Ultimatum Trial

At lvl 38 it feels very overtuned and the mod options are insane. Not even remotely close to be on par with equivalent level content.

+1
Boss attacks feel too oppressive when combined with the trial penalties. If this is intended, fine, but make Trials of the Sekhema harder to establish the precedent early.
I feel incredibly frustrated getting one tapped by boss mechanics (skill issue) but having to run three rounds of the same encounters to get another attempt and a 1/3 to get the same boss,
AND not being able to forfeit the quest inscribed ultimatum when I brick my modifiers makes the words of the Trialmaster sting that much more. Am I getting trolled by this mechanic?

Ultimatum is superbusted.
I've tried it at lvl 40, 1k life, 86% evasion and failed 4 times.
The penalties are superhard and i had 0 problem before with anything else, be it boss, act boss or sanctum run.
I've made a full level while trying to finish the trial, but even with that, the penalties are just brutal.
Ruin, 50% less recover or boss dmg boost with less dmg received.
Or Ruin, whatever zoning mechanic (lighting, phys explosion or corrupted blood pyramid) and escort the totem.

It's a bit strange - being a main mechanic - it got the green light in this state. It is supposed to be the first contact / tutorial for Ultimatum.

While having some problems in the beginning of my first POE 2 playthrough, I had no trouble after Act 1 and dealt with everything the game threw at me just fine with a bit of gear + skill upgrades and learning mechanics. Ultimatum brought this to a full stop.

You have mods like all mob hits bleed and poison, 50% allres, invisible mob applies ruin and at 7 ruin you lose the run, no hp + mana flask charges for the whole run (not even after completing a round) etc. This would be hard enough if 4 of those were stacking together, but 10?
It doesn't help neither that in most rounds a bazillion mobs spawn, just waiting to chain stun you to death. Not sure if it feels that much better for ranged chars.

There are hardly any semi difficult mods, mostly ones you could deal with far later in your character development when you have a couple of immunities / "free" mods to chose from. And also being much beefier when it comes to defense layers.

I wonder what mods the endgame version of Ultimatum has right now, when the values for the "entry" level are already that sizeable. For level 38 this feels overtuned at least.

Edit: Also, please GGG, no one likes "escort" missions in any game. Please substitute this one for something else.

Both Ultimatum and Sanctum are the first league mechanics I disable, alongside Blight.

If Blight ends up being the third "trial" I am going to have a stroke.

Bumping this because same. The chimera just oneshots you if you have any damage mods on (good luck skipping them) and the bird flails like it's having a seizure and then you die.

Who okayed these mods, by the way? This is endgame-level stuff, the kind of thing that would make a fight hard in poe1. FIFTY allres? The ES mod? You kept the "7 stacks of ruin" guy? Like holy shit did anyone at GGG even try this with an on-level character and non-perfect gear? And that's not even mentioning how crazy it gets if you had to take a "turrets that shoot X element" mod or god forbid the omnitecht. The screen becomes unreadable in some cases.

"

visibledark#0732 wrote:

snip

Edit: Also, please GGG, no one likes "escort" missions in any game. Please substitute this one for something else.

Completely agree, except that last part.
The problem is the characters are way too underpowered to handle such penalties at early level and you really have to hope for good rolls for penalites, otherwise you are screwed.

As for the escort, please please, any time over the alternative, which is the 3 Soul gems.
Not only does it do a huge phys DoT, you have to place them in 1 by 1 for a long animation, while everything is chasing you + the penalties (like blood orbs, turrets and whatnot) and also, you can get a version of the map where once you pick up an orb, you get blocked in and you have to active a lever to drop the raised walls, while being chased by mobs, the penalites and corruption being building up on you.

Took me 7 or 8 tries (thats half of my total deaths btw) and in the final one i got relatively lucky with the penalties and managed to pick the least brutal ones for the boss fight.
Like the last room, -50 global def, extra ES for monsters or ruin ...

Was
not
fun....

+1

Level 42 Merc here. Restarted 5 times.

- 1st one was a log out because I didn't know how the Soul Gem trial worked

- 2nd one was the bird boss one or two shotting me with its wind gust (and that's with a bunch of area hazards like fire projectiles and lightning runes. They were all manageable, but the boss got me while I was dodging hazards)

- 3rd one was dying to the enemy volatile hazard in the first room. I bunched a lot of them together and thought I could just run over the mass of volatiles at the same time to detonate them but they exploded too quickly

- 4th one was a crash when I pulled a lever in the Soul Gem trial... lol

- 5th one was the bird boss one shotting me with wind gust (no damage boosts, no area hazards)

I'll try it again once I upgrade my gear, but it definitely feels overtuned both in terms of hazards and the bird boss. If I somehow don't complete it even after upgrading, then I guess I'll just run more Sanctum (Sekhema).

The options sure seems overtunes for the level we are.

And the soul gem room is just stupid mechanic... getting killed by mobs/mechanic because you have an animation to put it in the socket...

So I just completed lab while having reached cruel act 2 and now being level 52.

I'm not really sure if GGG changed something about Ultimatum already, but this time around it felt almost too easy for my power level.
Anyways that would be the expected outcome when being 14 levels overleveled.