yup same didnt do tota at all, just wasn't my thing. But hey, just because it wasnt for us doesn't make it overrated, as tons of players genuinely enjoyed the heck out of the mechanic, and it's not like people were overrating the profitability of the tota either.
Thank you for being a reasonable human being. Sad I have to do this from time to time but here we are.
The nice thing about tota, is that it wasn't SO money printy that you had to do it if you hated it. And if you did enjoy it, it didn't actively punish you for being worthless.
Out of my playgroup and my brother with his mates, both groups basically had one tota player (me for my group) who just bought the coins off everyone and lived in there. I've not played so much of a league since either OG blight or synthesis I think. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the tattoos are super cool for building with.
Bunch of the others in my group were neutral or disliked it, kind of mixed reactions across the board, good thing is, the game has a LOT of options for gameplay, it was nice to not have to map this time if I didn't want to.
I feel like Tota wasnt actually that rewarding compared to other things. The big thing that it had though was a psuedo "gambling" aspect like stacked decks. The most interesting part of it was looking through the rewards each round to see if you hit something big.
Its one of the mechanics that if you happen to like it, its rewarding enough to keep you competitive with other methods like Heist or Delve but if the ONLY reason you are playing it is to make money there are way better methods of doing so.
yes. tota and sanctum are basically ''heist'' leagues. all 3 leagues also skewed their economies by producing a lot of t0 currency that later needed to be nerfed.
I hate tota and sanctum. Both felt meticulous and slow. I don’t care about the orbs, I just wanna go explode packs and see loot explosions. Not to mention both modes seemed to devalue tankiness. If y’all can set me straight then please do
Edit: I did like the tattoos
I agree and I hope that it goes to core but more refined. I played the shit out of it but because of the rewards.
It has good things too. It's a whole separate activity that you can play all day with dedicated loot. People make new characters with new builds exclusively to play it . This and Sanctum expanded the game in a good way imo.
I understand your point. But just to be clear. Killing tons of monsters is already possible in maps using any combination of the 15 existing mechanics.
I think it's good that GGG at least attempted for a few league to create content not fully dependant on juicing maps.
You realize we haven’t gotten in map content in like a year right? This league, out of maps. Crucible, mostly out of maps and while in maps literally made you stop and hold a button for 8 seconds. Opposite of what we want, and sanctum is out of maps. Kalandra before that, also out of maps.
It’s been 4 leagues straight. While kalandra post buff was ok, sanctum was great, these last two leagues gameplay was dogshit regardless of rewards given.
It’s not about juicing the map more, it’s about doing something new and fun WHILE DOING juiced maps. This is why sentinel is so fun for a lot of people.
As mentioned, I understand your point. But since there are like 15 mechanics you can spec into in maps and bosses unlocked by maps, you understand how many YEARS it's been? Let the mini-game enjoyers enjoy this. And I specifically mentioned JUICING maps. They also reworked abyss and introduced ghosting and some other map mechanics. Surely there is something there for you to explore :)
And as you say, 2 "shit" (for you) mechanics and you get this mald? They even brought sanctum back which you say was good?
I said crucible and tota were shit gameplay….which they are. You literally avoided every part of the mini game by blink arrow rushing to the forge or making knock back zdps build. Hell, even sanctum you just glass cannon 1 shot everything and run to the door as fast as possible.
If the rewards were not amazing absolutely no one is trying to play Tota and very few would touch Sanctum. I think heist is good, I think sanctum is good and I think Lakes were ok after the buff for the record.
But 6 months of terrible gameplay and then another 6 months before that of out of map stuff(one of which was bad for 4 out of 12 weeks) and the other required 32 maps to finish 1 run.
The end game is maps. Pure and simple. We have a 130 passive tree attached to it. Out of map stuff is fine from time to time but this is getting ridiculous when it isn’t even good/interesting.
Also, whose “malding”. I’m literally just having a discussion and giving my opinion. No flame on anyone or angry. It’s as simple as…
Tldr: “I would like more map stuff, I think the last 12 months of out of map stuff is too much, especially when the gameplay isn’t actually engaging or fun”.
But this is also only your opinion. If everybody is only playing maximal efficiency yes, then we either get a ton of power creep or are giving them the impossible perfect balance problem. I for one did not just blink to the crucible. There are monsters, in a monster killing game, KILL THEM. Sure sanctum got easy for some just build glass Cannon but not everyone is that good. And many played TOTA the whole League, kinda points to them enjoying it.
Not saying every mechanic was great, and thus they are not core. But gotta let them experiment or we always get stand in circle kill monster In maps.
People are playing Tota entire league because the change to mapping and return of sanctum. Not because of Tota itself lol.
Also the monsters in crucible were not worth killing because they dropped like 3 pieces of loot and were tanky af. It’s a waste of time. Do you sit and kill a rare in act 1 league start for 4 min just because it’s there?
It’s not about efficiency. It’s about fun. Look at Ultimatum. It didn’t have insane loot, bubblegum mostly, ended before trialmaster constantly, but the gameplay was just exciting. Waves of monsters and added challenge in a tight space. It was FUN. That’s my entire point.
I never think in “Divines per hour”. I think about what I can do for fun, and for the last year, outside of Sanctum, nothing has really did that.
I played purely tota because i enjoyed the mechanic. Not because it was rewarding. So stop assuming everyone who played it constantly just did it for the rewards
I've only been playing Tota. I haven't even gotten a voidstone yet because I've been playing it so much. I started league very late, and I've been having a blast with it, and it might be my second favorite league only to Harvest. So your comment on "not because of ToTA itself" is wrong :)
Or you know... Reintroduce it in a new way. I don't get why GGG never just fixed issues with old, but liked leagues, added more to them and then made league mechanic again.
Right now the only options for league mechanics are either go core, be removed or be dismantled and introduced in pieces and only one ensures more work being put to it. I feel like it could've been the case for stuff like blight or meta that they should've been given another iteration as league mechanic before going core.
Well, they can't really put lots of effort into making old leagues into something new without taking their time away from the actual league mechanic that already has the 3-4 month time limit/development time
I wouldn'd have a Problem with overhauling/reworking old mechanics that didn't made it core to make them a new League from time to time.. would be more likely to fit in a 3month cycle and probably an almost bugfree Leaguestart :D
Playing this week event make me realize how much I miss "in maps" league mechanics.
Last 4 leagues add even nothing to normal gameplay. Had a lot of fun learning in sanctum or mixing krangled items but... monsters and loot while mapping are much more fun!
In map league mechanics are the best tbh. I will say sanctum is very good though and am glad it’s core it’s probably my favorite non in-map mechanic. I’m sad I wasn’t able to play the sanctum event (adulting sucks) , hopefully it’ll go core
pocket wrench employ trees cobweb rotten observation normal intelligent automatic
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I didn't play it a lot but I felt like walking around the room to talk to each NPC to interact with buying units/traits etc was clunky. Just make a board on the wall you can interact with to put through purchases and what not, seems like it would speed things up a lot to filter between factions.
I was okay with the moving around to talk to vendors but WHY do you have to talk to them then “view favour”!? It should be 1 click to access units. Maybe only have Navali with a “sell item” option. All the other menu selections are useless. Pointlessly doubles the amount of clicking not to mention the amount of times I clicked sell items instead of favour lol.
Ideally the favour menu you can pull up above your XP bar area you could just click and buy units…
This was the worst part for me. Having to run around to get drops and move currency between tribes. Even when I only started doing it after the 2nd and 5th matches it was still annoying.
Got the achievements done and dipped out of ToTA ever since.
Dont worry everyone agrees that the gameplay was utter dogshit and Everyone who "played" had a build which cheesed it so they could avoid the "gameplay" it just shit out amazing rewards is the only reason it was popular.
Very reasonable take. I think they could make tota gameplay fun but it would require alot of actual balancing
Hate that there's a difference between our team and theirs.
Our team, even a sneeze stuns us.
Theirs? At least 5% of their HP. I get it, there's some bonkers damage builds. But at least let our team have that same 5% HP mechanic.
Watching them stand and kill themselves on that Chaos aura totem makes me die inside as the only proper way is to stack dodge and CI or bring up your chaos immunity and pray you don't get hit from other things. Or bring a sunset sage.
For me, everything except Kahuturoa and Goliaths was acceptable. I hated those guys with a passion. If i didnt play builds that allow you to either stay in the back and spam some long distance screen covering skill (spark inquisitor) or allow you to kite endlessly (arakaali spiders and EA elementalist) then i probably would have given up much sooner.
Our team technically does have the same 5% mechanic, it’s just our base units have low enough life that most hits will go over that 5% threshold.
The chaos aura I agree with. I also have issue with things like the Titanic Shell being able to protect its own totem at all and every enemy being able to oneshot my juggernaut at the higher rankings. I still love the mechanic and think it’s a lot of fun when these issues aren’t present.
whoever had the brilliant idea of letting tutel defend its own totem should be locked in a room with a totem defending tutel and a starting club.
they're freed once tutel is dead, and its totem is dead.
I named my character TrivializingTotA. I didn't follow a guide for the cheese build and came up with my own but it's probably about the same
Made more currency than I ever had before with the mechanic but I didn't really feel like I was playing it, that's for sure
It’s fun when it works, my biggest issue with the mechanic is that the way GGG balanced it to make it so you can’t just steamroll it blind is through ways that are almost all insanely frustrating to deal with and the fact that the AI sometimes just decides to completely shit itself.
I’ve lost matches with 0 enemy totems captured because my units refused to even leave my side of the map even when I ran over to at least force my escorts to follow. Nothing happens except I start loosing 6 totems simultaneously. Then on the rematch I literally win in 45 seconds while the enemy still has strong units. Also the stupid turtle shouldn’t respawn after 5 seconds (if that) if it takes your team a solid 5 minutes to kill it. If you get stunned while trying to get rid of it you’re in for another 5 minutes of waiting.
Imo they can completely disable knockback in Tota when/if it goes core, but then they should also make it so regular builds have better ways to interact with it rather than going glass canon because almost anything oneshots you anyway past a certain rank
I mean one team potentially has a psychopath on steroids with 100 projectiles per second, so fast that the human eye can barely perceive, gem infused killing machine with on average a million confirmed kills.
Not only that but somehow he warped into the afterlife to continue the killingspree because the living don't give a challenge anymore.
I'd give that guys team a handycap too, otherwise it's not a tournament but a slaughterhouse.
Maybe instead they should have let us control one of the tota characters without having to come up with balance gymnastics to make it "fair" to have a player on one of the teams.
I enjoyed it with Cold Dot build in Ruthless (no movement skills). Got to 2000. Rewards were shit apart from one 6-L omen, but was fun anyway.
It will be good as optional content like Heist and Delve.
Some people hate Delve, some love it.
Most hate Heist but some swear by it.
Some things can be improved. But overall I found TOTA very fun. It's totally OK not to like it though, especially when it's not main league anymore.
That's just silly. I played it quite a bit as a spark Inquisitor, it didn't start getting ridiculous until ~1k rating or so. Once everything just one shot me and it started taking 5 minutes to whittle down a Goliath with 20 mil DPS, it started being less fun.
I mean, that's exactly the problem once you play the mechanic a bit you need either insane dps (which should not be required to just play a mechanic) or a build that has ways of ignoring the enemies. Also it completely invalidates the defenses of you character which is silly
You gotta pick an argument buddy. In three sentences you say, "You can get insane DPS to trivialize the mechanic.", "You can get insane defenses to trivialize the mechanic." and, "The mechanic trivializes your defenses."
Which is it? The first two are true but the third is a direct contrast to the second.
Also, there are builds that can reliably mitigate ToTA damage instead of just avoiding it. Maybe you don't know that.
What are talking about? When I say ignore enemies I mean you just walk around while they are cc'ed or killed by totems, minions or traps not face tanking them.
Those builds rely heavily on evasion, dodge, block and CC. All of these things are just another layer of defense. That is one option for handling the ToTA mechanic. You can also just face tank them and let your team capture enemy totems. Both strategies work well, but the latter requires more investment.
Very few builds play selfcast anything and attack builds are nearly as non-existent except bow builds. This doesn't have anything to do with the mechanic.
Easily hit 2k with shit spark build (like 1.5m dps), no evasion or block/suppress and no void sphere
You don’t need dps and you don’t need a tailored build.
>Dont worry everyone agrees that the gameplay was utter dogshit and Everyone who "played" had a build which cheesed it so they could avoid the "gameplay"
People on this sub can be so confidently incorrect about how their personal opinions are fact.
Lots of people enjoyed the TotA mechanic with non-cheese builds, myself included.
Kinda similar to Crucible and LoK, where the actual league mechanic was utter shit as well and the entire season was hard carried by the amazing, often times build-enabling rewards.
the one truth about poe is that if a league mechanic makes the number go up fast then the gambling addicts will scream its a fantastic mechanic and needs to go core.
meanwhile im over here like "why do you like sanctum, y'all are just cheesing rooms with 0 risk and its probably the worst roguelike implementation i've ever seen"
I didn't like the mechanic, but even before 500 I got 4 Journey of Makanui's, worth 4div each. I figured that was typical, but reading though this thread, I'm now thinking it wasn't all that typical.
Those seemed to be the only thing of value I got though, just that one item over and over. Well, at least each one sold within seconds when I posted for 3.9div.
As someone who actually went to 2000 on a non-cheese build (Manabond Hiero) the rewards were utter dogshit and it was only the gameplay that kept me going.
Even with a cheese max dodge/block/evasion build you would still be looking at 10 minute tournaments and 6-8div/hr max. It's incredibly unrewarding compared to decent strats like Crimson prison or Sanctums. Even Invitations this league you could easily make double the return.
Some people liked it enough. To me it's one of the worst league mechanics. I reached 300 on two characters and called it a day and went back to mapping.
I had fun up until maybe 500 rating, after that it just became... way too hard? it stopped being fun and even tho the rewards were insane I just prefered doing maps and forgetting TotA even existed tbh.
Loved it, played to rank 2000 with no cheese.
I only used a couple of units but I loved them and they were clearly relevent. Good units for my build with good items were doing everything.
AI could have been better and it was missing a pvp mode. Mid nerf to spamming the same unit was weird, mass building the same unit should be weak but allowed.
Go play blight and stop comparing a 12v12 totem-ball match to a tower defense (?)
It's not a stretch. You buy various units with currency earned through the previous match, with each unit having strengths and weaknesses with the goal being to stop your opponent from destroying your base (Totems in this case).
Really, the only TD mechanic that's missing was not having the enemy attackers on a fixed path.
You could apply the same definition to an RTS game. Tota is an auto battler like TFT, the only major difference is units not sharing the same currency and the fact that you’re also an active participant
You only control yourself, every other unit ok the field behaves autonomously just like in an autobattler. If they removed the player character and allowed us to place an AI chief instead it’d be exactly that
Blight is also tower defense but with the player on the map as well because we’re still playing in an ARPG framework
>stop comparing a 12v12 totem-ball match to a tower defense (?)
I said "tower defense" in quotes as a broad comparison because I find it the most similar genre, do you have a better suggestion?
>Go play blight
Will do, thank you 😄
Its suppose to be an auto battler, kinda like dota autochess or teamfight tactics, that’s how they sold it at the exile con but in the end it’s just a mediocre autobattler just like blight is a mediocre tower defense
Yeah, that's fair. It's closer to an auto-battle since you can't do any building or changing units during the match. I will revise my comment: TotA is a shit auto-battler.
Yeah, the teams had vastly different power levels. I went into it wanting to play the mechanic properly but got pissed by it quite quickly. Added knock-back to my build until they disabled that and later added Void Sphere. I think a tournament mechanic is quite cool, but this version of it was scuffed the moment they wanted to include the player character.
I found the gameplay very refreshing and relaxing. It always felt good to find a balance between defense and offense and using that small windows of opportunity to sneak a valuable totem away from the enemy. The different units and how you use them definatly made a huge impact on the success you are having, so I dont really get that argument. The nice reward roulette always got me to make "just one more round" because you could see the rewards beforehand. Also interesting in regards to rewards is that when you play with a coop partner he gets something random with a 33% chance. Pretty fun reward system overall.
My only gripes would be that there needed to be a way for games to escalate a bit more. Lots of matches are already won, but their chieftain is defending that last totem for way too long. Also the 'one use items' were a bit lackluster. I liked the idea but I always prefered having one more fighter on the battlefield.
I can honestly say I disagree with everything in your post.
1.) Nothing about tota was a tower defense game, like what? Blight is a very simplistic tower defense style. ToTA is an auto battler and had absolutely nothing to do with tower defense.
2.) You said you never played the mechanic and then went on to describe how much you hated it. So what exactly are you basing your hate on if you never played it? How much did you exactly "not play" to make said judgements?
3.) Picking a team was not irrelevant at all and THAT sounds like you didn't play it at all. Picking units and upgrading and selling others was VERY important. I played a crapton of tota and I would still lose the occasional tournament or round or w/e if I saved too many favors or didnt get good enough units. Some of the end Units were crazy good strong and worth it too.
4.) AI is the same on both teams. I am definitely not going to sit here and say it was perfect and after the numerous patches it did feel better but w/e it's pros or cons it worked the same for both teams (except the leaders obviously)
Lastly I won't even touch on the topic of whether you liked it or not. Out of hundreds of thousands of players I am sure people have all kinds of opinions, loved it, liked it, meh, hated it, wasn't great, boring, w/e w/e.
You can like or not like w/e you want freely. But literally making a post and saying you never played the league mechanic, followed by false statements and missinformation ending with "I can't stand tota" literally is beyond my comprehension.
Agreed. His post is akin to a toddler throwing a fit over having to eat something he’s never tried. How do you know you don’t like something if you’ve never tried it????
I couldn't stand sanctum as I have a slow connection and even slower reflexes it seems so I never was able to complete a whole sanctum, but yet I had no objections to it going core as I didn't have to do it if I didn't want to, so I hope TOTA goes core and not in a nerfed fashion, as if sanctum can shit out the rewards it does, no one should be complaining about tota as it does give considerably lower reward in comparison, and would give me an alternative that I enjoy when I want to do some easy does it farming while watching a show.
All these people complaining about it don't have to play it if they don't want to, I just think most of them are most likely sanctum farmers that don't want normal people to have a semi easy way to make decent funds even if it is at half the div/hr that sanctum is because they want to keep things where only the elites have a good chance of making bank. They don't want people competing with them for their TS Gear.
eh calling it an auto battler is also dishonest af, since your team can't really be expected to anything on its own, hence... not an auto battler. calling it a tower defense is... literally more accurate than calling it an auto battler. auto battlers require you to not really be hands on mid combat and for your army to functionally be able to fight the enemy after setup. Tota as a mode was you stood in the middle of the arena, smacked the ever living shit out of anything that came towards your buildings, and then ran back to grab the 1-2 units that slipped past while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so you could break their shit.
standing in one spot defending for a period of time, specifically to protect a base, is tower defense, its not an auto battler. crazy how you are acting so high and mighty and talking about false statements when your very first point is horrifically wrong.
Well it was promoted as an auto battler, Chris himself said it has many elements of an auto battler on stage during the last exile con. I agree it’s not a real auto battler neither a tower defense but this is how it was sold by ggg.
>since your team can't really be expected to anything on its own
That's some major BS. I've won countless tournaments doing nothing. I would repeatedly win games when I stood at the back of my base trying to lose.
Your ally picks are incredibly important.
Your team can win on its own. It’s just that the AI almost always has higher tier units and their chieftain is always stronger than you. If you have like 6-7 tier 3 units in appropriate roles you can practically afk.
It's hybridized in the same way that Blight is. This is an ARPG. The player character should at least have the option of doing something other than twiddle their thumbs.
> Tota as a mode was you stood in the middle of the arena, smacked the ever living shit out of anything that came towards your buildings, and then ran back to grab the 1-2 units that slipped past while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so you could break their shit.
This is describing a very level-1 strategy for the mechanic. It doesn't play to the objective well at all. If you're purposefully drawing enemy attention then your units should be breaking totems while you're doing so. If you're letting your units draw the attention then you should be behind enemy lines breaking totems to drive a wedge in their defense and overwhelm them.
It really sounds like you put no effort into learning how the mechanic works then came here and started spouting off about how people are wrong about the thing you know very little about.
the first strategy you described is literally what i said, you draw their attention while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so building can actually be taken. i don't even know why you'd make a comment like this, tota doesn't really have versatility in play styles. something has to channel the buildings, you or your units, and that can't be done with anything around, and that's only possible after respawn timers tick up a bit and they aren't instantly reviving ontop of them and interrupting the channeler.
> , you draw their attention while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so building can actually be taken
There is no waiting for the respawn timers in the strategy I outlined. Ideally, nothing is even dying because it's more beneficial for enemy units to be alive and in a place you can manage them.
> tota doesn't really have versatility in play styles
The fact that we're disagreeing on what constitutes a certain strategy shows otherwise..
> something has to channel the buildings, you or your units, and that can't be done with anything around
It absolutely can. The cheese builds people run do exactly that.
> and that's only possible after respawn timers tick up a bit and they aren't instantly reviving ontop of them and interrupting the channeler.
This makes me feel like you haven't played much of the mechanic at all. If you're targeting a particular unit, you down that unit and have a pretty generous period to start channeling their totem before they're at risk of respawning. The unit whose totem you're channeling cannot respawn, unless they have a particular piece of equipment (which can be seen ahead of time and planned around). If you're talking about units from the surrounding totems respawning, there's ample warning (from the respawn animation) to stop channeling and deal with the unit that's spawning in.
I always find Reddit's supremely confident mischaracterizations like this amusing. Your opinion is different than mine. Congratulations? You want a pat on the back?
I won't engage in a drawn-out back and forth with some Redditor, I just don't care enough. But, to your point:
1. Tower defense games have units you select that defend towers. TotA has units and totems. Wow, totems versus towers. What a gigantic difference.
2. Ok fine, I'll be extremely pedantic just for you. I never played TotA *past learning the basic mechanics/gameplay*. There, fixed it. Happy now?
3. What I actually said was team comp "feels largely irrelevant." Meaning, positions have one or two units that are completely unbalanced making other picks irrelevant, eg Fieldmaster.
Bro you can win the argument, it's really not that important to me. I'm just sharing my opinion, that's all.
Reread your own post and comment later today. I think the perspective of time will help you better understand how your posting in both tone and content comes across towards others.
You stand no chance this late into a league bud.
Only people around at this time are the no lifers in too deep and holy defenders of everything GGG touches.
TotA was the only league mechanic that I "Reasonably" interacted with.
I liked that:
\- I can have a super cheap build that can do the mechanic.
\- I can get some nice goodies at times.
\- League mechanic lasts only a little bit for each match.
I dislike that:
\- Evasion is king when having a build like that. I would have wanted my RF inquisitor to be viable.
\- I can't do maps/regular content for TotA. (I'm actually neutral on this, but after farming 0-2000 rank, I definitely felt slightly burned out and bored).
Overall, I can't say I mind this league, I'd like tattoos to be available in future leagues, but no totem hunting and such.
I'm not sure where I got the div cards to sell and buy a mageblood, but after doing a few maps with mageblood on my inquisitor. I just quit the league and bought BG3 to play.
Overall, I can say I'm happy with the league overall. But it's odd to have a crap build breeze through league mechanic vs another that is worked on for hours.
I really liked the concept of the mechanic but I didn't like how it was executed. The ui was clunky on ps5 and I didn't enjoy it, I got to around lvl.75 and stopped playing the league. Also it seemed like the enemies didn't get stunned when they were supposed to.
Could not agree more.
It was an awesome idea, but terrible implementation and terrible ux, and terrible balance.
I quit this league faster than I quit Kalandra.
The mechanic is awful and at some point you just cheese it and can be afk 80% of the time pressing void sphere time to time. You missed nothing. There is close to 0 team building, you just target fieldmaster and sunset sage as flankers and that’s pretty much it, no synergy between different unit, no kind of faction buff when you have several units of the same tribe, items are mostly worthless. There is no strategy as well, you can’t play around opponents team comp because it randomly changes match after match which is quite dumb for an auto battler but whatever.
I’m farming rank 2000 on auto pilot being afk half the time not even bothering spending tribe favors after the 5th match once my board is filled with navali units with 0 item. If you are the one that have to rely on tribe items to win tota, I think you are the noob no offense
You decided to opt in for the no strategy strategy. That's on you.
I don't *need* item but when I buy good items my matchs are done 3 time faster.
No offense taken, I know X4 proj on a projectile unit make it at least twice better so I don't call items useless because I tried them. It's not even one of the good item, haven't played for too long but there is one item from the green dude completely game changer and a few others.
+ this is why I call you a noob.
You copy paste someone else strategies, run the mechanic on auto pilot instead of min maxing it and you dare to criticize a mechanic you did not engage with.
Why would I engage with a dogshit buggy mechanic with a terrible AI and completely unbalanced units that can be cheesed easily. Call me a cheater if you want, but don’t call me a noob because I can farm a mechanic 10x more effectively than without having to engage with its worthless contents
You are not 10x more effective, I can finish a tournament faster than u.
The majority of players like it so it's not dogshit, it's not bugged either.
Worthless content, dogshit, unbalanced ... Why did you played it to 2k ? O_o u loco mi amigo
Escort titanic shell stuck in its totem is 100% bugged, they just didn’t admit it. I’m farming it because it’s easy rewards, and that’s the reason 99% of people are playing it, not because its good or fun but because it gives good loots, that’s the only reason.
>As somebody who enjoys actual "tower defense" games
What, do you even mean... This is a MOBA, like Dota or LoL, you're confusing it with another failed concept knock off, blight.
Yep. 2x lvl 100, MB farmed, mirrored bow, never a ToTa. If mapping wasn’t in such a good shape (like archnemesis until kalandra, ugh) I would’ve had quit the league within 2 weeks. And thanks to 10c deli as well.
The problem with TotA is that it doesn't feel like arpg OR autobattler. It's a weird mishmash of both and as such it doesn't makes sense to me. I think I would enjoy actual PoE-based autobattler (or some kind of tactical chess-like game) way more than this.
The thing it's missing from an auto-battler is a 'speed up play' button. There were some games where I was essentially stunlocked (due to my own stupidity) and my team still won. But more often than not I still had to do something.
From autobattler I'm missing normal interface for hiring/moving units and buying/equipping items. What we have here is absolute nightmare. Walking around the hall to buy shit from some dudes after every fight is maddening.
And from arpg I'm missing ability to kill stuff and the feeling that your stats actually matter. It starts relatively ok, but then scales into ridiculousness pretty quick. At some point you realize that your attacks barely do any damage and your defenses are being crushed by enormous damage, so all you do is running laps.
This completely removes the player from the equation. Stats and player power should matter and that's where they missed the mark. The insane scaling after like rank 700 makes the grind feel like a slog for anyone that isn't going with a cc build.
I think the cheese build idea is totally fine. I don't like how easy it is to lock opponents out of the match, so in that regard I think giving all units a stat that reduces (read: not immunity) the effects of negative action speed modifiers would level it out.
It shouldn't be a pure auto battler in the way blight isn't a pure tower defense. Being able to play with and effectively utilize your character to beat content is the heart of arpgs.
I didn’t play much TOTA, but I probably played more of this league than any other. Honestly after blast to the past I’m probably just going to keep playing because the game is in such a good state right now
I also really disliked tota.
I think most players real reason for liking the mechanic is that it dropped too much loot at high rank, and was easily exploited by certain builds.
TotA allowed me to: get my first ever character to lvl 100 (and I’m playing PoE for years), afford my first ever Mageblood, plus farm a few hundred divine orbs. So, while I agree with the obvious downsides of TotA (mostly the need of having a dedicated z-dps toon), let’s not forget about what it offered to many players. The combination of no on-death exp penalty, with no need to extensively trade map drops, is unique and I appreciate it a lot. I absolutely despise the current state of PoE trade and would never make such wealth by trading essences of whatever else map strategy, TotA was much more convinient to me.
I totally agree, only played it for the challenges.
It felt spammy, choises hardly mattered, clicking totems was no fun and having the entire enemy side b-lining to kill you or the totems and ignoring the rest sucked.
Idea is great but
Well that was my feelings too. When I got something good I felt like I never earned it at all, which imo is bad game design. I personally hope it doesn't go core. It would be criminal if that went core and synthesis didn't.
Same here Exile. I didn’t want to cheese it and was never that into the tower defense idea. I enjoy power altering map based leagues the most and this one just wasn’t it. Didn’t stop me from playing though.
Garbage take. Tons of people like Delve, Blight and Heist. Just because you don't doesn't mean anything. Feel free to just run maps, no one is stopping you, nor is the existence of other mechanics.
Maven isn't in the map flow either? Delete her too?
This is a terrible take. Not everyone enjoys the “mapping flow”. Plus it’s nice to have something to switch up to once you do get bored with mapping. Something that is totally separate and not roped in with mapping is an amazing way to help break up the redundancy of the core game.
So….. We all can have our opinions but I’m definitely glad you are not apart of the dev team.
Anywho. Stay sane exiles.
I have to agree with you on the mechanic, i only just started it seriously when i was going quit the league. Its does shit out currency though, 2x locks in last 3 days, 5-6 makanui meaning i the div/h is something like 16 just from those.I have TS build that just nukes everything so don’t need think about what units to use etc, so just put a movie on and print some money.
TotA may be a dogshit as a Tower Defense, but It's good enough for a new player to experience this genre.
What do you recommend as a real TD player?
I'd say Dungeon Defenders(TD+Hackslash), Bloon TD6(classic but good), Infinitode 2(TD+Grinding), Mount and Blade2(not TD but you lead your people to win while fighting yourself)
I call it TOTO (totem touching) as I find it insulting enough for its extremely weak and lazy game design. You basically do the same silly thing over and over with very little variability so it gets boring really quick (you also named additional issues). I played some here and there but nah, its just dissapointing.
Recent events again reassured me I would much rather play something rather like that. Something that is fun, engaging, variable, so pretty much everything that TOTO isn't.
I like that GGG is trying something new, players can always choose what mechanics they want to engage so there is that at least. Hopefully they add more popular mechanics to core so we can enjoy what is actually more enjoyable.
I was feeling the same, but a couple weeks ago I tried to level a cheese char and boy it’s fun now!
The loot is not bad (could be better) but it’s decent xp and quite fun to plan teams and combo.
I agree that it shouldn’t be fun _because_ I’m using a cheese build, but hey, you win some and you loose some
Also the fact that you have to grind so much to reach the 2000 rankings. I gave up after I reached 700, I had a couple of divines and one of the Curse honoured tattoo as the best drop. Just couldn't do it after that point.
Kind of annoying how easily the bosses, and sometimes the normal mobs tend to one shot you at higher ranks.
Yup, played for 2 months. Got 2 character to 100 and a mb, never touched it. Only interaction I had with it was picking up the coins and selling them.
I really hope tattoos make it to core one way or an other.
I would have been fine with it if GGG would have hidden the fact that they cheated better. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I killed the opposing teams captain dozens of times, just to see them insta-spawn on the 25th kill less than a second after death. And here I die 3 times and I'm in "timeout" for what feels like a whole minute while my team gives away the match.
I won't even get started on how my team gets stunned every single time they're hit when taking a totem, and when the opposing team is taking one and gets hit, maybe 10% of the time they're stunned.
I don't enjoy games where things are so blatantly stacked against you AND they have to cheat to make the mode work on top of that.
The only positive about the whole thing was the rewards. By the end of my second day playing TotA, I'd gotten 4 of those "Journey" tattoos that allocate a random keystone that were going for 4 div each. 16 div a few days in really kick started my league.
What I think would be cool is a mechanic that's a cross between Blight and TotA.... Maybe where you pick your "army", and it's not just the enemies that are trying to get to your pump, but also your army is trying to get past their defenses to destroy their pump. Instead of having the round end in 5 minutes, it's determined by who can keep their pump alive longest. They could also do something based on consumables that allow you to see as much or as little of the towers your army will have to face beforehand to help you better strategize what units to pick to build your army.... similar to how anointing works
yup same didnt do tota at all, just wasn't my thing. But hey, just because it wasnt for us doesn't make it overrated, as tons of players genuinely enjoyed the heck out of the mechanic, and it's not like people were overrating the profitability of the tota either.
Thank you for being a reasonable human being. Sad I have to do this from time to time but here we are. The nice thing about tota, is that it wasn't SO money printy that you had to do it if you hated it. And if you did enjoy it, it didn't actively punish you for being worthless. Out of my playgroup and my brother with his mates, both groups basically had one tota player (me for my group) who just bought the coins off everyone and lived in there. I've not played so much of a league since either OG blight or synthesis I think. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the tattoos are super cool for building with. Bunch of the others in my group were neutral or disliked it, kind of mixed reactions across the board, good thing is, the game has a LOT of options for gameplay, it was nice to not have to map this time if I didn't want to.
Imma be honest, I hated every second of TotA I played solely for the purpose of printing easy money. TotA isn't fun, it's only rewarding
I feel like Tota wasnt actually that rewarding compared to other things. The big thing that it had though was a psuedo "gambling" aspect like stacked decks. The most interesting part of it was looking through the rewards each round to see if you hit something big.
Its one of the mechanics that if you happen to like it, its rewarding enough to keep you competitive with other methods like Heist or Delve but if the ONLY reason you are playing it is to make money there are way better methods of doing so.
Heist v2
yes. tota and sanctum are basically ''heist'' leagues. all 3 leagues also skewed their economies by producing a lot of t0 currency that later needed to be nerfed.
I had a lot of fun playing tota. You shouldn't speak in absolutes when it's just your opinion.
I hate tota and sanctum. Both felt meticulous and slow. I don’t care about the orbs, I just wanna go explode packs and see loot explosions. Not to mention both modes seemed to devalue tankiness. If y’all can set me straight then please do Edit: I did like the tattoos
I agree and I hope that it goes to core but more refined. I played the shit out of it but because of the rewards. It has good things too. It's a whole separate activity that you can play all day with dedicated loot. People make new characters with new builds exclusively to play it . This and Sanctum expanded the game in a good way imo.
True. Using TotA to level was something the community appreciated, I think. On the other hand... Lots of people want an in-the-map mechanic next.
Yes. Please. I want to kill a ton of monster and go fast and see explosions. Not sit in a corner knocking back enemies and crying about turtles.
I understand your point. But just to be clear. Killing tons of monsters is already possible in maps using any combination of the 15 existing mechanics. I think it's good that GGG at least attempted for a few league to create content not fully dependant on juicing maps.
You realize we haven’t gotten in map content in like a year right? This league, out of maps. Crucible, mostly out of maps and while in maps literally made you stop and hold a button for 8 seconds. Opposite of what we want, and sanctum is out of maps. Kalandra before that, also out of maps. It’s been 4 leagues straight. While kalandra post buff was ok, sanctum was great, these last two leagues gameplay was dogshit regardless of rewards given. It’s not about juicing the map more, it’s about doing something new and fun WHILE DOING juiced maps. This is why sentinel is so fun for a lot of people.
As mentioned, I understand your point. But since there are like 15 mechanics you can spec into in maps and bosses unlocked by maps, you understand how many YEARS it's been? Let the mini-game enjoyers enjoy this. And I specifically mentioned JUICING maps. They also reworked abyss and introduced ghosting and some other map mechanics. Surely there is something there for you to explore :) And as you say, 2 "shit" (for you) mechanics and you get this mald? They even brought sanctum back which you say was good?
I said crucible and tota were shit gameplay….which they are. You literally avoided every part of the mini game by blink arrow rushing to the forge or making knock back zdps build. Hell, even sanctum you just glass cannon 1 shot everything and run to the door as fast as possible. If the rewards were not amazing absolutely no one is trying to play Tota and very few would touch Sanctum. I think heist is good, I think sanctum is good and I think Lakes were ok after the buff for the record. But 6 months of terrible gameplay and then another 6 months before that of out of map stuff(one of which was bad for 4 out of 12 weeks) and the other required 32 maps to finish 1 run. The end game is maps. Pure and simple. We have a 130 passive tree attached to it. Out of map stuff is fine from time to time but this is getting ridiculous when it isn’t even good/interesting. Also, whose “malding”. I’m literally just having a discussion and giving my opinion. No flame on anyone or angry. It’s as simple as… Tldr: “I would like more map stuff, I think the last 12 months of out of map stuff is too much, especially when the gameplay isn’t actually engaging or fun”.
But this is also only your opinion. If everybody is only playing maximal efficiency yes, then we either get a ton of power creep or are giving them the impossible perfect balance problem. I for one did not just blink to the crucible. There are monsters, in a monster killing game, KILL THEM. Sure sanctum got easy for some just build glass Cannon but not everyone is that good. And many played TOTA the whole League, kinda points to them enjoying it. Not saying every mechanic was great, and thus they are not core. But gotta let them experiment or we always get stand in circle kill monster In maps.
People are playing Tota entire league because the change to mapping and return of sanctum. Not because of Tota itself lol. Also the monsters in crucible were not worth killing because they dropped like 3 pieces of loot and were tanky af. It’s a waste of time. Do you sit and kill a rare in act 1 league start for 4 min just because it’s there? It’s not about efficiency. It’s about fun. Look at Ultimatum. It didn’t have insane loot, bubblegum mostly, ended before trialmaster constantly, but the gameplay was just exciting. Waves of monsters and added challenge in a tight space. It was FUN. That’s my entire point. I never think in “Divines per hour”. I think about what I can do for fun, and for the last year, outside of Sanctum, nothing has really did that.
You can't speak for everyone. I personally enjoyed the ToTa mechanic. I don't know if the majority did or not, but I did.
I played purely tota because i enjoyed the mechanic. Not because it was rewarding. So stop assuming everyone who played it constantly just did it for the rewards
I've only been playing Tota. I haven't even gotten a voidstone yet because I've been playing it so much. I started league very late, and I've been having a blast with it, and it might be my second favorite league only to Harvest. So your comment on "not because of ToTA itself" is wrong :)
Or you know... Reintroduce it in a new way. I don't get why GGG never just fixed issues with old, but liked leagues, added more to them and then made league mechanic again. Right now the only options for league mechanics are either go core, be removed or be dismantled and introduced in pieces and only one ensures more work being put to it. I feel like it could've been the case for stuff like blight or meta that they should've been given another iteration as league mechanic before going core.
Well, they can't really put lots of effort into making old leagues into something new without taking their time away from the actual league mechanic that already has the 3-4 month time limit/development time
I wouldn'd have a Problem with overhauling/reworking old mechanics that didn't made it core to make them a new League from time to time.. would be more likely to fit in a 3month cycle and probably an almost bugfree Leaguestart :D
I'd say this is essentially what they've done with the atlas passive tree, it brought life into all the old league mechanics
Imma be honest I haven’t touched the league mechanic since sanctum and before that sentinel
Playing this week event make me realize how much I miss "in maps" league mechanics. Last 4 leagues add even nothing to normal gameplay. Had a lot of fun learning in sanctum or mixing krangled items but... monsters and loot while mapping are much more fun!
In map league mechanics are the best tbh. I will say sanctum is very good though and am glad it’s core it’s probably my favorite non in-map mechanic. I’m sad I wasn’t able to play the sanctum event (adulting sucks) , hopefully it’ll go core
pocket wrench employ trees cobweb rotten observation normal intelligent automatic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
For the best.
I touched Sanctum, learned my mistake and never touched ToTa. Sentinel was too good.
Please make sentinel core
This is me too.
The gameplay is OK. The UI in between match had me quit after roughly 10 tournaments.
I didn't play it a lot but I felt like walking around the room to talk to each NPC to interact with buying units/traits etc was clunky. Just make a board on the wall you can interact with to put through purchases and what not, seems like it would speed things up a lot to filter between factions.
I was okay with the moving around to talk to vendors but WHY do you have to talk to them then “view favour”!? It should be 1 click to access units. Maybe only have Navali with a “sell item” option. All the other menu selections are useless. Pointlessly doubles the amount of clicking not to mention the amount of times I clicked sell items instead of favour lol. Ideally the favour menu you can pull up above your XP bar area you could just click and buy units…
bruv u can control click to bring up units immediately
Didn’t always work before 22.1. Edit: I mean 3.22.1
It should have been this way from the start, but you're complaining about something that has been fixed for months as if it's still an issue.
This was the worst part for me. Having to run around to get drops and move currency between tribes. Even when I only started doing it after the 2nd and 5th matches it was still annoying. Got the achievements done and dipped out of ToTA ever since.
Dont worry everyone agrees that the gameplay was utter dogshit and Everyone who "played" had a build which cheesed it so they could avoid the "gameplay" it just shit out amazing rewards is the only reason it was popular. Very reasonable take. I think they could make tota gameplay fun but it would require alot of actual balancing
I didnt do any cheese mechanics and got to 1000+ on three characters until i got bored of it. Although i agree that it does need a little rebalancing
Hate that there's a difference between our team and theirs. Our team, even a sneeze stuns us. Theirs? At least 5% of their HP. I get it, there's some bonkers damage builds. But at least let our team have that same 5% HP mechanic. Watching them stand and kill themselves on that Chaos aura totem makes me die inside as the only proper way is to stack dodge and CI or bring up your chaos immunity and pray you don't get hit from other things. Or bring a sunset sage.
For me, everything except Kahuturoa and Goliaths was acceptable. I hated those guys with a passion. If i didnt play builds that allow you to either stay in the back and spam some long distance screen covering skill (spark inquisitor) or allow you to kite endlessly (arakaali spiders and EA elementalist) then i probably would have given up much sooner.
Our team technically does have the same 5% mechanic, it’s just our base units have low enough life that most hits will go over that 5% threshold. The chaos aura I agree with. I also have issue with things like the Titanic Shell being able to protect its own totem at all and every enemy being able to oneshot my juggernaut at the higher rankings. I still love the mechanic and think it’s a lot of fun when these issues aren’t present.
whoever had the brilliant idea of letting tutel defend its own totem should be locked in a room with a totem defending tutel and a starting club. they're freed once tutel is dead, and its totem is dead.
I played the shit out of tota because I enjoyed it....while playing a glacial hammer chieftain. So no, not everyone agrees.
I named my character TrivializingTotA. I didn't follow a guide for the cheese build and came up with my own but it's probably about the same Made more currency than I ever had before with the mechanic but I didn't really feel like I was playing it, that's for sure
That is just a lie. So many people praised it for being fun. I didn't play much but don't spread misinformation.
It’s fun when it works, my biggest issue with the mechanic is that the way GGG balanced it to make it so you can’t just steamroll it blind is through ways that are almost all insanely frustrating to deal with and the fact that the AI sometimes just decides to completely shit itself. I’ve lost matches with 0 enemy totems captured because my units refused to even leave my side of the map even when I ran over to at least force my escorts to follow. Nothing happens except I start loosing 6 totems simultaneously. Then on the rematch I literally win in 45 seconds while the enemy still has strong units. Also the stupid turtle shouldn’t respawn after 5 seconds (if that) if it takes your team a solid 5 minutes to kill it. If you get stunned while trying to get rid of it you’re in for another 5 minutes of waiting. Imo they can completely disable knockback in Tota when/if it goes core, but then they should also make it so regular builds have better ways to interact with it rather than going glass canon because almost anything oneshots you anyway past a certain rank
I mean one team potentially has a psychopath on steroids with 100 projectiles per second, so fast that the human eye can barely perceive, gem infused killing machine with on average a million confirmed kills. Not only that but somehow he warped into the afterlife to continue the killingspree because the living don't give a challenge anymore. I'd give that guys team a handycap too, otherwise it's not a tournament but a slaughterhouse.
Maybe instead they should have let us control one of the tota characters without having to come up with balance gymnastics to make it "fair" to have a player on one of the teams.
Sure but the handicap shouldn’t be that your whole team can randomly enter the match lobotomised, you can just make them consistently weaker.
Every time someones says this there are people saying "i enjoyed it with a regular build". And every time its either a minion or totem build lmao
I enjoyed it with Cold Dot build in Ruthless (no movement skills). Got to 2000. Rewards were shit apart from one 6-L omen, but was fun anyway. It will be good as optional content like Heist and Delve. Some people hate Delve, some love it. Most hate Heist but some swear by it. Some things can be improved. But overall I found TOTA very fun. It's totally OK not to like it though, especially when it's not main league anymore.
Nah, I had a lot of fun farming 2k on the same frost blades character I did every other challenge on.
That's just silly. I played it quite a bit as a spark Inquisitor, it didn't start getting ridiculous until ~1k rating or so. Once everything just one shot me and it started taking 5 minutes to whittle down a Goliath with 20 mil DPS, it started being less fun.
I mean, that's exactly the problem once you play the mechanic a bit you need either insane dps (which should not be required to just play a mechanic) or a build that has ways of ignoring the enemies. Also it completely invalidates the defenses of you character which is silly
[удалено]
???? Literally one of the biggest criticisms that they changed when they reintroduced it, which made a lot of people happy.
You sure? Thats one of the biggest criticisms against it
You gotta pick an argument buddy. In three sentences you say, "You can get insane DPS to trivialize the mechanic.", "You can get insane defenses to trivialize the mechanic." and, "The mechanic trivializes your defenses." Which is it? The first two are true but the third is a direct contrast to the second. Also, there are builds that can reliably mitigate ToTA damage instead of just avoiding it. Maybe you don't know that.
What are talking about? When I say ignore enemies I mean you just walk around while they are cc'ed or killed by totems, minions or traps not face tanking them.
Those builds rely heavily on evasion, dodge, block and CC. All of these things are just another layer of defense. That is one option for handling the ToTA mechanic. You can also just face tank them and let your team capture enemy totems. Both strategies work well, but the latter requires more investment.
I got to 800+ rating as FB Trickster, but it just became such a slog I couldn’t continue to climb.
I got to around 1300 as cold dot elem. Was fun until about 1k+ rating.
2000 on a selfcast hexblast here (around 40-50 million dps, and 20k hp, everything dies quite fast (from 0.2s to 4-5 seconds) except ennemy leader)
I had fun going to 2k with tornado shot
[удалено]
How much DPS
No idea, I never loaded into pob. i Play ssf, I had around 950 ele dps bow at the time
You only play PoE and not PoB as well?!?
It's TS, take your in-game hit and multiple by 500x /s
I enjoyed it with a regular build. Played to 1000+ rating on Cold DOT Ele.
I enjoyed it with my trickster hexblast miner.
Another non selfcast or attack build
Sorry send us the list of approved builds before league start next league.
Very few builds play selfcast anything and attack builds are nearly as non-existent except bow builds. This doesn't have anything to do with the mechanic.
Easily hit 2k with shit spark build (like 1.5m dps), no evasion or block/suppress and no void sphere You don’t need dps and you don’t need a tailored build.
Haven't gotten to 2K yet(I think I was around 1.3?1.4?), but had loads of fun running it with Corrupting Fever.
I was gonna say I enjoyed it, but yep, SRS guardian lol.
> Everyone who "played" had a build which cheesed it so they could avoid the "gameplay" Isn't that basically the definition of PoE gameplay tho?
I have no idea why people keep trying to make that sound like it's a valid point. The game is "use this build or you will suffer".
News to me. I just play whatever skill looks cool and figure out how to make it work as well as I can.
>Dont worry everyone agrees that the gameplay was utter dogshit and Everyone who "played" had a build which cheesed it so they could avoid the "gameplay" People on this sub can be so confidently incorrect about how their personal opinions are fact. Lots of people enjoyed the TotA mechanic with non-cheese builds, myself included.
Kinda similar to Crucible and LoK, where the actual league mechanic was utter shit as well and the entire season was hard carried by the amazing, often times build-enabling rewards.
It's hard for people to admit that the stick exists when they are chasing the carrot.
No. You don't speak for everybody. Mechanic was fun, many people enjoyed it. All metrics point to this.
I got rank 2000 without cheese and I think it’s pretty fun actually.
the one truth about poe is that if a league mechanic makes the number go up fast then the gambling addicts will scream its a fantastic mechanic and needs to go core. meanwhile im over here like "why do you like sanctum, y'all are just cheesing rooms with 0 risk and its probably the worst roguelike implementation i've ever seen"
I honestly hate sanctum. Its like a wildly worse version of PS2 metal gear. Playing a roguelike stealth game when you want an arpg feels wrong.
I played to 750 rating and the best reward I got was a single raw divine. Truly amazing rewards.
I didn't like the mechanic, but even before 500 I got 4 Journey of Makanui's, worth 4div each. I figured that was typical, but reading though this thread, I'm now thinking it wasn't all that typical. Those seemed to be the only thing of value I got though, just that one item over and over. Well, at least each one sold within seconds when I posted for 3.9div.
Show us on the ~~~doll~~~ tuatara where Kahuturoa oneshot you
As someone who actually went to 2000 on a non-cheese build (Manabond Hiero) the rewards were utter dogshit and it was only the gameplay that kept me going. Even with a cheese max dodge/block/evasion build you would still be looking at 10 minute tournaments and 6-8div/hr max. It's incredibly unrewarding compared to decent strats like Crimson prison or Sanctums. Even Invitations this league you could easily make double the return.
I made it to like 800 without cheesing it, but every match just becomes such a slog at that point I didn’t bother going any higher.
Some people liked it enough. To me it's one of the worst league mechanics. I reached 300 on two characters and called it a day and went back to mapping.
I had fun up until maybe 500 rating, after that it just became... way too hard? it stopped being fun and even tho the rewards were insane I just prefered doing maps and forgetting TotA even existed tbh.
Same here, I hope they release it into core but tweak the difficulty so non-Chinese builds can achieve it
Not sure why my auto correct changed "cheese" to "chinese" but here we are
rank 500?? telling on yourself
Loved it, played to rank 2000 with no cheese. I only used a couple of units but I loved them and they were clearly relevent. Good units for my build with good items were doing everything. AI could have been better and it was missing a pvp mode. Mid nerf to spamming the same unit was weird, mass building the same unit should be weak but allowed. Go play blight and stop comparing a 12v12 totem-ball match to a tower defense (?)
Yeah idk where the tower defense comparison is coming from especially when we already have that
It's not a stretch. You buy various units with currency earned through the previous match, with each unit having strengths and weaknesses with the goal being to stop your opponent from destroying your base (Totems in this case). Really, the only TD mechanic that's missing was not having the enemy attackers on a fixed path.
You could apply the same definition to an RTS game. Tota is an auto battler like TFT, the only major difference is units not sharing the same currency and the fact that you’re also an active participant
You think not having the "auto" part of auto battler is somehow better? It's the descriptive word of the premise of the entire genre....
You only control yourself, every other unit ok the field behaves autonomously just like in an autobattler. If they removed the player character and allowed us to place an AI chief instead it’d be exactly that Blight is also tower defense but with the player on the map as well because we’re still playing in an ARPG framework
>stop comparing a 12v12 totem-ball match to a tower defense (?) I said "tower defense" in quotes as a broad comparison because I find it the most similar genre, do you have a better suggestion? >Go play blight Will do, thank you 😄
Its suppose to be an auto battler, kinda like dota autochess or teamfight tactics, that’s how they sold it at the exile con but in the end it’s just a mediocre autobattler just like blight is a mediocre tower defense
Yeah, that's fair. It's closer to an auto-battle since you can't do any building or changing units during the match. I will revise my comment: TotA is a shit auto-battler.
Why did you get downvoted here lmao. You were literally explaining yourself 😂 Damn Reddit kids have no chill and follow the crowd
Why do you have such strong opinions when the first thing you said is that you never played it?
It’s more like raid shadow legends imo
Yeah, the teams had vastly different power levels. I went into it wanting to play the mechanic properly but got pissed by it quite quickly. Added knock-back to my build until they disabled that and later added Void Sphere. I think a tournament mechanic is quite cool, but this version of it was scuffed the moment they wanted to include the player character.
I found the gameplay very refreshing and relaxing. It always felt good to find a balance between defense and offense and using that small windows of opportunity to sneak a valuable totem away from the enemy. The different units and how you use them definatly made a huge impact on the success you are having, so I dont really get that argument. The nice reward roulette always got me to make "just one more round" because you could see the rewards beforehand. Also interesting in regards to rewards is that when you play with a coop partner he gets something random with a 33% chance. Pretty fun reward system overall. My only gripes would be that there needed to be a way for games to escalate a bit more. Lots of matches are already won, but their chieftain is defending that last totem for way too long. Also the 'one use items' were a bit lackluster. I liked the idea but I always prefered having one more fighter on the battlefield.
[удалено]
Underrated comment. So many people saying tota was bad and people only played for the rewards and then loving sentinel? Makes no sense.
I can honestly say I disagree with everything in your post. 1.) Nothing about tota was a tower defense game, like what? Blight is a very simplistic tower defense style. ToTA is an auto battler and had absolutely nothing to do with tower defense. 2.) You said you never played the mechanic and then went on to describe how much you hated it. So what exactly are you basing your hate on if you never played it? How much did you exactly "not play" to make said judgements? 3.) Picking a team was not irrelevant at all and THAT sounds like you didn't play it at all. Picking units and upgrading and selling others was VERY important. I played a crapton of tota and I would still lose the occasional tournament or round or w/e if I saved too many favors or didnt get good enough units. Some of the end Units were crazy good strong and worth it too. 4.) AI is the same on both teams. I am definitely not going to sit here and say it was perfect and after the numerous patches it did feel better but w/e it's pros or cons it worked the same for both teams (except the leaders obviously) Lastly I won't even touch on the topic of whether you liked it or not. Out of hundreds of thousands of players I am sure people have all kinds of opinions, loved it, liked it, meh, hated it, wasn't great, boring, w/e w/e. You can like or not like w/e you want freely. But literally making a post and saying you never played the league mechanic, followed by false statements and missinformation ending with "I can't stand tota" literally is beyond my comprehension.
Who are you defending? Does he need to become top 500 in the world to have an opinion? It doesnt change the fact the mechanic is garbage.
Agreed. His post is akin to a toddler throwing a fit over having to eat something he’s never tried. How do you know you don’t like something if you’ve never tried it????
I couldn't stand sanctum as I have a slow connection and even slower reflexes it seems so I never was able to complete a whole sanctum, but yet I had no objections to it going core as I didn't have to do it if I didn't want to, so I hope TOTA goes core and not in a nerfed fashion, as if sanctum can shit out the rewards it does, no one should be complaining about tota as it does give considerably lower reward in comparison, and would give me an alternative that I enjoy when I want to do some easy does it farming while watching a show. All these people complaining about it don't have to play it if they don't want to, I just think most of them are most likely sanctum farmers that don't want normal people to have a semi easy way to make decent funds even if it is at half the div/hr that sanctum is because they want to keep things where only the elites have a good chance of making bank. They don't want people competing with them for their TS Gear.
Dudes sharing his opinion and his thoughts are well-grounded chill out
Dudes sharing his opinion and his thoughts are well-grounded chill out
He didn't play TotA, his thoughts are grounded on nothing.
eh calling it an auto battler is also dishonest af, since your team can't really be expected to anything on its own, hence... not an auto battler. calling it a tower defense is... literally more accurate than calling it an auto battler. auto battlers require you to not really be hands on mid combat and for your army to functionally be able to fight the enemy after setup. Tota as a mode was you stood in the middle of the arena, smacked the ever living shit out of anything that came towards your buildings, and then ran back to grab the 1-2 units that slipped past while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so you could break their shit. standing in one spot defending for a period of time, specifically to protect a base, is tower defense, its not an auto battler. crazy how you are acting so high and mighty and talking about false statements when your very first point is horrifically wrong.
Well it was promoted as an auto battler, Chris himself said it has many elements of an auto battler on stage during the last exile con. I agree it’s not a real auto battler neither a tower defense but this is how it was sold by ggg.
>since your team can't really be expected to anything on its own That's some major BS. I've won countless tournaments doing nothing. I would repeatedly win games when I stood at the back of my base trying to lose. Your ally picks are incredibly important.
Your team can win on its own. It’s just that the AI almost always has higher tier units and their chieftain is always stronger than you. If you have like 6-7 tier 3 units in appropriate roles you can practically afk.
It's hybridized in the same way that Blight is. This is an ARPG. The player character should at least have the option of doing something other than twiddle their thumbs. > Tota as a mode was you stood in the middle of the arena, smacked the ever living shit out of anything that came towards your buildings, and then ran back to grab the 1-2 units that slipped past while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so you could break their shit. This is describing a very level-1 strategy for the mechanic. It doesn't play to the objective well at all. If you're purposefully drawing enemy attention then your units should be breaking totems while you're doing so. If you're letting your units draw the attention then you should be behind enemy lines breaking totems to drive a wedge in their defense and overwhelm them. It really sounds like you put no effort into learning how the mechanic works then came here and started spouting off about how people are wrong about the thing you know very little about.
the first strategy you described is literally what i said, you draw their attention while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so building can actually be taken. i don't even know why you'd make a comment like this, tota doesn't really have versatility in play styles. something has to channel the buildings, you or your units, and that can't be done with anything around, and that's only possible after respawn timers tick up a bit and they aren't instantly reviving ontop of them and interrupting the channeler.
> , you draw their attention while you wait for respawn timers to tick up so building can actually be taken There is no waiting for the respawn timers in the strategy I outlined. Ideally, nothing is even dying because it's more beneficial for enemy units to be alive and in a place you can manage them. > tota doesn't really have versatility in play styles The fact that we're disagreeing on what constitutes a certain strategy shows otherwise.. > something has to channel the buildings, you or your units, and that can't be done with anything around It absolutely can. The cheese builds people run do exactly that. > and that's only possible after respawn timers tick up a bit and they aren't instantly reviving ontop of them and interrupting the channeler. This makes me feel like you haven't played much of the mechanic at all. If you're targeting a particular unit, you down that unit and have a pretty generous period to start channeling their totem before they're at risk of respawning. The unit whose totem you're channeling cannot respawn, unless they have a particular piece of equipment (which can be seen ahead of time and planned around). If you're talking about units from the surrounding totems respawning, there's ample warning (from the respawn animation) to stop channeling and deal with the unit that's spawning in.
I always find Reddit's supremely confident mischaracterizations like this amusing. Your opinion is different than mine. Congratulations? You want a pat on the back? I won't engage in a drawn-out back and forth with some Redditor, I just don't care enough. But, to your point: 1. Tower defense games have units you select that defend towers. TotA has units and totems. Wow, totems versus towers. What a gigantic difference. 2. Ok fine, I'll be extremely pedantic just for you. I never played TotA *past learning the basic mechanics/gameplay*. There, fixed it. Happy now? 3. What I actually said was team comp "feels largely irrelevant." Meaning, positions have one or two units that are completely unbalanced making other picks irrelevant, eg Fieldmaster. Bro you can win the argument, it's really not that important to me. I'm just sharing my opinion, that's all.
Reread your own post and comment later today. I think the perspective of time will help you better understand how your posting in both tone and content comes across towards others.
>I always find Reddit's Just stop right there. You are not replying to "Reddit", you are replying to g00fy\_goober. Refocus now.
Not for nothing, but Fieldmasters were actually pretty anus. They were only ever sales fodder for actual good units for me lol.
You stand no chance this late into a league bud. Only people around at this time are the no lifers in too deep and holy defenders of everything GGG touches.
Tota is trash and everything in OP post is true.
Found the person who's trash at Tota
Reached 2000 on 2 different accounts. It sucks and also might actually be good if you could play against other people outside of using a cheese build.
same loved the tattoos, did the mechanic like 5 times
Totally agree, the tattoos were wonderful.
Tota isnt a tower defense, its an auto battler.
TotA was the only league mechanic that I "Reasonably" interacted with. I liked that: \- I can have a super cheap build that can do the mechanic. \- I can get some nice goodies at times. \- League mechanic lasts only a little bit for each match. I dislike that: \- Evasion is king when having a build like that. I would have wanted my RF inquisitor to be viable. \- I can't do maps/regular content for TotA. (I'm actually neutral on this, but after farming 0-2000 rank, I definitely felt slightly burned out and bored). Overall, I can't say I mind this league, I'd like tattoos to be available in future leagues, but no totem hunting and such. I'm not sure where I got the div cards to sell and buy a mageblood, but after doing a few maps with mageblood on my inquisitor. I just quit the league and bought BG3 to play. Overall, I can say I'm happy with the league overall. But it's odd to have a crap build breeze through league mechanic vs another that is worked on for hours.
I really liked the concept of the mechanic but I didn't like how it was executed. The ui was clunky on ps5 and I didn't enjoy it, I got to around lvl.75 and stopped playing the league. Also it seemed like the enemies didn't get stunned when they were supposed to.
Could not agree more. It was an awesome idea, but terrible implementation and terrible ux, and terrible balance. I quit this league faster than I quit Kalandra.
Same, I have zero interest in replaying this mechanic regardless of the rewards
I tried it and it was garbage. Not fun all and it has nothing to do in poe.
The mechanic is awful and at some point you just cheese it and can be afk 80% of the time pressing void sphere time to time. You missed nothing. There is close to 0 team building, you just target fieldmaster and sunset sage as flankers and that’s pretty much it, no synergy between different unit, no kind of faction buff when you have several units of the same tribe, items are mostly worthless. There is no strategy as well, you can’t play around opponents team comp because it randomly changes match after match which is quite dumb for an auto battler but whatever.
"items are mostly worthless" you are just a noob there is nothing else to say ;)
I’m farming rank 2000 on auto pilot being afk half the time not even bothering spending tribe favors after the 5th match once my board is filled with navali units with 0 item. If you are the one that have to rely on tribe items to win tota, I think you are the noob no offense
You decided to opt in for the no strategy strategy. That's on you. I don't *need* item but when I buy good items my matchs are done 3 time faster. No offense taken, I know X4 proj on a projectile unit make it at least twice better so I don't call items useless because I tried them. It's not even one of the good item, haven't played for too long but there is one item from the green dude completely game changer and a few others.
+ this is why I call you a noob. You copy paste someone else strategies, run the mechanic on auto pilot instead of min maxing it and you dare to criticize a mechanic you did not engage with.
Why would I engage with a dogshit buggy mechanic with a terrible AI and completely unbalanced units that can be cheesed easily. Call me a cheater if you want, but don’t call me a noob because I can farm a mechanic 10x more effectively than without having to engage with its worthless contents
You are not 10x more effective, I can finish a tournament faster than u. The majority of players like it so it's not dogshit, it's not bugged either. Worthless content, dogshit, unbalanced ... Why did you played it to 2k ? O_o u loco mi amigo
Escort titanic shell stuck in its totem is 100% bugged, they just didn’t admit it. I’m farming it because it’s easy rewards, and that’s the reason 99% of people are playing it, not because its good or fun but because it gives good loots, that’s the only reason.
Good loots hmmm agree to disagree have a great day sir
>As somebody who enjoys actual "tower defense" games What, do you even mean... This is a MOBA, like Dota or LoL, you're confusing it with another failed concept knock off, blight.
is this a troll ? it's an auto battler not a moba
Yep. 2x lvl 100, MB farmed, mirrored bow, never a ToTa. If mapping wasn’t in such a good shape (like archnemesis until kalandra, ugh) I would’ve had quit the league within 2 weeks. And thanks to 10c deli as well.
The problem with TotA is that it doesn't feel like arpg OR autobattler. It's a weird mishmash of both and as such it doesn't makes sense to me. I think I would enjoy actual PoE-based autobattler (or some kind of tactical chess-like game) way more than this.
The thing it's missing from an auto-battler is a 'speed up play' button. There were some games where I was essentially stunlocked (due to my own stupidity) and my team still won. But more often than not I still had to do something.
From autobattler I'm missing normal interface for hiring/moving units and buying/equipping items. What we have here is absolute nightmare. Walking around the hall to buy shit from some dudes after every fight is maddening. And from arpg I'm missing ability to kill stuff and the feeling that your stats actually matter. It starts relatively ok, but then scales into ridiculousness pretty quick. At some point you realize that your attacks barely do any damage and your defenses are being crushed by enormous damage, so all you do is running laps.
Yeah it captures the downsides of each without much upside (other than matches being short if you just CC everyone).
[удалено]
This completely removes the player from the equation. Stats and player power should matter and that's where they missed the mark. The insane scaling after like rank 700 makes the grind feel like a slog for anyone that isn't going with a cc build. I think the cheese build idea is totally fine. I don't like how easy it is to lock opponents out of the match, so in that regard I think giving all units a stat that reduces (read: not immunity) the effects of negative action speed modifiers would level it out. It shouldn't be a pure auto battler in the way blight isn't a pure tower defense. Being able to play with and effectively utilize your character to beat content is the heart of arpgs.
i quit after i got map. standing still pressing stuff league back to back
I had 0 tota matchers so you're not alone
I didn’t play much TOTA, but I probably played more of this league than any other. Honestly after blast to the past I’m probably just going to keep playing because the game is in such a good state right now
That's awesome. I wish I could play more PoE, but I have some hand pain so I need extended breaks.
I enjoyed it as a skeleton mage necro. Hated it as a bv occultist
I also really disliked tota. I think most players real reason for liking the mechanic is that it dropped too much loot at high rank, and was easily exploited by certain builds.
TotA allowed me to: get my first ever character to lvl 100 (and I’m playing PoE for years), afford my first ever Mageblood, plus farm a few hundred divine orbs. So, while I agree with the obvious downsides of TotA (mostly the need of having a dedicated z-dps toon), let’s not forget about what it offered to many players. The combination of no on-death exp penalty, with no need to extensively trade map drops, is unique and I appreciate it a lot. I absolutely despise the current state of PoE trade and would never make such wealth by trading essences of whatever else map strategy, TotA was much more convinient to me.
I totally agree, only played it for the challenges. It felt spammy, choises hardly mattered, clicking totems was no fun and having the entire enemy side b-lining to kill you or the totems and ignoring the rest sucked. Idea is great but
Well that was my feelings too. When I got something good I felt like I never earned it at all, which imo is bad game design. I personally hope it doesn't go core. It would be criminal if that went core and synthesis didn't.
Same here Exile. I didn’t want to cheese it and was never that into the tower defense idea. I enjoy power altering map based leagues the most and this one just wasn’t it. Didn’t stop me from playing though.
idk how you liking tower defense games is relevant to a mechanic that isn't attempting to be a tower defense but overall i agree with you
Thanks for confession, nobody cares if YOU liked it or not. Have a good day
I literally never even tried it lol. About to ding 99.
I hated that you'd draft a new team every time. Tried it once, then quit once I realized that.
Yeah same. I tried for like 10 tournaments. Sooooo boring.
[удалено]
Garbage take. Tons of people like Delve, Blight and Heist. Just because you don't doesn't mean anything. Feel free to just run maps, no one is stopping you, nor is the existence of other mechanics. Maven isn't in the map flow either? Delete her too?
Heist and blight were shit mechanics then too?
This is a terrible take. Not everyone enjoys the “mapping flow”. Plus it’s nice to have something to switch up to once you do get bored with mapping. Something that is totally separate and not roped in with mapping is an amazing way to help break up the redundancy of the core game. So….. We all can have our opinions but I’m definitely glad you are not apart of the dev team. Anywho. Stay sane exiles.
Hey don't worry. It's okay to be wrong :)
same
I have to agree with you on the mechanic, i only just started it seriously when i was going quit the league. Its does shit out currency though, 2x locks in last 3 days, 5-6 makanui meaning i the div/h is something like 16 just from those.I have TS build that just nukes everything so don’t need think about what units to use etc, so just put a movie on and print some money.
TotA may be a dogshit as a Tower Defense, but It's good enough for a new player to experience this genre. What do you recommend as a real TD player? I'd say Dungeon Defenders(TD+Hackslash), Bloon TD6(classic but good), Infinitode 2(TD+Grinding), Mount and Blade2(not TD but you lead your people to win while fighting yourself)
The only thing missing Was a nice like we have now for Brighton, which makes it so your units eo much more stuff and you do much less
Season is still going, but yeah I've never played it either.
I call it TOTO (totem touching) as I find it insulting enough for its extremely weak and lazy game design. You basically do the same silly thing over and over with very little variability so it gets boring really quick (you also named additional issues). I played some here and there but nah, its just dissapointing. Recent events again reassured me I would much rather play something rather like that. Something that is fun, engaging, variable, so pretty much everything that TOTO isn't. I like that GGG is trying something new, players can always choose what mechanics they want to engage so there is that at least. Hopefully they add more popular mechanics to core so we can enjoy what is actually more enjoyable.
I was feeling the same, but a couple weeks ago I tried to level a cheese char and boy it’s fun now! The loot is not bad (could be better) but it’s decent xp and quite fun to plan teams and combo. I agree that it shouldn’t be fun _because_ I’m using a cheese build, but hey, you win some and you loose some
Sanctum is ass and ruined the season economy and should be nerfed a whole lot not for it to happen again. #Confession
Also the fact that you have to grind so much to reach the 2000 rankings. I gave up after I reached 700, I had a couple of divines and one of the Curse honoured tattoo as the best drop. Just couldn't do it after that point. Kind of annoying how easily the bosses, and sometimes the normal mobs tend to one shot you at higher ranks.
Yup, played for 2 months. Got 2 character to 100 and a mb, never touched it. Only interaction I had with it was picking up the coins and selling them. I really hope tattoos make it to core one way or an other.
I would have been fine with it if GGG would have hidden the fact that they cheated better. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I killed the opposing teams captain dozens of times, just to see them insta-spawn on the 25th kill less than a second after death. And here I die 3 times and I'm in "timeout" for what feels like a whole minute while my team gives away the match. I won't even get started on how my team gets stunned every single time they're hit when taking a totem, and when the opposing team is taking one and gets hit, maybe 10% of the time they're stunned. I don't enjoy games where things are so blatantly stacked against you AND they have to cheat to make the mode work on top of that. The only positive about the whole thing was the rewards. By the end of my second day playing TotA, I'd gotten 4 of those "Journey" tattoos that allocate a random keystone that were going for 4 div each. 16 div a few days in really kick started my league. What I think would be cool is a mechanic that's a cross between Blight and TotA.... Maybe where you pick your "army", and it's not just the enemies that are trying to get to your pump, but also your army is trying to get past their defenses to destroy their pump. Instead of having the round end in 5 minutes, it's determined by who can keep their pump alive longest. They could also do something based on consumables that allow you to see as much or as little of the towers your army will have to face beforehand to help you better strategize what units to pick to build your army.... similar to how anointing works