It’s part of the classic journey to becoming a shaman that you would learn each of the four elements and get the special totem.
Regardless of your spec, you’re supposed to have all four totems at your disposal. It literally is pictured in the character login screen that you have a fire totem behind you.
For resto and enhance, though, you have nothing except potentially skyfury for resto, which you can’t afford to talent, is a little one dimensional, and is exclusively a pvp talent.
Why does Blizzard not love Shamans or have someone who enjoys the class fantasy?
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I think from a design perspective, they had each spec lean into an element as to differentiate the specs and abilities and give us some unique flavors.
From a true lore perspective, each spec would use all the elements.
I.e. Resto would have fire-based cauterize spells (And 1-2 damage spells), earth warden/guardian spells, water for rejuvenation and wind for transportation (And a damage spell or 2) out of danger, etc. But that could get pretty bloated from a spell perspective, so they lean heavy on water.
Same goes for Ele (Fire) and Enh (Storm)…And the Stone Tank spec we will never get (Earth) =)
Funny enough, with how healers DPS a bit now, Resto is probably the spec that uses the 4 elements in the most balanced way.
I think this approach would be really REALLY cool, but no doubt it would involve extra work for the class and I think most Shaman players would prefer the design team focus on our tuning currently before a re-work on class design/playstyle.
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They could throw liquid magma in baseline- wouldn’t be that complicated or distracting from other efforts.
It’d be nice to get flame shock up easier that way to get lava surges/master of elements up as resto.
I mean they seem to be able to find the man hours to nerf riptide and unleash shield so this would be simple enough without detracting from class design and tuning changes. But sure, I’ll forego wanting the class to be fully fleshed out if that means we could get the more pressing and necessary changes. (doubt)
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately as well. Totems just feel really bad right now. Personally I think they’d be justified in adding in a short questline to allow you to change totems into little elementals. It would solve a lot of the issues people are having around the mobility of totems and could allow for some much more interesting and obvious spell effects. Mechanically they’d be the same but functionally it would still follow class fantasy while allowing for more flexibility.
You could even maintain the totem flavor by having the shaman drop a totem at their feet while the elemental is active. Then the elementals could only move so far from their respective totem which would both maintain and increase the viability of Totemic Projection.
TLDR; Totems feel bad atm. Replace them little elementals that do the same things.
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Placing, projecting, and protecting totems is so clunky/wonky in PvP it really makes me wonder if any devs really play and enjoy the class lol.
We need more totem health, shorter projection cd, more placeable totems, or some stoneclaw totem variation badly. I doubt they’d do the mini elemental thing.
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I can almost guarantee they won’t do the elemental thing, it was just a fun thought experiment.
As to your points, I’d take any or all of them. I think “clunky” is the best way to describe it though I’d extend it to PVE as well. It’s not nearly as much of an issue there since we remove the totem destruction aspect but it still just feels . . . clunky.
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Would love mini elementals that followed the Shaman. Would certainly solve some range issues and be really cool from a class/lore perspective.
Or just make (most of them; things like LMT still make sense; as a totem/location based effect etc.) them auras/buffs/spells and have the totem drop be the spell effect. What they have done with mana spring basically. That would be the easiest way to solve some of this.
But yes. Mini elementals and more and more powerful elementals is always a good answer =) … How we don’t have a healing water elemental CD is beyond me.
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The main reason is that searing totem was button bloat, and overall an extra source of damage that caused the rest of our kit abilities to do less.
It was also outdated and uninspired, whereas Elemental got Earthen Rage ( which is essentially a totemless searing totem), you would still have to place Searing Totem every 30 yards, it still had 5 hp meaning pointless in PvP meaning less dmg done, and it had no inspired mechanics.
Rather than rework the ability into a meaningful DPS cooldown with a 1-2-3 minute timer, which would have been amazing (think Rokhan’s totem in the arathi warfront), they decided to just axe the totem.
Alongside this, Enhance had already moved away from magma totem for AoE, and Fire Nova Totem had been redesigned into simply Fire Nova. Liquid Magma Totem is still there, but became an Elemental Talent, and was largely skipped over except for M+.
The problem with having any of your dps attached to a totem, is that in PvP, it is easily killed, but your dmg is balanced around having it out.
It’s just easier to not have any, even if it’s not thematic. Easier on design, and easier on button bloat. Totems also moved away from throughput and buffs to utility and on-demand effects, with windfury and skyfury being the last remnants.
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Just don’t give the totem a stupid or worthless design. Liquid magma is meaningful, spreads flame shock. Skyfury is, too, we just can’t afford the PvP talent.
Everything you’ve mentioned is a sympton of them having designed totems poorly (e.g. searing being frivolous) not an argument for doing away with them and continuing to do so.
Totems do need to be meaningful globals and a part of the shaman fantasy of wielding the elements, AND shamans need more mechanics or counterplay to fight totems being too easily smashed.
Liquid magma is meaningful, but Enhance already has a way to spread flame shock. Does Resto need it? Maybe…but probably not now that it has Acid Rain dealing passive dmg while healing.
So baseline doesn’t make sense.
Similar to how PW can apply either FS or RT to a target (and other talents that affect both) it would be kinda cool for LMT to become a water variant under Resto (geyser totem? IDK, just spitballing here) and apply riptide to 3-4 allies in an area. Baseline can make sense, but only if you do something like this, which I think we know they’ll never do.
This expansion is my first playing shaman, but I’ve always thought that one of shaman’s specs should be based on the Warcraft 3 Orc hero Witch Doctor (not the Witch Doctor unit but the hero like the Blademaster or Far Seer) where you would have more offensive types of totems. Not sure if any shaman spec was like this in the past.
This defeats the entire purpose of it being a fire totem if its applying water element though?
I miss searing totem, so iconic. They could easily add it as a choice option on a damage talent. There was a talent for a while called totem mastery that placed four totems on the ground that each gave a different buff, that one looked really cool too.
Lol okay then just give us a useful fire totem baseline then.
Can’t this class ever just unapologetically ask Blizz for buffs and get something fun?
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For real and Elemental needs to be able to bring buffs to the party
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We’ve been asking for skyfury baseline for elemental for a while.
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I just prefer elemental as lighting focused over lava/fire focus.
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Once upon a time I wanted maintenance totems.
I then leveled a shaman in WotLK and realized how stupid I was.
The pace in LK is faster than the pace in TBC but much much slower than DF.
Totem upkeep is very tedious in LK and I can only imagine that 90% of you GCDs will be spent spamming totems in DF. Hell most cry they can’t maintain EQ because of movement yet you want stationary required dps totems dropped in range back???
The only way I want a maintenance totem for ele is if it is RNG drops itself in target location.
Hell you can change our mastery to totem RNG drop. Increasing your mastery increases the benefit of the totem. Each spell cast procs a different totem. You could be constantly surrounded by totems. Just running around 
totems everywhere.
Lvb/lvbeam can proc LMT (spreads FS) make dmg baseline for ST and split for aoe increasing the dmg of lvb/lvbeam stacking.
Healing surge can drop HST (healing increased by mastery)
LB/CL can drop stat totems increases all secondary stats by x% (Mastery increases effect by y%). A second idea could be drop a cast while moving totem (mastery increases movement speed)
EQ can drop a quaking totem (basically mimicking EQ)
ES can drop an echoing totem that duplicates all spells cast by the shaman. Mastery increases the amount of dmg/heal echoed.
FrS could proc icy totem to slow with chance to root.
Could be intersting fishing for slot machine totems spec.
Idea. General tree. Cauterizing totem. Removes 1 bleed effect from allies within x yds of the totem.
Cauterizing inflicts 10% of the total remaining damage on the effect removed instantly.
Idea. General tree. Fire tongue totem.
Place down a totem for 30s that empowers allies melee attacks with a chance to burn their target, causing damage over 6s and increasing magic damage taken by 5% for the duration.
This wouldn’t directly increase your damage but it would cause your Allie’s to put a debuff on targets that increases magic damage to the target (which could be dealt by the shaman)