Trial of the Ancestors League Mechanic Guide Winning

The Winning Strategy

Winning trials consistently and quickly is key to any successful farming strategy for Trial of the Ancestors. If you’re not careful, however, you may find the tides can quickly turn against you – or worse, find yourself in a protracted battle that can take upwards of 10 minutes to win!

The strategy outlined in this guide will not only allow you to win, but win quickly – so you can beat even the final Trial of a Tournament in less than a minute!

You are the MVP

While Trial of the Ancients may take inspiration from the auto battler genre, make no mistake – you cannot rely on your AI Warriors to win battle for you.

You are the MVP, and while your Warriors are an important part of supporting you and your strategy for winning, they will not win the battle themselves.

The enemy AI will follow set patterns in how they attack, but you have the freedom to put pressure on different parts of the battle as needed – and your Escort allies will help you. This is a key advantage you need to press in order to consistently win.

Avoid Combat

While you might think that the best way to crush Trials is to simply overwhelm the enemy with insane DPS, this is not the case. Enemy Warriors are INCREDIBLY tanky, and if you try to simply farm them in the middle of the battlefield to eventually win when their respawn timers are high, you will find that your Trials take a long, long time to win.

This only gets more true as your Rank increases – enemies will begin to one-shot you with basic attacks, and even the strongest builds will be unable to overwhelm them with sheer character power.

The better – and faster – strategy is to control the battlefield and push important objectives. Destroying a Totem will completely remove that Warrior from the Trial and is far faster than killing that Warrior many times over – and involves far less combat.

Banish Totems Early and Often

The key to winning Trials quickly is to generate a Warriors numbers advantage by destroying enemy totems early on and using that advantage to snowball into even more Totem destructions – crippling your opponent’s ability to fight back, as you mop up their remaining Totems.

Banish Totems Back-to-Front

Most enemy Warriors are focused on charging your Totems and attacking your Warriors, as opposed to stopping you from banishing the enemy Totems.

Exploit this.

If you banish Totems on your opponent’s backlines, most of the enemy team will simply ignore you. The only Warriors that will attempt to stop you are the ones assigned to the enemy’s Defender positions – the four Totems at the very back.

Which is to say – once you have destroyed the enemy’s Defender totems, there will be absolutely nothing to stop you from banish all the enemy team’s totems, back-to-front.

As such, you should start every battle by running around the enemy team and banishing these four totems at the back. You can kill any problematic defenders, or simply avoid them by alternating between banishing the topmost and bottommost Totems.

Once you have destroyed the Defender Totems, you should move onto any problematic enemies (such as the Titanic Shell), followed by the enemy’s Flanker Totems.

Once all their Flanker Totems are destroyed, you have basically won the match. Your AI teammates will have no trouble overwhelming the remaining Totems through sheer numbers, leading to a quick win – even in late-tournament matches.

Prioritize Flankers and Escorts

Because this strategy relies on getting an early lead, and snowballing from there, you need to set up your team assist you in that goal.

Flankers and Escorts will both avoid battling enemy Warriors and focus just banish totems – exactly what you want.

While you will want some Warriors in the Attacker and Defender roles in order to buy some time at the very start of the match, ensure you have powerful Flankers and Escort Warriors to assist you.

Build Considerations

While the winning strategy doesn’t involve a ton of combat, your build still DOES have an impact on the battle.

Being able to quickly dispatch Defenders while you Banish their Totems will ensure that you can quickly snowball a fight without issue, and being able to do so without fear of getting stunned will further increase your consistency.

The following are all significant advantages to consider with your build for Trials:

Attack while Banishing

Builds that can attack while banishing Totems have a significant advantage in Trials. You won’t have to choose between spending your time banishing totems OR fighting the defenders – you simply do both at the same time!

If you’re aiming to do chip damage while banishing, the very best builds at this are Totem and Minion builds. Simply let them do the fighting, while you do the Banishing! If your goal is instead to CC enemies while you banish, Mirage Archer and Brand setups have proven incredibly effective.

Crowd Control

Being able to keep the Defenders away from you while you banish their Totems – without having to actually kill them – is also a great tool to have in your arsenal.

Builds focusing on crowd control make use of Slow, Knockback, Chance to Flee Support, Void Sphere, and Temporal Chains.

You can simply banish their totems, watching as the CC-ed enemies slowly approach. And then when they get near, you break off, CC again, and go banish a different Defender Totem further away.

Avoiding Hits

The player is only stunned while banishing a Totem if they are hit with an attack or spell.

Evading an attack – or dodging a spell – will neither interrupt nor stun you. Capping Spell Dodge, having 95% Evasion, and using Blind will all significantly improve your ability to banish Totems.

In addition, at very high ranks, damage from enemies scales up so high that avoiding death through damage-reduction mechanics becomes borderline impossible. Not only does capping Evasion and Spell Dodge help you avoid these one-shots, many players choose to combine them with capped Block and Spell Block as well.

While you can attempt to simply “not get hit”, these defense allow you to banish far more aggressively, with much less risk of interrupts or one-shot deaths.

Conclusion

Be sure to check out the other pages of this guide, covering even more topics related to Trials of the Ancestors! This guide will continue to be updated in the future – if you have any feedback, or find something cool you want to share, head on over to the PoE Vault Discord, and let me know!

Good luck, and have fun farming Trials of the Ancestors!