Suggestions to Make Trials/Ultimatum SLIGHTLY Less Unbearable

Ultimatum:

1) Offer a fourth choice of debuff. They are punishing enough that with some formats and layouts there is so much spam that it becomes nearly unavoidable. Another choice would at least make the player feel like they had some control over the situation.

2) The "escort the statue" radius around the statue is too small, and it moves too slowly. Give it a speed bonus for killing enemies or something, and please do some combination of expanding the range around the statue to keep it moving, marking the AOE around the statue that you need to stay within, or making it ascend faster when it stops moving. As it is, the thing is just a chore in every way.

3) Remove the stupid Vaal Cores mechanic or at the very least speed up the drop animations substantially. Enemies, even with action speed buff, shouldn't be able to run to you from offscreen and start hitting you before you can drop a single core. At the VERY LEAST don't make the animation lock and let us roll out like you can in the shrine water pouring animation in sanctum.

4) Make the chimera boss run away less, or give some visual indication of where he is going. He is on a short timer that starts based on proximity but doesn't take into account vertical distance. If you guess wrong and walk to the top/bottom and spot him, he runs away again by the time you walk back down.
I get that his arena is part of his power, but it just feels terrible chasing him around so much. Make him stay in place longer please.

5) Forcing people to run the ultimatum three times at minimum to get a single entry to the final fight is terrible.
Lets face it. Almost NOBODY would be playing trials outside of trying to get those final two ascendancy points. The fact that you have to run three to get a single shot at this is just terrible.

6) Elevators are janky. This is a minor gripe, but they are annoyingly small and the button has a weird delay before it can be activated which causes the elevator to behave as if it is waiting for you to get off of it before it will ascend. Very minor thing, but the entire mode is annoying and it's just one more thing.

7) Introduce a way to speed up the "survive" challenges. As it is in the vast majority of cases you either cannot kill the mobs and they overwhelm you eventually, or you end up instantly killing every mob that spawns and just... standing there for 1:30. Either one feels bad. Reward players for fragging out or killing rares please. Spawn more monsters faster and accelerate the timer or ... SOMETHING???

There is a very edge case where you BARELY survive and it's exciting, but are you really going to complete the trial when you have to do it again with three more debuffs in 5 minutes? Let's not pretend that anyone who is going to win that pinnacle boss fight is struggling with what is very nearly an AFK section.

Summary - This mode is terrible. I would never electively play this mode if I was not forced to in order to get ascendancy points, and I would say it is the worst experience in the game I have had thus far. The mode is slow, difficult, RNG based, completely unfun, a chore to play, and ultimately unrewarding as well. Strongly suggest making it fully optional and removing Ascendancy points from it.


Sanctum:

1) Final boss is very over-tuned and has too much HP.

2) I can't speak on melee classes, but I have no idea how they would ever manage to complete the mode. Seems like another great case for not making Ascendancy points contingent upon the mode.

3) Entries don't drop often enough for the degree of difficulty. Especially considering how overtuned the pinnacle boss at the end is.

4) Other than that it's just Sanctum with all the usual problems and frustrations of Sanctum. You either love it or hate it.


In conclusion, both trials are among the worst parts of the game. Even if ALL the suggested changes were made I think the vast majority of players would not electively engage with either mechanic outside of trying to get their ascendancy points.

I cannot fathom why two of the most polarizing modes with the most specialized builds from PoE1 were selected to be a mandatory part of building a character in PoE 2.

Dealing with the trials WILL be the reason tens if not a couple hundreds of thousands of players opt to drop the game and pass on a season. I promise you. Get these modes out of the mandatory portion of the game. If that is for some reason against the sacred "vision" then I beg you to at least implement some of these changes so that the 95% of players who don't want to deal with these modes can more easily get their points ever season and forget the modes exist.

Crashing needs to not end the chaos trial run as well. It's super demoralizing to end a run on level 8 or 9 with nothing because the game loves to client crash still.

Finally someone making reasonable suggestions for changes instead of just whining about it being too hard and wanting it removed.

I think these would be good changes to make it more fair.

Especially agree with the change to the statue, moving that thing is a nightmare if you have modifiers like the shade stalking you

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Nyon#6673 wrote:

Finally someone making reasonable suggestions for changes instead of just whining about it being too hard and wanting it removed.

I think these would be good changes to make it more fair.

Especially agree with the change to the statue, moving that thing is a nightmare if you have modifiers like the shade stalking you

Make no mistake, I would prefer to have it removed. The modes both suck, Ultimatum being the worst of the two.

I don't think they'll really do that though.