Trial of Sekhemas is just unfair and not fun at all

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paprdok#3328 wrote:

Its incredibly infuriating.
As many have said, the honor system is so bad its baffling. Melee characters are punished for being melee, and everyone is punished for not stacking honor resist (what even is the point of having relics if all everyone does is stack resist..).

It also doesnt enable learning from your mistakes and trying again since every time you die you lose the key to the trial (as if losing 2 hours on your life on the most frustrating content in the game wasnt enough). So it forces you to come insanely overpowered and overgeared or not at all. Huh?

So yeah, it needs to be less of an RNG masochism fest. Pls get rid of honor.

Everyone tries it as their first trial to gain Ascendancy, but they fail because they don't have as many relics as they did at the beginning, and everyone has bad memories. The level design of the game progression is wrong.

I tried a level 66 trial stone when i was level 66. I messed up because I got lazy with avoiding traps and died on the last trial before the scorpion boss. Next time, I did a level 71 stone at level 75 thinking that would offset my power vs the mobs in there, while taking lessons from the previous attempt and playing more carefully/picking only sacred water and honor restore trials. I breezed through it, killing the scorpion boss with 5500/6300 honor at the end.

Does using a lower level djinn stone help or do the mobs scale with player level? I only played about 4 hours of PoE1 so kot super familiar with GGG convention. In either case, it was super easy for me the 2nd ti e. Playing arsonist witch, which probably helps me a lot ofc.

Trials are not fun when there is character power, special boss encounters or item drops locked behind them.

The demoralization and humiliation is made worse when we have to spend up to an hour grinding through a boring maze with minimally challenging requirements just to get to the challenging segment of trials. While these can be quite fun, we can lose from one mistake or one bad random element, rendering the previous hours grind wasted.

Removing ascendancy acquisition, permitting multiple attempts or removing the earlier completed segments of trials could improve the experience.

I have completed the first three ascendancies and made two attempts on the last, I'm not willing to invest anymore time in to trials. I will have to trade for a carry.

I do not want to play a maze roguelike, I want to play an ARPG.

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SayaTulipa#4106 wrote:

I've cleared up to tier 3, but if you have the DPS to clear tier 3, tiers 1 and 2 are just tedious and a waste of time.

Yeah, it's like having to go through normal, cruel and merciless lab in a row for 3rd ascendancy in PoE 1.

Apart from the fact that you can completely screw the run by being forced to pick bad afflictions in floors one and two, that is...

yes, too bad the devs are busy enjoying their holidays and doesn't give a crap about player feedback. We told them we hated the honor system, they gave a tiny ass 30% decrease in melee, which does jack all. they are so out of touch. maybe the success of poe1 got into their heads a bit too much.

I really wanted to give this a fair chance. So I waited until I'd tried it multiple times with different characters to give my feedback.

That said, it's pretty terrible.

There's a huge investment of time required, and despite very careful choices your run can be ruined, and often will be, by getting railroaded into bad debuffs.

I like roguelikes, so this isn't really about the die once and you're out bit. The thing is it's simply too long for the 4 level trial and the final boss isn't so much hard, but just ridiculously tanky requiring insane gear to take out in a reasonable time.

Generally the game is pretty good, and stands to be excellent in time. But the trials need a complete rework.

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chalud#5960 wrote:

I really wanted to give this a fair chance. So I waited until I'd tried it multiple times with different characters to give my feedback.

That said, it's pretty terrible.

There's a huge investment of time required, and despite very careful choices your run can be ruined, and often will be, by getting railroaded into bad debuffs.

I like roguelikes, so this isn't really about the die once and you're out bit. The thing is it's simply too long for the 4 level trial and the final boss isn't so much hard, but just ridiculously tanky requiring insane gear to take out in a reasonable time.

Generally the game is pretty good, and stands to be excellent in time. But the trials need a complete rework.

Same here i made my own thread showing 2 runs with pictures before entering last timeless boss room. One had minor affliction each time i get affliction. Second i had tons of boons. Completely RNG and it has nothing to do with player or character skill test. You ether win RNG lottery or not. You cant be careful even with 2 rooms ahead visible choices. Eventually player ends up taking least dangerous affliction or build brick choice and loose visible upcoming choices.

Gear alone wont help if RNG god is against you. Chaos however has more balance. There are annoying afflictions but they are managable that wotn brick whole build.
Also Sekhemas you need RNG regarding relics and % chances on some of them. Without those you are more likely to get afflictions ending your chances in last floor. So in Sehkemas you are essentially against 2 RNG gods. First are affliction choices and second are relic drops and RNG rolls on those.

The thing I don't get is why do I have to do all the other trials BEFORE the actual trial that gives me the ascendency. If I am on trial 4, make me do that one, not 1,2 and 3 beforehand. It's so tedious and boring, hard to stay engaged with it, so they only serve the purpose of chipping away at your Honour total and accumulating random afflictions. You die at any point? Restart. Oh you can't restart without another key, yeah, lovely thanks, I learned so much from my run, happy to repeat it... one day, maybe. This is so painful because it is SO EASY to fix (if we must have Trials; GGG please consider an option of scrapping this or re-purposing for something else) e.g. please let me try again; please let me die once or twice, the boss battles are really fun in this game. How am I supposed to get better... oh wait, I can trade and get OP beforehand and 'one-shot' the boss instead (well, it may take a few shots but you get the point). I ask: where is the fun???

Are we playing the same game? I have 2k life and just fly through it

-It's unfair that I am forced to trade with the website to get the Djinn's Barya to unlock the Ascendancies, because I couldn't find any.
-It's also unfair that I had to spam for an hour to trade with players who didn't respond to me.
-It's unfair that the game suddenly and randomly stutters during trials.
-It is unfair that suddenly client crash and everything is lost (Djinn's Barya, Currency, your time).

You have no idea how many things are unfair right now in PoE 2.

It's better to take a break and wait for them to fix all things that most of the players are complaining about, including the trials.

Yesterday I unlocked my fifth and sixth ascendancy and I said:
"I'm finally free, who cares about the last ones and I don't even want to imagine what they're like".