Trial of Sekhemas is the Worst Thing I have Experienced.

I can't even get to the boss with my warrior.
When I run it with friends melee has to sit back and feel useless.
I have to sit back and act like a cheerleader because all my skills require me to get in close and hit things which results in massive honor drops.

While my damage is sufficient, my armor is fine, and I have lots of sustainability.

The trials become a way of "No you have to play our way."

Important content should not be locked behind this. Worst thing about PoE2 so far for me. Absolutely disappointing. Honor is a miserable mechanic.

If you absolutely must keep this dogshit content then tune boss damage way down and add in way more chances to heal.

I agree with you. There's definitely a huge difference between melee characters and ranger characters in ascendancy. Players are getting punished for choosing to play as melee.

Something needs to be done here.

I can confirm, playing as a ranged class (I was Ranger with bow) felt good in the trial. I lost honour during some stages where I let myself get overrun by mobs, so melee feels to be punishing indeed.

I totally understand your problem and even though I didn't experience the same as witch I have to say both ascendancy trials - no matter of Sanctum or Ultimatum - feel bad in some kind of way and are either unfair for some classes or simply way too hard in general so you do them over and over again, failing and building up frustration that you have to do this instead of odenary labyrinth instead now.

I was trying to get the 5th and 6th points and spent an hour to carefully reach the boss of room 3 with 2000+ honors but got stuck in the muddy pools created by the boss with 1/3 HP left, then got shot twice which depleted my honors instantly even I still got plenty of HP. Came back with nothing. Time wasted and it's unfun. Thinking of quitting for a week or two and coming back. The game is good overall but this kind of bad experience prevented me from keeping playing. I will accept it since it's EA.

The Rouge-like mechanics suck. It was terrible in POE1 and remains the same in POE2. But many gamers like it (I don’t know why, but still).
But both games has one great feature - you can drop mechanic you don't like and never go there.
You don't need to go to trial to get ascendancy. You can complete ultimatum in 3rd act to get it.