This is not how I thought our "Choice" between Ascendency methods would work.

Obligatory "I'm not a dev" but I think this makes sense. Expectations, perception and propositions.

So the Labyrinth in PoE worked well as the path to ascendancies because it was relatively universal. Resistance check, DPS check, defenses check, etc. Pretty much any build besides ZDPS could do them, and you could bring a friend if you needed. (Not to mention Izaro is a literal celebrity, easily the most quoted NPC in the entire game. He's got his own MTX sets even.)

Ultimatum and Sanctum are not doing this for us. Ultimatum and Sanctum as mechanics actually restrict the builds that can successfully do them in their current state, and that's wildly unfortunate.

Examples: If your build functions off of being hit (block builds, thorns, etc) you simply cannot do Sanctum. There is also a genuine chance in Ultimatum that you will be posited with a choice between 3 debuffs that brick your build, forcing you to start over. This can be okay for a room or two but often once they've stacked up, even taking the objectively best choices, you're boned because an important part of your build just doesn't work in there anymore.

You don't actually really have much "choice" do you?

Your first one is a Sanctum, your second one is an Ultimatum. Full stop, at least that's where I've stopped. AFAIK you also cannot do these in a party (i dunno, i got no friends).

This is very different than what I thought, for whatever reason, these systems would behave. Now, I want to be clear, I'm not sitting here going "but wait how come this game isn't the one from my imagination?" --- The concept I'm about to explain just sounded like such a natural evolution of the Lab, that it felt super reasonable. Without much thought at all on my end, the ol' brain was just like "oh yeah this makes sense."

When I first heard we would have a "choice" between Sanctum or Ultimatum, I immediately thought "Oh, so you can choose between traps or mobs. Dope."

The Labyrinth can pretty easily be split into two "halves" --- Traps and Monsters.

I thought Sanctum was going to double-down on the Traps aspect, a very big half of the Labyrinth experience. Just a chaotic maze of traps and switches and doors, spikes and fire, giant falling blades, pendulums. NO enemies. Honor keeps track of your ability to not get hit, not just your ability to out-regen the DoTs. You can do this on a build with crap defenses and no damage, if you need to, if you're slick enough. I think this would be a lot better than what we have now, with some apparently much needed changes to how much damage to honor certain things do.

I thought Ultimatum was going to double-down on the Monsters aspect, the other big part of Lab --- beating Izaro, surviving his dps/def checks, fighting packs of strong monsters. If you hate avoiding traps and have the coordination of a toddler, here's your rooms full of tough stuff to smash. The rooms each have substantial build-changing debuffs, a goal mechanic (survive the timer, kill everything before it runs out, etc), to prove that you can use your build against some challenging odds.

Granted, this is sort of how Ultimatum works, but the way you just get a bunch of awful debuffs that persist through every room is really crap for a lot of builds. I was honestly not expecting it to be exactly like original Ultimatum in that regard.

I expected instead something like each room proposing a choice between three setups, essentially choosing between three different rooms. 3x Debuffs and a Goal Mechanic in each one, and only that one. Each room becomes a proving ground, can you face these specific challenges this specific time, a bunch of times in a row. I think this would be much more fluid for so many more builds than what we have currently.

I really think that if these two areas behaved as above, they would be totally fine and even enjoyable in their different aspects. But hey, what do I know. Like I said, it just kinda seemed reasonable.

Thanks for reading and gl, Exiles. I hope your drops are far better than mine have been.