Sanctum Being Mandatory for Ascension is the Best Thing Ever, Change my Mind

No, really! Never have I felt so rewarded!

Trial with 2 runs. First run went okay. Stepped out with over 2k Honour, but was cursed with Enfeeble.

Encountered a new (rare) bug enemy. It blasted me with invisible Burning Ground (hadn't rendered in yet) that took me down to a little over 700 Honour. Nice!

Moving on, I found a fountain to restore some Honour. Back to 800.

Next room was a cramped, narrow room with a portal that has a (rare) giant that keeps slamming the ground in front of me, and it has an invincibility aura. Fuck yeah, I felt that! Man, was I hyped when I saw that!

Next room, I got blasted by crossbowmen and spirits down to a little over 200 Honour. Just keep rolling, rolling, rolling. At this point, I was really pumped! Couldn't wait to fight the boss!

Got to the boss room, ooouuh, new boss! Twin statues. No biggie, a little low on Honour, but I can just roll. Boss goes into rage mode, slams ground, I dodge, still hits me and barely touches my HP after the little ES I have, and boom. Run ended.

Glorious! Damn. How did I miss out on all that fun?! Never bothered with Sanctum in PoE 1, but I'm really glad that PoE 2 is teaching me all these cool new tricks! I can't wait to grind out the next one.

This trial is intended for glass cannon ranged characters, tanky melee is better in ultimatum one. We are supposed to pick the one we feel like doing but they made a poor decision to reward points on both in the same playthrough. The intention was good but execution is off by light years.

The irony is that GGG gutted my build (Cast on Ignite) because of some people abusing Cast on Freeze with Comet, so I respecced into something else that worked fine, and I was doing fine until that one stupid bug nuked my Honour completely. This kind of stuff is just cheap, unfair nonsense that invalidates the entire system to begin with. This isn't an offline game where lag spikes don't happen, either.

Sanctum has and always will be awful, unfortunately.

I just came here to write that if the ascendancy trials are in the release game as is then I won't be playing.

I've attempted the third sekhamas trial twice as a lvl 70+ frost invoker and it's just too much BS that is impossible to mitigate as melee. Even now at level 74 I've paused to write this during a lvl 66 attempt

I stocked up on honour resist only to lose 25% of my honour on an hourglass trial because there's so much stuff going on whilst I'm meleeing the rares that I can't avoid getting hit.


I'd rather go without my third ascendancies than try to attempt this at least once per day - and that's before I've even reached the second or third boss.

I got to the second boss once and didn't make it. How many attempts will it take me to reach the third boss and learn that fight (even with a bell build that nukes bosses fast am I going to be kill it quick enough to not deal with his abilities)


Everyone said POE1 hated melee. POE2 was meant to make melee more viable right, so why screw melee over entirely by gating ascendancy points behind melee unfriendly trials?

Even on the other one I got stuck on a lift with runes spawning lol (I know that got patched)

Well, I tried running the Ultimatum I had before that. These were the only 2 ones I had that would have allowed me to ascend. Ultimatum failed because the last room had a boss new to me, and I couldn't outrun the tornadoes. And then I wasted like an hour with the other trial. #FeelsGoodMan

Just got to the second floor of Sekhamas lvl 66 as a lvl 74 Monk.

I typically keep bosses frozen, drop the bell and go to town, but now there's two and the bell shockwave doesn't hit both.

2073 honour to 0 with both bosses at 25%.



I guess I'm not getting my third ascendancy points until I'm level 80.


How is this a working feature/game design choice?