Sekhema Trials are a bad mechanic

OK, locking progression behind what should have been achievement hunting is bad enough. But the design of the Sekhema trials is just utterly frustrating and quit-inducing.

Honestly, I've decided if the Sekhema Trials remain in their current form, I'm not going to be doing them with any future character

Problems with basic mechanics:

* Tokens
Requiring a token for entry. As stated, if this was optional achievement hunting, then ok. But a part of character progression requiring hours of farming to just get a chance to complete? Trading the third (and fourth) ascendancies is also quite expensive.

* Honor System
The honor system is the most perplexing mechanic here, as it goes against the rest of the game. In the rest of the game getting hit is OK, because you have Armor, Evasion, Shield, Life Regen, Life Leech and a myriad of other mechanics to deflect or mitigate incoming hits. But Honor makes it so you can't get hit at all. You have to kite and dodge every single attack. And every single other mechanic in this broken game mode is centered on utterly shafting the player in regards to their honor.

* Afflictions
On top of dealing with honor, we also have to deal with afflictions that range from "get cancer and die" to "melt your skin off and die". Most afflictions will destroy your build (which is already not working, because you have to kite everything). There's afflictions that completely remove your Shield, Armor or Evasion. In a game mode where you are supposed to take as little damage as possible. Especially if Shield gets removed, you also lose the Honor it confers. There's an affliction that causes you to do half damage, and an affliction that causes you to move at 3/4 speed. The worst part is that usually you don't have an option to avoid afflictions, and very rarely do you get the option to remove one. There's afflictions that are not that bad, but are badly worded to make you avoid them (e.g. hits remove 5% of life, mana and energy shield, when it actually should say "damage", as "removes" sounds permanent)

* Room selection
Someone had the bright idea to make us plan our route ahead (which is actually the only good idea here). And then someone had the bright idea to conceal the path forward. And then someone else had the bright idea to sprinkle in some afflictions that make planning your path obsolete and you just move randomly or blindly forward. Worse yet is that often, selecting a room is pointless. Half the time, whatever your choice, you'll be taken into an Affliction, which can be run-ending. The way pathing works makes it so you can get locked into a path that leads you to failure by quickly dismantling your build. There's no way to go back or change paths. Afflictions coupled with Room selection makes Sekhema trials a big time-consuming lottery.

Problems with specific mechanics:

* Enemies
It seems enemies are chosen so as to inflict maximum honor damage. With the exception of the small yellow spiders (whose webs just slow you down instead of damaging you), every other enemy either does extreme AoE damage over wide areas or is either a really fast mover or their projectiles are fast moving.

* Bosses
Same issue as the enemies but tuned to the extreme. All bosses are designed to destroy your honor with incredible and constant AoE attacks that can cover half the (already small) area.

* Traps
Just why? Where else in the game are there traps? Just another way for losing your Honor.


How to fix Sekhema trials:

* Either remove afflictions, or seriously nerf them by 80-95%. Chaos Trials already have Afflictions as their theme. They are not needed twice.

* If you don't want to remove Afflictions, then remove the Honor system, or replace it with some less punishing version of it (e.g. 20% of incoming damage is removed from honor).

* If you don't want to remove Honor and Afflictions, then tune down the enemies, and especially the Bosses. Give us enemies that attack in ways we can actually dodge. Eliminate all enemies that change the terrain with persistent damage (e.g. Burning). Ban Rare monster modifiers like Fiery explosions, or exploding purple trees. Remove AoE attacks.

* Don't require tokens for entry.

* Let us see the entire path, at least in the beginning of each Test, so we can actually plan our route accordingly.

Before anyone says the usual "git gud, cope". I have played with every class in PoE 1 since it was in early access. I know how the game works. I know how builds work. I have a Monk who finished Normal without dying and Cruel with dying two or three times (excepting in Trials). I'm currently doing Tier 7-8 maps (highest drops so far) with absolutely no issues.

I agree with the vast majority of this.

I think that as Sanctum, Sanctum is fine. It's even better than it was in PoE. Same with Ultimatum. As Map-Alternative content, these things are fine. Good even.

As Ascendency mechanics, they are absolutely awful.

"Trials" in PoE, the Labyrinth, are a very solid stat check. If you cannot progress through the Labs, your build is bad and you should switch it up to make sure you can. They tested your damage, defenses, ability to control your character, etc.

Trials in PoE2 do not do this. Sanctum tests your ability to play Sanctum mechanics, and Ultimatum tests your ability to not get shafted by RNG. Neither of these things actually help you determine if your build is functioning well and can progress through the game.

Not only that, but each time you go in for your next Ascendency point, you have to repeat the Trials you've already completed. That's like in PoE having to do Normal Lab for your first points. Normal and Cruel for your second. Normal, Cruel and Merciless for your 3rd, then all 4 back to back for your fourth. A total of 10 lab runs instead of 4.

That's what we have to do in PoE2, and it sucks ass.

Ascendency trials need to be treated differently than "I just want to run Sanctum/Ultimatum" runs. Aside from that, I don't think Sanctum or Ultimatum have any business being the litmus test by which EVERY SINGLE BUILD ANYONE EVER MAKES is tested either. They fail miserably at that crucial aspect of Labs, and instead actively punish creativity.

Yeah well... I died on the floor 3 twice.....
I still don;t get it why we have to run the 3rd Floor to get our asencendy points...

I am ok with 1st & 2nd floors (20/30 ish rooms in total)
But once I start the 3rd floor...it's ruthless for me
I guess I'll have to farm until I get to lvl 80 and then try it again.

I see what they are tring to do with the ascendencies in EA , that's ok, it's supposed to create a challenge

The 1st set of Ascendency points from the Trial of Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos are easy
The 3rd Ascendency will most likly be easier then running the 3rd floor in the trial of sekhemas when the full game releases, therefore I'm ok with the challenge, even though it's frustrating for me as well.

I understand the end goal of GGG, so I jsut accepted this, it's cool :D

This is the exact problem of only releasing part of the content. While some players claim Sekhema's are too hard, others are literally farming it. Same with the Chaos trials. We know there is another version of the trials coming, and perhaps that's the one the builds that struggle with the other 2 will be good at. We can't really know, and asking for other stuff to be changed without the whole picture isn't going to work either.

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While some players claim Sekhema's are too hard, others are literally farming it.

That's exactly right, because certain builds perform extremely well in Sanctum while others literally cannot function within the Honor system mechanics. You want to Ascend a Magma Barrier build? Tough shit. Better hope you find an Ultimatum.

It's important to note that nobody is "farming sanctum" when they need to Ascend. You either have an easy time, or it's a huge struggle fest. It's entirely build dependent. If you're "farming sanctum" you're doing so on a Sanctum Farming build.

It's bad mechanics for Ascendency for this exact reason, amongst others.

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LVC1FR#4407 wrote:

That's exactly right, because certain builds perform extremely well in Sanctum while others literally cannot function within the Honor system mechanics. You want to Ascend a Magma Barrier build? Tough shit. Better hope you find an Ultimatum.

It's important to note that nobody is "farming sanctum" when they need to Ascend. You either have an easy time, or it's a huge struggle fest. It's entirely build dependent. If you're "farming sanctum" you're doing so on a Sanctum Farming build.

It's bad mechanics for Ascendency for this exact reason, amongst others.

You just stated that some builds work and others don't. That's the point of having 3 different choices on how to ascend. If this trial isn't for you, then why not do the Chaos Trial?

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mikeab79#3627 wrote:

If this trial isn't for you, then why not do the Chaos Trial?

Ultimatum isn't much better. 50/50 chance you'll get a set of shitty mods and brick the run, especially and once again dependent on the kind of build you're using. Not because you're bad, or your build is bad, but because you just got 3 options that all break your build or make it basically impossible to finish.

You also have to wait until you find an Ultimatum you can run that will give you points, instead of being guided to it via the campaign.

We don't have the third one yet so there's no telling how that will behave, but at this rate I'm certain it will just gimp different builds in different ways, which is a terrible trend.

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OrnluWolfjarl#2561 wrote:

There's afflictions that are not that bad, but are badly worded to make you avoid them (e.g. hits remove 5% of life, mana and energy shield, when it actually should say "damage", as "removes" sounds permanent)

My understanding of this is that remove is different than damage and cannot be prevented or lowered. Since I play CI, I wasn't sure if it would simply outright kill me so I never picked it up but the trials have mobs that hit you for very little damage many times in a second and I wonder if this would cause them to just delete you in the blink of an eye.

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Summoner#7705 wrote:

... but the trials have mobs that hit you for very little damage many times in a second and I wonder if this would cause them to just delete you in the blink of an eye.

It does. I got stuck with some bad options and picked this. I got hit by an attack that did multiple (more than 20) small ranged attacks, that did little to nothing any other time, but instantly killed me that time.

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Summoner#7705 wrote:

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OrnluWolfjarl#2561 wrote:

There's afflictions that are not that bad, but are badly worded to make you avoid them (e.g. hits remove 5% of life, mana and energy shield, when it actually should say "damage", as "removes" sounds permanent)

My understanding of this is that remove is different than damage and cannot be prevented or lowered. Since I play CI, I wasn't sure if it would simply outright kill me so I never picked it up but the trials have mobs that hit you for very little damage many times in a second and I wonder if this would cause them to just delete you in the blink of an eye.

Yeah, it can do that. If you stand in burning ground you can get deleted. Sometimes it's the least bad option though. The run that induced this post, I had the 3 first room options to choose between this one, the one where you do -50% damage and the one that gives you an extra affliction every time you pick an affliction.

Doing -50% damage is suicide, as I've found out many times so far. And getting 2 afflictions for the price one is just nope. So I had to pick it up. Then I got almost insta-killed by the Fire boss's AoE default attack in Test of Will.