Sanctum/Trial of Sekhema

Nothing screams “honor” more than my gigachad tank Titan running around to avoid white mobs to keep my honor bar up

An alternative has to be worked out for ascendancy number 3 and 4. Give us ascendancy number 3 afeter killing act 3 final boss in cruel and 4 somewhere in maps.

The trials as is need to go! Act 2 normal is fine obv but what you have to do for your third ascendancy is just ridiculous and if you go ultimatum instead of sanctum you might not even get your points if you manage to defeat 7 trials overleveld...

Remove sanctum/ultimatum as an ascendancy option entirely, bring back labs and izaro job done.

Having sanctum/ultimatum gatekeep my ascendancy points is such a deal breaker for me.

So, I just spent some few hours doing Trials of sekhemas. I was just really going to get my ascendancy point but got a few lucky drops here and there and decided to just do a few to farm relics. I got some good relics and tried stacking honour resist stat and during my last run, I didn't bother dodging traps because I had some like 80+% or higher resist. Granted that, I had cap resist, 5k ehp and I had like close to 5k honour and traps do like 50 or less damage to my resolve. The bosses are easy provided that you don't get greedy with dps. For the record, boss 1,2,3 took less than a minute to do.

It's hard at first if you don't have relics but when you have them, especially the honour resist relics, its a breeze (again, granted that you have cap resist and respectable defense). Most relics were drop by rare monster so I always go for gauntlet or any room that is not find the exit obejective.

That being said, I liked sanctum in POE 1 and not all people want to engaged with Trial of sekhema and those people don't have relics, making their run hard.

it is waste of time for most builds.

As with labs I just waited to be extremely overleveled and then crushed both trials by brute force.

Labs#2 bad

It's unfinished, untested, unbalanced, unfun.

There are certain rooms that be cleared in less than 10 secs (so like POE1 sanctum hexblaster times). Cool. But others that make you wait 3mins no matter how good your dps is. And the forced trap rooms, the shit that everyone hates in labs, with DEAD ENDS everywhere, making you watch lever pull animations. I've run sanctum many many times in POE1, trap rooms aren't my fave but they never lead to dead ends.

Put this kind of enforced 3 mins/room, traps with dead end shit, mageblood zoom zoom banned, in POE1 sanctum and watch all the hexblasters whine endlessly in the forums. I bet they'd whine if all they did was put in a forced 3 sec animations when they interacted with objects.

This absolutely needs bumped.

I think they need to remove honor from the trials completely.

I completed the trials 2x on my Merc without much issue.

Warrior? Really tough but managed.

Monk, gtfo...

This trial feels really bad when the boss chunks 300+ honor in one hit and you just wasted your 20 minutes.

It's bad at first but overleveling by like 10 levels you can do it rather easily even with melee. It's much worse until you get to ultimatum and suddenly it's actually rather tame in comparision to that absolute bs of a trial. Either way, they both need to be heavily adjusted to make it bearable each next league.

I would make the following points:

1) Do not gate progress behind terrible content.

2) Anything with traps makes your game feel like a free demo you got from a magazine cover CD in the 90s.

3) It's not only terrible but way too long. Like at least one order of magnitude too long.

4) Lab always felt like when your Mum made you do your homework before you could play computer games. This is like that but 1000 times worse.

I would scrap the entire system and just give ascendancy points for defeating the Act bosses with the Acts being chosen so you get each set of points at the right level and the final two points coming from a map boss.

I have been really enjoying the game but am currently just going to never ascend as I simply cannot be arsed doing this even once. The thought of doing this every league is like that one time I picked up my ear wax remover instead of my eye wash.