Trials are terrible

Agreed!
I'm level 75, WitchHunter and just tried for 3rd ascend!

1st floor. no issues!
2nd floor is where it starts to being really bad!
Not a lot of way to regen Honour, any damage over time depletes Honour fast!
3rd floor, just a mess, already not a lot of honour left, the negatives you sometime don't have to get will just destroy you!

They need a rework or big nerfs!

For melee it must be a total pain the butt

I hate it so much that I can't bring myself to start the game after yesterday because I've been stuck on 3rd ascension since Sunday or Monday after like 6-7 trials, I don't have a habit of noting the time and date of a game frustrating the FUCK out of me.

Hours upon hours of tries, careful maneuvering, agonizing over debuff choices and literal butt clenching and all for naught because I play melee and am not a machine capable of pixel perfect dodges while using 0.8 second time windows to attack with 1 second attack time slams. Honour resistance? Seems cosmetic even at ~60%. One time I got one shot from ~600 honour from some type of chaos attack? I couldn't tell but I assumed it because a poison cloud spawned at the same time.

If that wasn't enough it also started crashing at the second boss fight whenever one of the bosses does an ice slam like attack? Can't tell because it's just a frame of ice expanding and then a crash, which I'm actually totally fine with because it's alpha and I wouldn't fault them for that, but it was just the cherry on top that the tries where I saw hope were ended by crashes.

Starting at the latest by cruel Trial of the Sekhema needs to halve boss health, remove specific resistance like 2nd boss fight, remove mobs from gauntlet trials, at least halve the possible curses on the first two floors while also nerfing all of them, have literal special needs level markings for boss attacks, slow down bosses by at least 33%, remove all rare mods modifying mob and player speed, remove some mob types outright (snakes, beetles) AND THEN SOME and it MIGHT be somewhat fun at that point because you don't feel a rising sense of dread about some bullshit that WILL happen, inevitably leading to a loss, which in itself is a mindset that is so incredibly counterproductive that it even messes up runs that start of well.

All in all a really incredibly disappointing design choice to have player power gated by this glass chewing experience.

Been trying to run the Trials of the Sekhamas as a level 25 (freeze focused) monk.

This is incredibly frustrating, unfun and there is no real to do this as an expression of skill. You're PRAYING that random aoe damage doesn't drop you too low before you make it to the end. And even then, Rattlecage being able to knock off 10-15% of your honour in a single hit at melee range? When you're melee?

I'd rather play Diablo 4 than this, the game feels entirely built with ranged in mind and melee was just slapped in as an after thought.

+1 to this.

They really need to do something about the trials. Extremely painful and boring after 4-5 reruns.

Good game--too slow to be honest for my taste but the trials are terrible.

Frankly I am surprised that POE has resorted to the cheap and boring strategy of gatekeeping ascendancies behind these overturned mechanics to do what? Get more people to play POE2? Get newer players onboard?....

To me it seems it's the 'VISION' of someone being brought to fruition.

Regret buying early access to be honest....

The honor system in the trials is so horrible for melee. I ran it about a dozen times, and got to rattlecage once with literally 2 remaining honor points. TWO.

So I intentionally played it slower and thought to myself that I wouldn't take unnecessary damage from monsters. Then I found the crystal trial which literally killed my HC SSF character when I "ran out of time" since I was literally shaking in my boots about losing "honor".

It's a dumb system, and it doesn't make any sense for a character that specialized in thorns, regen, recoup, or es recharge, etc. Please change this.

Also I'd like to point out that the HCSSF community has resorted to abusing shockwave totem just to get through the trials without losing honor. The idea that using a specific skill even remotely seems mandatory in order to beat a trial is bad design.

Hated ascending in PoE 1. They have somehow managed to make the experience even worse than before. When they said they wanted to slow things down, they weren't kidding, but having to do things over and over isn't engaging and fun gameplay. I guess that's PoE 2 for you, slow and tedious. Imagine having to do this shit over and over in leagues down the road. And on more than one character as well. I'ts gonna suck so hard!

Lvl 71 Titan. 3rd ascendancy. Full bar of 2,200 honor on the 2nd floor. Get nailed with an ignite or something while attacking a rare monster - honor goes to zero in about 1.5 seconds. Waste of 30 careful minutes of playing absurdly defensively

This is not a measure of skill. It is not fun. It is miserable.

meanwhile my fresh reroll frost sorc breezed through Sekhema at lvl 21 ...

ther is serious mismatch between ranged and melee at least on the first trial and it will become even bigger issue at the 3rd one

this simply HAS to get changed

Yes i hate these trials and the honor mechanic specifically. I have chosen not to get an ascendancy just based on the fact that its not fun at all. I Refuse to interact with this feature. If this never gets changed this ruins the entire game for me. I haven't even gotten to the second trial. I don't see myself ever bothering to complete the first. Ascendency is just something i will never get. I straight up don't enjoy anything about the trials at all. If this was just something you could do to get good loot. Fantastic, i don't have to interact with it. However key features are gated behind something incredibly frustrating. Its worse because im melee but i dont see myself enjoying this feature ranged either.

Honor is a dumb gimmick mechanic that breaks any immersion you build. Seeing your character fall down dead at full life is infuriating.

Love poe2 direction, but honor has no place in forcing restarts.

Honor = more loot better end chests. Go for it.