Got my first 40/40 after 11 years of playing. Feedback.

Yeah it's probably nothing for some of the regulars who have 40/40 in every league since it started, but it's a pretty big deal for me. I'm someone who holds the opinion that challenges shouldn't be something you necessarily have to pay someone else to complete for you. It cheapens the experience. And for the longest time, GGG's been releasing challenges that require very specific playstyles or builds to complete and if you don't have that, you'll either need to slog through the campaign making a new build or give up and pay for carry services. For a lot of these leagues, I reach a point where I run into those kinds of challenges and just give up.

Not this time. This time the challenges were made in such a way that I could complete all of them solo without any help or carries.

So I'm going to go into detail on my feedback for this league.

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THE MAIN ATTRACTION - TRIAL OF THE ANCESTORS

At the very start, I was excited to try it out. An auto-battler, what a great concept to add to a hack-and-slash. Once I was strong enough to start running it smoothly around act 3 or 4, I was having a great time. I really liked some of the units you had access to, especially the Fieldmaster and how it turns the enemy base into an abstract painting with all of the walls creating haphazard boxes to trap enemies inside while you swipe their totems. The rewards were also alright for the time, getting some early chaos sure helps kickstart your build.

Only later once I've reached T16 maps and killed the tutorial eldritch bosses do I realize the biggest problem I have with the league: The scaling. As I climbed the ranks, the enemies got harder to kill and the more likely I was to get 1shot. My 50m DPS turned into tickles while my 10k armor and maxed ele res became as fragile as wet toilet paper. We haven't seen a league that gets ever more difficult with prolonged play since Delve. And just like Delve, you're never going to get much in the way of good loot with some ordinary build. Instead of playing the league like any other, I had to change everything I knew and start treating myself more as a distraction to get the enemy's attention and literally nothing else so my allies can sneak in and steal totems. That's personally just not engaging to me, and I'm sure not going to make a whole new build dedicated to maxing out evasion, block, and radius to maximize the fun and profit I can pull out of the league.

And make no mistake, TotA is a profitable league. While I've only pulled about 2 divines out of it around rank 400, reddit's been on fire with stories of how people are getting whole Magebloods and even mirrors out of it. The truth of the matter is that I don't personally enjoy the league, and that's okay. Not every league has to be enjoyable for you. So I gave up on TotA, and deliberately deranked myself to the bare minimum I need to complete the challenges.

Honestly, I hope it goes core. While I would never touch the content again much like Delve, unless there's challenges involved, I do appreciate having the tattoos in the game. I hate getting maps that have temporal chains on them, but being able to completely ignore them by stacking tattoos which reduce curse effects on you feels too damn good to lose.

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THE SECOND ATTRACTION - THE FORBIDDEN SANCTUM

I'm going to be a bit biased on this one since I enjoy roguelikes, but I'm so happy to have this back. Not only does it play like one, but it's genuinely the one and only league which is most suitable for my playstyle. Speed clear mappers have Harbinger and Delirium. Single-target bossers have Metamorph and aspirational boss fights. Summoners have Sanctum.

And just like TotA, Sanctum is very generous with its rewards. Unlike TotA, however, the rewards are a gamble. You have to risk taking crippling afflictions or accursed pacts and ultimately failing the run if you want to get your hands on the divines this content throws at you hand over fist. There are a few times I've failed my runs where I had 5+ divines on the line, but the thrill of risking them is something I enjoy. Where I fail in TotA, I thrive in Sanctum. I've got the technique down, I know what afflictions to avoid, what boons to prioritize, and what relics increase my odds of success.

It is also the safest content in the entire game. Not only did I reach 40/40 for the first time ever, I also reached level 100 less than a week prior. I've never payed for leveling services, I don't do 5way rotas which everyone else does. I chose to grind Sanctum instead. Once my DPS was high enough to kill Lycia's 2nd phase before she can do the blood wave ability, it was impossible for me to die in Sanctum. Don't get me wrong, the journey from 95 to 100 entirely through Sanctum was a slog and absolutely not a viable alternative if you want a fast leveling experience, but it was amazingly profitable. In the two weeks it took me to reach level 100, I pulled a hundred divines, thousands of chaos, and a generous amount of awakened sextants. And thanks to my finally being able to reach level 100, I felt confident enough that this might finally be the league I'll get 40 challenges!

Make no mistake, when 3.23 launches, I'll be grinding there again.

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CHALLENGES

I'm not going to list down every single challenge to nitpick about them since most were tolerable, but I am going to go over the ones I found particularly the most annoying to complete.

1. Brutal Breaches, Harrowing Harbingers, Legendary Legions, Delusional Delirium, & Relentless Rituals
I've listed all of the challenges into one grouping, because they all share the same problem: It was tedious and so unrewarding that I was losing currency doing it. Maybe it's because I need to run a very specific atlas passives with sextant modifiers to juice them for maximum profit which I didn't do, but these challenges were just not enjoyable to run. I especially hated having to do 8 Simulacrum since I can't reach wave 30 so I bail at 20. The 4-way legions in the Domain of Timeless Conflict was also annoying since my build has terrible clear speed which meant I had to spend a sizeable amount of emblems to complete the challenge. Harbingers were the least awful of the bunch since I only needed to rush to the boss room and just wait.

All in all, I spent several divines to get the challenges done which makes me all the more grateful I farmed Sanctum to level 100 before doing any of this.

2. Insane Invitations
This is the only challenge I can think off the top of my head where some players might want to pay for carries. I had to try Maven's Invitation: The Elderslayers twice before completing it, because fighting those conquerors together is an absolute nightmare. It also cost quite a bit.

Funnily enough, I didn't struggle at all with The Feared invitation. You kill the Cortex boss and maybe Atziri ASAP and it becomes a lot easier.

3. Antagonistic Adversaries
Why, GGG, why are Abyss Liches so damned difficult to find? I wasted Orbs of Unmaking to spec into Abyss passives to increase depth spawn chance and they didn't show up after running so many maps. Only after I spec'd back out of it to complete another league-based challenge did it finally spawn.

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WHAT'S NEXT?

So for once in a long time, I have finally beaten Path of Exile. It was a hell of a journey, but I'm not done with the league just yet. I'm gonna spend what money I've gained from farming Sanctum to try out another summoner build to pass the time, mostly to see if it'll be viable on the offchance GGG gets around to nerfing poison SRS.

I find it funny you hate TOTA for the same reason you LOVE Sanctum...

I agree with your initial TOTA assessment: mechanics that require a total departure from original gameplay don't do it for me. TOTA makes your personal build meaningless and forces you into a support, Sanctum makes your DPS MOSTLY useless in 90% of cases and instead rewards you heavily for indirect damage and hiding. God help you if you didn't choose a projectile/minion build...

For both of these, you need a "Sanctum" build or you need a "TOTA" build: I hate that so much. Granted, the difference between Bossing and Mapping can be seen as similar, the gradient different performance of builds is just much smaller in normal gameplay when compared to Sanctum/TOTA/(delve).

I don't need all builds to perform equally well in all situations: that should NEVER happen. But when all aspects of a league mechanic straight up negate the basic building blocks of ALL character building, Houston...we have a problem.

Look at other leagues mechanics we have: Strongboxes, Heist, Breach, Ritual, Harvest, etc., some builds perform better than others but NONE of them actively punish you or totally stop you from doing the content.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I find it funny you hate TOTA for the same reason you LOVE Sanctum...

I assume this is in regards to the thing where you need to play a certain niche build to farm them? There is a difference between TOTA and Sanctum in that regard. For Sanctum, you just need a summoner build which can also handle all other content in the game (granted not very well for mapping). With TOTA, you need a very niche CC/support build that would almost certainly be incapable of doing any other content, making it only useful in this specific scenario.

Other than that, I agree that when it comes to content that negate all fundamental aspects of a build that you're expected to have, I tend not to find that enjoyable. I won't go so far as to say its unacceptable, because people willing to make an effort to optimize their experience it deserve to be rewarded, but it's something I avoid unless necessary.

Congrats! I remember the feeling I had for my first 40 (didn't think I could come close all league till a certain tipping point).

By the way, I'm curious since you specifically said no carries--did you do the ToTa challenge with no warriors or field items solo? This is my second league attempting 40/40 in SSF and that one has me scratching my head some still.

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TemjinGold wrote:

Congrats! I remember the feeling I had for my first 40 (didn't think I could come close all league till a certain tipping point).

By the way, I'm curious since you specifically said no carries--did you do the ToTa challenge with no warriors or field items solo? This is my second league attempting 40/40 in SSF and that one has me scratching my head some still.

Correct!


The trick to completing the challenge is wearing the enemy respawns down. They take longer to respawn every time you kill them so you want to play defense for a few minutes and just beat them senseless. Once their timers are long enough for you to take a totem, that's when you can start going on the offensive.

By the way, I've noticed that successfully banishing a totem kickstarts enemy respawns. I took one damaged totem shortly after killing the last enemy and instantly they all respawned at the same time.

The most important thing to take note of here is to try the challenge objective with the bare minimum rank requirement which is 200. The lower you are when you try it, the easier the enemies will be.

Thanks, I did stop my ToTa plays ~rank 180 or so as my plan was to attempt it as close to 200 as possible. Glad to hear that strat works.

Since you mentioned having trouble with the Elderslayers, I thought I might share a trick in return. Drox and Baran are the nastiest but don't go after Drox first. If he's one of the first spawns, go after whoever spawns with him. The reason is that, unless you have obscene damage (like uber-melting damage, in which case you don't need help) you won't kill him before he goes into his invulnerability phase. I used to go after him first because he's the nastiest (since his flags super buff everyone else and his attacks have huge AoE) but what really ends up killing me in that situation isn't him but rather the fact that there very quickly will be 4 of them on the field at once.

Focusing on quantity over quality with killing (when there's only 2 of them left, it doesn't matter as much who they are as they become much less of a threat) is what allowed me to clear the 80% invite for them on less than 2M sdps this league.

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TemjinGold wrote:

Thanks, I did stop my ToTa plays ~rank 180 or so as my plan was to attempt it as close to 200 as possible. Glad to hear that strat works.

Since you mentioned having trouble with the Elderslayers, I thought I might share a trick in return. Drox and Baran are the nastiest but don't go after Drox first. If he's one of the first spawns, go after whoever spawns with him. The reason is that, unless you have obscene damage (like uber-melting damage, in which case you don't need help) you won't kill him before he goes into his invulnerability phase. I used to go after him first because he's the nastiest (since his flags super buff everyone else and his attacks have huge AoE) but what really ends up killing me in that situation isn't him but rather the fact that there very quickly will be 4 of them on the field at once.

Focusing on quantity over quality with killing (when there's only 2 of them left, it doesn't matter as much who they are as they become much less of a threat) is what allowed me to clear the 80% invite for them on less than 2M sdps this league.

Funny, I always considered Drox a low-priority threat so I always killed him last. For me, it was Veritania and Baran that I considered the most dangerous due to their ability to spam the arena with hazards (cold tornados and rune grid). It does make sense you'd want to focus Drox last though since his banner phase makes him incredibly difficult to kill so the others are gonna spawn in while you're chipping him to death.

Hey! Congratz and good job! I think harbingers, legion, breach challenge require „proper” mindset, I didn’t like doing them but I was also not specced in any way into them, not interested in doing them other than for challenge. Had same problem with sanctum - I wanted to get my challenge done, didint want to do sanctum in that moment, so was trying to rush it without preparation - hated those runs. I did some runs after 40 and enjoyed it a lot more. Again - congratulations!

Congrats !