I finally wormed my way to the second type of ascendency trial last night, and after a good rest I'm ready to properly vent about both of them.
The first trial is a rogue like dungeon crawl in which getting hit too many times regardless of life totals ends your run. Across the various times I've run it, the stages themselves are not bad. You get to choose your path and hope everything works out with the positives and negatives of the new rooms you come across. The various challenges are also interesting.
However, the final boss is absolutely abysmal to fight against. In a mode where the term honor is used, this thing has several area of effect attacks that aren't visually telegraphed at all. Even it's normal slam attack has a decently sized area of effect.
Whats worse are the various and random effects it also has that spew projectiles all over the place. If you're not fast enough in killing the thing, the battlefield basically becomes a bullet hell. My first clear I spent more time looking at my character to see where safety was than the boss. It feels not great for the first encounter of this system to include what amounts to rng damage pings from out of no where.
The second trial (and currently only other) trial you're introduced to is based on the ultimatum league from path 1. You choose a modifier, go into a space, and do the challenge. Finish that and you go to the next, stack a new modifier, and do the next challenge. It's fairly straight forward and some of the modifiers are terrifying but manageable... Until you get to the boss.
The boss doesn't so much fight you as it does flop around the area farting annoying elemental effects everywhere. I'm glad I'm playing a ranged character so I can just not be near the damned thing.. But this is where those modifiers come in big. If you chose any of the mods that cause the ground to get more area of effect effects on it, good luck. The boss bounces around so much you will have to chase it down while also keeping an eye on any poison, ice, fire, or electricity on the ground.. And whatever other effects might be problematic. I probably died a good 4 times on the boss alone, and twice to the challenges before due to not minding my modifiers. (do NOT dodge roll through death bubbles.. They body block you.)
I don't really feel cheated by either of them even after all of this is said and done.. But I do feel that they are incredibly poorly chosen for their respective trials and would really benefit from being moved to either later bosses, or elsewhere in the game.
Instead of going to find it.. I'll just do my best to list it from memory (and it's not going to be complete)
ammo economy in general was ruined from the first game. The entire 'guardian' legendary weapon set were removed, and most class mods no longer have any ammo regeneration unless certain characters. Lots of guns now shoot multiple bullets per shot, making this problem even worse.
Backpack space was lowered from the first game, while equippables was increased. Overall space was increased with the bank included.. but not by much. I think the difference is 2.
The rock, paper, scissors health types first introduced in the general knoxx DLC were really leaned into really hard, which means it's very handy to have a weapon of each element type on your person.
These three were my major issues. It's a LOOTER SHOOTER. I need to LOOT and SHOOT. These three points made it more of a chore to do the base game loop at higher levels, especially considering that most characters had only a couple preferred weapon types. Combining all three points meant I was usually balancing 3 weapons of different types so the ammo didn't overlap with different elements so I could effectively shoot fleshy, shielded, and armored enemies.. and then sometimes slag.
There are some other gripes about the skill trees being overall worse than the first game, the DLC's eluding to the best fights from 1 and being really disappointing (looking at you Crawmerex), and the lack of any real changes in the enemies from the first game. Sure there were plenty of new skins, but the actions didn't change at all.
I'm sure there were more, but these points were enough to show me that the dev team was moving in a direction I wasn't particularly excited to play. The story and most boss fights were way better than 1's. So there was some positive growth, but in terms of overall gameplay I felt that the game was a massive downturn from where I would have liked to see the game go.