Completing Ascendancies Should Not be a Despised Experience

Hi folks,

Maybe I'm out of touch and, in reality, people LOVE the mechanics of either the trial of Sugma, or trial of Khekos, but I'm just curious - just HOW overleveled do I have to be to complete any of them?
I've played PoE for about 8 years now and I've downed all the Uber content several times over. I'm quite familiar with the mechanics that PoE 2 borrows from PoE, that are used in these trials.
However, the Trialmaster and budget Chronos (whatever his name is) in PoE 2 are extremely overtuned.

For context, I'm a level 90 Monk with okay gear, can blast Tier XV maps and don't struggle with clear, or single-target. The trials I chose were only level 75-76, but when I get to the last bosses of each respective trial, it just seems like those 15 levels disappear. They seem to have 3 or more times the expected HP and deal double damage.

I'm looking for two things:

1) Feedback (whether you think any of these mechanics are balanced/okay)
2) Advice (apart from avoiding the worst possible afflictions, etc. what can I do?)

Is melee simply dogshit if you don't have 500 Divines' invested?

It does feel weird to me, and a little underwhelming, that you can not have completed ascendencies when you reach "endgame".

In my mind, when I start "mapping", my character's build should be complete, and I would rather focus now on incremental gear & skill gem upgrades as well as the ATLAS trees.

It's also confusing how you can start trials early, but you dont have to, and you can do them overlevelled. It feels like a half designed concept.

They are both garbage and terrible design.

Ascendancies should be complete and easily achievable by lvl 75.

Ascendancies should not be RNG gated

Ascendancies should not be build gated

Whichever dev keeps trying to force players to do their stupid Sanctum/Ultimatum mechanics should be fired. The playerbase have spoken, we hate those mechanics and nobody wants to do them.

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

They are both garbage and terrible design.

Ascendancies should be complete and easily achievable by lvl 75.

Ascendancies should not be RNG gated

Ascendancies should not be build gated

Whichever dev keeps trying to force players to do their stupid Sanctum/Ultimatum mechanics should be fired. The playerbase have spoken, we hate those mechanics and nobody wants to do them.

Well, that's not exactly true as many players me included had and still have fun doing trials. Sekhemas is not really that hard if you know what to do.

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

Well, that's not exactly true as many players me included had and still have fun doing trials. Sekhemas is not really that hard if you know what to do.

Question, are you running trials outside of doing ascendancies? If so, are you doing it because you like the trials or because you are chasing rewards you can't get elsewhere?

As it stands now, I don't have fun with these trials.
They are tedious, RNG-prone and the Honor system locks my melee characters out.
As it stands, I basically plan my builds to be complete with 6 ascendancy points, and the last two are just a bonus... that I haven't achieved yet.
I outright ignore any build that would require all 8 points.

PoE1 Labyrinth was a little annoying at times, but 1. never purely tedious and 2. not build-dependent. Of course, bad builds were definitely going to have a hard time, but that is valid for the whole game. Any average build played with a decent amount of player skill could manage a full ascendance. (I'm not saying "easily", but it was possible.)

And more importantly, coupled with the One Death punishment in Atlas, this makes build-experiments and casual-gaming in PoE2 a lot less affordable.

If their target audience is now only Hardcore gamers, let them say it outright so I can stop even trying.

Not of fan of either system. Honor is the worst. It isn't a big deal room to room as you can have high resist and choose paths that restore honor. The issue is that it is present in a boss fight. Get rid of that crap.

Trials I do run. Have run, dozens of times. To farm currency, basically. Selling soul cores and hoping that Trialmaster drops something valuable(shield, diamond). Which he hasn't as of yet. Trials are easy for my build, but still incredibly tedious. And the 3-headed tornado bird boss still randomly will just kill you(even after he dies) and I don't understand that. Not even using tornado.

Anyways, keep them both in game and give different rewards. Make ascendencies attainable through something that doesn't completely suck and actually makes sense for the ascendency? That's my opinion, anyway.

Sekhemas is fun even running them just for rewards. Though this might be a bit less if you dont play SSF.

Personally even outside of SSF, mapping forever would be pretty tiring. Doing other mechanics break that up. But it is rewarding, you get exalts, rares, jewels from sekhemas.


Chaos I dont really like. I never enjoyed ultimatums CORRUPTED gear because .... its a theme I guess. I think its stupid to have corrupted gear as a reward unless it has some crazy weighting or something unique about it but its just random pieces of random rare mods, on a piece of a gear you cant change.

TLDR:

Sekhemas: Much Love, run it even without going for ascendancies
Chaos: Eh... Only do if I am bored or feel like it.

Just did my SSF warrior on level floor 3 run as well. Got through it :D

i spend most of my time in trials i like it exept from gauntlet wich tilt me for some unknown reason :D

First 2 unlock are easy, done it with weakest toon ever so idk; don't bother me than the nexts unlock are harder i think they should be and with a decent relic set the difficulty is all relative.

i don't think many advice is needed for the first trials, get honour res. After +merchant relic choice are realy strong and will make your life easy so 75% res and like 5+ merchant choice (then pick reduc boon price, speed, 50%water, damage, resist ...)

Just play Infernalist where only 2 nodes out of 13 really do much of anything =D