Unpopular mechanics chosen to be mandatory content in Poe2 - Sanctum/Ultimatum/Delve

Sanctum - Trials of Sekhema

The two biggest issues here are knowledge gap and multiple run requirements. Without an understanding of what afflictions to avoid and which rooms you should trying to path towards on which floors, Sekhema will be extremely punishing for more casual players. This combined with the requirement of farming lower mlvl runs purely for relics and potentially ZERO REWARD just to guarantee success for an ascension run, just to never touch this content again, would make any gamer angry.

Bosses have substantially less HP than in 0.1 because they were BUGGED, but you didn't have to offset your BUGFIX by adding more difficult trap rooms on the 4th floor to offset this. Running trials on melee also still feels substantially worse than ranged.

Potential Solutions
1. Relax the pathing on the first two floors by adding more connections between the rooms. They're way too rigid and being forced into a terrible affliction is a pretty common outcome.
2. Remove the 5% of ES/Life lost on hit. Players still don't know that this will outright kill them and end their run regardless of honor.
3. Give us more bargain options like in Sanctum to sacrifice % of honor for more interesting boons. Currently the only purpose these shrines provide is a small chance at getting rid of a bad affliction at the expense of a boon.

Ultimatum - Trials of Chaos

Players are still wondering why so much downtime was included such as the time freeze from the trial master, the forced travel between challenges, waiting for elevators, long mechanic animations, etc.

It's objectively worse than it's iteration in Poe1, and we can't have a 1:1 anymore because the current iteration of Ritual feels more like what ToC should have been.

Potential Solutions
Just make it a large arena based challenge with the trial master just reappearing to issue the next challenge so there's zero travel between rounds.

If a rework isn't in the cards:
1. Give us the option to drop the life draining relic during the deposit quest OR speed up the deposit animation.
2. Increase the radius for the escort statue to reactivate.
3. Increase the speed of the escort statue to match player speed.
4. Remove the closed door AFTER the elevator between rooms or replace the elevator with a ramp. There's zero need to have BOTH player time-wasting devices.

Delve - The Atlas

The current iteration of the endgame is basically a multi-directional delve. This idea may seem great on paper, but imagine player response if in the new Poe1 league, you deleted 90% of the atlas tree, deleted the current mapping system, and replaced it all with Delve and the tablet/tower system.

Locking mandatory progression behind RNG should never be a thing. Separating atlas tree progression from waystone level progression feels extremely bad because you're stuck in one of two states of shit loot.

1. Low waystones to path faster on atlas to find more nexus.
Low WS means low ilvl, which means you've already outscaled all of your drops, so that immediately makes all item drops worthless unless you get a lucky unique. The only worthwhile drops here are currency and uniques.

2. T15 waystones with little to zero atlas points.
So the ilvl is now at an acceptable level, so item bases are now "craftable," but now we're forced to run T15 with zero juice until we're 40/40 because juicing maps with tablets will be a waste without any atlas points. So ground loot becomes worthy of id now, but do we even waste the time to "craft" in-map because it would detract from the total time required to find 15 nexus'.

The other RNG progression element is finding Citadels and Arbiter atlas progression. If you're at the point in the end-game where you're 40/40, you're set to start juicing maps. The inherent issue with the tower system and juicing in Poe2 is that it's forcing you to be stationary while the nature of the infinite map is supposed to reward you for exploration. So we're forced to either efficiently interact with the tower system or search for citadels.

Outside of those issues, it was stated in interviews that the current iteration of the endgame was essentially thrown together just to get 0.1 out the door. What we're currently playing feels like we're just reiterating on an afterthought. What we need is a more thoughtful and fleshed out endgame system OR a simple 1:1 from Poe1.

Potential Solutions
1. REMOVE the ENTIRE Delve element from the first stage of the endgame ENTIRELY. Make the first section of the Atlas static with ZERO RNG and the same for every player and make it essentially the atlas from poe1. All 40 of our atlas points would be gained here and would end once we reach T15/16 making progression feel cohesive again. Completing this first circular section of the atlas leads to part 2.

2. Once the atlas is complete, reintroduce Delve, but also lean more into the delve aspect of it. Our new atlas objective becomes clearing the corruption by finding nexus, citadels, etc. Now more similar to delve in poe1, the further away we get from home, the more difficult it becomes, but instead of just ramping monster health/damage, make it so all maps are corrupted once you reach a certain distance. This would be a great way to introduce a Beyond tree in the atlas as well, and even Beyond boss maps and tainted currency.

3. Keep towers, but only use them to cleanse corruption and reveal the map.
Make tablets roll static values so they're tradable on the CE.
Allow us to use tablets with waystones in each map or allow them to be consumed so they apply their effects to the next X amount of maps we run.