Another TOTA Thread - Not Just Whining

Things I like:

-Tattoos are cool. I like them. Makes interesting choices for making my character stronger especially so early in the league when sometimes your character is a bit starved for attributes. Is that added burning damage worth 10 strength? Could I spare 30 int right now if I got a gem level tat? Its good, thumbs up and all that.

-I like the aesthetic. Not much else to say. Game just looks cool.

-Stackable run currency. I can just pick up the coins while mapping and store them up to burn through a bunch at once instead of storing sanctums until I suddenly have to remember what in the heck I was doing eight maps ago. That rocks.

- Rewards are alright. Not every league mechanic needs to throw handfuls of currency at you. But I've gotten a few uniques to flip, couple chaos here and there, some fusings and stuff you need to farm up for later in the league anyway etc. Its fine. Not awesome, but serviceable. If the mechanic is fun I like doing it even if its not insanely rewarding.

- There's some semblance of strategy there. You can sorta make a build once you learn what all the tribes do and how they interact. You can cheese a few fights. The respawn blockers seem broken and really the only viable one because the scaling gets really stupid, explained below.


Things I do not like:


- Dialogue every time. After running a bunch of this mechanic I don't want to have to go back to the hub and do extra clicks through all the tribespeople going "woahhhh exile you WON/LOST that match! That's insane! You're insane! You sure did win/lose against me!" Dude I'm just trying to spend my favor shut up.

- My units are useless and are becoming more useless over time. The HP/damage scaling seems to only work one way. Already every enemy tanks harder than a map boss. I haven't got an especially tanky character at the moment, or mega blasting dps, I get that. But my units are starting to get instant stomped after just a few wins, forcing me to carry the entire match and it defeats the idea of an auto battler when the enemy could have an identical team to mine and still be miles away stronger.

- Respawns are confusing and unintuitive. I'm told that the more you kill a unit the longer their respawn is. I'm just gonna take everyone's word for it because I don't think its very noticeable. Whatever it is, its way too short. There will be matches where I'm just killing them over and over and over while trying to get a window to click totems down because again, my units become absolutely worthless the higher your rank goes. But if I go down even once, its probably game over. That's straight up not fair.

-Difficulty is tedious, not challenging. I've had matches go longer than they have any right to because my team gets flattened and at best can soak up a few seconds of aggro while I babysit and run back and forth across the arena chasing and killing the same flankers I've already killed a billion times to slowly try and get a totem down. And then once I get one down, it quickly starts to snowball. That's not worth 4 jeweler's orbs and makes me want to stop playing for the night. Its a slog.

^

The art is nice at least, but their scaling is bonkers. Also some of their effects outright brick characters in poe, like flask charge stealing or turning off regen. Or stealing mana/charges. Or heck just teleporting you away.

So I learned an interesting tactic to prevent enemy scaling beyond your ability to fight them without it feeling like a slog: Just fail the tournament. If you don't deploy any units then run to the far back of the arena, the enemy can take your totem without effort. It causes your rank to go down which lowers the monster level.

I hate it personally. It's counter-intuitive and is a waste of silver coins.

strategy is all fine and good but if i can defend an opponent who has 10 totems with just my escort and myself, they shouldn't respawn that fast, it should be checkmate in favor of the player. Otherwise right now i can just give up if my flakers are gone to save time. Bad game design. If the ai opponent is reckless enough to lose all his units in an attack even though they have more than double the totems it should be game over for them.

The player dies once = game over usually, the ai boss dies 10 times, game is still open like nothing happened yeah great, who came up with that? Maybe let him design a couple of flowers next to the npc nobody talks to next time, tyvm :)

you should give your tota ranking so we have an idea what scaling you re talking about

i said it in another post and i will say it here again, if the power gap between enemy units and our units is going to be so big then make the lanes thiner and remove flankers.

is bad enought to see your units die to a breeze while enemy units have more HP than area boss to also have to be constantly going back becouse a flanker went right for the totem and the 4!!! defenders i put back there cant even stop flankers from wrecking everything.

While purposely losing does work to scale the enemies back down, I think that's also degenerate and I hope we don't give GGG the indication that we should just purposely lose the mechanic they made to make it halfway reasonable again.

Every aspect of this game is just horribly plagued with the "GAME MUST BE HARD GAME MUST BE HARD" kind of garbage attitude where you need to be using five different websites and API's and never take your eyes off your POB page just for your character to function at a base level

Found it fun early. Then i spend some hours in it and got 0 valuable reward.

Now i'm stomped in seconds. Yeah, not fun at all.

Rank 350 +-

I haven't enjoyed it early, I thought maybe it was only good at end game, but from what people are saying it gets even worse.