The labyrinth is both boring and frustrating

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The_Wuggly_Ump wrote:

Background: I'm pretty casual, 90% solo, and I mostly play for the weird, cool, ridiculous, often underpowered builds you can make thanks to weird combinations of skills and junk. I'm not good at this or any other game. In 2000+ hours I've never made it past level 84 because I get bored playing the same character.

So. The labyrinth is awful. It's both boring and frustrating, which is a damn impressive combination. It's boring because:

1, It's way too long, and every area feels the same since all the traps have the same mechanic: wait, then move.

2, The "puzzles" are incredibly simple, you don't actually have to use your brain at all. Which I actually approve of in theory, because who would want to use their brain while playing an ARPG? But of course, if you don't have to think about them, puzzles are entirely pointless.

3, The bosses, which should be a chance to break up the tedium, don't use any new mechanics or particularly original attacks (and attacks are just copy-pasted from previous bosses). There seems to be something going on with Izaro and stuff that spawns around him to click on, but clicking it didn't seem to have any effect, and it definitely didn't have any feedback on what it was supposed to do, so I just attack the guy.

4, Lots of little corridors, traps that slow you down, etc. Everything is designed to make the experience take more time, not by adding content but by making the existing content slower to get through.

It's frustrating because:

1, On a self-found first character in Perandus league I just ain't gonna have the resources to kill the bosses unless I've been lucky or I'm playing a cookie-cutter OP build. Luckily I found a Tabula, so I do enough damage - but they still have vastly more health and defenses than any bosses in normal difficulty, which is frustrating (if you haven't been lucky and/or want to play something unusual) and boring (because whether kiting or facetanking, it just takes too much time).

2, The lab is very uneven in difficulty. Beyond the fact that the entire labyrinth is much more difficult than any other content before maps/Act 4 Merciless, which makes no sense, the Normal lab bosses feel level 40+ because of their DPS, one-shot potential, and damage mitigation, but if you go through it several times in Normal you're instantly overleveling the trash mobs, and they quickly become a total waste of time. Basically, you run through a mess of worthless trash to get to migrants from a higher difficulty.

3, The traps do too much damage on Normal (and probably Cruel, I dunno, I quit after my third or fourth lab attempt). Scaling by health percentage could make sense, but since the game is supposed to be easier on earlier difficulties (one assumes?) it just feels weird, out of place, and, y'know, frustrating.

4, Navigating the traps with PoE's control scheme just feels awful. I mostly just ran through stuff and chugged pots because it's so awkward trying to figure hitboxes and how to dodge a trap when your controlling the character more or less one click at a time. The controls just do not work for this kind of content.

5, Again, starting from nothing, your defense is gonna suck unless you're lucky. I'm at 1k HP and otherwise fairly crap defense, since I haven't found anything decent and most of my build concept's defense comes from my first two Ascendancy points.

I'll lay out my deaths real quick: first time, I died to Izaro's Blood Rage pet; fine, that's on me. Half hour later, I desynced into some traps. Took a break, came back, died to the burning ground trap because I couldn't see where I was supposed to go thanks to the room being too large. Went to bed, woke up, spent an hour going through the lab again, died to Izaro stage 2 one-shotting me. That's three deaths I couldn't predict (why would I expect a Normal boss to one-shot me?) or control, and that's at least an hour and a half of time wasted.

Back to point 5: I shouldn't get one-shotted on Normal. I'm against it in the first place, being able to die instantly without warning is a bad mechanic, but it's not usually something I have to worry about with a bit of preparation, and when it does happen, I don't usually lose much progress. But because this is my first character this league, I have no way of preparing except vastly overleveling the content and coming back - which makes the lab an even bigger waste of time, since I lose out on XP and useful loot. I should also mention that by this point I'm already six levels above the damn place from running it so many times.

6, It punishes players with poor connections. The labyrinth is impossible if you're having an unreliable ping rate. PoE's always been a game I could play casually without worrying about being punished for living in a rural area with only one (awful) ISP, but thanks to point 7 coming up, it's now totally unplayable if my connection's acting up. Luckily this has only happened twice, the first time was the desync death, the second time I just quit the damn thing rather than desync into traps again.

7, This is the big and obvious one: you have to repeat the lab every time you die. This isn't how the rest of the game works, so it's unintuitive, but worse, it's annoying. I honestly can't remember the last time I got angry at a game - I die constantly in just about any game I play, I'm atrocious at video games, but it's been a decade or more since I had to stop playing a game due to being too pissed off to continue. And that's kinda where I am now - I just don't feel the game's worth playing with this content. Getting bored isn't fun, and getting frustrated is even worse, and that's the entirety of my reaction to Ascendancy so far.

I'll probably check up on patches to see if the issue is dealt with, but considering the last boring content introduced (Broken Masters' awful fetch quests) was never fixed, I think I might actually be done with this game. It's very disappointing for me as I've proselytized the game for years to anyone who would listen, but the labyrinth is entirely lacking in everything that made PoE fun and I'm not gonna play a game that isn't fun. I'd just skip the lab, but the whole reason I play is to try weird new builds, and nearly every Ascendancy class has multiple new build-enabling things to try so I'm missing out on a huge amount of diversity by not wanting to slog through the dull obnoxiousness of the lab.