The Trial of Chaos is everything Ultimatum is not, in the worst way.

Let's talk about Ultimatum, one of my all-time favorite leagues (and I've played nearly all of them and then some).

Ultimatum is the pinnacle of an informed risk vs reward mechanic. It can be exceedingly difficult, especially before your character is properly geared, but also exceptionally rewarding. It presents choice for the player, both in what modifiers to run and whether to keep going or to cash out. It is relatively quick and well-paced, with escalating difficulty in a single, focused encounter. The Trialmaster's challenges are fair (whether he likes it or not). The player is rewarded for choosing modifiers that their build can withstand or ignore and punished for trying to push further than they can handle, but every decision the player makes is an informed one--nothing is hidden, everything is in plain view for the player to make an informed choice about whether to attempt the Ultimatum, avoid it, push further, or cash out.

The Trial of Chaos is none of the above, and honestly it's disappointing that the Trialmaster is involved at all. This is not a mechanic that fits the existing portrayal of the Trialmaster. The player is not afforded an informed choice as there is quite a lot of hidden information. The mechanic is slow and awkwardly paced. Choice in modifiers is limited to effects that are nearly all universally bad, regardless of build. It is not a fair fight, which makes the Trialmaster's taunts not feel earned at all.

Let's go into more detail about the Trial and its issues, specifically the ones that make it a flatly inferior version of Ultimatum.

Firstly, hidden information. This is far and away the worst problem with the Trial. Unlike Ultimatum, you are not told what mechanics you'll be facing until you've already started the encounter. This means you cannot make an informed choice. We'll get to issues with the individual mechanics later, but for now let's take the example of the Soul Cores -> Altars room. If your build cannot handle that mechanic, you have no way to know you'll be facing it. You can't choose to avoid it. You'll only know it's the one you have to attempt when you're already in the room, and you can't back out. Even if it's merely a mechanic you don't like rather than a mechanic you can't do at all, you're still making the choice to enter it blindly.

You also must make your choice in modifiers blindly. Some modifiers more or less brick certain mechanics, such as the physical damage rings in certain Statue Push layouts. Not being able to make an informed choice based on what mechanics you will be facing makes the Trial a frustrating experience in RNG, a stark contrast from the very clear choices in Ultimatum.

"Mechanics," plural, is another issue. One of the best parts of Ultimatum is that it is one mechanic with escalating difficulty. This makes decisionmaking easier in terms of picking modifiers and choosing to continue or cash out, but it also is why the encounters are so well paced. Each wave will be incrementally harder than the last but in the same overall configuration: a survival Ultimatum will be ten waves of survival, a protect will be ten waves of protect, etc.

The Trial being several unrelated mechanics, separated by long, tedious walks through empty corridors, is paced horribly and makes decisionmaking awful. Sure, you easily killed everything in the kill-all room, but that has zero bearing on whether you can handle a survival room. You might be well equipped for a statue room, but you have to do a soul cores room which you can't handle (and can't back out of). Difficulty is all over the place, with rooms not getting incrementally harder--often, later rooms may even be easier than earlier ones!

So let's talk about room types and how they are significantly worse than Ultimatum's infamous cirlces-within-circles.

The Soul Cores room has a mechanic that is not explained to the player at all. You are to pick up three Soul Cores and transport them back to three Stone Altars. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, the game doesn't tell you until you pick up one of the cores that carrying one will apply a physical DoT to you that stacks over time. For most characters, this likely isn't much of an issue. For some, particularly Mind over Matter characters, it is awful. The debuff will quickly overwhelm mana regeneration and it cannot be cleansed, nor can you put down a Soul Core after you've picked it up. So you better hope you can make it back the Altar quickly and safely, or you'll find yourself with no mana, no way to regen mana, and thus no way to survive. Then you have to do it twice more. No, the monsters won't just let you do it.

Even assuming your character can handle the DoT for a while, modifiers can spawn that will simply brick your attempt. Some will just prevent you from moving to the altars for a short while (which means the DoT builds up further...), but as you are vulnerable while placing the Soul Cores, some mechanics will straight up kill you as you attempt to put the cores in. Sure, you can avoid taking those modifiers, but how are you supposed to know you'll get this room? You aren't making an informed choice, as mentioned. You're guessing and hoping.

The Statue Push room is awful. You have to be essentially underneath the statue to have it move, which again makes certain modifiers either exceedingly annoying (and the room unbelievably tedious as a result) or just brick your run. There are some layouts, for example, where the statue must be pushed across a narrow bridge or landmass. Physical explosion rings modifier makes it an absolute nightmare to complete that layout, as do several other modifiers. The only saving grace for this room is that the monsters don't endlessly spawn, though I'm sure that was the case in some version of this room during initial testing.

I'm realizing this post is getting absurdly long so I'll spare criticism of the remaining rooms, though there is still plenty to criticize. So let's talk modifiers.

One of the best parts of Ultimatum is the ability for players to build in such a way that they can negate or withstand many of its modifiers. It feels really, really good to "stick it" to the Trialmaster by taking modifiers that don't affect your build, even if it's something as simple as ignoring the chaos cloud because your character is a CI build. Similarly, taking modifiers that are less effective for that particular mechanic is fun, as is avoiding modifiers that are worse in that particular mechanic. For example, avoiding Lightning Runes in a stand-in-the-circles Ultimatum feels good. You made an informed choice and it makes you safer. Taking Lightning Runes when your build can zip through them while running around in a survival Ultimatum feels good, too. Informed choices feel good!

The Trials seem to have removed most of these modifiers and replaced them with ones that are bad for most if not all builds. Many of these are harder to avoid than the ones they replaced, some are flat-out bad no matter what--like 20% increased boss damage/reduced boss damage taken. I'll stick to calling out only a couple more so as to keep the thread from getting too much longer.

The Ruin Shade is so, so much worse than he was in Ultimatum. Firstly, the lack of phasing means it is exponentially more difficult to get away from him. Sure, you can dodge his attack, but with how many other mechanics that must be dodged it is a tall order. If you get yourself swarmed, you're taking a hit. If you're forced into a small area by one or more other mechanics, you're taking a hit. If the room's mechanic forces you to stay underneath a statue as it is pushed, slowly, to its destination...you get the idea. Even if you do manage to dodge it, it simply isn't fun. In Ultimatum the shade was a fun way to keep you moving. In the Trial it is a frustrating experience that at best is annoying and at worst ends your run in the most infuriating way.

More/stronger Rare monsters is a nightmare and it has nothing to do with the monsters themselves being scary. The nightmare is, as it has always been, Archnemesis. Reviving minions, invulnerability auras, sapping auras, plants, and every other godawful mechanic, all stacked on top of each other, is horrendous in the Trial, worse than it ever was in Ultimatum. GGG you already learned that too many rares in a tiny area is a mistake, why has that been forgotten here? But worse, finding the rare monsters (and magic monsters) is annoying as hell as the visual clarity is, frankly, trash. In the campaign and maps this is bad already, but in Ultimatum where you're trying to deal with several other modifiers and whatever mechanic you're doing it is the least fun thing I can imagine in an ARPG, and I was here for Synthesis. (It's a joke, Synthesis lovers. I know there are at least a dozen of you out there.)

The other modifiers are similarly awful, but as mentioned the most prominent issue is that the player cannot make an informed choice of which ones to take. Fix that first, then work on the modifiers--but please, please don't forget to change them, too.

Overall, the Trial is a sad, pale imitation of Ultimatum. It is exceedingly disappointing, even disregarding the unbelievably stupid requirement to finish three of them to get the final 2 ascendancy points (seriously, GGG, I thought you learned that lesson, too. Ascendancy points shouldn't be such an annoying slog to get, we went over this with shortening normal/cruel Lab and the iterations on removing RNG and frustration from uber lab. And, of course, respeccing ascendancies...but these are topics for other posts).

This is not the mechanic I love. It's almost an insult to have the Trialmaster be associated with something so antithetical to that great mechanic. Please, please change this horrible monstrosity into something worth doing. You had a good formula, just use that one.

+1 Agree, I can't believe this crap even made it into the game.

this

Trial of chaos looks better than ultimatum from poe1, but bosses are way overtuned, especially the bird one that spams many oneshot and aoe high dps attacks, and jumps off and on screen.

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GODOFWARSANCHEZ#4574 wrote:

Trial of chaos looks better than ultimatum from poe1, but bosses are way overtuned, especially the bird one that spams many oneshot and aoe high dps attacks, and jumps off and on screen.

I honestly have much less problem with the bosses than the core issues with the mechanic that I outlined. I don't like the bosses and think they need tuning at the very least, but I don't find them to be so egregiously disappointing and disrespectful to the player (and the Trialmaster, really) as the other issues.

The bosses need some work. The mechanic as a whole needs a massive, sweeping overhaul.

While we wait for devs to balance this crap content, solution to everything bad about POE2: more EHP, more DPS, so content will disappear before spawning, or cannot kill you no matter what your actions are.

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eeeeechuta#7800 wrote:

While we wait for devs to balance this crap content, solution to everything bad about POE2: more EHP, more DPS, so content will disappear before spawning, or cannot kill you no matter what your actions are.

"Balance" is not the issue here. The design of the mechanic is the issue. That can't be fixed with just "more" of whatever. It's a fundamental issue with the mechanic. It's bad design, simple as that.

I also ran into a bug with the soul core part of the trial. I was putting in the last core and started to get swarmed, so I rolled. The action of inserting the last core did not complete and I did not have it on me. Looked at the map and it was all the way back where it started.

Now that Sanctum has been at least somewhat addressed, can we address not-Ultimatum, please?

Agreed!

You present valid and constructive criticism. The whole mechanic is a good first draft, now is the time to improve it.