Ascension trials

I don't know if you have enough feedback about this topic but if there is not enough i will add my voice to it.

The trials of the sekhema is the most frustrating, badly designed and stressful content in this game. Tying this to ascension is actually laughable and i hope you reconsider. Failing this and having to try again from the start is a complete waste of time and makes me want to quit this game and never come back. I hope you change this when the release comes because this is not acceptable in current for whatsoever. I'd like someone who designed it actually play through the game and try this trial for himself on a melee character to see how overtuned it is.

Another thing is, why is the system for obtaining points is so unbalanced and convoluted for no reason ?
3 floor sekhema or 10 trials of chaos while at the same exact time only 7 trial of chaos drop ??? why is it so uneven ? I thought the idea was that you could chose what you want to do in order to ascend, but in fact the game subtly forces you to pick a certain trial because of drops and level requirement. SO it is an illusion of choice and I'd like it to be addressed.

Whining about an unfinished game is the most counterproductive thing you can do. For yourself and also for the developers. At some point they'll just ignore you and you'll ruin your own gaming experience.

I would suggest that you change your mindset. Basically, it's your job as an early access player to TEST the game and GIVE OBJECTIVE FEEDBACK!

So pull yourself together or play something else!

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kocser#6262 wrote:

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Can you please stop whining about feedback you don't like? The trials are stupid in their current iteration, objectively so.

Sanctum is a mechanic that favors or rather requires specific builds if you don't farm/buy enough good relics to buff you enough. I simply hate the honor mechanic. My build managed the first trial (one floor), but I don't want to get there with a melee or lower damage build.

Ultimatum sadly isn't much better for other reason right now. If I get the wrong debuff selections I can quit, it will be impossible. I even had to do the 2nd trial version with over 10 levels higher and it still took me some tries. It felt very overtuned.

Then the fact that the the 3rd set of points already requires a currency to get into. Not only that, it's long and hard (unlike CoC after the nerfs) for both of them. Tried a sanctum once with my lightning sorc and I just couldn't beat the 2nd floor boss, because that duo simply ran me down without a break, not giving me time to cast. Eventually my honor ran out. Felt terrible considering the time investment for basically nothing.

The bosses in general have a high frequency of heavy hit attacks, that you have not much time do damage. With minions you can focus on dodging the boss while you minions do their work. As range you spend less time in doing any damage, more like you spend more time to dodge the boss. As melee marauder, it is almost loughtable. Armor and Life is a very bad defense mechanic in PoE 2, not compareable with Energy Shield or Mind over matter. Most attacks are not blockable at all.

Big agree

1. It is absolute bullshit to gate attempts of ascension behind random drops
2. Honor system is bullshit
3. Ultimatum is out of whack and bugged, cannot use it for third ascension

I only tried this mechanic in PoE1 a couple times because the honor system is so blatantly anti-fun, which should really be one of the first things they think about and design around. I'm honestly astounded that they thought taking this mechanic and replacing labs with it was a good idea.

But the worst part is that it is inherently more punishable for melee characters. Why would you use such a heavily unbalanced mechanic like this for something as major as class ascension? That's extremely short-sided and stupid. You might as well just remove melee characters altogether if you're going to do something like this.

If we absolutely have to keep this mechanic, though, then at least make it so honor is only lost on the standard floors and freeze it during boss fights. It's still extremely stupid and unfun, but you can at least cheese most of the floors with a melee character.

+1

Neither of these are fun challenges through the lens of needing to do this just to get your ascension. One of several design choices that feel very antagonistic towards the player. The mechanics themselves are cool and would potentially be great fun if the player feels they have a choice to do it. As it stands, this feels mandatory and is not a balanced experience by any means. It's largely up to RNG with the player left feeling frustrated, rather than rewarded.

Achieving the first ascendency nets you not very much in the grand scheme of things, and it's absolutely insane to expect someone to run a full Sanctum or 10 waves and a boss fight that needs rare key pieces just to get their class. You are gatekeeping player agency behind contentious mechanics you know a large portion of the playerbase in 1 avoids because of their difficulty and RNG.

This mechanic--among other sections of the game--seems to clumsily reinforce the idea that POE 2 must be overleveled to play comfortably. Certain challenging boss fights are made irrelevant by leveling up a bit, since they are made to be so difficult when approached at the level of the area. Ascension is the same and this is not good, healthy design that fosters excitement, but rather frustration and bitterness at being made to feel like my time attempting them is wasted. Failing a lab run feels like my own damn fault, but failing the Sekhema or Chaos trials feels too much like it comes down to RNG and a game designed to frustrate, rather than to have fun.

The bottom line is that, for many, this design choice--among others--takes motivation away from the idea of experimentation with different characters and builds. Seeing the reveal convinced me I would make 36 characters to try each ascendency. If this ascension design remains as it is, I absolutely will not be doing that. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Even with a full ascendency, I still have to work in the constraints of the stat requirements for a build to be viable and the power I get from the ascension will, by no means, carry my experience in the game at all. It's merely a flavoring of gameplay, rather than a truly massive boost.

You have expressed that the EA is a time for figuring out what works and what doesn't and fixing it quickly. Well this needs fixing, however long it takes, but it needs communication as well. A statement and a roadmap. I can understand making this prohibitively difficult at first as it's easier to bring difficulty down than up, but we need to hear something from y'all about what you intend to do to fix it.

Again, being forced to do Sanctum and Ultimatum just to get my ascension isn't fun. The whole point of the game is playing the character. It's a role-playing game. If getting to play the character isn't fun, the rest of the game won't matter.

The honour system feels absolutely awful as a warrior. Especially with how slow everything you do as a warrior is, it feels like the honour system is there purely to punish your decision to play this class/this type of build. It basically just says sorry your character is no good here and there's not really anything you can do about it, but also this is basically mandatory as your ascendancy is gated behind it (thankfully chaos trials exist at least and are much better).

Of course you can hyper outscale the content to the point where you can one shot everything, and stack honour resistance, which then causes the trials to be somewhat doable, but even then you will still take incidnetal honour damage simply by virtue of being melee and having to be near things to kill them. This would be okay, except that it is pretty difficult to regain honour once it's gone.

Also no hit run on a warrior for the chest piece I'm not sure is actually possible unless you convert it into a ranged build somehow. That might be fine that some builds/classes cannot do this, but it really just feels like if you choose to play a warrior (in the classic melee sense - i.e. actually hitting things at close range) you are suffering many downsides and not gaining any upsides mechanically speaking. Not exactly sure why this is something that the devs think needs to be punished so heavily in almost every area (damage, survivability, action speed, movement speed).

Trials of chaos are a much better expression of this type of roguelike gameplay, since your build is still allowed to actually function in them and the modifiers are interesting to deal with rather than just frustrating.

Super +1.

I'm a lvl 77 Sorc who ran through every boss on the 1st try except 1, and found this game to be "too easy"... until I had to ascend. I've given up completely on ascension. I can't get past the 3rd one.

I've easily, EASILY beaten every FromSoftoftware game available on PC (+ original PS3 Demon's Souls), along with a ton of other "hArD" games like Nioh, Nioh 2, Steel Rising, Lies of P, etc. I always found the "hard" complaints to be a meme and never took it seriously. Yet these trials are so infuriating, so absolutely soul-sucking anti-fun BS, that relies on luck to determine whether it's actually possible or not, to the point that I won't try again.

It's not a "skill" issue, it's not even a stat check, & the odds that it will roll a combination that's statistically possible to pass is asshole level cruelty.

It's anti-fun in the truest meaning of the word, nothing about it, even modified, could ever be fun.

It's like it's intentionally made to make people rage. At best, the feeling after (even when victorious) a trial is relief and residual anger at how fucking stupid it was.

I deleted my level 85 character and uninstalled the game because I couldn't trust myself to not try to run a trial again. It is not a tolerable experience. I would rather not play the game again than not be able to complete my subclass within reason. I would rather not play the game again than do the trials again.