They need to either throw out Totemic or swap all physical damage to elemental damage and switch out activators from off from ascendance/sundering/stormstrike to Pwave/Feral Spirits/Lava Lash or Ice Strike. IF they are going to make Stormbringer not have any interaction with Elementalist Build and solely for Storm, they should design Totemic to only work with Elementalist and use talents only the would use. Them trying to make it work for two different builds is what makes it completely unappealing for either build.
Also remove the nodes that amp our weapon imbues for something we’d actually use, literally wasted talent nodes to amp something that accounted for 1% to 1.5% of our damage profile now.
I am not sure stormbringer is not compatible with elementalist. I mean both cast lightning bolts and if primo wave does on release work with tempest procs it may actually be insane for both. If they go your route then I think they should also rework completely stormbringer to be more around storm strike and crash lightning and less around lightning bolt for enhance. But I also see potential for a decent totemic future for both specs if they add choice nodes and potentially rework the talent tree.
Honestly they should have made tempest strike be like a spender replacer. Not a procced spender replacer but w/e.
Or it enhances your next offensive maelstrom spell by X% damage wise idk. But if they want it to be around storm, then IT NEEDS to be around storm strike crash lightning, and have windfury/doomwinds interactions. Maybe an anger management mechanic where X maelstrom spent reduces the cooldown on doomwinds.
This seems to be a problem with class fantasy.
I didn’t get the sense that enh was using totem in a useful way, despite what the dev said about it being the primary use of totem.
Suddenly creating a talent called totemic doesn’t mean it’s implemented properly.
I think the end result is a talent that feels like it just throws one totem out of obligation and actually just deals damage.
Resto is better than that.
In the end, I think totemic should have had more useful totems in the base spec for it to be properly implemented.
The thing is that even if that is the case, it’s only working with LB and EB amp’d by the extra wolf; the haste amp might be useful but even then its determined by whether or not we can stack it enough with substantial uptime to gain additional usages of SS (because it’s still important for Elementalist via MSW gen based CDR), IS, FS, and LL usages. Both are super unpredictable in their current iteration and can’t be leveraged because Elementalist is best optimized by planning usages of CDs and abilities vs Storm being more forgiving of fire-and-forget type play which Stormbringer is more suited for. It does nothing with the second major source of funnel damage via Lava Lash + Ashen Catalyst and does nothing for our other major source of cleave via Frost Shock + Hailstorm.
I tried Ele and Enhancement. So far I like Totemic. I know its not a popular choice, but honestly, using a physical style build, I found it very interesting. Chail lightning was up as a instacast quite a bit, using frost strike and frost nova as fillers. using Lava lash to spread, and getting totem from it is also kind of cool. Speccing into Alpha wolves get you physical damage, as well as doom winds give more physical damage.
It seems that the Totemic build will do well with physical damage. Though it’s not the mastery, there are ways to increase it. A few tweaks and I think the build can be successful. Need to load details to see what its putting out, but it felt good.
Ill be the odd man out here and say i actually enjoyed what i played with totemic.
BUT i see major glaring issues with it as well. In pvp it definitely needs more health. Nothing addresses our squishiness. But the thing i do like is proccing flame totems for passive damage. Thats obviously not all the issues we have, i could write an essay there… but all in all i enjoyed the combat mechanics.
Now make it so were not hamstrung into prim wave and ill be happy. God i hate that spell
I have not seen any Totemic spells that says PWave is a must. In my current build on beta I do not have PWave.
Totemic will look to use fire nova, hailstorm, or lava lash, coupled to frost shock, to get some of its damage out. Which you can weave into rotation. Using Icestrike to bolster Ice shocks helps in ST. Using FS behind a Lava Lash in AOE will cause searing totem to spit AOE damage to targets.
I still need to get the gist of it all, I was Elemental for all of Dragonflight, but I started my Shaman as an Enhance back in Shadowlands. So I need to get the builds and rotation down. Today I will try to get details going so I can see some numbers. Also I will take a look at Farseerer for Elemental. But so far Totemic has the vote for me.
After playing some more today, I will say PW will help out some of your lightning bolts in AOE and ST. It goes into the rotation as a fire-off when CD type thing, or as a opener after flameshock, but not so much it interferes.
I will say having the talents to reduce lava lash may be a must, because more more lava lash = more chance of fire totem being up = more dps. It also feels smoother. So for now I have a hybrid Elemental-style build, that also takes Physical damage modifiers for the dungeons.
There are no numbers because I cannot get details to work, but I am not worried about that anyway as it is early in and anything can change. Just trying to get a feel for the different builds is more important now.
Thats what i thought too. Pwave haste buff felt real good to keep damage rolling., i just hate the spell. As for totemic, itll be garbage pvp but i was enjoying it pve
A lot of Shaman’s seem to have Stockholm Syndrome with P-wave. Like one of the so called precious crumbs given to shamans that they are so attached to it.
I don’t like how P-wave feels to cast and how it looks as it goes out. I would like some build choices instead of a cookie cutter. To many crap talents like icefury itself is so bad damage wise even after they so called buffed it but its needed for move casting with ice shock.
After some more testing today, the Enhance totemic build is starting to become more in focus. I see now what Blizzard is trying to do and what they are trying to accomplish with this build.
The Totemic build offers two choices within its setup. A Physical build with Deeply Elemental Roots, Alpha Wolf, and Thorims Invocation, or a build using the Fire side of the tree using Primordial Wave, Splinter Elements, and Elemental Wolves as the capstones. Both of these builds will work well with Totemic but very differently.
I have called these builds in my testing the Fire Nova Elementalist, and Deeply Rooted Physical since these will be the sort of lynchpin for the builds.
The FNE build relies on shorter CD-driven Lava Lashes and Fire Nova to help give you more Lively Totems. These totems are Searing totems that shoot out searing bolts. They last 8 secs. By having lower CD’s you can generate more of these totems and the damage can add up. Also with the other Lightning buffs and Elemental buffs in this build, you are doing (what seems) to be considerable AOE damage. (I do not have details as of yet, simply because I know numbers will change) This rotation feels good when playing and does not feel combersum. It just flows fromone attack to another. Lots of procs up to use.
The DRP build is more of a beat on them until DRE pops drop your Wind attacks, and back to the rotation. It is a slower style it seems, (well to me) because you do not get as many procs, and since Lava Lash does not have any of the cooldowns, you will not get many searing totems. What you do get is a LOT OF PHYSICAL DAMAGE procs. Doom Winds, Alpha Wolves, Legacy of FW, all of this adds to the Windfurry weapon, and the Surging Totem itself. Remember, the Surging Totem does PHYSICAL damage. All of the physical damage multipliers add up. When DRE pops, yes it hits with nature damage, but your wind attacks are PHYSICAL damage. So more multipliers to the Totem doing physical damage.
I will try to get details going, because I am interested in just what kind of damage this spec is doing, even though it could change. I believe the Totemic spec will be very viable, (unless nerfed into the ground) for PVE. Note, that I have not done any PvP testing, as I use other toons for PvP. I will give it a good college try so we will see!
Playing around with Pwave with Totemic I’m starting to think it might be cumbersome in practice for raid fights and M+ given stuff like Surge Totem being a 30-second CD, potentially playing Sundering, more MSW generation from double Wolves duration via Tier, and EB stacks resets is going to add a lot more GCDs to an already busy spec. I’m hoping that they make some changes with Flameshock spread, either by making Pwave also apply Flameshock to 5 nearby targets and/or adjusting Molten Assult so it spreads to 5 instead of 4 to get rid of the cursed setup needing to Flameshock a mob then tab and do Pwave > Lava Lash. I’m tried basically
I think a sleeper aspect about Totemic is the Totemic Coordination choice node plus the Fire buff aspect of the capstone since it might give us another secondary stat to scale with if Searing Totem ends up pumping. We scale kinda poorly and tend to fall behind other classes across seasons, especially in later seasons when we start easily hitting DRs on Mastery and Haste and don’t gain too much from Crit and Vers other than throughput. Having another scaling aspect will be a nice little treat for later seasons and during gearing each season.
I like Pwave currently (though they can deff make it smoother to setup/use) but if we get cool stuff in its place I’d be down. The only concern I have is that if we go away from Pwave we lose a major aspect of our funnel/prio damage which I’ve always liked about the spec. We’ll still have funnel from Ashen Catalyst but it gets most of its value from your Flameshock targets stay alive for a time where as Pwave’s funnel component just needs you to get your lightning bolt cast off to gets its funnel value which was a strength to us since funnel specs fall off over time in raids as adds tend to die faster with more gear.
Elemental I get 100% but for Enhance I think it’s great.
Main thing I worry about is Fire Nova on single target given the biggest issue in DF playing Fire Nova in any build was that you traded so much single target for AoE damage. For Fort keys i think it can do ok but it’s going be awful on Tyranical. Even then, I think Hailstorm will be significantly better given the loss on AoE is made up by the Single Target damage aspect and you’re still spending a 1/4th or 1/5th of your time in a key killing a boss. For raids, I don’t think Fire Nova will be viable at all especially during progression. With Hailstorm, Primordial Wave, and now Searing Totem + Surge Totem we’re still gonna have our best strength in Elementalist in that we do considerable cleave in our Single Target build. Taking Fire Nova would literally just be a choice to parse which in most cases is not really conductive towards killing a boss.
I haven’t messed much with a physical build with Totemic but already my first thought goes to scaling issues in single target. Enhance kinda scales bad long term, we start off strong then begin to get passed by specs that scale better. With DRE builds they do scale with mastery the magnitude is not the same as Elementalist builds. Stormbringer is going to scale way better than Totemic with mastery given that its adding a bunch of additional magic damage sources and both will benefit from haste. Only Mastery scaling Totemic will provide DRE builds is from increase Stormbringer % interacting with Windfury Weapon damage and Totemic Rebound damage. Mass AoE it might fair better but Mass AoE tends to be only a portion of pulls in M+ and even most cleave fights in raid still value single target damage higher.
I was messing around more tonight and the more i do the more i dig it. The totem itself is a nice addition, but the random generated searing totems are really nice imo. I was doing fire build and it felt nice.
Also- the developers of details were on the server updating their files for the beta
Quite literally if they did this and the molten assault suggestion in season 3, people would have shut up about Pwave for a good while. Similarly people would have liked Storm a bit better if they had Tempest Strike in season 2 like people were suggesting in PTR leading into Season 2.
I’ve always said we’ve been on the cusp of greatness if we had some minor adjustments to stuff and they always fell short…that if they added defensives on par to other specs.