I’m a little confused by the totem summoning quality of life spells. They take 3 seconds to cast which with the totem 1 second gcd provides no advantage to casting and keeps you stationary and susceptible to pushback.
Doing each totem with a cast sequence macro is far superior.
1 totem/ 1 sec/ 2 totem/ 1 sec / 3 totem/ 1 sec / 4 totem takes 3 seconds to get your totems down and an extra 1 second gcd to cast another spell. You can move, you cant be interrupted.
Casting the spell saves you 1 second on a gcd but offers no real benefit.
I really think if you are trying to improve shaman totem management to reflect actual combat situations the cast time should be reduced to 2 seconds. Not super short and you still have to stay still but it at least saves you 2 seconds of gcd time as a trade off.
If you’re dropping all four totems and not being targeted, you save a second by using the combined drop.
The only issue with it is that you get the skill too early, because it doesn’t really do anything other than let you be lazy until you have all four totems.
This is incredibly useless to be stuck for 3 seconds unless maybe a stationary raid boss. Its super impracticle questing and for dungeons with group constantly on the move.
They reduced the global cooldown for totem drops from 1.5 to 1 second, so no, the new ability doesn’t save you any time. You can manually drop 4 totems in 3 seconds of global cooldown, or spend 3 seconds casting for call of the ancestors.
Problem is, there’s hardly any situation where a shaman of any spec wants to consistently drop the same 4 totems (or even 4 totems at all). Totems are meant to be dynamic, outside of the flat buff types.
You will have all four totems on the ground in the same amount of time.
If you cast call of the ancestors, you will be off GCD and ready to go; if you pressed four totem buttons, you will have to wait one more second before you can cast another spell.
it is exactly the same amount of time as manually casting 4 totems since totems have a 1s gcd. You just can’t do it on the move which is the penalty for the convenience
It should be instant cast and cost less mana. Paladin can prebuff for an hour. We have to keep casting totems every 5 min and keep repositioning them, spending mana in combat, and totems can be destroyed. In Tbc (or was it Wrath?) there was no cast time, totems dropped instantly, all 4 of them. And we had mana. Now we are mana starved. I really hate what they did with mana costs.
I’m not even sure how to respond to this its so far off base.
Totem time has nothing to do with tank threat, I can still summon and attack after tank has appropriate threat. If anything windfuy faster is faster tank threat.