Benefits of Totems?

[Razaron]

I'm just wondering what everyone's opinion of totems, I'll lay out a question so you can answer it,

What benefits do totems actually give shamans these days that a buff or spell couldn't?

I feel the totem system is hugely outdated and that totems aren't totems anymore. They've ceased to have any benefit whatsoever because Blizzard have nerfed any uniqueness out of them. I also think that they could be done so much better, like mini-pets supporting your character and interacting in special ways, always present and ready to cast spells to counter or injury the enemy.

But I guess that's just one of my many ideas on how to update the totem system. Do you think totems need an update or are they fine how they are?

[shamantime]

I'm just wondering what everyone's opinion of totems, I'll lay out a question so you can answer it,

What benefits do totems actually give shamans these days that a buff or spell couldn't?

I feel the totem system is hugely outdated and that totems aren't totems anymore. They've ceased to have any benefit whatsoever because Blizzard have nerfed any uniqueness out of them. I also think that they could be done so much better, like mini-pets supporting your character and interacting in special ways, always present and ready to cast spells to counter or injury the enemy.

But I guess that's just one of my many ideas on how to update the totem system. Do you think totems need an update or are they fine how they are?

Totem is basically an entity that has a buff, healing, damage, or unique mechanic attached to it.

[Razaron]

I know that, but what's the benefits of a totem these days that a spell couldn't replicate?

[nyc81991]

I know that, but what's the benefits of a totem these days that a spell couldn't replicate?

Nothing, it's class flavor.

[Hekili]

Totems don't seem to be governed by any consistent vision.

The difference between a totem and any other effect is simply that totems have an additional physical counter where other class' abilities would require effects to be dispelled. With that in mind, I'd argue that they're too weak when compared to their cooldowns and the extra vulnerability. In PvE, the vulnerability isn't as big a deal, but in PvP, you can nuke down a totem so quickly their effect is completely invalidated. Try nuking Shadowflame or Shockwave out of existence.

Also, having our pets lock us out of our totem toolkit is a bit frustrating. Doesn't matter a whole lot for Fire Elemental, but having to kill Rocky to use Earthgrasp is a pretty lousy trade-off. Are you going to kill your Storm Elemental in order to pop Capacitor Totem? Grounding Totem?

So, I'd propose a few changes:

1. Either move pets off of totems, or give us Totemic Persistence baseline.

2. Totems that are destroyed prematurely should refund part of the cooldown, similar to our old talent.

3. Totems should have longer uptimes, but require manual triggering. If you put down a Capacitor Totem, it shouldn't be a 3/5 second charge time to explode. (Why tie such a short duration event to a *totem*?) I'd say that a Capacitor Totem could go up for 20 seconds, but doesn't stun until you trigger it. Perhaps it would generate 1 charge per 5 seconds. It's still vulnerable in every important way -- you can nuke it from ranged, you can simply stand outside its radius -- but isn't so easily wasted.

You can apply similar logic to Tremor Totem: have it break X fears over so many seconds, but *six* seconds is far too weak for its cooldown, when it can't be used reactively. And in PvP, a smart team would know to nuke it anyway. It's not an "immunity."

You could also apply that logic to Searing Totem. Even as Elemental struggles to find a proper niche for Earthquake, Enhancement is still saddled with Magma Totem which is equally restrictive in terms of situations where it is useful enough. The Liquid Magma totem should simply be a replacement for Magma Totem -- a button to mash when you have adds coming, while Searing Totem continues to passively provide its effect.

Anyway, that's what totems convey to me. They aren't particularly different from auras or effects, except they're more vulnerable since you can 'dispel' them by killing them rather than needing a dispel ability. However, you'd expect them to be stronger if they're going to be more vulnerable, but they're not. And if the enemy isn't burning up your totems, you'll end up locking yourself out of them when you have your elemental pet out.

[Lavindar]

The biggest advantage of totems in general is that they provide their effects without a continuous intervention of the shaman. Other than that we have to do a case by case analysis to see if it's beneficial for each effect to be a totem or a common ability.

I believe that now, the best ones that exemplify that is Spirit Link Totem and Healing Tide Totem.

Grounding Totem is another one that can have advantage for being a Totem and not a simply buff, like when it ground a Death Knight's Death Grip for example.

On the other side as Hekili mentioned, Elementals being tied to the totems are detrimental for the ability, as their long duration lock the others totems of that element, they despawn whenwe get too far from the totem, with happens a lot in both PvP, and even in PvE we have lots of fights that transport us for other areas, like Garrosh's intermissions.

[ComputerNerd]

Totems are a separate entity.
That alone means that you have to deal with them differently than you do a buff.

It is questionable certainly if that is a "benefit" or not, but it is a pretty fundamental difference and more than just "flavour".

[Mithgroth]

Actually I asked a similar question in here.

As far as I understand, there are no benefits to totems. None at all.
Anything is better off not being a totem. Totem means a spell becomes an immobile area effect, dispellable by everyone, even pets. Plus it inherits the only-one-kind-at-a-time limitation by default, so they conflict.

We sacrifice having normal spells without any restrictions like any other class, for... well... "flavour".
If there was a single point that made totems advantages, it would make sense.

[Volitar]

To make the Shaman class clunkier than any of the other classes, that's our niche...

[jayinjersey]

Blizzard has repeatedly stated (granted this was almost always by Ghostcrawler) totems were a "Defining Characteristic" of shaman...


So sad to see the Totem Tier is, by their own admission, not a priority for Shaman given that totems are our "Defining Characteristics"

[shamantime]

I really wish they made Projection and Persistence baseline, and instead had the Totem Tier be about being able use your totems twice (CoE), gaining stronger versions of pre-existing totems, and a unique totem utility.

[Omanley]

To understand totem design, you have to look at the time they made their entrance: vanilla.
At that point of time, everything everyone used was unique, same was the case for the benefits of our totem's effects.

Since then though, a lot of homogenisation found it's way into the game, and buff totems started being simply inferior versions of regular buffs, supported in that buffs where raid-wide all of a sudden, so you didn't need a shaman for his big selection of buffs avaiable (though it could be nice in ten-mans).
From a buff POV, shamans had by far the biggest selection of benefitial buffs ingame, and suffered restrictions like
-limited to your 5man sub group in raids (removed)
-immobile, destroyable and limited to one of each element => huge amount of utility means having restrictions to it

Dont forget that totems for the most part had no cooldown and lasted long.


Basically losing that entire buff mentatility aspect has made it important rethinking totem's design. It became even more relevant that the new utility consisted of totems with higher cooldowns than originally (grounding, fire nova and earthbind were all below 30s cd, I believe), so totems being destroyed meant losing a big cooldown, just like that. With the existence of long duration totems such as SBT, and elemental totems, having short duration utility is an additional big blow.

And again, homogenisation. If aoe snares became widely avaiable, being the only one with a destroyable version suddenly doesn't appear as okay anymore as it was during vanilla.


The outlook on what totems bring changed tremendously, but the restrictions remained, were even tightened, by not allowing them being played while silenced.

And as said, pretty much every useful totem was nerfed at least once, or removed completely (grounding, healing stream (on the horizon), healing tide (limited to resto come WoD), tremor (nerfed twice come WoD), grounding (used to not break on eating non dmg spells), cleansing...This part makes me probably the maddest. Basically if you so heavily restrict such a wide-collection of utility, it would have to be very strong to compensate. Continuously nerfing because they provide an edge somewhere, because of homogenisation, means you have to hemogenisate their weaknesses as well (but ofc that's where blizz's double standards come in, saying they wouldn't be totems anymore (as if such weak spell could still be called that, anyway)).

[Deleted]

As far as I understand, there are no benefits to totems. None at all.

From a design perspective? There is a massive benefit to them.

The purpose of totems has changed over the years, but they have always fit nicely into a design decision that restricts what abilities you can use in conjunction with each other. For instance, using Stormlash, Grounding, Capacitor and Windwalk all together is something you're not supposed to be able to do, so if it makes sense to tie abilities to this restriction then they can. Shaman brings a lot of utility to the table, and it has to be controlled somehow.

[CID-77]

I love totems but keeping them competitive isnt that hard. Everyone keeps saying it, make Totemic Projection and Persistence baseline. It makes so much sense I dont get why it isn't implemented. Call is a worthy talent. Make two new totem talents and done.

I would love one hypothetical new totem talent for Condensation Totem, reducing the CD by 2sec, so a 3sec delayed stun baseline, and 1sec with Glyph. But maybe this is a mediocre talent too and should just be baseline. And maybe a talent to increase the duration of Tremor? Although as I write this, Call of the Elements would be the sure pick anyway, so maybe not the most interesting alternatives.

Being able to drop totems while silenced seems mandatory though. That's a really logical change imo.

[Omanley]

For instance, using Stormlash, Grounding, Capacitor and Windwalk all together is something you're not supposed to be able to do, so if it makes sense to tie abilities to this restriction then they can. Shaman brings a lot of utility to the table, and it has to be controlled somehow.

-Stormlash is a dps cooldown, not utility. And it's gone come WoD anyway.
-Capacitor is the worst stun ingame
-Windwalk is a talent
-Grounding is a weaker spellreflect

That's already plenty restrictive to me, not mentioning immobility, being destroyable and unusable while silenced. Dont puff up totems to be something strong, as they are not. The current totem design is not a result of blizzard's master plan "these totems are not supposed to be used together", but rather of their lazyness to change something that is 10 years old and long outdated.
Dont tell us this milk is supposed to taste sour. It's blizz's oversight that it expired. And it's borderline criminal that they keep presenting it to us like that.
There is no logical explanation why a shaman shouldn't be able to use wind totems for a whole minute, because they chose Stormelemental Totem. It's simply just bad design. Stop defending blizz on such obvious fails, if you want to be taken seriously.

[Thralk]

Would simply love if the baseline HP of totems scaled with level to the point that they couldn't be one- or two-shotted. Aside from the round robin of nerfs they've taken over the course of each expansion, that one irks me the most from both a PVE/PVP perspective. I agree with the statement above about feeling like a Swiss Army Knife of utility at one time (cleansing and mana totems, hell, even the one that made only ranged attacks do less damage), and never having that balanced out as more of those gimmicks were refurbished, refined, and handed out to other classes in some form.

Why couldn't/shouldn't we have some tools that others don't, if the restrictions to them will always include not being able to drop while silenced (aren't totems inherently "charged" with whatever energy we're trying to draw from?), and can be wiped out by a butterfly landing on them? Visually I still love those rare situations where I've got a reason (and an opportunity) to have totems of all four elements sitting around my Shaman. It feels right, but doesn't perform they way it should.

[jayinjersey]

Maybe we should all agree to NOT choose any talent in the Totem Tier until they make them useful and not band-aids...


A showing of support might be just want Big Blue needs to realize we aren't the lemmings they take us for.

[Socialhealer]

To make the Shaman class clunkier than any of the other classes, that's our niche...

true that, our niche is to have easily killed buffs, so everyone can dispell our buffs instead of just a select few, what a joke....

[Deleted]

-Stormlash is a dps cooldown, not utility. And it's gone come WoD anyway.
-Capacitor is the worst stun ingame
-Windwalk is a talent
-Grounding is a weaker spellreflect

- Replace with Storm Elemental Totem then.
- Use it properly, I get amazing usage out of it.
- So? I'm not seeing what it being a talent has to do with exclusivity of other air totems.
- 1) Glyph it and it's not. 2) So?

If you really believe you should be able to have a Storm Elemental damaging and healing, a grounding totem absorbing/reflecting a spell, unimpaired movement for 6 seconds and a 5-second stun (when you learn how to use it properly) at the same time as all the other different elemental totem effects and non-totem abilities you have, then all I'll say is thank the Gods you are not a game designer. Stick to your day job.

Also, don't bother replying with "BUT <insert class here> GET <insert list of abilities you can't defend against here>". Homogenisation is bad, remember? Every class is different. Let's put it another why. Why DO you believe you should be able to do all that at the same time?

That's already plenty restrictive to me, not mentioning immobility, being destroyable and unusable while silenced. Dont puff up totems to be something strong, as they are not. The current totem design is not a result of blizzard's master plan "these totems are not supposed to be used together", but rather of their lazyness to change something that is 10 years old and long outdated. Dont tell us this milk is supposed to taste sour. It's blizz's oversight that it expired. And it's borderline criminal that they keep presenting it to us like that.

Good game design != laziness. They've changed so many things in 10 years, if they wanted to change it, they would have done so when they changed the totem system in this expansion.

There is no logical explanation why a shaman shouldn't be able to use wind totems for a whole minute, because they chose Stormelemental Totem. It's simply just bad design.

I just gave you the explanation, and it's more than logical, it's good game design. I don't defend Blizzard per sé, I defend good game design.

Stop defending blizz on such obvious fails, if you want to be taken seriously.

I see your "stop defending blizz cos i h8 wot dey du der4 u r a fanboi" and raise you a "Stop attacking Blizzard because you're useless at identifying what makes good game design".

[shamantime]

Capacitor Totem isn't necessarily bad but, it's a skill-cap for Shaman and once you get properly get it off the reward is big.