Ascending in PoE 2 - Honour

First of all. This is your game and you can make it as challenging, fun or hard as you want to. Your never going to please everyone. There will always be voices on both sides of the spectrum advocating for things to be harder or easier.

I didn't like ascending in PoE 1. I always dreaded doing it. However there was always a sense of relief and accomplishment of getting it done. Which does give merit to having challenging content. That feeling is worth something.

I think I will dread ascending in PoE 2 even more if Sanctum is going to be involved. Its one thing to avoid traps to not die, but when your effective healthpool is your honor it feels terrible to engage with it at all. That being said, the traps weren't so bad. You lost a little bit of honor if you touched them. Fair. Your given a lenient pool of over 2000 to begin with. At least it seemed lenient until I encountered a rare monster that burned over 1000 in less then 2 seconds without me being close to dead on my character.

I was on my third ascendency. I had carefully gone through the whole maze with barely losing any honor up until that point. I had killed the first sanctum boss and I realized I had to do it all again. I dreaded going into that door. Because I knew I would have to do it all over again if I failed at any point going forward. However I was not gonna pass up the chance to get some very powerful ascension points. So I went forward. Got hit by a trap and lost some honor. Tension was high. Got through one challenge room, then a second challenge room. I had 1500 honor left. A good margin I thought. I go into the next room. Theres an hour glass. I turn it around. Survive for 2 minutes. Thats easy I thought. Enemies start spawning shrouded in shaddows. I have to get close to be able to hit them. Meanwhile they are hitting me for free until I find them. They are really hard too see, but very easy to kill. Then a rare spawns in. I attack it immideately. I freeze it, but it spawns in freezing bombs. I am immune to these in the regular game due to freezing immune charm. However, I still try to get away from them. However... there is no space in this room to actually get away. Behind me is the hour glass. In front of me is a wall. I have no mobility skills that will get me out of this spot. I could technically jump to a different enemy if I can see it, but they are as previously mentioned shrouded in darkness. BOOM. 1000 honour depleted and im dead. It doesn't matter that my character could easily kill everything in this room. It doesn't matter that I carefully avoided traps all the way up until this point. Im just dead. Could I of done things differenty or better? for sure. Do I ever want to go back in there again... slowly go through it all... with the constant fear of something like that happening again at any point... I mean... yeah... I want the ascension points... but do I want to do it? HELL NO.

I don't know how many times I will be willing to do something that my mind is saying "HELL NO" to. It feels partly like a skill issue and partly like an rng issue. Will I get easy doors, easy punishments or hard doors and hard punishments. Will my luck last or my patience perservere through this grueling task. When I get through it. I don't think I will feel a sense of accomplishment. I think I will feel relief and a sense of getting lucky. There are people who will have the skill to make it everytime. Im not one of these people. I have to accept that. I think with enough attempts I will become better and have runs with good enough rng to make it. I also know I will hate every second of it for the rest of this games existence.