Poe 2 Ultimatum/trialmaster feedback - 150+ runs

First of all its worth mentioning that ultimatum farming (trialmaster not included) is a fantastic source of currency which doesn't really care about your magic find and has set rules which can be beaten by certain builds or any character with a minumum amount of investment.

The more options you can deal with, the easier it gets. And for that, CI is unparalelled. Immunity to poison and bleeds, doesn't care about extra chaos damage, and can tank a lot of the effects with ease thanks to its massive ES pool. Definitely will try this as my league starter farming strat if it stays profitable.

That said, there are some things i would like to address and hopefully see improvements down the road.

------------ Rooms, trials, and layouts----------

Theres just too much walking between each round. Im using blink/shield charge with a maxrolled shield of ardura and it still feels tedious to walk through long hallways. i understand that its one single map and you may be trying to squeeze rooms in a procedual manner but there has to be a way of making this less annoying. Assuming that out of combat movement speed buff is not an option, at least teleport us to each trial i guess.

Statue trials are way too slow. Make the statue move faster if there are no enemies nearby, which is a lot of the time. This would also be a great incentive to preemptively kill most monsters before pulling the statue, which would be a cool way of optimizing your run.


Timed trials should work like they do on Sanctum. If you kill 4 rares the round ends, which can be significantly shorter than the whole 1:30 mins.

Core trials are mostly alright, however layouts that require you to toggle walls don't feel good. takes a significant amount of time to go through the process in order to get all the cores sometimes, and the only thing this does is incentivize everyone to use blink on weapon swap which completely trivializes the mechanic. One could argue this is a clever solution to a problem, but i'd say that its just a requirement to not make it tedious, which is by no means the same.

----------------------- Bosses ------------------

Im not alone when i say that the tornado bird is overtuned. A lot of their patterns are extremely deadly but the tornado is just something else. I actually invested more currency into my build just to make sure that it would die instantly so i would never have to deal with it.

The Chimera gimmick also gets old after a few runs, making it drop the "coward" fate is funny but doesn't justify some annoying AI that will run away every couple of seconds. Again, incentivized to oneshot bosses just to make it not annoying...

The other bird is mostly ok, though its vomit attack can be daunting if you are not fully prepared for it.


----------------------- Rewards ---------------

I have mixed feelings about the rewards. 99% of the time the items offered are absolute garbage, simply because being corrupted without sockets means a bricked item, and often they don't even have 6 affixes. The saving grace are extremely rare unique corruptions, such as my 282% widowhail. I have ran this more than a hundred times and i can count on my fingers the amount of memorable rewards offered. And its 10 per run!

First, it should also offer currency. Poe1 ultimatum did, this one should do aswell.

Second, The current system makes you learn a set of ok debuffs and pick only those, the things you can handle with ease and not think too much about it. I would suggest something more engaging, which is adding a different reward for each of the three options.

This way if you have a really good reward but its tied to a deadly effect for that character, the player will be more willing to leave their confort zone and play more carefuly, in order to earn actually good loot. With this change you add more player agency over what they earn while also making ultimate way more exciting and less predictable.

And finally the elephant in the room, which was completely mishandled in my opinion.

For those who are not aware, you can reforge cores for a new random core. This include the very valuable azcapa, which is worth around 2 divs right now. What people used to do early into the league was buy the cheapest cores and gamble reforges with them, hoping to hit the jackpot. Which is all fine and dandy, though the math was severely off given that these cores were so bad that their currency exchange value was <1 per exalt.

What did GGG do? block these 3 horrible cores from reforging. Which undeniably solved the issue, however this caused another problem: it made these cores even worse as rewards.

They are part of the round 10 pool, which means that instead of getting a wave 10 azcapa you get a "converts dex requirements to int" which is worth a fraction of an exalt. You ran this for 15 minutes and this is your final reward, which clearly is usually a more valuable core. And you can't even reforge them now, which adds more salt to the wound.


Please, reconsider either reworking these cores or removing them from the wave 10 pool specifically, as its very demoralizing to have them at the end of a run. The amount of builds which can even benefit from this are incredibly small, so it makes no sense to have them there.


On a side note, the drop rate for the Adorned seems terribly small. 85 runs and no adorned drops led me to simply stop running trialmaster since shield drops were not enough to sustain my keys. This may be an economy problem yes, but consider how long it takes for 85 trialmaster kills. Meanwhile other pinnacle bosses (sanctum aside ,which gives you temporalis) can be fought in a few minutes.


Thats it for my feedback, and i would love to hear your opinions about the trial of chaos :)

"...really good reward but its tied to a deadly effect for that character, the player will be more willing to leave their confort zone and play more carefuly, in order to earn actually good loot. With this change you add more player agency over what they earn while also making ultimate way more exciting and less predictable."

THIS. Absolutely this if I had to cherry pick your post.

GUARANTEED CRITICAL MONSTER HITS | MONSTERS HAVE 50% BONUS ADDED CHAOS DAMAGE?

I've geared solely for just farming chaos trials myself and have for the most part been able to ignore all mutations but would be nice if players were rewarded for arguably difficult mutations vs others.

"

Vastrose#5931 wrote:

"...really good reward but its tied to a deadly effect for that character, the player will be more willing to leave their confort zone and play more carefuly, in order to earn actually good loot. With this change you add more player agency over what they earn while also making ultimate way more exciting and less predictable."

THIS. Absolutely this if I had to cherry pick your post.

GUARANTEED CRITICAL MONSTER HITS | MONSTERS HAVE 50% BONUS ADDED CHAOS DAMAGE?

I've geared solely for just farming chaos trials myself and have for the most part been able to ignore all mutations but would be nice if players were rewarded for arguably difficult mutations vs others.

For sure, and it would make it a bit more exciting. The original concept of ultimatum was very fun, having to choose between being greedy and try to squeeze more rounds for extra loot or leave with what you have. Seeing a high tier currency or item for the next wave was fun and would put you at the edge of your seat for that one last round, and i feel like this is missing from the poe 2 version.

We need more risks and more rewards :P

Very good post. I have just started Trial of Chaos farming myself and after about 30 runs I can agree with most of the points made.

Imagine if they removed the corrupted affix from the game and vaal orbs only give a chance at implicits. Would make the loot more fun and interesting in my opinion.