Ascendancy Trials in POE2 make the game completely unbearable and unfun.

The ascendancy trials are challenging, but the ones in cruel difficulty have left me with no desire to continue playing the game.

Here is my experience with the Trial of Sekehema:

1.) D/ced during my first run and lost all progress. This means I had to farm for 10 hours before getting another entry item.

2.) On my second run I ran into something I've never seen before and some bad RNG so I ended up losing all my honor on the second to last floor. This sent me back to farming for another 6 hours.

3.) Third try I fought the two Golems for the first time, got hit by one attack I wasn't prepared for them to do since I had never seen the content before, lost 800 honor, and now I must go farm for another 10 hours.

Frankly, I'm just not going to do it. I also suspect, that most people who are employed and have a life won't do it either. The gauntlets are too long, the debuffs are too obnoxious, and you get punished way too hard if you've never seen something before.

You either need to tone down honor loss by about 50% in these trials, or give us unlimited entry items. I'm not going to grind 20 some hours worth of entry items to grind my way through learning these trials.

So until this is patched I'm done with the game. I have other things in my life that demand my attention more than mindlessly grinding entry items.

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Excellus#2314 wrote:

So until this is patched I'm done with the game. I have other things in my life that demand my attention more than mindlessly grinding entry items.

Kind of curious about the percentage of people doing Sanctum in PoE. What made GGG add that into the 2nd game for ascendancy?

I just uninstalled because of this too. Back to Stalker I guess. Will check back on the 2nd game in 2026.

Because GGG have the weird fetish to bring the hate of the community for no logical reason. There is no other explanation. How many people were playing Sanctum and having fun in this Dungeon Crawler mini game in POE1?
And after ofcourse they saw, nobody wants to play it, they are enforcing by making it ascendancy related...
Good old GGG never changes....

I don't think it's a bad trial. I just think the parameters are too punishing relative to the rest of the game.

If the game was generally about dodging traps, and avoiding every single attack an enemy makes then the trial would make sense. The problem is the trial requires you to play considerably different than 99.999% of the rest of the game.

For example, I'm playing cold sorc with Ice Armor. I don't mind if an enemy comes up to auto attack me because they're be autofrozen and instantly die. In this trial, that valid tactic will result in -300 some honor. Why?

Trial of Sekehema is heavily overtuned in my opinion, honor losses are too punishing
Context - trying to get 3rd ascendancy with lvl 78 char, trial zone level was 71

1st attempt - lost most of the honor when fighting 2nd boss, wiped on 3rd floor
2nd attempt - died after successfully completing time trial room with crystals - looks like they still damage if you linger in room for too long (I tried to collect loot). HP reached zero but no honor was lost
3rd attempt - died to a poison trap (10 chaos res, but you wouldn't expect everybody attempting trial to have 75 chaos res?). 3k honor and 2k hp deleted in a second

I give up. One mistake (or pure rng) and run is ruined. Can't even imagine how melee characters are feeling there

Completely unbearable sounds about right. I'm sure some folks can bear it, but I don't think I can and it really kills my motivation when I realize that it only gets harder from the absurdly hard ones I *hate* doing now. Probably should just stop playing until they completely redesign it, because I won't put up with that much frustration for a videogame. I don't have the time or blood pressure for that nonsense. Love the game other than the trials btw, beat elden ring dlc before they nerfed it, and these trials are not just punishing, but they are punishing and demoralizing. Stacking a million debuffs on you over 20 minutes and then throwing a boss at you that throws permanent pools while flying around is straight player abuse imo.

There are so many ways they could have challenging trials that aren't demoralizing, but I really question the line of thinking that led us here.

Agreed. Completely lost interest in playing further once I encountered the trials. The game is too punishing.

Maybe lab not be perfect but 100% better than sanctum or ultimatum... Today i finish, one week its enough, create build smash couple bosses but game not have for now too much to make me stay longer, all mechanics like breach delirium rituals very fast boring, i have hope about expedition (gamba) but new system destroy my mind... How long i can play only for roll armor/weapons/jewelry. Tujen should still have currency. The same feeling about currency to craft, after one week play my stash tab curr still almost empty, only trans orb and augm full, i cant even easy craft map to rare because now orb alchemy its like divine orb in poe1, balance its very bad and this must be fixed because Poe always 50%fun its crafting. See u in full game release, ill hope content will be much bigger (items/mechanics), crafting bench back and gamba ofc (that's most important for me;)

New to PoE2 and starting to enjoy the game up till the first trial as a melee warrior. But the trial within itself for melee players is a bit over tuned in certain aspects.

List of Examples,

-Chalice Room generating specific elites that can regenerate health with either the bramble, volcanic, or ice to slow. Or when there are more than one in certain sector of the map.

-Randomizing Rooms to where the player doesn't have the option to regenerate lost honor.

-Mobs trailing and following you after defeating the room mechanic.

-Poor honor regeneration options

If this sounds like complaining then please allow me to apologize in advance for this post. I'm not a hardcore, max difficulty, type of gamer. I am more or less just a player trying to understand and play the game at a steady incline.

I think they just looked at the metrics of the last few leagues and went "Wow! Lots of people are running Sanctum! They must love it!"

When in reality those people were running it on hyper-specialized builds because it shit currency, not because they really liked it.

Absolutely unbelievable that no one in a meeting went "Okay, but... Can every build run this?"