Trial of the Ancestors introduces an auto-battler league mechanic that can scale up to incredibly high difficulty levels. However, if you master it, you can get incredibly lucrative tattoos and worth multiple Divine Orbs.
Much has been said by the community about one-shotting earthquakes, titanic turtles, and long battles of attrition. With this guide, however, you will have nothing to fear from any of those. It is possible to win trials quickly and consistently.
In this guide, I’ll be covering a number of topics, starting with the winning strategy to win battles, followed by how you should put your teams together, and finally covering all the tips and tricks you can use to maximize your POE Currency rewards by manipulating tournament brackets.
The Winning Strategy
The strategy you need to follow is to avoid direct combat, and focus on banishing totems.
The goal here is to create an early lead by banishing a few Totems as fast as you can, and then using that lead to snowball into a quick win.
You do this by banishing totems back-to-front to stop enemies from interfering and utilizing your Flankers and Escorts to help you banish totems faster.
In between matches, you want to recruit Warriors that will help you snowball, and manipulate the tournament brackets to receive better rewards.
So how, specifically, do you snowball matches like this?
When you’re behind enemy lines, only Defender Warriors will attempt to stop you when you’re banishing enemy totems. And once those Defenders are dead, there’s nobody to stop you. Your job is to abuse this by banishing totems back-to-front, starting with the Defender totems.
Now, those defenders will try and stop you while you’re banishing their totems. At lower ranks, you can simply kill them. But as your ranking gets higher and higher, you’ll find that this quickly stops being an option. They’ll become obscenely tanky, and they’ll be able to one-shot you with even the lightest tap.
What you’ll want to do is kite them around, while working with your teammates to banish their totems. When an enemy gets close to you, just stop banishing, kite them to another Totem, and banish that one until they get close again, and repeat. If they won’t break off of you, simply focus on kiting them around, while your teammates banish the totems. As defender totems become banished, you’ll have fewer enemies to kite around, and will be able to join in.
After you’ve dealt with the Defender totems, you’ll want to banish as many totems as you can and as fast as you can. Start with totems with problematic warriors, like Spear Dancers, and then work your way forward, helping finish off totems that your teammates have weakened for you. This results in exceptionally fast wins. When paired with a strong team composition, less than 60 seconds is not unusual for even late-tournament matches.
Build Considerations
While we’re talking about the actual Trials themselves, let’s take a second to talk about build considerations.
While this strategy is fairly build-agnostic, there are a few things you can do to make your build better suited for Trials.
The first is to play a build that can attack enemies while your character banishes a totem. This is incredibly useful both to get damage in at lower ranks, and also to distract enemies.
Totems and Minions are best at this as enemy Warriors may spend their time attacking them instead of stopping you or your teammates from banishing Totems!
Something else that’s quite powerful is slow and knockback. Since you’re not really trying to kill Defenders outright and instead just banish their totems, slows and knockbacks allow you to keep them away from you and your teammates while you banish them.
Something else I’ve noticed is that high evasion on your character can be quite useful. Not only because everything is a one-shot at higher ranks, thus rendering other defensive layers completely useless, but also because if you evade a hit while channeling, you won’t get stunned for 5 seconds.
In either scenario, evading a hit gives you a second chance when you otherwise most likely would have died. It’s not something you want to be relying on, but it can definitely help!
Team Composition
Next up, team composition.
Something to keep in mind is that Flankers and Escorts are the most important roles. These will be the teammates that are there with you behind enemy lines, banishing totems, and fighting off defenders.
That’s not to say that you won’t get used out of all four roles, though. And before discussing which particular units you want in each slot, I want to go over what you’re looking to get out of a unit in each of the four positions.
For Flankers, you’re looking for units that can easily sneak past enemy Warriors, and quickly banish Totems alongside you. Warriors with stealth abilities, or high move speed, or utility to support banishing Totems are extremely powerful here.
For Escorts, you’re looking for just warm bodies that can hold off defenders and banish Totems. The actual units you choose to use as Escorts matters far less than any other position, as they will spend almost all their time banishing Totems.
For Attackers, you’re not looking for units that actually excel at killing enemies. After all, you’re looking to kill enemies by banishing their totems, not by winning some war of attrition. So what you want out of an Attacker is a Warrior that can buy you time and distract enemy Warriors. Tanky Warriors are incredibly strong here.
And finally, Defenders. What you’re looking for out of this role is units with range that can interrupt enemies that attempt to banish your totems, primarily enemy Flankers, or the enemy leader.
Once again, it’s not important that they be able to actually kill these enemies, only that they can prevent them from banishing your totems for long enough for you to banish the enemy’s totems first.
Best Warriors
Now, let’s talk about specific units that are particularly strong, and what positions you want them in.
The three best Warriors are the Thunderbird, Fieldmaster, and Caldera Ravager. Thunderbird and Fieldmaster are incredibly powerful Flankers. The Fieldmaster has an ability that places walls down, that both friendly and enemy units can’t pass or attack through without destroying it or going around.
This ability is incredibly powerful, mostly because the enemy AI isn’t very smart and will often break off and do something else instead of running around or breaking the wall.
It’s worth noting that these walls can cause a bit of an issue for the AI of your friendly units as well. But the benefits massively outweigh these downsides.
The Thunderbird is powerful because it can teleport to Totems and begin banishing quickly. Its teleport also allows it to teleport past the fences created by your Fieldmasters, negating the one downside your Fieldmasters can have, and making them a potent combination.
Caldera Ravagers are incredibly powerful as Attackers due to their incredible tankiness and AoE abilities. They can hold off the enemy team for quite a while all on their own, and their AoE abilities will interrupt enemies attempting to banish your Totems. The amount of time they can buy you to banish enemy Totems is just obscene.
Other notable warriors include the Spearfisher and Spear Dancer. These are melee units that excel at being Defenders as a result of their quick movement speed and huge reach, with the Spear Dancer also being a pretty good Flanker due to its movement speed.
The Storm Guard is powerful in any Non-Defender position, as its proximity shield will protect you and your teammates while either banishing totems, or buying time fighting the enemy team. The Jade Hulk is another very tanky unit that can buy you tons of time in the Attacker role, despite lacking the utility that the Caldera Ravager brings with its AoE skills.
And, finally, Sunset Sage and Tidecaller are both casters that excel in the Defender role. Their ranged attacks and abilities allow them to interrupt enemies banishing your Totems with ease, without getting in danger of dying themselves.
Favour
So, knowing all of this, how should you go about spending your Favour?
Of the three best units, it’s worth noting that the Thunderbird and Fieldmaster are both low-ranking Warriors, and will always be available from their Tribe’s vendors for the first few rounds of a tournament.
On the flip side, the Caldera Ravager is a rare Warrior, and can’t show up for the first few rounds and sometimes isn’t available at all.
The end result of this is that the Valako and Rongokurai Tribes are the best tribes to get favour with, especially early in a tournament. And you should prioritize picking battles that give large amounts of Favour with these tribes in order to get a strong team going as fast as possible.
Remember that you can sell Warriors for Favour of other tribes. You should always spend your 250 Navali Favour that you get every round on a Warrior or Equipment from her, and then sell them to another Tribe if that little of Favour lets you get something good.
As long as you get 500 Favour with either the Valako or Rongokurai Tribe, you should be able to sell your Navali Warrior to them to pick up a Fieldmaster or Thunderbird. Do this every round for the first few rounds, and you’ll be in a great position to just sweep the rest of the Tournament.
Equipment & Field Items
Next, let’s talk about Equipment and Field Items. These simply aren’t all that important.
Equipment can make a difference. And if you are going to buy and use equipment, you should be looking to buy cheap equipment that synergizes with the winning strategy of banishing totems, and putting them in strong units.
The main places where equipment can have an impact is by making Flankers faster, and making Attackers tankier. There are actually quite a few pieces of equipment that make Warriors tankier, and putting a few on your Attackers can buy you a lot of extra time in case you make a mistake and die.
The one significant piece of equipment that I’ll call out is the one from Navali, that costs 250 Favour, and doubles the life of a Warrior. Because you always get 250 Navali Favour, you’ll have a lot of access to this equipment, and slapping it on a tanky Attacker, like a Caldera Ravager or a Jade Hulk, can be pretty impactful.
As far as Field Items (a kind of POE Items that are placed on the battlefield), I personally don’t use them. I find that having all of your positions filled with Warriors is just a heck of a lot better, even if the Warriors themselves aren’t very good. I only ever use Field Items as a way to transfer Favour from one Tribe to another.
Ranking & Rewards
Now that we’ve covered everything related to actually winning battles, let’s talk a bit about rewards and what you can do to maximize your Trial profits.
The first and most important thing is that higher ranking increases the difficulty of Trials, but also gives you dramatically better rewards. Consistently winning, and using a strategy that lets you win even at very high rankings, is crucial, which the strategy I’ve outlined here will help you do.
The other big thing to know is that rewards are better in later rounds. The deeper into a tournament you are, the better the rewards will be.
Manipulating Tournament Brackets
Something that’s very important to understand is that the tattoos you get as match rewards are tied to specific Tribes. And that the Rare Tribe tattoos will only appear in later rounds. You want specific Tribes to make it to later rounds so you can get their valuable Tattoos.
However, what Tribes make it to later rounds is something that you have some amount of control over. You can vastly improve your overall rewards by intentionally knocking out Tribes with worse rewards early on to preserve other Tribes with good rewards.
Currently, though, the best Tribe by far is the Ramako Tribe, as its rare Makanga tattoo is worth upwards of 10 Divine Orbs.
Forfeiting
Something else you can do to improve your rewards is tactically forfeiting matches.
This can be used in a number of ways. The most common one is to simply re-roll the rewards for a round, likely used for the final round, which often has the very best rewards.
Another way to use it, however, is to save a specific tribe from potential elimination. Imagine you have 3 Tribes left, each with one loss, and one of them is the incredibly valuable Ramako Tribe. If you fought one of the other two tribes, you’d have a 50/50 shot of the Ramako Tribe losing its match, and not making it to the final round.
If you, instead, fight the Ramako Tribe, and intentionally lose the match, then you can guarantee that Ramako will be the final Tribe remaining. Keeping an eye out for this situation and intentionally forfeiting like this will lead to Ramako being the final tribe far more often, meaning you’ll get a lot more of those 10-divine Tattoos!
The final use for intentional forfeits is to drag out a tournament. As I mentioned earlier, later rounds have better rewards. And while you might think that every tournament would have the same number of rounds, this isn’t actually true. Depending on when Tribes get knocked out, you can have rounds with an odd number of tribes, where some get “byes”.
As you get late into a tournament, you can create a situation where the final two tribes remaining have no losses, netting you 2 extra rounds where a tribe gets a bye. This will give you more shots at valuable rewards like Divine Orbs, and can help you squeeze a bit of extra POE Currency out of a Tournament where valuable Tribes have already been eliminated.
This last use is a bit niche, as even with the intentional forfeit, you’re still only setting up a 50/50 chance of dragging things out. But it does come up sometimes, and having it in your bag of tricks can make a difference!
