Honor mechanic for the ascension trial is... kind of really hateful.

The current trials honor mechanic is kind of really, really annoying.

When the boss has around 30 or 40 thousand health and there is no way to regen honor mid battle and the boss puts dozens of vulcanos that last a year to disappear makes it EXTREMELY annoying.

I can't even think how the trials will be for melee characters.

I would absolutely vote for a removal or at least changes to the honor system as it is currently.

The trial could be twice as hard when it comes to enemies or damages, but that honor is absolutely hateful, being fully honest.

I would suggest at least that we gain 1 honor point every x amount of damage dealt to enemies.

Been discussing a bit on the honor system with friends, some who play, some who don't and had a few ideas that could help make the ascension trial and honor system less hateful.

One way that could be very interesting is that you get to choose between a few options before the trial start on what is honor for that trial, meaning you choose what makes you lose honor and what makes you gain honor.

| Suggested Options for Ganing Honor |

Option 1: Regaining honor when killing and causing certain amounts of damage to enemies.
Gaining 1 honor when killing common enemy and 1 honor for every X damage caused would make it a lot more manageable to handle your honor, while being fair and not scuffing the trials or changing it too much.
Honor to you is being strong enough to kill enemies.

Option 2: Regaining honor every time you block an attack and for every 100 damage reduced by armor or elemental resistances on a single attack.
This option for the tank focused builds means that it would be possible to maintain your honor by being so tanky that being hit doesn't matter to you.
Honor to you is being strong enough to resist any attack.



| Suggested Options for Losing Honor |

Option 1: Losing honor per second when enemies are within X distance from you.
Losing a 1 honor per second for each enemy within X distance from your character, growing with time the longer that enemy stays within range.
Honor to you is not allowing enemies to get close to you.

Option 2: Losing honor every time you get hit based on the damage taken.
The current way to lose honor.
Honor to you is not being hit by enemies.


| Final Considerations |

With these options, the player can make many combinations to test their honor.
A tank could choose to lose honor based on damage taken as is but gain honor by tanking that damage, so if you tank more damage than you take, they will counter each other or you will gain more honor than you lose.

Similarly, a DPS character could choose to gain honor by killing and causing damage but lose honor by enemies near them, so honor to them is in killing enemies before they even manage to get close.

This would make the honor system not only a lot more acceptable, but actually fun in challenging yourself.

With these 2 options for each, the recombinations can fit a lot of different builds or make for fun personal challenges, which would actually be fresh and interesting, perfectly fitting into the idea of a challenge on your honor as the devs intended, easy to be implemented in a short amount of time and needing little code to actually be introduced to the game.

Thought of a few more options for gaining and losing honor that could be interesting if this change to the system is applied.


| Options for gaining honor |

Option 3: Gain honor by dodging or blocking an attack that would hit in the last second before you are hit.
Honor to you is not doing unecessary movements.

Option 4: Gain honor whenever you finish a room in under X minutes or kill a creature in under X seconds after first damaging it.
Honor to you is being fast.


| Options for losing honor |

Option 3: Lose honor whenever you use a potion or tricket based on the effect of protection or amount regained.
Honor to you is not needing to resort to external consumables or tools.

Option 4: Lose honor by second whenever you take too long to kill a creature or finish a room.
Honor to you is not taking longer than necessary.

please love of god i was never do in poe 1 since i only play melee . and now they make it to campaing progress not even see room 3 .

As opposed to changing things within this trial I would allow players to do different [non-honor] challenges to ascend. This way they can pick a style of ascension test that works for them.

Ideas:

A series [ladder?] of boss fights that you have to do deathless may be one idea.

A series of encounters with "non-boss" monsters that have a difficult mix of melee, ranged, spell, monster ability, etc -- almost like a survival mode.

Heck maybe bring back ToTA and you have to lead your team to victory through the tournament.


******************************************************************


There are plenty of alternate ideas. Unfortunately if something as core as "Ascension" is gated behind honor mechanics I'll just go looking for a different game to play as I'm just "not gud" at those sorts of things -- heck I even consider rogue-like elements in an ARPG to be backwards .... YMMV.

It took me a number of tries to complete my first trial.
Getting to the boss was easy enough, I only failed in route 2 or 3 times, but the boss got me several times.

In my experience, when fighting the boss, it really didn't matter how much honor I had when reaching it.
Whether I had a bad run and had less than 100 honor left, or if I had a great run and had over 500 honor left, it didn't matter.
Because the boss didn't beat me by whittling down my remaining honor, it beat me by smacking off all the honor I had in one hit.
And when I won it was because the boss never hit me at all.

"

The_Song#4903 wrote:

It took me a number of tries to complete my first trial.
Getting to the boss was easy enough, I only failed in route 2 or 3 times, but the boss got me several times.

In my experience, when fighting the boss, it really didn't matter how much honor I had when reaching it.
Whether I had a bad run and had less than 100 honor left, or if I had a great run and had over 500 honor left, it didn't matter.
Because the boss didn't beat me by whittling down my remaining honor, it beat me by smacking off all the honor I had in one hit.
And when I won it was because the boss never hit me at all.

That would be the problem I have with such mechanics. I realize there are people that WANT games that effectively force them to be perfect. For me though I will [virtually never] be perfect so if there's a critical mechanic that doesn't allow for significant mitigation AND recovery I just simply won't be able to do it.

So far my only "big" problems with the game as-is are the "Dodge or die" (DOD) mechanics and Honor gating character progression.

"

The_Song#4903 wrote:

It took me a number of tries to complete my first trial.
Getting to the boss was easy enough, I only failed in route 2 or 3 times, but the boss got me several times.

In my experience, when fighting the boss, it really didn't matter how much honor I had when reaching it.
Whether I had a bad run and had less than 100 honor left, or if I had a great run and had over 500 honor left, it didn't matter.
Because the boss didn't beat me by whittling down my remaining honor, it beat me by smacking off all the honor I had in one hit.
And when I won it was because the boss never hit me at all.

In my case, I'm playing a minion witch and while I can keep my distance from the boss and fight from away quite pretty easily, my damage output is constant but not too high, so I only lost so far due to having my honor whittled down by the vulcanos and falling rocks barely ever being hit by the boss in any run.

I only managed to defeat him because I REALLY lucked out and got the boon that you are immune to all damage for the next room on the very last room before the boss, so I was impervious to all damage and just took the time to damage him without dodging at all.

"

KingAlamar#4071 wrote:

As opposed to changing things within this trial I would allow players to do different [non-honor] challenges to ascend. This way they can pick a style of ascension test that works for them.

Ideas:

A series [ladder?] of boss fights that you have to do deathless may be one idea.

A series of encounters with "non-boss" monsters that have a difficult mix of melee, ranged, spell, monster ability, etc -- almost like a survival mode.

Heck maybe bring back ToTA and you have to lead your team to victory through the tournament.


******************************************************************


There are plenty of alternate ideas. Unfortunately if something as core as "Ascension" is gated behind honor mechanics I'll just go looking for a different game to play as I'm just "not gud" at those sorts of things -- heck I even consider rogue-like elements in an ARPG to be backwards .... YMMV.

I believe there will be 3 ascension options at release, but my focus with this suggestion is because this first ascension, which has bennefits to being repeated, currently heavily favors evasion and high DPS ranged builds while unfairly punishing others.

The other ascension option seems to only be in act 3, which is very unfair to force some players to finish act 2 without their ascension due to being heavily incompatible with the first option of ascension.

It also doesn't change the trial much, just offers other options with a clear reason under the phrase of "What is honor to you, Exile?"

Honor has different meanings to different people and if I understood, we are taking the trial assisted and guided by the Djin, so it makes sense that the Djin would ask us that and the trial would take our understanding of honor into consideration.

It also is a self-balancing mechanic for all builds since it gives players the choice AND it would be absolutely great for content creators to do crazy challenges, since it would allow them to choose the worst possible combination for their class.

The trial is indeed extremely anti-melee.
You might have enough staying power to facetank the boss, and in fact it's quite easy to reach that threshold. Yet the honor system means you can at most take 1-2 big hits or a few small ones.

As a warrior, I had to outlevel the boss by quite a lot before the fight was reasonably manageable. My initial tries ended up with the boss slowly chipping away honor meter here and there, and while I didn't take any big hits, still the meter drained away a lot faster than his hp (which he has quite a lot of).

I would understand if the boss would be some "highly technical" one with clear hit zones and big damages, but no, its main source of damage (to the honor meter) is the fissure spam and falling rocks spam.