Love the game. Ascendancy is a bad experience.

I agree with this post 100%. Yes, I get it it's Early Access and there's much room for improvements before the actual release of PoE2. However, there needs to be further improvements to BOTH trials.

With that said, the experience in Trial of Sekhemas especially for your 2nd Ascension points, you're first challenged with the "base" 10/10 rooms which is mainly for your first trial to ascension while the Trial of Wills is the next area with 10 more rooms towards your second Ascension points.

The issue I have with this is that you're bringing along ALL of the debuffs from Trial of Strength (1st trial with 10/10 rooms) into Trial of Wills (2nd stage of 10/10 rooms) with however much Honour you have remaining as well. Why is this a thing? Why do players automatically go into Trial of Wills AFTER we've just completed Trial of Strength with debuffs and expended Honour?

I have failed Trial of Wills time and time again MAINLY because of the carried debuffs from Trial of Strength into Trial of Wills AND not having fully restored Honour(I usually start off with 2.3k Honour in Trial of Strength), by the time I've completed 10/10 rooms from Trial of Strength, I'm left with ~1.9k Honour (depending on RNG rooms w/ Honour Shrines or not).

Then it's time to press into Trial of Wills with 1.9k Honour, and 4 debuffs currently, with the two most notably worst debuffs to pair with which were -40% damage (self) and Monster HP increased by 50%. Well, because of some "awesome" RNG going from room to room, with "Golden Smoke" I had from Trial of Strength, (the one where you cannot see the rewards on the map), you're rolling the dice to either hitting a Honour Shrine or not, well, 8/10 maps deep into Trial of Wills, and I have 7 DEBUFSS on my character, SEVEN, four from Trial of Strength and 3 leading up to my 8th room with 2 remaining (which is the dual boss room). Well, not for nothing, I was heading into the final room (10/10 in Trial of Wills) with 1,042 Honour facing those two bosses with now 9 DEBUFFS, N I N E. I did manage to retrieve 50% less Honour reduction while fighting bosses (which was nice) thinking it would help my chances, NOPE, that -40% damage reduction debuff FROM Trial of Strength still carried into Trial of Wills....thanks. Anyway, pumping as much DPS as I can and slowly chunking away at the two bosses (which when you defeat ONE, the other inherits FULL HP and you're set to battle that as well) I failed because I ran out of Life potion and was ultimately dead by the massive AoE spells those two Fire and Ice Terracotta bosses have that engulfs the ENTIRE arena so you're taking AoE damage reguardless AND you're Honour is depleting. There's no escape or dodge or anything you can do to avoid it, it's 100% UNAVOIDABLE damage you take and lose Honour. Why? That is the worst thing to do to a player, to inherently deplete their Honour despite any and all measures the player takes to avoid it, YOU CAN'T!!

This isn't a "git gud" issue, the issue is with the Trial mechanics itself. There absolutely no reason for players to carry on debuffs and loss of Honour from Trial of Strength INTO Trial of Wills.

This was my full experience with this Trial to get my 3rd Ascension points and the build I'm using is a Fireball Blood Mage build (Level 71 w/ maxed out gear, 1.9k HP, 1.1K Mana, 970 ES). Super frustrating and I hope players who have the similar experience can relate and hopefully in the future, Trial Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos do get reviewed and adjusted accordingly. Thanks.

Hey all, thanks for the feedback. Hope it reaches GGG.

A little more on my experience in the hopes that it can be constructive.

I am level 89 with a full inventory of strong relics, maxed honor resist, good + max honor, 4k es 1k life, maxed ele res and 71 chaos res, and have done probably 15 hours of trials trying to get my last points. I have done 3/4 trials. I found the first two annoying, the third hard and discouraging, and the last points seem outright impossible for most builds.

My boss damage is low and the learning curve unforgiving. I make it to the last boss (the time guy) every time, usually with ease, and die to him. I think my single target damage is low so the fight goes on for like 10 min or something..? Super hard to participate in those mechanics for that long especially when he gets low and the mechanics seem to accelerate. In one run I made it to the boss with 12k max honor 8k es due to boons and was still 1 shot by his lightning when I got stunned due to randomly getting the -5% hp, es, mana when hit debuff earlier. Now I know the run is over when I get it and just leave, but what a hard way to learn.

I have had many disconnects during trials. This fully resets the trial and you lose the material.

I have tried running many hours of trials with a friend and we still failed. Many mechanics seem more difficult in a party. It seems like maybe some chaos mechanics, such as lightning runes, are spawning twice as much.

Overall, my POE time has become grinding mechanics I do not enjoy in hopes of unlocking a class I wanted to play. I wanted to do a hexblast/blasphemy bloodmage, for example, but it seems like a 1 second cast that you need to be in near melee to cast will never in a million years ascend so I gave up on this character at level 82. So I rerolled pathfinder, got to 89, and still cannot ascend.

Maybe not every player needs to be super good and maybe people might enjoy builds that aren't the strongest possible. I think these players still want to play their class.

If this does reach someone at GGG, I really would like to conclude with how much I love your game overall and thank you for the thousands of hours of enjoyment I have gotten from your first game.

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Bamo#3596 wrote:

agree
why the hell have they done this with the Ascendancy
Also die in a map and its over should be removed what is the point of that
YOU GAME ISN'T FUN

For some reason they really like the idea of punishing players through scarcity of entries/low drop rates instead of just making the actual encounters themselves difficult.

A proper challenging game game lets you spam retry with full flask charges at a checkpoint right in front of a boss, it doesn't simply kick you out and make you have to play the entire level again(and even farm an entry in the cases of maps!).

Didn't we learn this back in NES days with Ninja Gaiden?

Trials are fun for me. I like the challenge they provide.

At the same time i agree that expecially new players to the genre might have a too hard time to run the trials. Maybe make the trials a little easier and shift the challenge more towards an endgame version of the trial.
Still, the ascendency being something that you have to earn, is cool.

What is the worst about Ascendancy in my opinion is the time required. I love a difficult game, no issues with that. This is a point that makes this game really good in the first place. However, having a full time job, social life, and family, there is only so much time to play. How am I supposed to learn the boss mechanics if I have to dodge for one hour through these completely pointless minigame rooms only to have 1 single try for the boss? Most people don't have 10 hours+ per day to play the hame and ascendacy is the closest to a game feeling like a job since WoW.

Yesterday as i got out of waystones i thought: lets do something different, fetch a lvl 67 ultimatum and get the next ascendancy points. Me lvl 75, me stronk.

I entered the first room of the chaos trial, used the elevator. As it touched the ground i put one foot into the arena... big mistake... one does not simply put one foot into the arena. One has do immediately dodge.

Within a milisecond it went BOOM and the screen told me: Thou artst dead.

the games fun til you realize ascendancy is blocked by these lame azz trials

Agreed. The fact of the matter is that it's a rng crap show. First in the fact that rng if you're lucky enough to get a token to drop to even attempt it and not have to grind 8 hours for one. This is a big problem especially since if you die you lose it.

Second the trials themselves are built as rougelikes and inherently rng dependent. Both the path, the monsters, the debuffs and buffs. If you get unlucky your fked and to all the git gud crowd go try playing melee with no evasion and movement speed debuffs and let me know how that goes.

It's not about as much about skill as it is luck and time investment. An extremely frustrating and unfun experience. It was a crazy decision to lock class progression behind such a system.

yeah its super tedious and time consuming i dont have all day to fail a trial thats not really fun or anything

i totally agree. 99% of the game is really well put together but every time i get to an ascendancy i want to quit the game and ask my self who thought that this would be a fun idea to put the most important part of your character behind this gamble system.
i cant imagine how frustrating this must be for someone new to the game, really sad imo.