Poe 2 Ultimatum/trialmaster feedback - 150+ runs

I've just farmed 50+ 10 trial ultimatums in a row and wanted to agree with much of the OP and also add some new points.

Overall I like the Chaos Trials and think they're a far more interesting expression of the roguelike system than the Sekhema trials. It feels like the player has more agency when it comes to the difficulty modifiers, and the modifiers themselves are in general interesting to deal with and make for more engaging gameplay without being just stupdily frustrating like some of the Sekhema effects.

**Rooms**

- Survive Until the Timer Expires: Monsters spawn painfully slowly, and almost 100% of the time, when they do spawn, it is just 2 packs of white monsters that you kill in a second or two and then just stand around doing nothing waiting for something to do.

By far the worst room, you can't speed this process up in any way by either character power or player skill, and it is pretty much an afk room. Monsters need to spawn much faster, and killing rares (at least, or maybe just killing anything) should subtract seconds from the timer. OR at least give the player something else to do while waiting around.

- Sacrifice Enemies In Blood Circles: Similar to the above, monsters spawn very slowly and are almost always white monsters, resulting in a lot of standing around waiting and doing nothing.

- Collect The Soul Cores: If you get pushed by a monster while putting the Soul Core into the altar, you DROP the soul core and the Soul Core gets teleported back to it's original spot on the floor, meaning you need to go back and pick it up again and insert it again. This is very frustrating and time wasting, especially as it can't be prevented by clearing out monsters near the altars, since more can and do spawn and then charge into you causing this issue. Presumably this is just a bug and not an intentional design.

Some of the soul core room layouts are definitely pretty tedious, and I often find my approach to this room is just running back and forth between cores and altars ignoring monsters as much as possible to get it done quicker. Least favourite room after the AFK room.

Suggestions to make these more interesting: Get rid of the switches and wall puzzles, they're not engaging, just annoying and cause more waiting and walking. Instead why not have each soul core guarded/held by a mini boss, so that there is some actual gameplay in these rooms, would make collecting the cores much more engaging than just running past everything and clicking on them.

**General**

- Downtime: Definitely too much pointless walking/waiting between the trials. Between the elevators, the stone doors, the time stops, and the sometimes very long hallways, I feel like at least half my time in a run is spent just getting to the next encounter. This does not make for engaging gameplay and seems like it should be very easy to improve, this is one area where Sekhema does it better.

- Where Are the Rares?: In many runs it seems like there are zero to very few magic or rare monsters, even when selecting the Lethal Rares modifier, I often run into 3 or less rare monsters over an ENTIRE run. I guess 30% of zero is still zero... Regardless, one shotting sparse packs of white monsters and an occasional magic pack isn't particularly engaging. Perhaps pack size and magic/rare monsters should increase with each modifier you select as a baseline.

- Endgame Scalability: This might be an unpopular opinion, but whereas Sekhema trials feel painfully long and tedious, Chaos Trials often feel very short. This is not a problem/criticism, having content like this that you can jump into for 10-15 minutes is a positive. But I think the Chaos Trial formula could also lend itself well to a more 'infinite' system, where you can keep progressing and stacking more difficulty modifiers until you die or cash out.

Or at least perhaps have Ultimatums with more rooms, 15, 20 etc. Since in Sekhema you're already going through dozens of rooms per run, this doesn't seem too crazy. Perhaps you can use currencies on Ultimatums like you can with Waystones, which increase the room count and give various modifiers to the run. This again doesn't seem too wild since the Trialmaster can already drop Ultimatums with various rarities and modifiers.

Perhaps have a modifier that increases the area level of the rest of the run, or maybe every X rooms, or when you defeat a boss, the rest of the run gets +1 to area level.

These options would provide some extra endgame scalability to the runs so that they can still provide an element of challenge and interest for powerful characters.

- More Difficulty Modifiers!: The current pool of difficulty modifiers is fine, but can get stale pretty quickly if you are doing a lot of runs. It would be awesome to see the pool expanded so that you are less likely to get runs where you are just choosing the same 3-5 that your build can deal with easily. I think this would increase the replayability significantly.

- Heart Tethers: Unable to use travel skills while tethered (only tested with Leap Slam and Stampede). Is this intentional or a bug? Means that if your clear skill/s are also travel skills you can't use them and thus cannot choose to stay in the heart tether and fight if you don't want to get stunned, and also have to try and walk/roll out of it while getting attacked and not being able to use your abilities. If this is an intentional extra challenge that's fine I guess, but it is very counterintuitive and is not indicated in the description of the Heart Tether modifier.

- Rewards: Definitely agree that having all the rewards be corrupted, while a thematically fun idea, in practice makes these rewards pretty much useless. In 50+ runs I have never seen even a vaguely usable item from the non-soul core loot. As others have said, if they are going to be corrupted they could at least have max quality, sockets, and affixes. Even so the majority would still be vendor/salvage trash, so I don't see how this would be too good.

- Chimera Boss: The flying off is not an interesting mechanic, it's just annoying, and due to the size and verticality of the arena, means that if you don't kill it before it flies off, you spend more time walking around to find the boss than you do fighting the boss. I don't think I need to elaborate on why this does not make for engaging gameplay.

**Overall**
Chaos Trials are probably my favourite endgame activity, I hope to see them refined and expanded on in the future.

For reference: Lvl 93 Titan.

Thank you for reading and have a great day Exiles.

Aaand the waypoint saying "you cannot go there from here" lol.

You do click the waypoint from some distance and the character moves to the checkpoint as it shall do, then the game automatically stops the movement near the waypoint and opens the map, but is unable to teleport the character because it stands too far away from the waypoint (where it has been stopped by the game itself)