Temple stuff...

SSF

Chamber of iron.

There is nowhere to stand in this stupid room.

Big fire circle in the middle. Often enemies in there that are difficult to see. Enemies seem to get stuck in there as well.

Limited space to remaining safe standing area in the room. Then enemies in the room, then the giant boss doing decently sized aoe slams. Usually at least one rare with who knows what mods. Its often difficult to get a little space to attempt to attack.

Oh, and fire constantly spitting out of the giant fire ring.

All this combines to a really annoying experience, especially when mobs are buffed up by the temple mods.

Especially depending on mods. Sometimes you get the fucking mana ring... so now the already limited space is basically gone. Now you have to toe to toe the boss... its not impossible, but you may still have the rare alive as well.

It just feels terrible fighting in these small spaces. Terrible.


Oh, and the reward scaling is TERRIBLE. I'm not even endgame yet, not even 60 yet, and the rewards are already pretty much trash in comparison to effort. The longer you do temple, the more worthless it becomes- it scales negatively in effort to reward.

For example I clear a chamber of iron, its like 8x harder than it was earlier on... the reward is a artificers orb. Uh, I was getting that at like level 12 from this thing... 50 levels later its the same reward?

Seriously? Geezum.

Stand in the fire ring, it does almost no damage.
The waves of fire do.

If you're not instantly deleting monsters in temple with some kind of build that's likely going to be nerfed in 0.5, you need to be very well rounded because there's so many rare monsters with extra modifiers, you're definitely running into dangerous scenarios where multiple modifiers can converge in ways that create "bullshit" moments.

These are the kind of things that ruin unprepared players, such as mana siphoners + temporal bubble + denial of area arena hazards + a boss that's gonna slam you back to the riverbank.

I don't know which tools in the toolbox would be best for your character to use to deal with these sort of scenarios but they do exist.

If it's any inspiration, I can share my hcssf level 98 Walking Calamity Shaman:

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhcssf/character/karsey-2995/IsFiveAliveStillAround

It's not going to win any clear speed awards but it can do all of the content currently in the game including pinnacles. I haven't tried t2/t3 arbiter (I did t1 just to unlock rare tablets and the longest parts of the fight were the transitional phases) but it can do t3 of everything else as long as you're not purposely tanking every slam/hit. Doing +4 boss difficulty pretty handedly in maps as well.

I'm about 1/3rd through (re)building what I want to be a synflesh chain temple focused on XP and the only time I care about map mods is when there's -max or penetration in tandem with elemental/dmg mods. I pretty much play the character like a honey badger that doesn't care about anything and just keeps attacking and slamming and roaring while keeping walking calamity up almost all the time.

Improvements I would wish for on the character would be reduced freeze duration on boots and some extra spirit somewhere (just 15 needed really) to run warm blooded support to be freeze immune. Doesn't happen often but those skeleton mages on increased freeze build-up maps + multi proj will get ya lol. Maybe some extra reduced effect of slows as well. Maybe if those boots were exceptional with another slot for the soul core that offers it. SSF does make things a bit more constrained lol so I think at this point it's basically wishful thinking.

Someone mentioned standing in the fire ring earlier - this character can do that but honestly, I prefer to eat the fire waves. If you run out of mana, maul doesn't cost anything and leeches it back very quickly and a slam + aftershocks will straight up refill the mana. Usually you are inside the ring doing this so your mana is not going down anymore. Just avoid dodge-roll (bear-hop?) out of the blue circles.

Level 60 is a tough spot though. You're on the cusp of being out of the campaign and into the endgame, it's a transitional period where the difficulty really ramps up and depending on your build + gear things can seem really unaligned difficulty-wise across different kinds of characters.

It's ok not to do the whole temple and honestly, you can just build it in a way that's suitable for what your character CAN do. Buffing the effectiveness of rare monsters too much and then adding in all those chambers of iron is usually not a great idea unless you're specifically looking for danger-juice lol.

Maybe this was helpful for you or someone else. Either way I kind of agree with your feedback in a way - I think the temple needs a pretty large overhaul balance-wise. Maybe not directly to the Chamber of Iron but in ways that would indirectly improve your situation and reduce the frustration it can too easily introduce within the level 45-75 areas. I think by now most players are probably just avoiding it until endgame even in SSF and who knows how common the crystals will be post 0.4. It might not be a problem at all in the future.