Trial of Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos are anti-fun and should be overhauled or scrapped entirely.

Not only is it extremely lazy to borrow content from POE 1 and repackage it as a worse Lab, but they also picked two of the most annoying league mechanics chock full of RNG nonsense.

Scrap these terrible 'pseudo-labs' and give us a fresh and new mechanic whereby we can acquire ascendancy points in POE 2 (learn to be creative).

Both of these encounters are anti-fun and need to have the time investment and difficulty reduced. I'd also like to point out how the labyrinth feels like the most enjoyable and fun experience in the world compared to these two trials.

In the meantime,

Either:

Tone down some of the bosses and shorten room encounter mechanics----

OR

Let us start 75% of the way at a checkpoint if we fail the final encounter----


Ascendancy points are too valuable to lock behind such irritating content.

Bring back Lab. These trials just straight up suck. Make it skill based not random punishment crap.

Yea its the worst level 41 Lich and I cannot get my 2nd Ascendency. I tried the Choas one and die like 3 times and quit...

These trials are just pure RNG toxic garbage that shouldn't determine whether or not you acquire your ascendancies. One mistake at the end of either trial in the third ascendancy boss room and I just wasted an hour + of my time. I don't even want to think about the fourth one (I will probably never get my third or fourth ascendancy points in SSF unless there is a major overhaul to the system).

They are fine, but a bit much for the third and fourth ascendancy.

Stops progress, which sucks.

So much this. I thought there is no way they can make labs more annoying, but oh boy was I wrong. These new trials are just extremely tedious rng garbage.

Heavily punish "wrong" builds, total RNG and take WAAAY too long time.
The whole honour system is also completely unfair and borked beyond reason. Some builds wont even notice it, and others will have a massive issue just by its nature. Any melee build for example suffers waay more with this system than any range build ever will. Honour should be completely removed, and even then it will still be insufferable.

The old system was nowhere near perfect, but at least you could be done fairly quickly and get out of there. Its a downgrade in such a MASSIVE degree its almost unbelievable.

Not saying it needs to be a 2 min faceroll easymode thing to do, but this is also not the way. Even bringing the old labs back would be a huge upgrade at this point.

Sekhemas are fine, you can go around rng if you know what you are doing. Chaos is harder but I usually do only my second ascendancy here so with unlimited key I can restart the trial if first two mods are too punishing for my build. Easy workaround.

Personally I prefer the PoE2 system to PoE a thousand time.

They're harder, not denying that but PoE1 lab are just cancer. The most boring thing ever.

Based on the number of people spamming ascendancy runs in chat, and the fact they are almost always full, it semes like the majority of players agree with this sentiment. It will be interesting to see what GGG decides. Do they crack down on people doing ascendancy runs, or do they fix a mechanic the majority of players truly hate?

I think they will ultimately either tone it down or scrap it.

That said, I do get the design philosophy, but it's beyond over tuned. For all the problems in the game, the good stuff, imo, far outweighs the negative, and GGG have clearly shown they listen to their players and are trying to make this a great experience. It doesn't mean it is for everyone, but Johnathon and Mark clearly do care, and I think they are making good progress with the game.

Except for trials. I don't even bother doing them anymore. I do the first 2 and that's it in a lot of cases. I'll try the 3rd, and can get it most times, but have yet to even attempt the 4th.

People can say skill issue, but I don't care. I'm a full time student, and I don't have the time to waste on it. I'm sorry, not sorry. And I like a challenge. I like that you have to work for it, but they are so unbalanced, it's not worth it.

Also, even if I were "good enough" at it, it still wouldn't matter. It's just so exhausting and, as the poster says, anti-fun. They're long, boring, incredibly punishing, completely unforgiving, inaccessible for a lot of builds, and almost entirely RNG dependent. Maybe there are tricks you can do get around the RNG for trials, but it's so specific and not accessible for most people.

Also, depending on your build, you may get a roll that completely undermines the core power of your build in the first few rooms, and then you're done for the rest of the run.

The whole idea behind rogue like games, which is what these are based on, is that while you can get a bad roll and get heavily punished, you stand a chance of getting an amazing roll and being really strong. That does not happen with trials. They took the rogue format, but removed the good rolls, so it's just a terrible experience.

Again, game wide, GGG is doing a good job. It's not perfect, but they are listening, trying, and frequently succeeding at crafting a good game here, except for trials.

I've found both my first and second ascendancy to be much easier to get in 0.3.0 than in 0.2.0 and 0.1.0.

There are many things that could be improved but this "anti-fun" stuff is kind of an exaggeration.

The bosses in Temple of Chaos are all over the place and add too much RNG. You could either get the Dragon that does no damage but takes 20 minutes to kill. Or you could get the bird that has 40 different one-shot area skills. Or the other bird that is mostly fine but can puke another boss so you need to learn a lot of stuff to defeat it but once again you need tons of RNG to get to learn its patterns.

Sekhemas is actually completely fine now for first ascendancy? Seriously, just do two or three tries, get good relics do 8 rooms and kill the golem.

Third ascendancy onwards probably need some fixes because of how it is actually necessary to farm tokens/barya 10 tiers behind of what you can actually do map-wise.