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With about a week remaining in Path of Exile 3.28 Return of the Ancestors (RoTA) event, have you seized the opportunities it offers to boost your earnings and enhance your final league experience?

If you've been playing since the event began, you likely understand the core mechanics by now; however, there are still some key strategies you should master to maximize your currency gains.

What are RoTA rewards?

At its core, this event combines the auto-battler gameplay of Trial of the Ancestors with the limited-time Ascendancies from Legacy of Phrecia event, rewarding you for defeating enemy NPCs that constantly respawn.

Rewards include various types of currency, unique items, Divination Cards, and exclusive tattoos. You can sell any of these for more PoE currency, especially the tattoos, which provide powerful benefits during RoTA event itself.

How to get more valuable currency drops?

You don't lose XP upon death in Trial of the Ancestors, so you can gradually climb the rankings to unlock tougher battles and earn rarer currency rewards.

To achieve this, use your first character for initial progression, farming Tier 16 maps to accumulate enough currency to fully fund a specialized RoTA build for your second character.

You can then transition your second character into a build optimized specifically for Trial of the Ancestors. In essence, that first character exists solely to facilitate your RoTA journey.

To pull this off, you should aim to create a character with zero damage output. Since achieving this right from the start is difficult, you can make the switch once you decide to stop running standard maps.

While returns are modest in the early stages, the true endgame offers both significant challenges and lucrative rewards. Consequently, this playstyle is best approached either as a casual diversion or a full commitment to the very end.

Optimal team composition

The complexity of Trial of the Ancestors varies greatly depending on the opponents you face. In the early stages of the tournament, your primary focus should be on the special currency known as Favor.

Favor is used to recruit Ancestor NPCs, and the team members you bring along directly influence how much Favor you earn. Currently, Utula is the NPC who offers the most Favor.

You can verify this by checking the tattoo options and NPC's tribe affiliation, which helps you decide whether to utilize a specific Ancestor early or late in the tournament.

Furthermore, as the tournament progresses, you should aim to eliminate troublesome NPCs before reaching the final rounds, where the difficulty spikes, to avoid unnecessary complications.

Regarding team composition, flankers are paramount; they can bypass frontal combat to strike the enemy backline and capture totems directly.

Therefore, you should assign fast-moving characters to this role, ideally those with special abilities, such as Kunekune, which can charge forward.

Slower units are suitable for offensive roles; tanks should be placed on the front lines to tie up and harass the enemy team; guardians should stay close to you at all times; and defenders should remain in the rear to protect your totems.

It is worth noting that ranged control units are excellent Ancestor NPCs; if your defensive NPCs fail, these units can use their unique skills to push back enemy NPCs approaching your totems.

After each round, remember to check for new Ancestors to recruit or items to trade. You can often sell NPCs or items back to various tribal chieftains to increase your favor.

Additionally, once an item is equipped on an NPC, its value drops by roughly half, regardless of the reason. Consequently, you should prioritize trading NPCs as early as possible.

How should you intervene in the battle?

Although ToTA is an auto-battler, simply setting up your team isn't enough; you still need to intervene at critical moments to prevent errors.

For instance, you can adjust your NPCs' positioning based on the real-time flow of battle to more effectively pin down enemy NPCs on a specific flank.

Be aware that if you are attacked while channeling a totem, you will be stunned. Therefore, on higher difficulties, your goal shouldn't be to channel the totems yourself, but rather to draw enemy aggro, usually achieved by briefly touching an enemy totem and then running away.

In practice, if you do intervene in combat, your primary task is to control and distract the enemy, leaving the destruction of totems to your NPC teammates. However, if the opportunity arises, you can also join them in channeling the totems.

Summary

To generate substantial income from Return of the Ancestors event, you must commit to seeing it through to the end right from the start; a half-hearted, casual-meets-hardcore approach will probably leave you in a frustratingly awkward position.

The tournament continues until every member of your team has suffered at least one defeat. Upon finally defeating your last opponent, you will receive a final reward. The higher your ranking, the greater the currency income.

Additionally, you will receive a bonus reward from Hinekora, allowing you to choose between a unique item, a signature item from a defeated NPC, or a tattoo. Whichever you pick, selling it yields a handsome profit.

In short, we hope this Return of the Ancestors currency farming guide ensures that you reap rewarding surprises in the later stages, rather than just facing early-game frustrations. Now, waste no time, get out there and push forward!

Path of Exile Patch 3.29 Curse of the Allflame will be streamed on July 16th and officially released on July 24th, bringing the highly anticipated skill Ice Crash of Cadence back into the spotlight.

This skill is essentially still an extension of ice-based melee skills, but compared to the traditional Ice Crash, its attack rhythm and feel lean towards a continuous, cyclical output rather than a single burst strike.

Looking back at the current timeline, before Path of Exile's official release on July 24th, this type of skill is closer to a verifiable but undefined state, requiring further confirmation of its stability and adaptation in the actual patch environment.

Understanding the Skill Mechanics

While Ice Crash of Cadence shares the same mechanical foundation as the original Ice Crash, its defining difference lies in how you time your strikes.

Simply put, it can be divided into three points:

First, it still primarily uses melee-range Ice Crash as its output method, relying on area coverage and hit timing rather than single-point bursts.

Secondly, compared to the traditional Ice Crash, this branch emphasizes a more rhythmic, continuous attack pattern, resulting in a smoother skill rotation and deviating from the typical one-hit-kill playstyle.

Finally, its actual performance is significantly affected by weapon attack speed and skill rhythm; different weapons directly alter the overall feel.

Therefore, this skill is more like a rhythm-based melee ice skill than a traditional burst-type ultimate.

League Start

In PoE Patch 3.29 environment, Ice Crash of Cadence is not suitable as the primary skill for early game progression.

A more reasonable approach is:

Use basic melee skills or standard ice skills to advance the story during League Start phase, such as the common Frost Blades or Cyclone transition skills, for stable enemy clearing and chapter progression.

Only consider switching to Ice Crash of Cadence after your gear and skill support are fully developed in the mid-game.

Typically, you won't find the opportunity to swap to this skill during the early story chapters; instead, it tends to open up once you reach normal maps or the lower tiers of red maps.

The core criterion isn't level, but whether attack speed and range support a complete rotation.

Building Core Ideas

There's no single, fixed template for PoE builds in Ice Crash of Cadence, but it can be broken down into three core modules:

1. First is the skill itself, providing a basic damage rotation and area-of-effect clearing capability.
2. Second is Cold Damage Scaling, including frost penetration, frost damage amplification, and area-of-effect expansion, used to improve stability and clearing efficiency.
3. Third is the weapon system, which determines the skill rhythm and overall feel, and is the part that has the biggest impact on the experience.

These three modules don't have an absolute priority; they work together to form a complete rotation.

Class Selection

Currently, the most common choice in PoE community is Slayer.

The reason isn't skill binding, but that Slayer possesses good sustained melee damage, survivability, and map-clearing stability, perfectly matching the rhythmic output mode of Ice Crash of Cadence.

Other classes can theoretically be used, but they usually tend to be playable but not as smooth.

Therefore, if you're trying this skill with Patch 3.29, it's recommended to start with Slayer.

Weapon Selection

Weapon selection is the most crucial and unpredictable variable for this skill.

Common PoE builds currently include:

Two-handed weapons with high physical base stats, used to increase the intensity and area damage of a single Ice Crash;

And certain special weapon systems (such as weapon combinations focused on rhythm or trigger mechanics), used to optimize attack smoothness.

The differences between different weapons are not just numerical, but also variations in attack rhythm, which directly affect the skill rotation experience.

Therefore, when choosing a weapon, it's not recommended to simply look at the stats, but to prioritize attack speed and skill feel compatibility.

Gear Progression

In Curse of the Allflame, upgrading your gear depends heavily on the spending Path of Exile 1 Currency, particularly when moving through the mid-game phase. Ice Crash of Cadence has a relatively typical progression curve, exhibiting a phased improvement structure.

• In League Start, it mainly relies on basic weapon and skill level support, with limited but stable map clearing ability.
• The mid-game phase begins with system building, gradually improving map-clearing efficiency through ice-based damage buffs and area-of-effect expansion.
• Endgame, on the other hand, relies on complete equipment synergy, including the overall coordination of weapons, jewelry, and the defense system, to demonstrate its full strength.

It's not a skill that linearly increases in power with better equipment; rather, it exhibits a clear progression through stages.

Its Role in Patch 3.29

In Curse of the Allflame environment, Ice Crash of Cadence remains usable but undefined.

It hasn't entered the mainstream meta, nor has it been excluded from effective builds; it's more like a skill branch that can be tried but requires personal testing to determine its feel and strength.

If subsequent patch don't make structural adjustments to melee or ice-based mechanics, this skill will probably maintain its current role: playable, but not a standard answer.

The core value of Ice Crash of Cadence in Patch 3.29 lies not in its power ceiling, but in providing a rhythmic melee experience different from traditional Ice Crash.

It's suitable for players who enjoy ice-based melee combat and are willing to adjust their own feel and rhythm, but it's not the optimal solution for a stable and mindless early game.

Path of Exile 3.28 Return of the Ancestors event brings back Phrecian Ascendancy classes, and this time around Idol system from Phrecia 2.0 does not return. Instead, new Ascendancy tattoos have been introduced, so the range of viable builds is even broader than before.

Among them, Behemoth - Phrecia variant of Marauder Ascendancy - stands out as one of the most worthwhile options to try during this event. You can stack Armour to gain a massive damage bonus and then use an Ascendancy tattoo to negate its inherent drawback.

Armour Stacking Behemoth Mechanics

Rampager

Rampager is the keystone that defines this build, yet it also comes at a cost. It disables your aura skills, prevents spell skills from dealing damage, and makes warcries disabled. In exchange, your melee hits trigger and sustain Rampage effect.

You can use a tattoo to overwrite Rampager keystone, thereby regaining the ability to use auras. This is a prerequisite for Armour Stacking Behemoth; without it, the build cannot work.

In practice, any tattoo works, and there are good alternatives in both Duelist and Marauder sections of the tree. One particularly strong choice is Champion tattoo, which synergises well with Fortify stacking and yields impressive results.

If you prefer to conserve your PoE currency for other gear or upgrades, you can opt for a more modest temporary solution like Forbidden Tattoo of the Scion. Even Forbidden Tattoo of the Duelist is not hard to come by, so you have flexible options at different levels of investment.

Strength Stacking Considerations

Some players might consider stacking Strength to boost their Armour, but the flat Armour gained from that approach alone is limited and will not produce a qualitative leap in defence.

Iron Reflexes keystone is very helpful here because it converts Evasion into Armour; without this conversion, your Armour numbers will fall far short of expectations.

Similarly, Power of Purpose keystone converts 80% of your mana into double the armour, but this introduces a serious problem: your attack skills still consume mana, and after your mana pool is severely reduced, your sustain drops dramatically.

Auras that reserve a percentage of mana are unaffected, because mana reservation is calculated after the conversion. However, fixed-reservation support skills such as Vitality, Clarity, and Precision become almost impossible to enable. To address this, you have several workarounds:

• Equip gear with modifiers that reduce mana costs.
• Use Eldritch Battery to shift your energy shield to cover mana costs.
• Redirect a portion of mana costs to life.

Viable Build Variants

Melee

The most straightforward way to get started with an Armour Stacking Behemoth build is to mimic the passive tree and gear of an Armour Stacking Champion, then make a few adjustments. This approach allows players who have just finished the campaign (around level 70) to get up and running quickly.

For weapons, Replica Dreamfeather gives 1% increased damage per 450 Armour. When combined with Steel Willed notable - which grants 2% increased damage per 450 Armour - you effectively wield the equivalent of three Replica Dreamfeathers, resulting in terrifying damage amplification.

Because Behemoth Ascendancy already provides ample damage scaling, you can also forgo Replica Dreamfeather and instead use a Two-Handed Sword with Molten Strike of the Zenith.

For this route, you need to pay special attention to defence; you can patch that gap by taking Divine Flesh node, which converts 50% of elemental damage taken into chaos damage.

Ranged

Armour stacking on Behemoth is not limited to melee weapons. You can experiment with a Bow Armour Stacker, a Wand Armour Stacker, or even a setup built around Kinetic Blast of Clustering.

These unconventional configurations are rarely viable on traditional ascendancies, but Behemoth's unique bonuses make them possible. While they are generally less powerful than their melee counterparts, they offer a lot of fun and novelty.

Gear Selection

If you choose the melee path, your equipment choices closely resemble those of a traditional Champion Armour Stacker.

Replica Dreamfeather remains the best weapon option. For the helmet, Alpha's Howl provides valuable mana reservation efficiency and lets you run more auras.

For the body armour, Doryani's Prototype sets enemies' lightning resistance equal to yours. By lowering your own lightning resistance to extremely low levels while relying on high Armour to mitigate physical damage, you can deliver enormous lightning damage output.

Alternatively, if you want to keep your PoE currency for other purposes, you can also use a rare body armour with high Evasion or Energy Shield.

Auras and Skills

Once the restriction is lifted, Determination and Grace become mandatory core auras. You can also activate Anger to add fire damage and pair it with the lightning aura from Smite, easily triggering Trinity support gem.

For your main attack, Smite works well, but you are free to choose any other melee attack skill you prefer. The build is flexible enough to even allow bows or wands, so you have plenty of room for experimentation.

Armour Stacking Behemoth is an endgame build, so it is advisable to wait until you are at least level 70 and have finished the campaign before transitioning into it. At the same time, you will need to invest in the required gear, skills, and tattoos ahead of time. Nevertheless, it is a highly promising build that opens up multiple playstyle directions beyond pure melee, and it is well worth exploring.