DELETE SANCTUM

+1 can not play it as melee, smart design.

+1

Ascendency in POE 2 needs a rework

- Ultimatum and Sanctum are not fun or creative and feels very difficult for the suggested level requirement to challenge it.

- I was 8 levels over leveled for the first 2 ascendencies and they still each took me way too long to complete. It wasn't even like it was difficult in a good way. It was just straight up an unpleasant gaming experience.

- POE 1 Ascendency trial were significantly better

I ignored this mechanic in POE. I skipped it outright until I got to Act 3 and tried Ultimatum. After getting absolutely annihilated a few times in there I decided to just give this a try. Figured I'm overleveled, shouldn't be that hard.

It wasn't "hard". At the end of the trial, I was unbelievably tense in my neck and shoulders, anxiety peaked, doing everything possible not getting hit and lose honor. I stopped playing just to relax. Lame, I know, but damn. It was a reminder to why I happily ignored it in POE.

No excitement or a sense of achievement and accomplishment like I should feel after completing it.

Honestly, kudos to the players that can knock this out all day long and really get into it. This is probably here to stay because we dislike it, I hope I can find the enjoyment in it over time.

I really hope the 3rd Ascendency doesn't suck.

100% agree

I completely agree. Both sanctum and ultimatum must be removed as mandatory mechanics for ascending or completely reworked to be fair, achievable and not locked behind trash rng mods. Ideally, the first three ascendancies should come from campaign quests like it was promised in the early promo interviews they made.

It is annoying because sanctum doesn't inspire players to design and build their characters for actual gameplay. The only thing in sanctum that matters is damage, your hp/res/defenses don't matter.

This means that if you spec/build for being a well rounded and balanced character, you will be significantly weaker at sanctum than if you went purely glass cannon. Not to mention the HUGE advantage range has over melee in a "take no damage" type content.

The funny thing is also picking ultimatum, which is the exact opposite, but also the hardest content in the entire game in poe 1. The only builds which can do ultimatum are builds which only work with this mechanic. Typical "immortal builds" not really much offense at all, most their damage comes from broken mechanics like DD. The large vast majority of builds aren't capable of surviving more than a few waves at best.

I really dislike that your runs for ascension not only take a very long time (sanctum). But that so much is left up to chance, you can have a great run go really poorly with some forced afflictions, unlucky room rolls, or some unfortunate damage taken from some enemies, and waste all that time and not even complete it.

I think taking two of the hardest league mechanics from POE1 and forcing all players to do them in POE2 is pretty fucked imo. (sanctum isn't that hard when you can off screen 1 shot everything before it can move. And ultimatum isn't hard when your character can't die 99.99% of the time. (I've had both a hexblast miner and an immortal CWDT build.)

I guess "Sanctum" means the 1st Ascendency Trial? (I played PoE for a few months and gave up on it because of feature bloat. Not familiar with all of the terminology and lore)

I don't mind the first trial, but I do think it needs to some tweaking. I completed it easily with my Witch first, but really struggled when trying to do it on Warrior. I was WAY over-leveled when I finally beat it with Warrior.

The problem I had was that it's just too many rooms. It takes way too long to make each attempt and the Honor mechanic is not balanced for different classes.

The design as it stands now is too heavily influenced by luck, with too many opportunities for your luck to turn and ruin a run.

Remove the honor mechanic, or reduce the length of the ruin to maybe 5 or 6 rooms total, and I think it's probably gonna be fine for most players.

This isn't content that players are going to want to farm or redo for fun. It should be a skill-check that determines if the player has sufficient mastery of the game mechanics to advance to more challenging content.

100% agree.

Also, Sanctum massively rewards minions builds, ranged builds and evasion builds, and massively craps on melee tanky builds.
It should not be like that.

It is also incredibly random.

Reward ascendancies as you progress the campaign.
Award two points after act 2,3,4,and 6.
Thats it.

And if they make some actual FAIR trials for all builds later, great.

Yup sanctum sucks major ass. I hate this mechanic

+1, first and second ascendency are a pain in the ass, third and fourth are a luxury thing, where it was a mandatory and relatively easy thing to get in PoE (third and fourth are 10 and 80 ex on tft)