Ascendancy is not fun.

I agree to the above. The first floor of sanctum feels kinda fine and doable but the rest I lost hope for. For ultimatum I tried 15 times the free version and it was as horrible if not worse than in PoE1.

Honestly I never liked and always avoided Ultimatum and Sanctum in PoE1 and with the current state I am not hopefull for the 3rd trial being Trial of the Ancients to be any better. I would prefer to run Lab trials over again.

This is just not fun.

So now I am left with either playing game with half of my ascendacy or just go back to PoE1.

The honor mechanic makes ascendancy a huge pain. It would be one thing if it were adequately supported, but it's not. Ok, I've lost honor for some reason. Sucks. Guess I'll spend sacred water to get it back!

Oh, RNG screwed me and I don't have any since drops may or may not happen.
Or, I chased sacred water rewards to ensure I could restore honor, only to get no chance to, and I got to the boss with 500 sacred water and no honor.

We don't need the whole map revealed, but we do need to be able to rely on at least one opportunity to offload sacred water before the end of a map, after an opportunity to actually get some.

I'd rather the honor mechanic just go away entirely. It's not fun.

The very idea that you can breeze through it if you picked minion builds, or a ranged build with tons of evasion, whereas if you went tanky melee you get brutally punished is stupidly unfair.

They are gatekeeping the biggest level up for a bunch of builds behind mechanics that brick some builds and becomes almost obsolete with others.

How in the world this got by testing and theory-crafting I can not understand.

Horrible, horrible game design.

Hated both ultimatum and sanctum mechanics in PoE1, Hate them more now since its forced upon you to complete it, just to get ascendancy points. Don't even know how to express how much I dislike ascendancy being like this...

I hated lab in poe1.
The first one in act 2 was acceptable, not that hard and not dying from random floor trap and OS by a stupid boss is okay.

But still this isn't my cup of tea.

I agree. I would like to ascend by Lab rather than Ultimatum or Sanctum. I don't like this mechanic and I love Lab.

Ultimatum was "fun"
I had to chose the ghost which follows you and gives doom on hit because the other 2 choices where build bricks, then I got the trail to collect orbs and then sit out a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animation to put the stone in. So you have to kite the ghost away, run back and be glad there is no deadly mob waiting for you while you put the stone in.

Then the boss completely bugged out for me, he randomly ecided to appear at the top and bottom of the stairs so I had to run up and down while the stair was fully covered in degen effects!

did the first ascendancy on level 30-32 and got it, tried the 2nd ultimatum like 20x now and cant finish it.. im lvl45 the trial is lvl38 but some rng always fucks me up.

every addition to the lab is just not fun!!! 0/10 for the labs

ascendars in act 2 are a mistake, honor is the biggest mistake someone has ever made, labyrinth in POE was much better.

I agree with others as well.
First sekhemas trial was complety fine although mostly probably cause I play ranged, even if I hate the mechanic.
First ultimatum was rather bad had to overlevel and basically finish the entire act 3 before I was finally managed to do it.
Second sekhemas now this is absolutely awful. Harder mechanics, harder overall cause more rares spawn from what I saw, and on top of that there is 2 boss, and two floor which make it even more rng based than it was.
Second ultimatum, I did not reached it yet but I am pretty sure I will utterly hate it.

Bring back labs or figure out a completly different mechanic for ascendancies that are fair, rather then using 2 of the most rng punishing leage mechanics.