Are you satisfied with the new patch's response to Trials?

Still hate it, not worth my time to even beat my head against it.

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Luidgi_Fisheye#2452 wrote:

I am lvl 74 warrior Titan. Can't do third ascension because:

- No barya (I have to grind lvl 60 areas that give no exp for a slight rare chance for one to drop? no thank you) (market prices are ridiculous, and people don't answer)
- Warrior too slow, no evasion, armour means nothing for damage avoidance
- Melee slams means you get close and can't dodge all the ground explosions
- Honour doesn't replenish (or rarely does)
- Debuffs are too nasty
- Buffs too weak
- Sacred water often is useless cause no merchant available
- Even at almost maxed out relic honour resistance: when you get hit, you get hit.

I don't mind challenge, heck I don't mind grind. I play this game to have fun. I am locked behind a frustrating mini-game. There is not a single ounce of fun-factor in it, and does not represent what the real game is.

There is only one way to solve this: remove honour, give us an NPC that sells barya. Let use use our builds (that we work hard for and grind for and tinker on). Let our builds be tested, not our patience.

I beat 3rd Ascension as Warrior. Heres my tips:

- Approach enemies diagonally instead of running straight towards them.
- Monsters are slower than in the base game and theres fewer of them. Do the Dark Souls tactic of running behind them to dodge their attacks.
- Use your faster basic attack for single mid-tier enemies. Basic attack does decent damage with support gems attached to it.
- Spider spit doesn't do Honour damage, it just slows you a little bit.
- Most dangerous basic enemy is the larger Crossbow skeleton with a jacket, she actually tracks you with her aim, kill her as quickly as possible so she doesn't get a chance to shoot her crossbow.

General Sanctum tips:
- Never pick paths that only have one path after it.
- Never pick Affliction that doesn't allow you to see future Afflictions.
- Prioritize getting the Boon that allows you to see 2 Rooms ahead, this is the best Boon.
- Losing Sacred Water is not the end of the world. Buying stuff from Merchant helps you win more easily but it is not mandatory.

Boss tips:
- Golem boss attacks have long recovery animations, bait out attack first, then go in to punish when Golem is still recovering.
- From Two Knights the Fire guy is the more dangerous one, prioritize it. Hammer of the Gods is very good for this fight because it can hit both knights at once.
- Scorpion boss kinda sucks, so build your Honor Resistance Relics. Try to get behind the boss to easily avoid the scorpion sting. The sweep has a long telegraph so its easier to dodge roll. Sand burying is the most annoying part, don't stand in the trap tiles that old djinn is lying. Just learn the rhythm of the jumps so you can Dodge Roll them.

Relic tips:
-Prioritize Honour Resistance. THE most important Relic stat for Sanctum runs.

If the balance gets tuned better, I can see it being okay to have these options at least. People who enjoy these mechanics and run them anyway should have no problem having these as their ascendancy options. I hope the third option is not TotA, but I'm guessing it will be. Fun fact...TotA, Sanctum, and Ultimatum were the leagues I skipped altogether, or only played a very short time. I appreciate that GGG tries out non-arpg mechanics as leagues sometimes, but they tend to be the ones I'm least interested in. I do not believe niche mechanics like these should be forced on the people who do not enjoy them, and we need to have an exclusively monster-killing and/or boss-killing way to do something as essential to the game as ascending our characters.

I know the Trial of Chaos is fairly close to what I'm talking about, but the rng options before each room are entirely too punishing. I have yet to attempt a set of trials that didn't have at least one room with 3 options that make it practically impossible. If those get tuned better, and both bird bosses get toned down to more reasonable damage numbers, I think I could accept ToC as my method of ascending, even if I don't like it.

GGG please consider adding a new version of labyrinth as a 4th option at some point in the future. I don't know why people hated it so bad. I didn't love it, but I didn't ever mind doing it, and I do really miss Izaro's amazing lines! It was mostly just outdated, and I think it could be much better in the new game. I can only imagine how awesome a redesign of the Izaro fight would be in this game!

I understand we probably all need practice at these before judging them too harshly, but we get so few entry tokens and it takes far too long to go through a run, just to get almost instantly destroyed by some overtuned boss ability before we have a chance to learn anything about the fight. As far as I've seen, the only people getting their 3rd and 4th set of points have builds that stun or freeze-lock the boss before it can do said abilities. These need to be fun fights, not either one-shot the boss or be one-shot by the boss.

No.

The fundamental problem with forcing players to go through the Trials is that people do not enjoy the Trials.

Sekhemas has a place in the game...as side content. And not main content. It is interesting, it should NOT be forced.

You can tweak the numbers and stats around to be free even, but at the end of the day for people who didn't like the sanctum format, we're just being forced to run content we hate every time we spin up a new character.

It has the exact same problem as Lab, if not greater.

Lab was not difficult. And even if it was difficulty for a weaker character, you could easily outscale it and trivialize it.

Core issue remains: Lab is not fun for many people, Sanctum is not fun for many people. Don't force us to run this each season please.

No. I definitely am not satisfied with the trials. It is not the difficulty, it is the mechanism. The reason I didn't play POE 1 was this same thing. Please stop gating ascendancy points behind horrible game design.

having RNG atatched to success is NOT good for these trials. got a movement speed penalty on my titan because of unlucky mandatory affliction that sent me to another room. warrior already suffers from movement issues that get even worse with movement speed reduction. I'm all for reading afflictions and deciding on the least bad, but the RNG ones are so bad for the game.

On my warrior I have max block and 3k life and sekhemas don't give a (fill in the blank).

In this game, half of character building is about building defensives. Trail of Sekhemas goes everything against this. Game says you need to be able to take a hit to do harder content and Sekhemas says "why are you getting hit at all".

When the core strategy is to hide in a corner and let minions and totems kill the boss because a hit could end your run, there is something wrong.

A game in early access, with so many bugs, badly balanced and poorly implemented mechanics should never, ever have mandatory bottlenecks for a characters main progression.

As it is today, there should be no sanctum and no ultimatum trials, just give the points as you progress in the campaign.

And there should definitively be no moronic hardcore maps mechanic.
That is the dumbest pile of c**p decision GGG ever made.

I think it is a good start, but I know the gap between my Sorceress and my Warrior, and these changes aren't enough to make the trial remotely fair between the two, let alone anywhere near fun as a warrior

At the very least, hitting a enemy with a melee weapon while up nice and close should restore honor.

And the Chaos trial just sucks.

Absolutely not. Not even remotely.

No.