Question for melee players with their 3rd/4th Ascendancy

I'm struggling with it. I don't think there's a lot more I can do with my build, I'm not having any trouble in maps and didn't have any in the campaign, so I'm starting to wonder what has made others successful (beyond impossible levels of damage output and/or high honor cap for me).

What I'm mostly wondering is -- is the incentive here to repeatedly engage with these trials as non-ascendancy content? Will this unlock additional relic space for me, and are better/more relics the big key I'm missing?

TBH I hate/hated both Sanctum and Ultimatum and want to interact with both as minimally as possible, but am beginning to suspect that the trials being a functional dipping of the toes into the pond of these league mechs is in fact not the case and I need to invest more time into this system so that I will perform better and have my mistakes punished less.

Help me help myself, I guess? Please?

I can only speak for Trial of Sekhemas as a lightning/cold quarterstaff monk.

Relics are very important and you might need to do 1-2 extra runs (or trade) just to get proper relics as they make your honour 2-3x more efficient. Imagine going in with ~8k honour instead of 3k.




Do note, you can actually use orbs of augment on your relics or reroll them with the 3:1 recipe.

Does doing the Trial outside of the Ascendancy portion of it increase the amount of relic space usable in the Ascendancy trial? I've only got enough room for three relics at present and have made sure that all of them have Honour Resistance on them (15-25%) but it's just not enough.

I'm not taking very much damage -- I don't think even the bosses could outright kill me unless I was being very inattentive, but it's the honour mechanic itself that's ruining my runs.

The honour system is not fair to melee, i respecked into grenades and got mine first try

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Orthawas#1462 wrote:

The honour system is not fair to melee, i respecked into grenades and got mine first try

I'm preparing to switch to a bow instead of my quarterstaff and try to skate through using the Cold/Lightning options there. I'd rather not, but unless there's some way for me to overgear (over-relic?) this I don't see myself being able to do it by spamming Glacial Cascade, the damage scaling on it just doesn't seem good enough and the melee options are strong but cause the problem I'm trying to solve.

I did a single 2trial ilvl56 run and here's the loot from that:



Seems decent to me.

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Scarletsword#4354 wrote:

I can only speak for Trial of Sekhemas as a lightning/cold quarterstaff monk.

Relics are very important and you might need to do 1-2 extra runs (or trade) just to get proper relics as they make your honour 2-3x more efficient. Imagine going in with ~8k honour instead of 3k.




Do note, you can actually use orbs of augment on your relics or reroll them with the 3:1 recipe.

Those are useless. Even if full honour resist monsters just take out 500 honour minimum per hit. Plating melee just to avoid being hit is masochistic design. GGG really messed up on this, just because Mark can do it doesn't mean everyone can.

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

Those are useless. Even if full honour resist monsters just take out 500 honour minimum per hit.

You do know that honour resistance has a cap, right?

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Scarletsword#4354 wrote:

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

Those are useless. Even if full honour resist monsters just take out 500 honour minimum per hit.

You do know that honour resistance has a cap, right?

For, uhh.. purely academic purposes..

What would that cap be? >.>

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ReggShanks#0071 wrote:

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Scarletsword#4354 wrote:

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

Those are useless. Even if full honour resist monsters just take out 500 honour minimum per hit.

You do know that honour resistance has a cap, right?

For, uhh.. purely academic purposes..

What would that cap be? >.>

75% like all resistances, can be increased to 90% with relics.


https://poe2db.tw/us/Relics#RelicMods

A bit silly imho but it's there.