Tota is easily best League mechanic of all time and it's not even close.

I fully mean what I said in the title and I am playing since late Perandus-Prophecy so I was there for all the fan favourites like Ritual or Sentinel. By the end ot the post even if you disagree with me you will be converted into Hinekora follower I hope you will gain new perspective on why people love Tota so much.

- It's fun whether you are playing normal build or cheesing it. There is a lot of strategy and decision making involved. Gameplay is engaging. Even if you don't like gameplay itself GGG absolutely nailed it's reward structure. That casino-like slot-machine-type of reward system that lets you choose among multiple rewards and at any turn there can be Mageblood or Mirror works incredibly well. Tota is Neurone activation dopamine generation machine in action.

- It's very rewarding. Getting stacks of raw Divines feels very sattisfying. Even if you don't get big drops you are still getting Awakened Sextants, Winged Scarabs and just stacks of chaos orbs and other decent reward smoothing out experience. And you don't need to do highest rank possible, rewards start scaling well as soon as mechanic stops offering rare items. You can just get in and start printing Divines on build that was struggling with yellow maps. It's crazy. Tota provided many people with opportunity to make more currency than they ever could before and afford things they couldn't earlier.

- It's incredibly deep mechanic. People are still arguing which units are best and where to put them. The only thing Community agreed upon so far is that flankers are very important and that Sunset Sages are OP. Then there are items and idols that make things even more complicated. Items are still largely unexplored. There is well of untapped possibilities.

- You can live in Halls of the Dead. You just need Silver Coins. One of the biggest issues with Sanctum was that you had to do maps in order to run it, you had to always stop your flow and go back to maps. No such nonsense in Tota. Just buy / farm your Silver Coins and enjoy League mechanic indefinetely. :p It's awesome.

- Tota requires no maintence. You just need Silver Coins you will buy once and forget about it. You don't need to roll maps, manage them in your stash and inventory. You don't need to buy compasses. You don't need to buy Scarabs. You don't need to buy Deli Orbs. Nothing like that. No nonsense like that at all. Just go from one tournament to the next with no tedium. You also don't need to stash items nearly as often as when you are doing mapping or most other strategies. No maintenance makes interacting with League mechanic feel so smooth.

- Looting. Looting rewards from Tota match / tournament actually feels good. Read it again. Looting in PoE feeling good. This is basically oxymoron. Something unheard of, because looting is one of the weakest aspect of PoE - it's awful. You need to click on every item you want to pick up, then your character has to physically travel to it and move over it. Often you will run around whole screen back and fourth picking up things. Inevitably there will be people saying something like - "Just run stricter filter". What filter I run you think? Most people barely see anything - it doesn't solve an issue - a lot of content will still drop things you need to pick up. Also as if such drastic measure as "Just don't pick up anything below chaos orb" or even sextant and leave 90% of the vlaue on the ground is doing anything but highlight severety of the issue. Also just how much stricter do I need to go? Anyways, Tota solves looting by making each encounte / match only drop one reward and usually it's worth your click. Also reward is coming from chest that is near exit so there is no extra travel. It also has special sound effect play when you open chest making it even more sattisfying.

- Do I even need to talk about Tattoos, Omens and unique items? They provide so much power, opportunities and QoL. We have so many new builds right now. Not even just new builds. New archetypes such as Blood Magic spell caster are born. You can get explossions into any build that travels through left side of the tree. You can get so many extra projectiles if you are on the right side of the tree. Or you can simply put massive multiplier on overleech of your Slayer. :p Every build can gain something from tattoos. Even if it's not significant QoL and small bonus stats like a bit of life or reduced damage from crits feels good. Also don't sleep on Defiance of Destiny. It provides very powerful recovery layer.

- Lore and characters. Chilling and talking with someone like Kaom and beating him in the match. Someone who was considered living legend of his time. Someone who united Karui tribes with his own might and was about to conquer entire Wraeclast. Just how cool is that? Meeting Kiloava, Rakiata or Akoya. People whom after Legion Keystones we use are named. Kiloava is a dick but still. Poor Akoya got her once OP Keystone butchered by GGG. ._. Ahuna is precious cinnaman roll we have to protect at all costs. Listening to their dialogues and interactions like "Are you calling me fat?" or "Of course you are, Keely!". Their commentaries before matches. Their personalities. Even if you are not into lore their presence still elevates League even more. It's almoust unfair that such absolutely insane League ALSO has lore and characters going for it. And of course lore, a lot of lore! Including some fundamental things (I recommend watching Noodle's video). We finally get to see Hinekora and can listen to her bullshit ramblings. And of course Navali is back which is great news for them black booty enjoyers people who missed Prophecy.

- Community aspect. I am not sure how important it is for other people, but I noticed that I am vibing with community feel of the League. You feel like you are part of something. You are participating in something that has history, like you are part of something greater or something. Your presence get aknowledged by karui like when Kaom simply states "Outsider walks among us!" or when Kaom and Utula talk about how you send them both to the Underworld. You get trolled or praised. It's first time you are accompanied by AI companions and they actually do their things reasonably well. You are all contributing to commonc cause. Also getting called Makanga will never get old.

- It's one of the best Leagues for multiplier, to play with friend, because Tota is team based so you can work together and fullfill different roles like one defends the base the other attacks enemy base. Unlike normal scenario where party play just makes monsters strongr and drop more stuff partying in Tota serves actual purpose. It's simply a lot of fun. While avoiding scenario where party play is strictly superior and becomes almoust mandatory.

- I heard some conflicting reports about this, but from my experience GGG put safeguards into mechanic meaning you will not lose a match to random disconnect or problem with internet or server or at least I didn't lose a single match to such issues. You will simply need to redo the match as it will be rerolled to earlier state without you losing reward. The game will somehow know if you plugged out your internet cable so you can't trick it like that. :p

- Any build can succeed in Tota. You don't need nor damage nor tankiness nor speed to win. At some point it just becomes less forgiving so you need to play well to win, but even rank 2000 is possible on normal build. Tota provides unique opportunity to do League mechanic at highest level with random ass build you just put together and that can barely map.

- Tota is unconventional League mechanic that enables new playstyle and makes underrated mechanics or mechanics that never seen the light of day shine. Void Sphere, Knockback, Warcry interruption, Dodge, petrification, etc. etc. - Tota makes so many mechanics you might not even heard of useful. Did you even knew that there is item that makes Warcry interrupt enemie? And I can't blame you, because there is basically no use for such items in the base game but Tota enables them. It's great that these mechanics gets to bask in the spotlight for once.

- Even if you are weird and don't like Tota it still makes you richer by adding new valuable currency into drop pool of your maps. It shines upon everyone indiscriminetely, like a Sun. Also thanks to new Keystones and other improvements base game is in the best state it was in years, if not ever so even though Tota would carry patch on it's own it doesn't have to.

Thanks for reading! It was quite a long read, but it's the only way to talk about Tota. Pretty sure I missed some things, like no loading screens and implications of that. But that's just how it is - everytime you think you mentioned everything Tota does great, you are missing something, it's actually much more. Honestly I could write a whole book about current League mechanic.

You may disagree or have other favourite in mind, but it doesn't change the fact that not a single League so far had so much going for it. The sheer volume of awesomeness Tota brings to the table is unmatched. No League so far has come even close. Tota is peak. PoE peaked with Tota. I have no idea how GGG is gonna match, let alone outdo themselves in december, but this expansion convinced me that PoE 1 is in good hands and the game will be fine.

Tota is easily best League mechanic of all time and it's not even close. I hope it goes Core.

I disagree.

I agree. This is by far my favourite league so far and I’ve played for about 10 years. Think I’ve spent more time on the mechanic than I have mapping.

ok so i guess im weird.

TotA is really good. I thought it looked meh when I saw the trailer during the Exilecon stream, but I was wrong.

I don't think it is my personal favorite, but I do agree with a lot of your reasons why it would be considered the best.

For reference I took my main mapper to 1700 rank, and then I made a cheese build(new character) and took it to 2000 rank, so I've played a ton of TotA.

TotA may be my favorite league of all time. It's always been Synthesis before, but this league I really played a long time after hitting 40/40, and most of that time was spent on the TotA mechanic.

I disagree on almost every point,
Unbalanced as hell and pushes normal builds out with no derank option.

Lore is interesting but not enough of it.

Gameplay is very repetitive

Allied units do practically nothing some if not most of the time. They really don't matter.

Rewards are ok, but depend on luck/ completion. I generally think when rewards are pushed off towards the end is just bad design. It makes partial victories worthless. I think the chieftan totem should have loot for example.

Silver coins are whatever. Not offensive at least.

Tattoos feel very underwhelming with like 2/3 notable exceptions.


But I am glad you enjoyed it.

Strong disagree.

Take away the rewards, which definitely will be nerfed IF mechanic goes core and you'll end up having a mess that suddenly isn't "The best league mechanic of all time" (ballsy statement btw).

This stuff is already unrewarding, unbalanced, repetitive, BUGGY and your strategy options are just an illusion. You don't strategize beyond killing kuhu first. Anything beyond that tiny aspect is you riding the waves of RNG tribute rewards, always playing the underdog.

Your builds that utilize "underrated mechanics" were already nerfed by GGG and in the end you can't even really play "normal" builds, cause this stuff is so unbalanced with oneshots.

Community is in its worst state i had ever seen it. Since week 3 nobody replies to your trade offers. This is tragic. People spend more time spamming PMs than actually playing. I've seen "cummunity vibing" so. much. more. With a week-long-events at the end of the league, than this.

IF and that's Moon-sized "IF":

- GGG fixed all the bugs (especially AI)
- actually bothered to add proper scallings for proper difficulty rampup (this means no more oneshots "because xD")
- added actual strategy, instead of "kill kuhu first, while trying to get tribute for best 2-3 units that MIGHT be available after next 2-3 matches"
- maybe rebalance rewards (cause they are either huge hit, or long streak of nothing). This mechanic is simply unrewarding for time spent. If you think it is rewarding it means you were either very lucky, or you never done any actual farming.

Then i'd be interested.

I want this league to be good, but calling it "The best league mechanic of all time" is just... No.

Fun is subjective, and I don't find fun in a league where I have to abandon the idea of fighting enemies to win once I reach rank 400-500+, because they're too tanky to kill and can 1shot me easily. When your gameplay gets reduced to you running around and distracting the enemy team so your allies can sneak in and swipe totems, I think that's unintuitive and just not enjoyable. Having to play a build optimized for the content that literally can't function outside of it is also unintuitive and not fun.

That said, I still wouldn't want Trials removed from the game. I like the tattoos they added.

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deothor wrote:

I want this league to be good, but calling it "The best league mechanic of all time" is just... No.

That goes to Sanctum in my opinion, but then I'm biased as a summoner main who enjoys roguelikes.

it isn't a deep mechanic but the rest is pretty sound tbh, though I disagree about it being easily the best league mechanic.

Its an interesting one to be sure though I'd love them to develop it further but its a bit weird to expect that so I don't really lol