Current Trials Set Players Up to Fail Ascendancy 3

I took me a long time to really put my finger on the problem that makes people hate Trail of the Sekhemas and Trail of Chaos so much. I've farmed both significantly in the endgame for profit, and enjoy them both quite a bit now, but experienced a lot of frustration trying to get my third and fourth ascendancies and hated those systems along with the much of the rest of the community for a while.

While I stuck it out and became quite comfortable with them, gained a better understanding of how they work, and came to like them quite a bit, I understand why many bounced off them and didn't enjoy the process. I spent a lot of time thinking about why, and I think the answer is the game path of least resistance disrupts the difficulty curve of these by allowing and encouraging you to get your first two ascendancies with rank 1 trials.

You can get ascendancy 1 in with Balbala's Djinn Barya which has unlimited retries and is a rank 1 sekhema trial, and then you can get your second ascendancy with the chimeric inscribed ultimatum which has unlimited retries and is a rank 1 trial of chaos.

The problem with this, is that players jump from rank 1 trials with unlimited retries, to rank 3 trials where they have to refarm their access if they fail which is a large difficulty spike, they aren't largely encouraged to engage with these mechanics outside of ascendancy, and at ascendancy 3 they find themselves with a lot of catch up learning to do.

The trial of the Sekhemas is particularly guilty here, despite being pretty objectively the easier trial, because the correct way to engage with it is to farm relics for a few runs to ease the difficulty before completing additional floors. When players come back for their third ascendancy after completing only rank 1 of each trial, they have few to no relics, no experience with floors 2 or 3, and they get bounced off by the difficulty spike.

I would suggest that the correct way to reframe this to preserve the difficulty curve is by making the second ascendancy harder, and a more direct continuation.

To accomplish this, I would propose having the Wetlands Chimera drop a rank 2 Djinn Barya with unlimited retries, and a 7 wave chimeric ultimatum, with some slight differences. These difference being that the 7 wave ultimatum has a break after wave 4 where players can collect their rewards and use a rank 1 ascendancy altar for their first ascendancy if they chose to skip the initial ascendancy trial in act 2, and then allows them to continue on to wave 7 to earn their second ascension.

Forcing players to complete the middle difficulty will make them more familiar with the mechanics of these going into the third ascendancy and in the case of sekhemas should mean they have more relics to empower them for that as well. It also would not hurt to have Balbala drop some starter relics when first killed with her djinn barya to better introduce and tutorialize this system and its importance in the initial sekhema run.