Trial of Ascendancy (Sorry, I know I'm by far not the first or hundredth to post)

Ok, I get it, leveling up ascendancy should be a challenge. Whoever designed these trials needs a serious check though. The RNG is a bit aggressive. First room I get a choice of having monsters do 300%!!! crit damage, bosses doing 50% more damage and taking 25% less damage, or rotating laser beams that stack damage on you when you're trying to escort the stupid totem. It would only have been worse if there was petrify statue in there. The honour system for the other trial isn't worth dealing with for an hour, either. Either you have a build that can just insta-kill everything or you're stuck HOPING for 4 levels of good RNG. And what's worse is the tokens don't drop often enough to make attempting them worth it in the first place. Not enjoyable - feels like Dark Souls if designed by a sadist.

100% agree

This is where I am also giving up on this game. It's overly punitive and these kind of mechanics cannot be in the game as a wall to player progression. Grinding for progression is one thing, but having to play perfect this early in the game to get anywhere is just too much.

And there I was... doing well on my 6th attempt today. Plenty of Honour, full health, minions killing the boss. Then boom. One-shotted by something off screen. Why, just WHY, would you force this crap on players for Ascendancy.

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ReTodded#5146 wrote:

Ok, I get it, leveling up ascendancy should be a challenge. Whoever designed these trials needs a serious check though. The RNG is a bit aggressive. First room I get a choice of having monsters do 300%!!! crit damage, bosses doing 50% more damage and taking 25% less damage, or rotating laser beams that stack damage on you when you're trying to escort the stupid totem. It would only have been worse if there was petrify statue in there. The honour system for the other trial isn't worth dealing with for an hour, either. Either you have a build that can just insta-kill everything or you're stuck HOPING for 4 levels of good RNG. And what's worse is the tokens don't drop often enough to make attempting them worth it in the first place. Not enjoyable - feels like Dark Souls if designed by a sadist.

To be fair some of those modifiers sound scarier than they actually are. The crit modifier is actually not that noticable. It's barely different than typical mob behavior.

I've run quite a few trials of chaos and the modifiers I tend to avoid are:
1. Impending doom - The big circle messes up too many of the other trials. It makes the escort, blood altar, and vaal core trials miserable.
2. Stalking Shade - I don't like alternate failure conditions. This is relatively easy to play around but it's very annoying.
3. Petrification statues - NEVER take this. The petrification statues were placed by sadists who put them in front of every switch.
4. Volatile Fiends - Giving every mob an on-death effect that follows you is insane.

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ReTodded#5146 wrote:

And there I was... doing well on my 6th attempt today. Plenty of Honour, full health, minions killing the boss. Then boom. One-shotted by something off screen. Why, just WHY, would you force this crap on players for Ascendancy.

Yes, trials are extremely badly designed. Until you are minion witch, you will need to overlevel Sekhemas by a mile in order to be able to do that. Mobs are tanky as hell and you are getting debuffed like hell at the same time. I was trying to do a level 22 Sekhemas on a level 23 ... no way of doing it. Just after first room I lost almost half of the honor and that's without debufs you get in later rooms. That's just ridiculous. I think that honor should be only a currency that will allow you to do something at the end of the trial, but not something you need to survive the trial.

Chaos temple is even worse. You are forced into RNG debuffs where some are just plain game over. Try to fight boss with those rotating lasers and Boss mechanic at the same time ... or how fun it is to pick those "gorgonic" statues that turn you into stone for quite a while and you are in the level, where you should move the bridges up and down with lever. Try to guess where are those statues? Yes you are right, near those levers so you will be turned to stone by using them and after that attacked while immobilized. It would be nice at least to have an option to pass all the debuf options but you will need to do additional room with the already picked debufs. This way you have at least some control over the outcome.

These trials definitely needs tuning

In PoE1 it was normal to "buy a carry" if your character couldn't trivialize content that was vital for progression. You just tag along in a game and have someone else do the hard work.

While I don't like it for Ascension it looks like this may be a real thing. :(

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KingAlamar#4071 wrote:

In PoE1 it was normal to "buy a carry" if your character couldn't trivialize content that was vital for progression. You just tag along in a game and have someone else do the hard work.

While I don't like it for Ascension it looks like this may be a real thing. :(

Hmm that is still just a workaround for a bad game design. You should be able to do it at your level, not at a level trial+15 or so. At least the initial ascedancies. What's the point in throwing part of the game at someone else and just watch? That's definitely not why people want to play this game.

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Puliver#7825 wrote:

Hmm that is still just a workaround for a bad game design. You should be able to do it at your level, not at a level trial+15 or so. At least the initial ascedancies. What's the point in throwing part of the game at someone else and just watch? That's definitely not why people want to play this game.

I'm not saying that I like it but it might be a reality.


Given the difficulty of the 4th floor Sanctum boss AND a 10 level Ultimatum I'm having problems that +10 levels sure won't help. The slows on the 4th floor boss would crush my build -- don't see a way around it. As for Ultimatum I'd eventually run into a run-ending set of mods that I couldn't deal with.

In PoE1, even in Ruthless, I wasn't too bad with Ultimatum and with lucky mods I could get by. I don't see the same happening in PoE2 as the mods feel more brutal in PoE2 for some reason.

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KingAlamar#4071 wrote:

Given the difficulty of the 4th floor Sanctum boss AND a 10 level Ultimatum I'm having problems that +10 levels sure won't help. The slows on the 4th floor boss would crush my build -- don't see a way around it. As for Ultimatum I'd eventually run into a run-ending set of mods that I couldn't deal with.

It's worse than you think. To get the fourth ascendency in ultimatum you don't need to just run a 10 floor ultimatum. You have to open the final door at the end which requires 3 keys. You get one of these keys from the final boss of a 10 floor ultimatum so at a minimum you'd need to run 3 separate 10 floor ultimatums to get a single attempt at the trialmaster to get your 4th ascendency.