Please bring back Trials of The Ancestors as an endgame mechanic for Path of Exile 1 in patch 3.28!

Petition for GGG to bring back Trials of the Ancestors as an end game mechanic. If they can bring back Ultimatum, they can surely do the same with TOTA.

For those who don't remember or have never played the league - it was an autobattling league mechanic where you hired units from various Karui tribes, equipped them with equipment, and placed them strategically on the field with the goal of eliminating the opposing team by destroying their totems. It was round-based in a tournament style and to win it all you had to eliminate most of the Karui chieftains, with each successful round you received a reward and as you got closer to the end of the tournament, the better the reward. With each tournament win, your ranking would increase, up to a maximum of 2,000 rating. Higher rating = better rewards but it also meant the chieftains and their units were much stronger, similar to Delve scaling to a point. It was a mechanic that was a lot of fun to many people.

How you accessed the zone was right clicking a Silver Coin, an item with a global drop rate, and entering the portal. 1 Silver Coin = 1 full tournament run, similar to how 1 Forbidden Tome (also a global drop rate) = 1 full Sanctum run.

PoE2 consideration - Main campaign spoilers:


Benefits:

1. Another source of farmable Tattoos and Omens outside of the Kingsmarch and Ritual mechanics respectively, as it was TOTA where the Tattoos and Omens were first introduced. Hinekora's Locks were also found here and can be another extremely rare source of them in TOTA (similar to a Mirror reward in Sanctum). If what Mark says about a potential Tattoo rework is true (see below for his interview), this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce TOTA back to the game.

2. TOTA can exist as an out-of-map endgame mechanic, like Heist, Sanctum, and Simulacrum. More so Sanctum in terms of similarity with access via Silver Coin. 1 Silver Coin = 1 full tournament, just as 1 Sanctum forbidden tome = 1 full Sanctum run. I'm sure balancing will be required should it become core - this is to be expected. But another option for players to farm end game? Why not!

3. An addition to the point above, I know some people were not fans of the "TOTA cheese" builds that were popular back during the TOTA league. These builds were essentially zhp all-in on CC effects to enable massive temporal chains / chill / knockback effects in addition to phasing and dodge to allow the player to zoom past enemy units and channel the totems right away. Part of me appreciates the build diversity that these sort of things have, another part also agrees it meant that every run was an auto-win because of how strong they were. With that said, I'll also point to other mechanics that have builds tailored specifically to them, such as Heist with its zdps 500% movement speed builds and Sanctum with its zhp off screen zoom dps builds. Perhaps GGG can balance such that cheese builds are still possible but much harder to achieve.

4. As mentioned above, access is via Silver Coin, the same way it was back during the TOTA league. They can simply re-enable Silver Coin drops similar to the global drop of Forbidden Tomes for Sanctum.

5. Assets and mechanics are already there from the TOTA league back in 2023 so not as much work is required to re-integrate it to the core game.

6. Reintroduce TOTA and you can make a Tattoo stash tab I guess. GGG profits and players get TOTA back. Yay.

7. Karui lore is awesome and those that care about the story would find it very cool to see guys like Kaom, Navali, Hinekora, and all the other chieftains there. For those of you that play PoE2 - there's some awesome dialogue tidbits referencing PoE2 stuff. There's also some overlaps into other mechanics from a lore point of view, such as the short dialogue on Queen Hyrri that's in the Legion mechanic.

Now here's something interesting, an article in early June 2025 before the 3.26 reveal stream where the interviewer was talking to Mark Roberts:

"

Q. Are the Medium Talent or Keystone Tattoos from Trial of the Ancestors coming back?

Mark Roberts: Not yet, but I want to. There were some balance concerns, which are valid. I can't remember exactly. It's obviously been a while, but yes, I want to reinvigorate and extrapolate on that tattoo system back to kind of how it was, but like maybe with some of the outlying issues addressed. But yeah, 100% I want to, and I would say that's probably going to happen with almost certainty in the future.

"

Q. A small follow-up, is the League mechanic coming back ever? Because I think people kind of came up with like really cool, different build ideas in that sense. So, is there a chance of Trial of the Ancestors coming back?

Mark Roberts: It's certainly not zero. I mean, I think a lot of us want to do it. I can't say with certainty one way or the other. I know a lot of these are just like, "Look, maybe... maybe...". But if it were up to me and not an entirely resourcing problem, I would do it without question.

CERTAINLY NOT ZERO!! Please Mark, please GGG, bring back the mechanic in Path of Exile 1. And when you do, it would be the perfect time for a tattoo system revamp like Mark stated. It would just be perfect.

Interview source: https://www.sportskeeda.com/mmo/i-certainly-considering-it-mark-roberts-talks-path-exile-1-spectre-resummoning-old-leagues-keystone-tattoos-integrated-trade

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Belief is the strongest metal of them all! - Izaro

TOTA is love, TOTA is life!!

+1

But only after GGG rebalances the content so you don't have to run a very specific niche build to farm it. That was my biggest gripe with TotA.

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Mistletoes wrote:

I love Trials of the Ancestors. Don't even have to add it to the Atlas passive tree, just re-enable Silver Coin drops. Since GGG seems to keep implementing tattoos and omens in various ways since the TOTA league, might as well have a permanent source of them through the Trials again too.

TOTA gang, rise up!! If they brought back Ultimatum, they can bring back TOTA too.

TOTA was a lot of fun. I'd love to see it come back with some better loot balance. The drops were overtuned, but the mechanic itself was extremely fun, and had a flow of its own, very different from standard game play.

I'd love to see it return in a more polished format.

I don't see why? It was the same thing over and over again with the same gear and the same tactic. The only interesting thing is the rewards we can choose.

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

I don't see why? It was the same thing over and over again with the same gear and the same tactic. The only interesting thing is the rewards we can choose.

PoE is basically the same thing over and over. Enter map, blow everything up, repeat. The entire genre is very reputative by nature - and the game is made by Grinding Gear Games... I think you can see where I'm going here...

There was actually a lot of nuance in your team and gear selections - I found mass summoning skeletons with totems and using others types of crowd control to be extremely fun - you became more of a helper to your team - a coach if you will - rather than simply blowing the enemies up.

If you played multiplayer, it became UTTERLY manic, with 2-3 bosses to deal with... oh the dread... Arrows and Ice...

...had so much fun with that league.

If anything, I'd want more in depth itemization of your team and some more diverse stats for my teammates.

Maybe even some skill gems geared directly toward TotA.

I found the entire league delightful.

They already reused most of tota stuff in one or another way. So luckily we can expect that this terrible mechanic won't ever make it's way into the game.

Ugh, that's not what I meant. You can clear content in PoE with different builds. However, the best way to farm TOTA is to use exactly one build. You all know what I am talking about.

Utter garbage mechanic. Just put some good uniques behind this so I have more reasons to not to play.

Everything as replacement for tormented spirits is fine.