Buff cap totem?

In legion, cap totem was a 5 second stun. So was leg sweep. Chaos nova was 4.

Fast forward to today. In PvP, leg sweep is still 5 seconds. Chaos nova, in practice, is also 5 seconds.

But cap totem is 3.

This is because, at the end of legion, blizzard nerfed AOE stun durations but kept the longer durations for pvp.

Except for cap totem. Which got an across the board 2 second nerf for PvE AND PvP.

Chaos nova is 5 now due to the almost universally taken isolated prey talent which adds one second. So 2 baseline + 2 vs players + 1 pvp talent = 5.

Back to cap totem: 3 second stun, generally needs to be covered with ANOTHER cc just to land it - meaning if that’s another stun then you are already in dr for half duration so you’re only getting 1.5 seconds from it.

Ability to use at range does’t mean much without other ranged cc to set it up, which enhance at least, completely lacks. At least outside of unleash shield talent, which only has 20 yard range and which noone seems to take.

So cap totem is basically just worse then those other stuns in every way.

I’ve previously advocated for cap to get +2 sec stun pvp like leg sweep and chaos nova. But another possibility would be giving cap a secondary effect that rewards successfully landing it. Chaos nova already does this through a damage component as well as proccing soul fragments to heal the demon hunter.

In Torghast, there’s an anima power that causes targets that you’ve stunned to take 25% increased damage, which gives cap totem a damage aspect as well. What if this kind of functionality were baked into cap totem baseline so that it significantly increased affected targets damage taken while stunned or for some period after being stunned? Or what if cap totem did big AOE damage on triggering to targets in range?

As is, cap is much harder to use than most cc with a significantly smaller payoff than most as well which makes it feel pretty unrewarding to actually pull off, unless you consider putting your target on DR to hurt your teammates better CC durations a rewarding payoff.

What about giving it a damage or secondary debuff component as well if a longer pvp duration isn’t in the cards? Something to make this feel a bit more rewarding for successfully landing it.

2 Likes

While we are at it… can we also make our wall usable in stuns and 60% reduction… plz…

Dying in stuns I think is supposed to be one of our weaknesses. Particularly as it is now where we have strong healing.

However, on that front, maybe we could get nature’s guardian baseline and another mobility/utility talent in its place on that row like making unleash shield a regular talent in place of nature’s guardian instead of a PvP talent.

But setting aside our own vulnerability in stuns, I don’t really see why cap totem can’t get an upgrade.

It’s not like DPS shamans are currently ruling the world.

Yeah… Our damage is pretty low compared to other classes and our utility is meh compared to everyone else.

I think you have to compare it to something like Shadowfury (1.5s cast, ranged, 3s). The pro/con here is that you can cast it while moving but you run the risk of people walking out of it or killing the totem before it completes its ‘cast’. You might call this the equivilient of an interrupt, but that’s not quire a fair comparison for obvious reasons. Personally however, I don’t see that as a fair trade given the 2s delay while it’s also on the GCD.

+1 buff it coz it’s ez to get out and dies in 1 hit

Take it out of GCD and keep the same duration . So Atleast we can follow up with hex without losing GCD time

Shadowfury w/haste is only like - what - a 1.2/1.3 sec cast or something? Shadowfury can also be cancelled/recast w/o wasting the cd until you land it. Lock also has an aresenal of CC tools of which shadowfury is just one so they can do things like mortal coil or use pet cc into shadowfury.

At least as enhance, leg sweep and chaos nova seem like the more analogous abilities. They’re just SOO much better that it feels like a weird comparison. Which is all the more reason to buff cap.

I don’t thin it needs to be off GCD. I just think it needs to be significantly rewarding to successfully land it.

Would be nice if Blizzard would spend more time working on class fundamentals and less time focused on designing and rewarding the use of one-shot gimmicky borrowed power cheese.

Jus gonna be that actually guy but all totems incur a 1s GCD regardless of haste etc, can see for yourself on wowhead on any totem

What’s your point? Was anyone suggesting otherwise?

I just don’t think incurring a 1 sec GCD is the problem with static totem.

I think the problem with it is being hard to land combined with lackluster reward for actually landing it.

Your op does, jus saying in case anyone didn’t know all totems incur a 1s GCD so you have 2s to benefit the stun not 1.5

My 1.5 sec point in my original post was about stun DR and how long the stun would last.

Not about GCD lockout after using.

My point was, that if you are using it as a follow on to another stun to actually secure landing it that you are already in 50% DR land so only getting half the benefit.

Oh

Although I guess being off GCD could help by making it easier to cover with another one of your own ccs (e.g., cap into sundering w/o having to wait for GCD - by which point the target may already have repositioned and sundering is too late).

So maybe taking it off GCD isn’t a bad idea. I’d just prefer to leave functionality as is and focus on improving payoff via longer stun or damage component or something so that the difficulty in using feels more balanced with the reward for landing it.

Cap totem talent should just remove the timer

You are absolutely right, I don’t even think the delay is decreased by haste, but I can’t recall at the moment. I was just pointing out that unlike the melee AoE stuns, Shadowfury is a closer analog in terms of range / delay / duration yet cap totem still fails to match up to in my opinion for the reasons you mentioned.

I’m not holding my breath on the removal of their beloved GCD, but it seems like you’d get more actions under CC comparable to a 5s stun that does include a GCD. But if it were off the GCD, I am not sure I’d even use it as a primary CC and just use it as a “free” extension to a longer stun from a teammate to secure a kill. Other classes do have to talent into the extension so there is opportunity cost there, but I still think the telegraphed nature, short duration, and generic interrupt via any damage or movement puts it firmly at the bottom of existing CCs.

I think the covered CC requirement is just a case of anti-pattern design that leads to this expectation for larger payoff because it’s clunky. Maybe it just needs to be an instant start channel as suggested above or something like totem protection such as stunning the attacker for 5 seconds if killed.

Running out of it is not an unreasonable counter-play even if it is fixed and telegraphed since it can be used for area denial if given some sort of feedback effect if killed. Maybe it should just be given something like “the static charge buildup disables movement abilities and restricts movement speed to 100% for the build-up duration and 1 second afterwards” so they actually have to walk out of it instead of the dozen or so blinks out there. It also offers an unique spin on roots that could cause a lot of confusion if timed correctly.

Alternatively, maybe just make static field totem replace cap totem with a 30s-45s cooldown (to offset talenting into the combined use instead of two 1m area denial cooldowns) and stun after 2 seconds as usual? A 1m cooldown while replacing cap totem might be okay if said talent replaced the static charge talent. This way 10% hp is at least better than 1 shot auto attack survivability and no way out means they either eventually eat the stun, prepare some sort of defensive, or really need to spend a couple of significant attacks on it (rather than you or your teammates).

1 Like

i like the idea of replace

I’ve always been bitter a little since Legion ended. Shaman AoE stun becomes just worse than others (especially worse than melee who are a nightmare) AND the loss of Gust of Wind.

Shamans seem to always lose something from changes for no real good reason compared to others.

I’d like to see the the only killable AoE stun gain some something for actually hitting.

1 Like

Personally, I would be more than happy to lose Capacitor Totem to be given a more useful totem.

It has multiple problems for both PvE and PvP. In PvE (particularly M+) it applies DR to everything it hits. I have been in groups that tell me not to use Capacitor Totem as it would weaken the more important single target stuns that can be used to lock down certain mobs from casting. Having the 2-second delay on its activation also makes it so that it isn’t reliable to use as a stop to normally uninterruptible casts.

In PvP, the totem can be either easily killed or run away from on top of being a short duration after it does get off. In arena, the fact that it is AoE doesn’t matter too much.

My suggestion to rework Capacitor Totem would be so that it can be alive for up to 4 seconds and recasting it (off GCD to reactivate) will trigger the stun. The longer it is alive, the longer the stun it applies. It can be instantly reactivated to be a 2-second stun, but every second it remains alive increases the stun duration by 1 second, up to a maximum stun duration of 6 seconds. This rework would make sense as it is a CAPACITOR totem. It gathers and stores electrical energy over time and then releases it to stun.

The other change that I would add to Capacitor Totem is that even if the totem is killed, its stored energy will be released to stun nearby enemies, making it so that it still stuns even if killed in PvP. Activating it “instantly” would still have a minor input delay from the player, and its stun would be a shorter duration than most other melee AoE stuns.

3 Likes