Everyone hates the trials of ascendancy.

Everyone? I disagree. I'm thoroughly enjoying ToA. I love the Souls-like difficulty. The developers should maintain the challenge and not cater to the snowflakes.

I hate sanctum. I skipped that league because it was so bad. There's just no choice whatsoever, and the same is true in PoE2's trial; you just get shoehorned into one path without knowing what lies in store. Sometimes you just get bricked by bad modifiers, and the loot isn't even good at the end.

I liked ultimatum. I thought it was a good league; at least it was 'funny' and you had the 1 in 10 billion chance of getting a Headhunter or other high-value items through the Ultimatum rewards. But it doesn't work in PoE2. They just copy-pasted the same modifiers, and now we don't have movement skills to get across the giant circles on the ground. Monsters are much faster than you are and will gap-close to you before you can play. It doesn't work in PoE2 and I would rather skip it.

So I would agree that everyone hates the trials of ascendancy.

Alright here we have someone who doesn't understand how a game is made. No problem I will explain to you while "dissecting" the BS you gave as an answer.

"

Powderoff#1246 wrote:

We are couple of days into early access (closed beta to be exact), game is not "made" as a final product yet. As being in a testing period this is actually a perfect time for big changes before a full release. So yes, there is a lot of constructive advise/criticism to be had: bug reports, improvement suggestions, etc.

I am talking here as a senior 3D artist who works in this field for a while now, so I can say from experience how this stuff works and how it doesn't work.

Here's the thing; BEFORE you start a game project you set up a roadmap for game design beforehand and work your way up that according to that roadmap to ensure that you don't bring up unnecessary workload to finish the product.

What this means is that it is set in stone beforehand how the game is going to be designed and how it will be presented to the customer.

Such things as bugfixes and small changes to "some" mechanics in the game does exist but never ever will you see any company who will overhaul a whole game mechanic where the game is built upon.

The ascendancy trial in this case is a "core mechanic" so to be removed from the game and to put another new mechanic will take shit ton of work and time to do so. This will cost manpower, money and as said time which no game company will ever do because this is a net loss for them.

So what will happen is they're gonna say to you high probably "it's your loss" as player and you will have to work with it somehow. Maybe some "Nerfs" might happen to the mechanic but nothing game changing. And the problem here is that Ultimatum is a mechanic for masochists to begin with.

Your improvement suggestions will have no effect in the game and if you check the history of GGG you will definitely see that they don't care about the "suggestions" you mentioned up until now. They always have done what they wanted to do and you either played the game or quit until next season.

Bug reports is ok anybody will make bug reports but reports about such things that suggests taking out a core mechanic will not be taken into consideration nor will they spend any second even reading it.

"

How do you know it's "a fact" that most people didn't like those mechanics? Do you have a statistics of engagement from GGG as proof by any chance?

You just need to check the player base percentage in every league that plays these mechanics. Most of the player base plays either chests, Vaal (Alva), Heist and so on to make much needed currency and/or items/skill gems. Most of the player base do not play Ultimatum because it is a hassle. Sanctum is more for niche builds so many people leave that out too. You just need to check the data then you will see who plays what.

"

This is false. Trials are not the whole game but a part of it, so of course it can be changed if GGG wishes so, without overhauling the whole game.

Ascendancy trials are the core of this game. I dare you to play POE1 or 2 without any Ascendancy! What did you say? you can't? Thought so. So basically when the roadmap for the game design was made. The devs sat on the conference table and decided long before they even sat upon their own desks to code the game what the mechanic was going to be. So this mechanic will STAY my friend and actually that is what the problem is. Maybe not for you but many people despises those mechanics so its forced.

"

What is your definition of "forced mechanic"? Everything can be thought as forced mechanic when you're limited to some final number of choices to achieve a goal. Ascendancy can't come free, there will always be something you have to complete to gain the ascension, thus it will always be "forced" by definition, will it not?

The standard mechanic for the ascendancy was acceptable up until now. There was no need to change it. It's a matter of people liking it or not.

Some mechanics are too much of a hassle to a person to play it. Therefore they leave it out or they stop playing the game.

A good game design is that you make the least hassle on a core mechanic, that way people might find it annoying but They can rush it trough like you can do in the ascendancy trial in POE1.

A forced mechanic is to force the audience to do a mechanic in the game that most of the player base does not play at all. You can go and make some research to understand what I am saying when I tell that most of the player base does not play Ultimatum.

"

Again, we are in a testing stage of game development (and at least 6 more months by GGGs own words). This means that things can, and many will, change in some way during this time. I have no idea why you think that nothing can be changed.

A testing phase in a game development means bugfix, stress testing the servers, server load testing, general testing of balancing and so on. Changing a core mechanic does not include this you do not test it, you implement it into the game and the audience has to work around it. Core mechanics are not subject to change this is what you people do not understand.

"

It helps categorize the threads, so it does actually help to write them in a correct part of the forum.
No idea where I'm trolling, can you point it out for me please as I might have done it unintentionally?

Honestly, most companies does not even check the "suggestion" tab in the forums. They look for streamers, and their audience what they say. This is the easiest way for them to do so. Most forum administrators are not devs at all so they pick up suggestions and some people look at it "sometimes" but most of the time those suggestions lie there.

And by the way if you think you're not trolling on intention, the way you try to defend a subject that is wrong and then telling people not to whine is trolling in itself. This is a sort of passive aggressiveness that some people admittedly are adept at and those are mostly some forum jockeys that have plenty of time in their hands.

"

Anyway, I hope you take this early access for what it is, in time things will be improved, balanced, changed or whatever you want to call it. Reliable history of GGG is suggestive the game development is in good hands, so there is no need to panic.
Have a nice day.

I know what a early access is. Improvements will be more of a balancing skills and other stuff. Core mechanics will never be changed except the community's majority is pushing for it. And to be honest that's my hope because this way many people including me will ask for a refund and stop playing the game.

i very agree with the above post that it shouldnt be mandatory to play this shit ascendancy system like this , not everyone like stealth game or jumping like tomb raider .. this mechanic with honor system is really broken to melee class and i dont know about majority or not , the mechanic should be optional and not tied to ascendancy .

Like em because they're not easy.

I never did the league these trials came from, I actually usually stay away from leagues and enjoy my OP standard gear so I was a bit dubious about having to do them in PoE2. But I actually really enjoy them so far, lots of risk and reward, kind of regretting not being able to play the leagues now. Just keep doing them and you might grow to like em.

Individual difficulty aside how exactly do we know what barya or ultimadum gives the third and fourth set of points?

I've seen all kinds of conflicting posts.

Once I discovered the first trial to ascend is Sanctum after opening my first key and getting a relic I logged out and haven't been back since. Doing that on multiple characters is not for me.

I believe it's here to stay however it would be really nice if there were multiple pathways available for ascension.

The list of mechanics I don't enjoy is very small (Heist, Sanctum, Kalandra, Ancestors, Old Harvest) but each a big killjoy on the desire to play without other options.

Everyone knew sanctum was only practical with certain builds. A lot of people never played much of sanctum precisely because of that.

So for a sanctum-like trials to be the ascendancy trials in poe2, it is certainly a wtf moment.

To me the sin of the honor mechanic design is that it violates the underlying rules of the game.

After all if you have a melee build that is expressly built to be tanky and have slow big attacks then avoiding taking hits is a totally different play style that requires a different build. The honor mechanic makes it so the purpose and benefit of such a build is nullified. You can't magically turn a melee build into ranged dps in order to do the trial.

The game literally has nodes on the tree that outside of trials work as expected, but inside the trial would be either useless or very detrimental (like the no dodge roll one or the blocks still take partial damage one)

So my first impression of the poe2 trials of ascendancy is certainly negative, but I also still haven't been able to beat the first one yet with my warrior character, I was waiting to try more until I get a weapon upgrade. As when I tried it last time I got to the part where there are portals spawning an endless stream of mobs and it seemed like it bugged out cause I killed the two guys tending to the center portal but the portal itself never stopped spawning mobs and my dps was too poor to make headway on that, as I got a lvl 10 weapon and my character is lvl 25, not had any luck on getting a better one yet.

Not my favorite mechanics: I hate Sanctum, and I slightly dislike Ultimatum.

Problem is that both are unfair for melee. Sanctum because it promotes "don't get hit" gameplay, good luck doing that on melee. And Ultimatum just strips you of any defense you might have making you basically useless. Also makes you dodge all manner of traps, time in which you can't really deal damage.....

On ranges classes, Sanctum is slightly better, even good in some cases, but Ultimatum just makes you so weak it's not even wirth the effort.

Also Ultimatum seems to be harder than intended at lvl 38 zone. Even if you're 5-10 levels overleveled you still het clapped by the boss! because the debuffs you get are just that punishing, and bosses there hit 10 times harder.

I don't mind difficulty, but these trials are not difficult, they simply are unfair. They are specifically made for certain builds (very few of them), if you're lucky and chose the right build GG, if not.....tough luck.

The biggest L so far for me. Love everything else about the game, but this.....