The biggest problem with ToTA is there’s no mechanism to farm it at a rank you can handle

I’m a big fan of this league mechanic but a lot of people aren’t liking it. All of the complaints follow a common theme, enemies are too tanky, they hit like a truck. In essence, the league mechanic gets too hard for them. I’ve been continuing to scale with it and can still take multiple hits at rank 600(I’m an SSF player with limited time). I get the sense a lot of people just don’t have the character to play a satisfying role in their matches. I could even see myself getting frustrated if I was being constantly one shot despite it still being possible to win with good strategy.

In other areas of the game, such as maps, delve, and even fairly static content like labyrinths, you can choose how much risk you take on and it affects your rewards. In ToTA, your rank goes up unless you’re completely bombing it and it drops very slowly - so it gets continuously harder over the lifetime of your character with no real choice to play it at a lower difficulty level for lesser rewards. People whose builds and strategy lag behind the curve just get shut out of the content with this lack of choice.

I really want to see this go core but I think it would be a lot better if players could choose what level they fight at. Alternatively, if ranking is intended to be an elo-style rating then it needs to drop a lot more significantly on losses so that you stabilize at what your build and strategy can handle rather than face character age based difficulty.

Spend 2 coins to derank. Coins are plentiful even in SSF

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Spend 2 coins to derank. Coins are plentiful even in SSF

This is not a good solution.

It cost two coins to drop 5 ranks and a win gets you +12. For every 5 wins (+60 ranks for 30 coins) you need to spend 24 coins deranking yourself to stay stable. Basically you cut your coin usage efficiency by nearly half. On top of that, you have to do dumb UI interactions (go to main menu then get back on the character and walk back). If someone pushed significantly past what they’re comfortable with for whatever reason, it will take them ages to derank down to an appropriate difficulty level.

So throwing matches is a horrible, boring, and time consuming solution that isn’t going to be fun for people who are getting frustrated by the difficulty. There needs to be a selector or the ranking algorithm needs to be tuned to demote people a lot more aggressively on failing the tournament.

I would prefer a ranking selector because the navali’s never ending nirvana challenge is a a thing and it looks impossible at my current rank.

Yea but there is a bigger picture. If everyone was allowed to play at a rank they are comfortable with/at which the potential rewards are greatest - that's exactly what they'd do. And the already-rewarding league mechanic will become even more simple and easy to exploit.


There is no way GGG does this unless they reduce the rewards. And I am firmly against that.

its not rewarding at lower levels and thats a problem since oneshots start like 300-400 depending on the char i guess.(i was trying it melee).

second problem its cheesing - i was doing some 50/50 block, 95% evasion and 75 dodge - this way it doesnt really matter if you play 800rank or 2000 - you just run around placing totems with knockback and try to get enemy totems. char is barely useful outside of ancestor trials.

in total i have like 6 tatoos on all my chars. theyre probably nice, but i cant see myself doing league mechanic for them. i dont even know what kind of tatoos exactly are there...

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Yea but there is a bigger picture. If everyone was allowed to play at a rank they are comfortable with/at which the potential rewards are greatest - that's exactly what they'd do. And the already-rewarding league mechanic will become even more simple and easy to exploit.


There is no way GGG does this unless they reduce the rewards. And I am firmly against that.

Eh, I'd rather GGG nerf rewards or at least Silver Coin drops for the QoL of being able to lock in desirable rank instead of wasting time hiding in corners and letting the enemy take your single totem. That's such a silly and unintuitive way to go down in rank, that'd be like blowing Sulphite in Delve to go backwards.

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DichotomousThree wrote:

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Spend 2 coins to derank. Coins are plentiful even in SSF

This is not a good solution.

It cost two coins to drop 5 ranks and a win gets you +12. For every 5 wins (+60 ranks for 30 coins) you need to spend 24 coins deranking yourself to stay stable. Basically you cut your coin usage efficiency by nearly half. On top of that, you have to do dumb UI interactions (go to main menu then get back on the character and walk back). If someone pushed significantly past what they’re comfortable with for whatever reason, it will take them ages to derank down to an appropriate difficulty level.

So throwing matches is a horrible, boring, and time consuming solution that isn’t going to be fun for people who are getting frustrated by the difficulty. There needs to be a selector or the ranking algorithm needs to be tuned to demote people a lot more aggressively on failing the tournament.

I would prefer a ranking selector because the navali’s never ending nirvana challenge is a a thing and it looks impossible at my current rank.

I'd like to start by noting that we've moved from 'there is no mechanism' to stabilize rank to 'there is a mechanism, but I don't like it'. So that's good progress.

I think its worth separating the critique of that mechanism into two parts. It costs 2c every other run and it takes time.

The cost is nearly trivial. I've been buying 260-340 coins per divine and turning those 300 coins into roughly 40 divs each set of 300 (of currency, god knows what all the winged scarabs, tattoos, and div cards add up to). Even spending an extra 1c per coin (which is what 2c per alternating run works out to) there is still tons of profit to be had here.

'I shouldn't have to' is silly. You don't have to, you want to as an alternative to specializing your character into not having to. If I want to run a Breach strategy on my atlas I *should* be running a sextant in addition to a scarab, in addition to all the atlas passives, in addition to having a character that is at least a 7/10 at the mechanic. There is no 'I shouldn't have to pay X chaos per sextant just to run Breach' its my choice.

The time cost is a weird one as I don't see why it seems like 90% of players who have this criticism talk about logging out of the match. You can afk and lose it in about 15 seconds. Back when I was playing stable in the 200 ranks I would get up, get a drink, browse the web, do whatever. The thing is other mechanics have built in 'bullshit' time associated. Breaches used to be terrible in this regard. Opened slowly. They improved it but you still have to go loot individual splinters. Heist you have to wait for doors. Abysses you have to track around and we've all seen those bastard ones that double back again and again.

You add it all up I'm not sure ToTA is much worse than those other time sinks. You save SO MUCH time in ToTA on the looting side. Pick reward, get reward. Easy as. To me this was bearable when I was 'going sideways' and imo if you're going to play it so much that this becomes an issue, just specialize a character for it.

and no, "second problem its cheesing - i was doing some 50/50 block, 95% evasion and 75 dodge - this way it doesnt really matter if you play 800rank or 2000 - you just run around placing totems with knockback and try to get enemy totems. char is barely useful outside of ancestor trials."

you don't have to sacrifice being able to map for this. Personally I chose to, but there's no reason you can't build a capable bow character that also has those defenses. Your mapping character could legit be 1 weapon swap away.

I'd be OK if people wanted to lock in a rank, if they want training wheels, it'd be no different than branching sideways in delve.

Seems unintuitive to have to intentionally lose matches and a bit of a time waster. But to be honest, if you gear for the mechanic - not even build for it - just gear for it (and cheaply I might add) - you can hit 2000 in a couple of weeks.

If you go all in and build a high block/dodge/evade character, and then gear for it, you will dominate at it.

I tend to build for different mechanics and have specific characters for doing them however, so maybe this concept is alien to a lot of folks.

Sadly, if it makes sense, the idea will never see the day of light. This has always been the motto for mechanics design.