Silly game issues

#1: I click my mouse or do a keypress to cast a spell, and 30% of the time nothing happens. Not afflicted by anything and standing in the clear.

#2: Evade always rolls me into the most dense part of the crowd, not away from it, regardless of where my mouse pointer is. Seems it might be dependent on my last movement direction. So if I move forward into attack range, I have no choice but to evade forward, too.

#3: Trials: no clue what they are for. As I progress I collect gear; but going to town to sell it the portal closes behind me and I lose progress. If the game designers don't think you should keep loot from a run, then don't drop it in the first place. And see #4. lvl 25 mobs one shot me.

#4: Events and bosses way out of line with the map. I'm lvl 37 and still dying to the lvl 32 boss at the end of Act 2. His bolts of whatever one shot me.

#5: Fire spells are overwhelmingly "bright" and block any chance of knowing if any mobs are still alive attacking. Especially important when in a rare/boss fight and you can't tell if or which mob is the rare/boss you should be attacking. Feels like an arcade game where the entire point is to hammer the buttons until everything is dead, no strategy involved. Add the fact you can start a fight against a few randoms and all of a sudden the mouse passes over a yellow dude. Where'd he come from?

So I've run the caravan dozens of times (and all of Act 2) trying to level up more. Still getting lvl 11 gear drops... lol, which is like an insult on top of the silly difficulty to progress.

Lvl 37 sorc, 1500 or so life + shield, lvl 12 fire spells; so not exactly weak.

What's worse, the first time I fought the Act 2 barrier boss I was lvl 33, and got farther into the fight than I can now at lvl 37.

Funniest thing is I saw a lvl 69 ranger yesterday - he's probably stuck on some Act 3 boss and wanted to come back to kill things for gold.

Trials are exactly that, a skill check which gatekeeps some of the more powerful passive nodes that give you some build defining properties.

The sekhema trials are designed in a way that tests the players ability to not get hit. Similar to mobile games like archero, survivor.io etc

Whereas the ultimatum trials are designed for players who don't necessarily want to put in as much effort into dodging but its more of a test of your ability to create a well rounded build.

They aren't designed to allow you to come and go, doing 5-10 rooms in one go is the intent. Otherwise it would be way to easy to get those powerful passive nodes.

They can be skipped and you can come back to them after farming the campaign a little longer, they don't affect your ability to progress the campaign at all and you can complete the campaign without it. I would recommend that new players do the sekhema trial over the ultimatum trial as the ultimatum trials are quite rippy if you haven't plugged up holes in your defenses. The sekhema trial has super slow enemy animations that are quite easy to dodge once you get the hang of it. Most enemy ability's are very well telegraphed there and it teaches you to become a better player. Some of the most powerful items in poe1 could be obtained through doing "no hit runs" which a very small number of players could do. You don't have to do a no hit run however to get your ascendancy points

But in the "quiet" interim rooms, you should be able to manage your gear. You can't. If you leave you end the trial. That is not at all related to skill, talent, or git-guud. It is just lame lousy lazy game design.

Again, if you can't keep gear that is dropped, then don't drop it in the first place.

At level 44 now and my resist are terrible and a big reason why I can't progress.

I try the "crafting" to upgrade my gear but RNG no luck.

Now I don't have currency to buy gear since I tried out their shitty crafting system.

I'm not sure what to do really. Just keep killing trash mobs for days?

That's all they leave for us. Pretty sure someone will come along and trash us for being poor players. I'm close to leaving the game - sadly for GG, when I leave I am the type of customer that never comes back.

ps As an update, I finally made 39; and now the mobs are one shotting me. Seems to me the game has a mechanic that if your level gets too high the game makes the mobs stronger. The sort of thing Blizzard did in early WoW and now D4 that everyone hates. That "just out of your reach" approach.

Thus, making certain builds played certain ways mandatory to progress. aka: forcing players to find the class META build on some streamer's site that actually works. Said build given to them by GGG so they could play and show off ...eerrr... stream content early in the games life.