The heavy reliance on luck makes both trials feel terrible.

When I say terrible, I don't mean extra hard. Extra challenging feels extra satisfying to overcome. That's how trials should feel. Terrible feels bad even when succeding. Like killing a roach with your bare hands. Any sense of satisfaction for vanquishing the foe is overshadowed by the disgust of coming in contact with it.

In PoE1, trials were difficult but at least I could point to something I did wrong when I died. I could research how the special boss mechanics of the day worked and come up with a strategy to overcome it.

When you fail a trial in PoE2, it's primarily due to being unlucky. Eventually even the lesser of 3 evils is evil enough to tank the whole run. The feeling of agency over my success vanishes when this happens. It's closer to pulls on a slot machine than a test of my skills and gear. It's easy to motivate myself to get the boss fight right this time. It's hard to find the motivation to invest another 45+ minutes to see if this slot machine pull produces a winnable run. Designing the game this way is disrespectful of players time.

As of right now, progressing past the second trial seems like something for the very lucky or those who have the currency to dump on someone running it for them. I fear we're back to the days of PoE1 when most players go all season without finishing their ascendancy (because access was gated behind collecting portals in random maps). GGG recognized that was a bad game design then and so changed it.

Lets hope it doesn't take GGG years to realize the same lesson all over again.