Ascendancy Trials Feedback: Understanding Player Concerns

I completely agree. Especially in SSF where you first need to get your tablet/chaos to drop so you can actually run the trial and if you get horrible mods for your build it´s just painful.

At least lab in PoE1 was something you could do even on days with "bad" mods.

Also don´t get me started on the running orbs thing with an animation to place them while you have all kinds of crap exploding on you even if you killed all the mobs. Have to time it perfectly to not get hit by stuff while locked in an animation that brings nothing to the table.

Jumping in to agree with OP. Had a Sekhema run that had a rare mob that was just impossible to kill without tanking a ton of hits.

Honor as it is right now is terrible, just terrible. Here's a few options:

Lose 1 honor every time you fall below 30% HP, or are hit while at below 50% HP (ES if you do chaos innoculation, also blood mage needs some exception to this). This has a delay between hits (so you don't lose all honor at once. Say 5 seconds delay). You have 10 honor points in total.

Increase the lethality and have it be a fake death (in return, you lose everything you got while in there. Make the items incorporeal until you cash out at the end of a floor). Have 1 spare death per floor.

Lower the requirements for ascendancy. Why are key passives that are build critical gated behind the single most difficult aspect of the game? That just feels horrible as a player. Sekhema 2 and Chaos 7 should be where you get Asc. 3 and 4. This will also allow you to buff the last floor's loot as those will be considered insane difficulty for the truly dedicated players.

I have to chime in here and agree that the trial system needs some work. I love the area and monsters with traps and such.

What I cannot stand is having to constantly avoid mobs and traps due to the fear of losing a trial. The honour loss and debuffs are build breaking and eventually get to the point where you get one-shot or cannot suffer any damage at all which is virtually impossible in the current game state. The end result becomes the same in both trials; you cannot get hit at all or you lose. Both scenarios are not player friendly and do not fit in with the rest of the game.

I played POE 1 and avoided both of these mechanics because they ended up in failure for me and the majority of other players.

Please take a look at this and remove the honour system and debuffs from these trials. There can still be graduating difficulty without negating a player's build abilities. It also needs to be friendly to new players and not gate player power/class fantasy.

I agree with everything said here. I love POE, but the ascendancy trials in POE2 will send me packing to a different game. It just isn't fun, and for some I know, just not possible to complete. My wife for example isn't the best gamer, but she does enjoy this game. Sometimes I have to play her character to get past certain things in different games. She CAN NOT progress as it sits, and I have to do it over and over and over and over again I don't really want to do that with her character also..

Please fix it. This is terrible.

Couldn't agree more!
Honor system is awfull. No fun, only pain and stress.

Hey Jonathan Rogers We wanna see you finish trials on stream, we wanna see you play

I think you hit the nail on the head that they were forced to recycle mechanics they knew were bad but had already designed due to time constraints and just aren't willing to admit it.

That honestly is the most generous way of looking at it, as all the other options would imply a truly staggering level of incompetence.

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Remove honor from Sekhema, at minimum from bosses, ideally altogether. It was a problematic mechanic in Sanctum, and remains so in Sekhema. Don't force players to suddenly walk on eggshells if you haven't before. Make these trials accessible to all builds equally, not just builds inherently good at avoiding damage.

This would literally fix the problem altogether. I just failed a run in the fourth floor 2 rooms away from the last boss and I just sunk into my seat, not even wanting to play anymore. What got me? Running out of honor. Just remove honor and Sekhema will be achievable. It has it's own challenge without the honor system.

Keep tokens in and they could be used specifically for the honor version for people who like sanctum. The rewards would just be gear based or currency. Literally just sanctum. That would be fine for how tokens work.

But for the ascendancy trial? Both trials should not cost a token to attempt for ascendancy, they should be repeatable with each difficulty being tied behind campaign progress and map level completed. Since it's 75 for Sekhema for the final trial, make the requirement completing an atlas waystone with that monster level. Same thing for chaos. Then you can repeat and repeat until you achieve your ascendancy. Remove honor from the ascendancy version and voila, you have an achievable challenge that awards you the important player power with less annoying friction.

These modes are not player friendly in the slightest and definitely not new player friendly. This should be a huge priority change before the game's integrity is damaged. Some people won't look back if they leave because of this and you're doing a disservice to the gem this game is currently and will become.

Bump for truth.

trials + ultimatum trash content