with positive feedback is either a ruthless player or an SSF guy lol

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Gkek#1581 wrote:

Hilarious how anyone with positive feedback is either a ruthless player or an SSF guy lol

Crazy that those of us who play the shit out of ARPGs like ARPGs that don't play themselves.

Vitriol aside, you guys got your sandbox power fantasy, let us have something NEW with with PoE2 that is more like what we loved about PoE1 before avalanche of power/speed creep.

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Izrakhan#0832 wrote:

Try being a warrior with a melee 2h mace approach. You have no clue what you're talking about.

Rattlecage traps melee players in his animations. Often getting shoved into degens and slams.

As usual ranged are favored and melee are oppressed. This isn't a fiction this is just the truth. To the point I am wondering if I should be building my warrior for ranged damage off the bat then swapping to melee later.

Some feedback from the melee members of my guild:

Attack-based builds by far have the biggest spike damage in campaign progression. After farming for some upgrade on the weapon (capitalize on artificer orbs and runes), the trials go from aggravating and unavoidable to trivializing one-shots on any challenge encounters.

GGG needs to move some early power to the gems for campaign grind on attack builds, or buff up crafting currency drops in EARLY acts. In cruel mode it becomes much less of an issue.

The first trial is decidedly anti-melee.

Yes, you can simply outlevel it with your melee char and then you shouldn't have much issues with it. Or use a build geared specifically at killing the boss fast (break armor / earthshatter / boneshatter for the warrior).

However, it doesn't change the fact that ONLY melee chars are heavily shafted here, if you're building towards increased survivability, you're gimping yourself specifically for the trial. The fact that armor reduces your honor damage isn't even helping here, because you will get consistently easier time switching all your passives from increased armor to increased damage. Other survivability things like life leech or regen or shield block are straight out ignored in trials.