Zarokh Killed my Want to Play
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Exactly what the title says. I'm done. I have close to a thousand hours across console and PC. I love this game, I love the idea of working on a build until it bears fruit. I have put in effort, time, and care into the entire experience.
The hourglass phase of the final boss in the ascendancy trial, is rediculous. I hardly have words for it. It's extremely lazy, it's insane even. Absurd on a level I would struggle to find in even the worst games the world has to offer. I had 40 percent movement speed, and couldn't reach all of them in time. Had no idea what it was at first. For about 2 seconds I thought I had to avoid them, that they might explode or something. It's a slap to the face of the system you wanted to make, where effort and skill are rewarded. A one shot mechanic that you'd have to know about beforehand. Breaking the entire flow of the meaning of POE. On top of that, there's no guarantee you'll even get movement speed along the way. There are even debuffs that lower your movement speed by a large margin. You have to get lucky to be fast enough in the first place, and that's IF the hourglasses spawn in a reasonable layout. Everything has to go perfectly, and on the first run when you have no idea this even exists, you just have to hope you get lucky. It's poorly designed, poorly implemented, in an already terrible honour system that most of the player base hates. I have uninstalled this game, and I regret spending my time on it up to this point. I feel insulted, for what I just went through. I have never been so unfairly killed in a game in my life. One hit mechanics are disliked by most people anyway, and here you have one that you can't avoid unless you are fast enough, and lucky enough, to be able to avoid. So now the trial I was LUCKY enough to find, is gone. And I have to farm for many hours more for the chance to even try it again, unless I want to buy more from other people. But even then, as I said, I'm not going to spend time on something that doesn't respect the effort I'm putting into it. Apparently this has been in the game for a long time, and many, many people have complained about it. It's still there. Farewell Path of Exile, maybe I'll return when this is patched out. And if it isn't, well I'm just one person, and me leaving means nothing. But I'm not coming back if that remains. I haven't been this angry at a game in years. Disappointed beyond belief. Last bumped on Aug 22, 2025, 11:57:38 AM
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It appears like this because there some stuff you probably don't know about.
First of all, 40% is not much, you need to also use increased movement speed relics, you will walk incredibly fast trust me. Second of all, if you dodge roll you will walk slower, so do not dodge roll. |
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I appreciate the kind reply, but I honestly don't want to do this anymore. Like I said, I'm tired of being killed due to luck.
At least with the Labyrinth, it was pure skill and build potential. There was no movement speed check. It was just you, your knowledge of traps, and your awareness of the bosses attacks. I've gotten hundreds of relics, not one of them had movement speed, and I've only seen that 40 percent movement speed buff three times out of all the runs I've done. That isn't challenging, that's an unfair, badly designed slog that pretends to be a skill check. Which is what I thought the game was supposed to be about. Skill, avoiding attacks, and build viability. This throws all of that out the window. An hour and a half of trying to never get hit, broken by a single mechanic. |
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"Failing to collect all the hourglasses during the Zarokh, the Temporal boss fight no longer fails your Trial of the Sekhemas, now instead only damaging your Honour. If you fail to collect the hourglasses, Zarokh, the Temporal now enters a secondary phase where the hourglasses and slow debuff persists but at a much slower rate."
this might help |
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" I understand your frustration, I got pretty mad at this specific fight first time i encountered it, i had the exact same reaction as you. And you are kind of still correct, those one shot mechanics are dumb when you have to do a super long dungeon to get to the fight and you are unaware of how the mechanic work. But when you do, this is actually very easy. But you need to be prepared for it and have the correct relics. When you have those relics, getting through the 4 dungeons is also much faster. This game is not very friendly, but somehow a lot of us enjoy this part. There are bosses like that that you need to learn their mechanics and will absolutely die on the first try. That one is particularly aggravating because getting to the fight takes a long time. Fighting bosses personally, is one of the thing i enjoy about that game, and the adrenaline of losing hours of progress so I have to be decent makes me play it. There are some bosses that are still overtuned imo and should be fixed, but this one is just one of those fight that is easy when you know how it works. Last edited by Oinkaments#6390 on Aug 20, 2025, 8:50:10 PM
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Also, just to preemptively deal with "those" types of people:
--- "Just get more movement speed lol" That’s the problem—there’s no guarantee you’ll even get enough movement speed, and debuffs can cut it down further. If success depends on RNG instead of skill, that’s not challenge—it’s a dice roll. --- “I did it fine, so it’s not broken.” Good for you. But balance isn’t measured by whether a small subset gets lucky—it’s about whether the design respects the time and effort of the majority of players. A fight that one-shots blindly on the first attempt, without clear telegraphing, fails that test. You have a VERY small amount of time to figure out what's going on. It's as if it's designed to kill you on your first go around no matter what. --- “It’s supposed to be punishing.” Punishing isn’t the same as unfair. A fair punishment comes from mistakes you can learn from and avoid next time. Zarokh’s mechanic punishes you before you understand what’s happening—it’s trial-and-error death with no real counterplay except for doing it again and hoping you get lucky. |
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" I honestly do like the challenge. It took me ages to beat the end of Act bosses, but those felt fair. They weren't based on RNG, but learning their attacks and trying again, like Dark Souls or Elden Ring. But this just legitimately made me sad. I don't think I've ever felt this way from a video game of all things. Also I have no idea how you put my reply in a box like that, I don't usually post on forums. I think I did it right? Not sure really. |
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" You did it right. When quoting you can also manually delete parts of posts you are replying to, like i just did to avoid a big wall of replies. But anyways, yeah this game is quite brutal and unfair and in a beta mode. Don't expect for it to be fair, it's very unbalanced too. Some classes perform much better than others, so the game experience is astronomically very different from a player to another depending which class they play. If you want to be really salty, play hardcore (please dont lol). I'm a hardcore player but I don't take it seriously here because the game is unpolished and you get killed for the dumbest reason ever in this game. Sometimes you die from something you have no clue that came off screen LOL. |
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" Ah, see they are fixing this next week in 0.3 So you will no longer instantly die to the hourglass thing in the new patch! Last edited by Oinkaments#6390 on Aug 20, 2025, 9:02:48 PM
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" Apparently they are updating this, very soon. Which is hilarious, because if I had waited literally a week or so I wouldn't have died to that crap lol. |
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