I'm liking a lot this community analysis and critique, this game needs more constructive criticism like yours, more so since we're getting closer to poe2
My least favorite thing about TOTA was the "difficulty" coming more to patience than actually being skillful. There are things that require patience to be successful at but also require other things like mechanical ability or pattern recognition like bossing. Though tota, unless with a tota build, it felt like i was walking circles around things more than fighting or strategizing a team comp. Just buy the good thing slap it in and circle until u can click the totem. That just feels so bad to me. I just dont like it very much, though that doesn't mean that the mechanic is bad.
I think the other thing that TOTA and Sanctum have going for them is; you dont have to roll ANYTHING. No looking for map mods that could kill your whole build like stupid reflect, reduced CDR or no mana/es/life regen.
i played tota all the way up to 2000 rating and beyond. While it did get me my first mageblood, it wasn't a very interesting mechanic, it's a skeleton of a autobattler and it felt terrible to slug through. If there were ways to power up your units or make a unique team comp it might've been interesting, but otherwise playing voidsphere and getting brain rot wasn't very a great experience.
Hot take: TotA and Sanctum and Heist are the exact same mechanic. People who comprehend how to make it work for them can really print money out of it, but for everyone else, it's immensely frustrating, difficult to get into, seemingly impossible to get good at, and leaves you wondering how the hell you're supposed to go from feeling like an idiot to being Richie Rich. There's no "difficulty curve" like any of the other mechanics. You either get it, or you don't. Played a couple hundred rounds of TotA. Every time I thought I had it figured out, I would end up getting absolutely destroyed and question what I was doing wrong. Then I would do the exact same thing and would have no problems. The balance is horrible, the AI is awful. I would love it so much more if it were like the Starcraft and Warcraft custom game modes it was ultimately descended from and would let me control my team directly as an overlord, not as one weak-ass combatant.
I believe there are two sides to the coin. On one hand, a diverse playstyle in Path of Exile is beneficial, but on the other hand, I think maps should be the main focus, imo. Expedition really hits the nail on the head for me.
we REALY need a good mapping mechanic next leage, crucible doesent cound as a good mapping mechaninc, so it's been all the way back to sentinel since we had a good nice in-map mechanic
The thing about ToTA and why I enjoyed it to a degree is that the bar to enter is really low. Like yeah you can build a cheese build and trivialize the entire thing but just about any build can enter and farm ToTA. You don't need sextants or a starting "investment". You just need the silver coins you collected in the campaign and those coins will make you enough chaos to buy more coins and keep it rolling. You can go in play some rounds, make a few divs to get your build up and running. You don't need a lot of damage to kill bosses like in Sanctum and the rewards are better than early maps. It replaced Heist for me this league and I must admit I will miss it next league.
I really enjoyed TotA, playing in SSF but I also only started playing it in maps. I think that’s almost always the way to go unless you hear something is broken in a good way at low levels (e.g. Ritual). I also was playing a minion build on the new guardian which made the mechanic a lot easier.
If ToTa had infinite maximum rating with infinite monster stats and reward scaling, but you still need just a 10 div build to beat anything, that's cheese. Imagine if something similar would be possible for delve, a 10 div build to beat any depth. Sure there are cheap build for heist or lab running, but they don't cheese, they are just good enough to beat that specific content. Make heist/lab harder and you'll need a stronger more expensive build. Any ToTa balance changes are meaningless, as long as there is void sphere or any other cheese. Fix that, make monster less tanky and remove 5 second stun, then ToTa will fit nicely into the game.
I made a character 2 years ago. Hit level 10 and stoppd because i had to free space up. So now im trying to see the amount of overwhelming features / mechanics there are now
My problem with sanctum and why I've stopped doing it was simple - shit was hitting you from off screen and punished you for not playing large aoe build or skills you could use to not interact with content like srs. Else you basically had to get super high damage burst build to do it comfortably or you were in for a bad time. With tota it was that your minions were dogshit and acted stupid most of the time, you couldn't interface with them and they would just ignore things that would make you lose, and that you had to rely on void sphere to do it at high end. Also nothing as frustrating as long stuns or resurrect wait times while you watch your team ai suck by running past one minion that destroys your totems.
I got a quad-tab filled with forbidden tomes and 1000+ silver coins laying around at the end of the league. All because I chose to play a melee boneshatter build. It's just not enjoyable to play certain league mechanics with melee characters, such a shame really.
I can't help but feel the Trials were half-baked. At a glance it seemed as though we would need to strategize with good unit and item selections, balance favor vs valuable rewards, consider which slots on our team will be filled and which holes the player themselves will fill in. But then the reality sets in...most of the expensive units simply aren't worth saving for, many clans cheapest units are still too expensive to pull their weight, the enemies' scaling as you go up ranks is obscene. It isn't uncommon that you encounter something like a goliath turtle or death's guide and were never offered a unit or item that could counter their specific flavor of cheese. Also it seems incredibly rare that I can ever interrupt a unit channeling on one of my totems, which feels unfair considering how long of a stun I suffer as a player. The tattoos on the other hand are one of my favorite additions (and thematic too!) in a long time.
I don't mind delayed loot mechanics. Deli and Ultimatum were great league mechanics in my mind, but ToTa and Sanctum just aren't fun to me because they take time out of maps, and not in a good way like Delve. With Delve, it's very similar to mapping, except easier (more loot = go down) and I think it's fairly well balanced. (until it isn't) Around 200-500 depth is pretty much where the good loot starts, and that's where I tend to farm. But Sanctum has these downsides that are just annoying, like you can't see what loot each room has, or you can't see what downsides you get, that just feel terrible if you accidentally force yourself into one of these. It punishes you for not having relics that let you see the entire sanctum, which completely avoids the bad rooms, which seems a bit silly to me (shouldn't these bad rooms provide insane loot equal to the insane downsides?). And ToTa feels worse the higher rank you get. (I capped out around 400 because I knew I wasn't going to want to play any further) So it seemed like gaining rating was just a hinderance, and the rewards weren't really worth the frustration in the actual league mechanics (clearly I became too frustrated with the mechanics to continue to the point where the good stuff actually drops). The mobs that one-shot you, drain your flask charges, resurrect INSTANTLY, etc. all felt really bad to play against and made me feel like I'd rather just make currency in maps/Delve.
Crazy how you only showed the bad comments about tota but not the good ones. Let me balance it a little. I liked tota. I’m rank 2000 and it was good to mix up the game when I got bored of mapping. This has kept the league fresh for me and I’m now 40/40
Personally i stopped playing the leagues during sanctum. It's not that i dislike the new leagues, but i hate feeling like I'm wasting time by not playing the new mechanic for currency over my maps. Like you said in this video, i prefer the content that adds to maps, not take you out of them. Stuff like blight, harbinger, expedition and legion have all been super fun additions to mapping and the amount of investment i put into them feels meaningful and rewarding. Playing on standard is great because there's no time pressure to be the most efficient/ profitable player at any point (unless that's my explicit goal)
The in-map leagues are blocked at pretty much the same rate as the out-of-map leagues: it's not simply a matter of all players preferring one or the other. Legion and Heist are blocked at the same rates (both are currently fluctuating around 26-27%), and you can make the same argument against either that the only reason people engage with the mechanic is that they are lucrative. The simple truth is that the PoE playerbase is varied and diverse. Some people love blasting maps, other people look to league mechanics to "fix" mapping from feeling terrible, or to escape maps entirely. Some want to turn their brain off, others want to switch it on. And that diversity applies to builds too: we see people lamenting the need to play from a selection of specific archetypes to do well in TOTA while blithely ignoring the fact that other archetypes are just as pushed in the existing league mechanics. If we want to be able to fit a wide array of mechanics into the endgame, they can't all appeal to one type of player.
I always try all mechanics. I can't remember when I did not do that. Sure I barely touched crucible, only when I wanted to. Just like I did not use every single silver coin I got. I barely touched sanctum, I had too much fun blasting maps. But I did give it a fair shot, and I lost over and over and over again. The idea of not getting hit is opposite to how I kake my builds. My builds are tanks. But sanctum did not care.
For as long as I can remember I have played defense games, tower defense and subgenres, I only touched TOTA 1 time, didn't touch it again. Seeing the rising final league prices of all those TOTA suff, how easy it is to get currency, how safe it is to level up, the free mtx. And I wasn't interested When Sanctum came out, I loved it, now that it's core, I took my time to make a build so I could make Sanctums fluidly... final of league and I still haven't made the build. The main reason is that it requires an archetype of builds that I do not like to play, nor in the approach that it requires of you to be able to do so.
While I personally really hated ToTA the moment I realised every tournament would reset your team progress and didn't make it past yellow maps because of that, I do really appreciate that GGG is willing to take risks. Sure, I didn't like ToTA because it was weird and differnet. But others didn't like Blight because it's weird and different, but I love that. Experimentation which really tickles some players fancy is better than slop which caters to the largest common denominator, which would make the game bland in the long run I think.
i had an easy time in that mechanic when i played ea ballista but later when i swapped to a multi mirror blade vortex it just felt awfull to play that mode and i never came back
As a player who likes to build tanky characters, sanctum and tota was a total bust for me. The whole thing ended up being a don't get hit league. I regret saying I don't want circle leagues now.
I was not satisfied with ToTA itself but man those bosses and monster mechanics are really good - walls, tidal wave, teleporter, etc. They should keep some of ToTA boss and replace some map bosses.
I like simple league mechanics, because when they are simple, it means there doesn't need to be a lot of balancing. TOTA and Sanctum are very complex, thus having so much to balance and the inevitable rise of builds that just do the mechanic. So anyone who wants to do the mechanic successfully needs to spend the time and currency making some dog build just to do it, and anyone who doesn't have that time or currency doesn't get to enjoy the rewards from the mechanic. I liked sentinel because we could all just blast maps and empower the content we enjoy. There wasn't some BS like "Here is my conversion trap build so I can run Apex sentinels". Affliction hits so close, but it's poorly balanced and you don't have the control sentinel gave you.
I'm ok with TOTA but the worst thing that make I don't like those mechanic is it's too punish while I progress. I'm notmasochism, thing like that aren't fun for me
For players like me with 5k+ hours, ToTA was like, huh this is boring asf and not profitable as other stuff. Most new players wouldnt mind making like 1-2 d a hour or the belief that they will sell every single bumble gum currency. People like me love their bubble gum because its all used for crafting, so things like ToTA are just UBER slow, UBER unrewarding maps. Sanctum on the other hand is UBER slow but SUPER rewarding maps.
I played about an hour of the tota mechanic all league. More than any other league, I'm bummed out that I played a league while avoiding the league mechanic. It makes me wonder, what was the point? I could have played in standard at that point. I really dislike boring league mechanics that are rewarding, currency wise, but terrible in terms of gameplay. Aren't videogames supposed to be fun? I already avoided Heist. Now I'll have a second mechanic to avoid if this eventually goes core.
It's stupid how in a auto battler game mode the last thing that matters is the units you bring along. Just go void sphere and cheese the mechanic, buy any unit you can afford, relog if you see turtle and repeat.
I'd make a sanctum dude if i could find a god build that doesnt cost mirrors, i guess a good freeze / evasion build would work well. Altho i dont have sanctum exp...
Personally don't enjoy tota but I do think it wasn't a horrible addition to the game for those that enjoy it. Mainly because you can completely ignore it if you don't want to engage with it which isn't always possible. Some things that maybe could have made it more enjoyable for me would be less getting randomly one shot, being able to bind a key to interact with the totem trying to click on them was annoying and hard at times, Randomly walking past a totem and getting stunned because your mouse went over it for a fraction of a second and it counted you as channeling was annoying. Not being able to move stuff around in the tota lobby so you didn't have to run the npc circle would have helped as well. Easier way to give up and remove those stupid turtles. Also the amount of dps you needed to kill stuff at the higher tiers was beyond uber boss dps. Tattoo's are sick tho wish they went core feels build empowering like clusters. Being able to completely remove stat requirements to go all in on tattoos or hit new break points on builds like eye of winter, or fixing a little mana reserve shortage without needing super expensive corruptions on jewels, or even just not feeling like you are wasting a quarter of your passive points on travel stats you didn't even need felt great.
Isn't sanctum the same as tota ? Abit fun on 1st floor, extremely hard on floor 3 and 4 for nonspecialized build. With tota you cheese with going around the enermy, with sanctum you cheese by going one shoot build or summoner either minion or totem and kill things around the corner.
Most people like sanctum mostly because it easier to go for a 1 shoot glass canon build then do tota chese And imagine sanctum have lake of kalandra reward, many people gonna say sanctum trash and to me sanctum mechanic is trash it just the reward that make people thing it good.
@@locmorningstar2740 I played melee for sanctum with heavy strike zerker, wasn't a super optimal build but it was a lot of fun playing the mechanics were fun and challenging, every league has some kinda cheese to ignore it/ just out gear check it. But sanctum added a lot of interesting fights and without hp it made you think about the game in a different way even if you were going glass cannon
@@locmorningstar2740 with that you had to play the mechanics as you progressed if you wanted to clear the end fight you had to make good decisions threw out the run total felt like a lot of the same while fun it was who do I fight next the meaningful choices you make were more often on your build then the league witch isn't a bad thing but sanctum felt much more impactful
You must be a really good melee player, i play boneshatter jugg and flicker strike slayer, with mid invest all i can reach is floor 3 with flicker and floor 2 with boneshatter and it feel so bad.
After hundreds of ours this league getting to 2k rating in tota and countless sanctum runs im burnt out for the next two leagues unless this league mechanic is nuts and they make minion builds aside from SrS super viable im taking a break but that poe in a nutshell lol
I disliked tota. I prefer to brainlessly blast maps. And tota sadly was designed in a way that you couldn't blast the monsters away to get over with it. Same reason why I didn't like Sanctum, so many silly extra bellls and whistles in a totally botched attempt at being ruogue like.. Playing these out of map mechanics always feels like a massive waste of time for me, mostly because I have no fun playing them. And when it's not enjoyable I DGAF about the rewards either.
I never played ToA a single time. After it was said it took hours to grind your way to anything considered rewarding I said, "Hell NO!", yes it may have been monetarily a bad idea, but what's worse is being miserable.
I hate tota. Getting killed randomly by something off screen and 2 screens away is... it's like Diablo 4, it's so stupid and annoying. I timed how long it takes for certain mobs to do their 1 shot killed on the player, .3 seconds, who the fuck is going to react in .3 seconds? Some of the mobs literally blend in with the background and are difficult to see, others just 1 shot with lightning off screen, over and over. Loss of character control is a surefire way to have people hate your game and poe decided to go heavy on that mechanic this league, it's so shitty. I literally only played it for the drops. I fucking hate tota.
I played like 5 Tota tournaments in total this league, the game mode is just so badly made and you need to cheese it with a specific build or it sucks even more. I also didn't like Sanctum although for many it is one of the best league mechanics. My favorite league so far was ultimatum. Too bad the ultimatum boss was rare as fuck and I only got him twice in the league.
my take on tota: ~Channeling: xD ~5 sec stun: xDD ~OPaf mobs: xDDD no wonder u cannot actually die there ~tattoos: very nice - but i hate tota gameplay and play ssf so: xDDDD/ nice ~build diversity in tota: xDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD I hope it will not go core - ever - not like this love the game anyway.. :)
im pretty sure it stayed so profitable since many of the botters/goldsellers and whatever couldnt cash in big in those mechanics ... there are many many more then anyone would like small asian childs that work for pennys and try to make some cash(for the parents or themselfes) in this game :D and an complex cheese bullshit is too much for the child workers here
No lifers that play from their parents basement 16 hours a day don't care if they have to play a league were you have to set up things, trade, learn in-deep mechanics to then be able to learn even more in-deep mechanics so you can have a chance to have a chance to have a chance to make some money or get something special doing content that you don't really like. The other 80% of the people who has a regular job and can "only" play 4-6 hours a day don't want to spend time doing something boring, the less time you have to play the less you want to do something boring. You can call it whatever you want but the real identity of poe is mapping, thats poe. Anything that takes me out of my maps and gives me no progression towards endgame bosses fights is always boring, go and check the leagues that people loves, its always in-map leagues. Sure you can say "that is this guy opinion" but you like it or not that is the vast majority opinion too. Sanctum was a poor copy of a genre that didn't fit PoE and still doesn't, Tota is the same, sanctum should never have gone core, most people that runs sanctum does it because it prints money, just like the people that used to run heist even though they didn't like heist (and most people doesn't), tota was the same story and thankfully the best case scenario happen, we keep the uniques and that trash of a league did not go core.
TotA was a placeholder whipped up by the few staff GGG could be arsed to spare while ramping up for PoE's new replacement. Lazy and uninspired, I suspect that's what the next coupla leagues are gonna be like. I'm glad I enjoy Standard play. ='[.]'=
@@andrenc3681 We'll see what the first week of the new league looks like. It usually takes at least that long to shake out the worst bugs, and to get a feel for the gameplay from the early adopters. ='[.]'=
@@FFS33 sanctum is actually one of the most enjoyable mechanics unless you play it non-stop for 3 days straight. Can't say same about tota. No change, no random, no killing monsters = no fun
The problem with videos like this is that they begin with the comments. People are idiots. Not some, not just a few, almost everyone is an idiot. Starting with idiotic comments end with a video full of idiotic comments. Missed opportunity to see how the author feels, because that would be interesting, instead of idiotic reddit comments flashing through the screen
Why Playing PoE for 6+ Years Doesn't Make You a Good Player: ua-cam.com/video/BwYq4dzKrWo/v-deo.html
I'm liking a lot this community analysis and critique, this game needs more constructive criticism like yours, more so since we're getting closer to poe2
My least favorite thing about TOTA was the "difficulty" coming more to patience than actually being skillful. There are things that require patience to be successful at but also require other things like mechanical ability or pattern recognition like bossing. Though tota, unless with a tota build, it felt like i was walking circles around things more than fighting or strategizing a team comp. Just buy the good thing slap it in and circle until u can click the totem. That just feels so bad to me. I just dont like it very much, though that doesn't mean that the mechanic is bad.
There is some strategizing team comps, but the fighting part is lacking for me.
I think the other thing that TOTA and Sanctum have going for them is; you dont have to roll ANYTHING. No looking for map mods that could kill your whole build like stupid reflect, reduced CDR or no mana/es/life regen.
The rewards were really good for ssf. I had 80ish raw divine orbs and several t1 uniques and several omens and the easiest 6 links I've ever had
i played tota all the way up to 2000 rating and beyond. While it did get me my first mageblood, it wasn't a very interesting mechanic, it's a skeleton of a autobattler and it felt terrible to slug through. If there were ways to power up your units or make a unique team comp it might've been interesting, but otherwise playing voidsphere and getting brain rot wasn't very a great experience.
Hot take: TotA and Sanctum and Heist are the exact same mechanic. People who comprehend how to make it work for them can really print money out of it, but for everyone else, it's immensely frustrating, difficult to get into, seemingly impossible to get good at, and leaves you wondering how the hell you're supposed to go from feeling like an idiot to being Richie Rich. There's no "difficulty curve" like any of the other mechanics. You either get it, or you don't.
Played a couple hundred rounds of TotA. Every time I thought I had it figured out, I would end up getting absolutely destroyed and question what I was doing wrong. Then I would do the exact same thing and would have no problems. The balance is horrible, the AI is awful. I would love it so much more if it were like the Starcraft and Warcraft custom game modes it was ultimately descended from and would let me control my team directly as an overlord, not as one weak-ass combatant.
I believe there are two sides to the coin. On one hand, a diverse playstyle in Path of Exile is beneficial, but on the other hand, I think maps should be the main focus, imo. Expedition really hits the nail on the head for me.
we REALY need a good mapping mechanic next leage, crucible doesent cound as a good mapping mechaninc, so it's been all the way back to sentinel since we had a good nice in-map mechanic
The thing about ToTA and why I enjoyed it to a degree is that the bar to enter is really low. Like yeah you can build a cheese build and trivialize the entire thing but just about any build can enter and farm ToTA. You don't need sextants or a starting "investment". You just need the silver coins you collected in the campaign and those coins will make you enough chaos to buy more coins and keep it rolling. You can go in play some rounds, make a few divs to get your build up and running. You don't need a lot of damage to kill bosses like in Sanctum and the rewards are better than early maps. It replaced Heist for me this league and I must admit I will miss it next league.
I really enjoyed TotA, playing in SSF but I also only started playing it in maps. I think that’s almost always the way to go unless you hear something is broken in a good way at low levels (e.g. Ritual). I also was playing a minion build on the new guardian which made the mechanic a lot easier.
If ToTa had infinite maximum rating with infinite monster stats and reward scaling, but you still need just a 10 div build to beat anything, that's cheese. Imagine if something similar would be possible for delve, a 10 div build to beat any depth. Sure there are cheap build for heist or lab running, but they don't cheese, they are just good enough to beat that specific content. Make heist/lab harder and you'll need a stronger more expensive build. Any ToTa balance changes are meaningless, as long as there is void sphere or any other cheese. Fix that, make monster less tanky and remove 5 second stun, then ToTa will fit nicely into the game.
I made a character 2 years ago. Hit level 10 and stoppd because i had to free space up.
So now im trying to see the amount of overwhelming features / mechanics there are now
These vids youve been doing lately have been very enjoyable. Keep up the great wirk :)
My problem with sanctum and why I've stopped doing it was simple - shit was hitting you from off screen and punished you for not playing large aoe build or skills you could use to not interact with content like srs. Else you basically had to get super high damage burst build to do it comfortably or you were in for a bad time.
With tota it was that your minions were dogshit and acted stupid most of the time, you couldn't interface with them and they would just ignore things that would make you lose, and that you had to rely on void sphere to do it at high end. Also nothing as frustrating as long stuns or resurrect wait times while you watch your team ai suck by running past one minion that destroys your totems.
I gathered over 100 sanctum books, I was not able to finish one
I got a quad-tab filled with forbidden tomes and 1000+ silver coins laying around at the end of the league. All because I chose to play a melee boneshatter build. It's just not enjoyable to play certain league mechanics with melee characters, such a shame really.
I can't help but feel the Trials were half-baked. At a glance it seemed as though we would need to strategize with good unit and item selections, balance favor vs valuable rewards, consider which slots on our team will be filled and which holes the player themselves will fill in. But then the reality sets in...most of the expensive units simply aren't worth saving for, many clans cheapest units are still too expensive to pull their weight, the enemies' scaling as you go up ranks is obscene. It isn't uncommon that you encounter something like a goliath turtle or death's guide and were never offered a unit or item that could counter their specific flavor of cheese. Also it seems incredibly rare that I can ever interrupt a unit channeling on one of my totems, which feels unfair considering how long of a stun I suffer as a player.
The tattoos on the other hand are one of my favorite additions (and thematic too!) in a long time.
I don't mind delayed loot mechanics. Deli and Ultimatum were great league mechanics in my mind, but ToTa and Sanctum just aren't fun to me because they take time out of maps, and not in a good way like Delve. With Delve, it's very similar to mapping, except easier (more loot = go down) and I think it's fairly well balanced. (until it isn't) Around 200-500 depth is pretty much where the good loot starts, and that's where I tend to farm. But Sanctum has these downsides that are just annoying, like you can't see what loot each room has, or you can't see what downsides you get, that just feel terrible if you accidentally force yourself into one of these. It punishes you for not having relics that let you see the entire sanctum, which completely avoids the bad rooms, which seems a bit silly to me (shouldn't these bad rooms provide insane loot equal to the insane downsides?). And ToTa feels worse the higher rank you get. (I capped out around 400 because I knew I wasn't going to want to play any further) So it seemed like gaining rating was just a hinderance, and the rewards weren't really worth the frustration in the actual league mechanics (clearly I became too frustrated with the mechanics to continue to the point where the good stuff actually drops). The mobs that one-shot you, drain your flask charges, resurrect INSTANTLY, etc. all felt really bad to play against and made me feel like I'd rather just make currency in maps/Delve.
I wouldn't say never (myself): I probably skip 1 league mechanics in every 5 leagues.
Crazy how you only showed the bad comments about tota but not the good ones. Let me balance it a little. I liked tota. I’m rank 2000 and it was good to mix up the game when I got bored of mapping. This has kept the league fresh for me and I’m now 40/40
Personally i stopped playing the leagues during sanctum. It's not that i dislike the new leagues, but i hate feeling like I'm wasting time by not playing the new mechanic for currency over my maps. Like you said in this video, i prefer the content that adds to maps, not take you out of them. Stuff like blight, harbinger, expedition and legion have all been super fun additions to mapping and the amount of investment i put into them feels meaningful and rewarding. Playing on standard is great because there's no time pressure to be the most efficient/ profitable player at any point (unless that's my explicit goal)
I just now realized that I haven't even used a silver coin this whole league
The in-map leagues are blocked at pretty much the same rate as the out-of-map leagues: it's not simply a matter of all players preferring one or the other.
Legion and Heist are blocked at the same rates (both are currently fluctuating around 26-27%), and you can make the same argument against either that the only reason people engage with the mechanic is that they are lucrative.
The simple truth is that the PoE playerbase is varied and diverse.
Some people love blasting maps, other people look to league mechanics to "fix" mapping from feeling terrible, or to escape maps entirely. Some want to turn their brain off, others want to switch it on.
And that diversity applies to builds too: we see people lamenting the need to play from a selection of specific archetypes to do well in TOTA while blithely ignoring the fact that other archetypes are just as pushed in the existing league mechanics.
If we want to be able to fit a wide array of mechanics into the endgame, they can't all appeal to one type of player.
I always try all mechanics. I can't remember when I did not do that. Sure I barely touched crucible, only when I wanted to. Just like I did not use every single silver coin I got. I barely touched sanctum, I had too much fun blasting maps.
But I did give it a fair shot, and I lost over and over and over again. The idea of not getting hit is opposite to how I kake my builds. My builds are tanks. But sanctum did not care.
For as long as I can remember I have played defense games, tower defense and subgenres, I only touched TOTA 1 time, didn't touch it again. Seeing the rising final league prices of all those TOTA suff, how easy it is to get currency, how safe it is to level up, the free mtx. And I wasn't interested
When Sanctum came out, I loved it, now that it's core, I took my time to make a build so I could make Sanctums fluidly... final of league and I still haven't made the build. The main reason is that it requires an archetype of builds that I do not like to play, nor in the approach that it requires of you to be able to do so.
Sigh, imagine thinking Tota is a tower defense game. There really is no winning for some people
Sentinel, my beloved.
?? we play it always
While I personally really hated ToTA the moment I realised every tournament would reset your team progress and didn't make it past yellow maps because of that, I do really appreciate that GGG is willing to take risks. Sure, I didn't like ToTA because it was weird and differnet. But others didn't like Blight because it's weird and different, but I love that. Experimentation which really tickles some players fancy is better than slop which caters to the largest common denominator, which would make the game bland in the long run I think.
i had an easy time in that mechanic when i played ea ballista but later when i swapped to a multi mirror blade vortex it just felt awfull to play that mode and i never came back
I got my first mirror in TOTA and I played every league since 3.8
As a player who likes to build tanky characters, sanctum and tota was a total bust for me. The whole thing ended up being a don't get hit league. I regret saying I don't want circle leagues now.
I was not satisfied with ToTA itself but man those bosses and monster mechanics are really good - walls, tidal wave, teleporter, etc. They should keep some of ToTA boss and replace some map bosses.
Yea if a league mechanic doesn’t add to my clearing of the atlas and trying to sustain/farm my fav maps; I’m probably not gonna do much with it.
I unable to play tota after the last update, keep crashing due to " device lost " error.
I like simple league mechanics, because when they are simple, it means there doesn't need to be a lot of balancing.
TOTA and Sanctum are very complex, thus having so much to balance and the inevitable rise of builds that just do the mechanic. So anyone who wants to do the mechanic successfully needs to spend the time and currency making some dog build just to do it, and anyone who doesn't have that time or currency doesn't get to enjoy the rewards from the mechanic.
I liked sentinel because we could all just blast maps and empower the content we enjoy. There wasn't some BS like "Here is my conversion trap build so I can run Apex sentinels".
Affliction hits so close, but it's poorly balanced and you don't have the control sentinel gave you.
SILVER COMET!!!! I will remember this one for a loooong time.
I'm ok with TOTA but the worst thing that make I don't like those mechanic is it's too punish while I progress. I'm notmasochism, thing like that aren't fun for me
Plenty of people are making great points about league mechanics, but where's the love for "Windmill Isle (Day)" theme as your song choice?
For players like me with 5k+ hours, ToTA was like, huh this is boring asf and not profitable as other stuff. Most new players wouldnt mind making like 1-2 d a hour or the belief that they will sell every single bumble gum currency. People like me love their bubble gum because its all used for crafting, so things like ToTA are just UBER slow, UBER unrewarding maps. Sanctum on the other hand is UBER slow but SUPER rewarding maps.
I played about an hour of the tota mechanic all league. More than any other league, I'm bummed out that I played a league while avoiding the league mechanic. It makes me wonder, what was the point? I could have played in standard at that point. I really dislike boring league mechanics that are rewarding, currency wise, but terrible in terms of gameplay. Aren't videogames supposed to be fun? I already avoided Heist. Now I'll have a second mechanic to avoid if this eventually goes core.
It's stupid how in a auto battler game mode the last thing that matters is the units you bring along. Just go void sphere and cheese the mechanic, buy any unit you can afford, relog if you see turtle and repeat.
I want Sentinel + prenerf harvest back , alot of people can make intrestings items then without and old synth mods back
I'd make a sanctum dude if i could find a god build that doesnt cost mirrors, i guess a good freeze / evasion build would work well. Altho i dont have sanctum exp...
Personally don't enjoy tota but I do think it wasn't a horrible addition to the game for those that enjoy it. Mainly because you can completely ignore it if you don't want to engage with it which isn't always possible. Some things that maybe could have made it more enjoyable for me would be less getting randomly one shot, being able to bind a key to interact with the totem trying to click on them was annoying and hard at times, Randomly walking past a totem and getting stunned because your mouse went over it for a fraction of a second and it counted you as channeling was annoying. Not being able to move stuff around in the tota lobby so you didn't have to run the npc circle would have helped as well. Easier way to give up and remove those stupid turtles. Also the amount of dps you needed to kill stuff at the higher tiers was beyond uber boss dps.
Tattoo's are sick tho wish they went core feels build empowering like clusters. Being able to completely remove stat requirements to go all in on tattoos or hit new break points on builds like eye of winter, or fixing a little mana reserve shortage without needing super expensive corruptions on jewels, or even just not feeling like you are wasting a quarter of your passive points on travel stats you didn't even need felt great.
i like tota a bit its fun just as you grind it, it becomes waay to hard for nonspecialized builds , sanctum was one of the best leagues we have had.
Isn't sanctum the same as tota ? Abit fun on 1st floor, extremely hard on floor 3 and 4 for nonspecialized build. With tota you cheese with going around the enermy, with sanctum you cheese by going one shoot build or summoner either minion or totem and kill things around the corner.
Most people like sanctum mostly because it easier to go for a 1 shoot glass canon build then do tota chese
And imagine sanctum have lake of kalandra reward, many people gonna say sanctum trash and to me sanctum mechanic is trash it just the reward that make people thing it good.
@@locmorningstar2740 I played melee for sanctum with heavy strike zerker, wasn't a super optimal build but it was a lot of fun playing the mechanics were fun and challenging, every league has some kinda cheese to ignore it/ just out gear check it. But sanctum added a lot of interesting fights and without hp it made you think about the game in a different way even if you were going glass cannon
@@locmorningstar2740 with that you had to play the mechanics as you progressed if you wanted to clear the end fight you had to make good decisions threw out the run total felt like a lot of the same while fun it was who do I fight next the meaningful choices you make were more often on your build then the league witch isn't a bad thing but sanctum felt much more impactful
You must be a really good melee player, i play boneshatter jugg and flicker strike slayer, with mid invest all i can reach is floor 3 with flicker and floor 2 with boneshatter and it feel so bad.
Yea I can't remember the last mechanic I legit enjoyed the game with
Tota was too much trouble i find 4 or 6 divine vs sanctum 12+ in like 6 run
I have opinions too, but I would like to just appreciate the spark of these type of conversation, a good one!
When you are a crafter you don't interact with any mechanic at all. It makes me losing money, crafting is mirror tier mechanic every league
Well, i enjoyed TOTA, but couldn't fathom why people liked sanctum.
Funny how for me it's the exact opposite, love sanctum, hate TOTA.
Never played tota either or sanctum but loved the last lg
When I saw the TotA trailer, it just reminds of mobile game. So I didn't even bother with the league at all.
Sanctum is dog. Tota is dog. Base game is dog. Past mechanics have been gutted and these "changes" dont fix that
After hundreds of ours this league getting to 2k rating in tota and countless sanctum runs im burnt out for the next two leagues unless this league mechanic is nuts and they make minion builds aside from SrS super viable im taking a break but that poe in a nutshell lol
Lol
See you next Friday!
i just hated tota mechanics because it was a out of the map thing, where you need to play cheesy build to be able to be something out of it
I hate Sanctum, i hate leagues where If u die u lose everything, an that "inspiration" we have tô protect was such a crap
I just want big areas with tons of monster to smash ! No more minigames ffs
TOTA was boring af. So was Crucicble... So was Sanctum.... So was Sentinel...
Hope they come up with a banger this time around
I liked the tatoo´s but did not even once play tota.
I disliked tota. I prefer to brainlessly blast maps. And tota sadly was designed in a way that you couldn't blast the monsters away to get over with it. Same reason why I didn't like Sanctum, so many silly extra bellls and whistles in a totally botched attempt at being ruogue like.. Playing these out of map mechanics always feels like a massive waste of time for me, mostly because I have no fun playing them. And when it's not enjoyable I DGAF about the rewards either.
I never played ToA a single time. After it was said it took hours to grind your way to anything considered rewarding I said, "Hell NO!", yes it may have been monetarily a bad idea, but what's worse is being miserable.
I hate tota. Getting killed randomly by something off screen and 2 screens away is... it's like Diablo 4, it's so stupid and annoying.
I timed how long it takes for certain mobs to do their 1 shot killed on the player, .3 seconds, who the fuck is going to react in .3 seconds?
Some of the mobs literally blend in with the background and are difficult to see, others just 1 shot with lightning off screen, over and over.
Loss of character control is a surefire way to have people hate your game and poe decided to go heavy on that mechanic this league, it's so shitty.
I literally only played it for the drops. I fucking hate tota.
This is a very insightful vid.
I played like 5 Tota tournaments in total this league, the game mode is just so badly made and you need to cheese it with a specific build or it sucks even more. I also didn't like Sanctum although for many it is one of the best league mechanics. My favorite league so far was ultimatum. Too bad the ultimatum boss was rare as fuck and I only got him twice in the league.
my take on tota:
~Channeling: xD
~5 sec stun: xDD
~OPaf mobs: xDDD no wonder u cannot actually die there
~tattoos: very nice - but i hate tota gameplay and play ssf so: xDDDD/ nice
~build diversity in tota: xDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
I hope it will not go core - ever - not like this
love the game anyway.. :)
i played tota only for challenges and then i did not touch it again. It was so boring and time consuming and not very interactive
im pretty sure it stayed so profitable since many of the botters/goldsellers and whatever couldnt cash in big in those mechanics ... there are many many more then anyone would like small asian childs that work for pennys and try to make some cash(for the parents or themselfes) in this game :D and an complex cheese bullshit is too much for the child workers here
No lifers that play from their parents basement 16 hours a day don't care if they have to play a league were you have to set up things, trade, learn in-deep mechanics to then be able to learn even more in-deep mechanics so you can have a chance to have a chance to have a chance to make some money or get something special doing content that you don't really like. The other 80% of the people who has a regular job and can "only" play 4-6 hours a day don't want to spend time doing something boring, the less time you have to play the less you want to do something boring.
You can call it whatever you want but the real identity of poe is mapping, thats poe. Anything that takes me out of my maps and gives me no progression towards endgame bosses fights is always boring, go and check the leagues that people loves, its always in-map leagues. Sure you can say "that is this guy opinion" but you like it or not that is the vast majority opinion too.
Sanctum was a poor copy of a genre that didn't fit PoE and still doesn't, Tota is the same, sanctum should never have gone core, most people that runs sanctum does it because it prints money, just like the people that used to run heist even though they didn't like heist (and most people doesn't), tota was the same story and thankfully the best case scenario happen, we keep the uniques and that trash of a league did not go core.
TBH I was bored with tota after 1 week
I skipped 40/40 this league bc of how boring the mechanic is.
TotA was a placeholder whipped up by the few staff GGG could be arsed to spare while ramping up for PoE's new replacement. Lazy and uninspired, I suspect that's what the next coupla leagues are gonna be like. I'm glad I enjoy Standard play. ='[.]'=
Lol
See you next Friday
@@andrenc3681 We'll see what the first week of the new league looks like. It usually takes at least that long to shake out the worst bugs, and to get a feel for the gameplay from the early adopters. ='[.]'=
Tota was made so the casuals can make easy currency and stop crying about the other parts of Poe that are actually cool
disingenuous... most people DO play it. the ones who dont are the minority.
Most people don't give a fk about sanctum
@@FFS33 sanctum is actually one of the most enjoyable mechanics unless you play it non-stop for 3 days straight. Can't say same about tota. No change, no random, no killing monsters = no fun
100% this. Reddit is where a loud minority gets mistaken for the majority.
@@linemat7887188h past 2 weeks ,18k in Poe ,I think I play more than your average player and I'm telling you those mechanics are S H I T
@@seapeajonesi'm so glad those s hi t mechanics are not going core
The problem with videos like this is that they begin with the comments. People are idiots. Not some, not just a few, almost everyone is an idiot. Starting with idiotic comments end with a video full of idiotic comments. Missed opportunity to see how the author feels, because that would be interesting, instead of idiotic reddit comments flashing through the screen