Trials need a rework

Have played poe2 for 250hours and liking it pretty much, but, every time e need to do 3th and 4th trial i just wanna quit after every run.

Its RNG oriented, take too much time and feels so extremely punitive.

I like the ideia of being hard, but, i dont feel like its hard and fun.

I REALLY wish GGG make a different approach to it. Its the worst part of the game so far.

it was a lazy way of creating difficulty

they have relied on randomness for many things in this game where they should have gotten creative instead. honour and random debuffs instead of challenging content. then you get to go farm another entry token. who thought this was fun

trials a fucking garbage on so many levels

you do know you can skip sanctum and just do ultimatum instead right? ultimatum is by far much more consistant and easier to clear for your 3rd and 4th ascendancies, at least from my experience after leveling every ascendancy to 85+ in 0.1 and doing smith to 90 so far in 0.2, on nearly every character i skipped cruel sanctum and just mapped up to 75-80 and did ultimatums for my trials.

My recommendation to anyone when they're struggling on sanctum.. skip it.. just get back to maps and 75+, line up some ultimatum keys and run those, clearing a 10 floor ultimatum gets you your third ascendancy, and if you do that with a trialmaster popset you can get your 4th ascendancy from killing him (and he's easy).

personally i farm ultimatums for soul cores at this point and can clear them in ~15 mins quite consistantly. usually once i have 3-4 ultimatum keys i just spend an hour or so running them and sell the cores/trial keys, just to break up the monotony of atlas grinding.

I only do sanctums once i have a character that can just 1 shot the final boss and get there easily, and that's usually 90+ on most characters i've played.

thank you for sharing that.

But... as a game design, it doesnt make sense for me why do we "only" can just get access to 3th and 4th ascendencys after 90+.

As a casual player, its a heavy grind and i dont think ppl will be willing to spend maybe hundreds of hours just to get acess to it in the deeper endgame...

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beozito#2664 wrote:

thank you for sharing that.

But... as a game design, it doesnt make sense for me why do we "only" can just get access to 3th and 4th ascendencys after 90+.

As a casual player, its a heavy grind and i dont think ppl will be willing to spend maybe hundreds of hours just to get acess to it in the deeper endgame...

You have a long time to get your ascendancy during the league. I dont see why being a casual and not having a lot of time to paly would prevent you from getting your 4th Ascendancy.

Also its not nearly as RNG based as you think. There is only a small amount of actually detrimental Affliction. 5% lost on HP, Mana and ES for example of no Evasion or ES.

And you can almost negate that issue by not taking random Afflictions. Simply get maximum Honour resistance and you should be fairly easily able to get all of the Ascendancy points. I was running Sekhema with a non stat stacking Monk without any Honour resistance before 0.2 it was extremely easy to do with maximum honour resistance. Basically ignoring all traps.

I completely agree... It makes zero sense for a system like this to be driven by RNG.

It should be a tough challenge where your skill and the power of your character are the key factors in achieving the Ascension — not some RNG-based system.

So many times you're forced into ridiculously bad choices that completely break your build, or you get weird, nonsensical stuff that just makes the whole experience way too frustrating!

There's nothing wrong with it being hard — quite the opposite, the 4th Ascension should be hard — but please, remove the RNG, for the love of god! You often invest resources to buy the item to even attempt the challenge, put in the time, and then lose because of some completely meaningless RNG.

Almost everything in this game revolves around RNG — even in places where it makes absolutely no sense for RNG to exist. It’s supposed to be a challenge, but it ends up feeling like a game of luck. And if you're lucky, you win… if not? Too bad. Game over.

+1

I think about doing trials then I think about 4 things and decide not to do it

1) Sheer randomness of debuffs

2) Honour

3) Entry tokens and fragments for Trialmaster

4) How tiresome and unenjoyable wave-based content is to begin with

then I continue doing maps
only to realize that it makes more sense to sell fragments on currency exchange than to actually do the bosses

game is not in a good state

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Alzucard#2422 wrote:

"

beozito#2664 wrote:

thank you for sharing that.

But... as a game design, it doesnt make sense for me why do we "only" can just get access to 3th and 4th ascendencys after 90+.

As a casual player, its a heavy grind and i dont think ppl will be willing to spend maybe hundreds of hours just to get acess to it in the deeper endgame...

You have a long time to get your ascendancy during the league. I dont see why being a casual and not having a lot of time to paly would prevent you from getting your 4th Ascendancy.

Also its not nearly as RNG based as you think. There is only a small amount of actually detrimental Affliction. 5% lost on HP, Mana and ES for example of no Evasion or ES.

And you can almost negate that issue by not taking random Afflictions. Simply get maximum Honour resistance and you should be fairly easily able to get all of the Ascendancy points. I was running Sekhema with a non stat stacking Monk without any Honour resistance before 0.2 it was extremely easy to do with maximum honour resistance. Basically ignoring all traps.

It is purely RNG there is no planning you cannot say "don't take random afflictions" because you don't always have a choice. If you get a room with say +50% monster life or -40% damage its game over start again unless you way over gear the content and have no true need to actually complete it.

On top of this, Ascendency is a HUGE bonus to player power and most of the builds are now purely designed around its mechanics which means if you cannot get those points you are completley gimped until you get lucky and get the exact right Ultimatums or a perfect run in Sekhemas, you are also leveling to 80-85 with a massive reduction in power.