There’s plenty of interesting totem designs possible. I think more deterministic means of spawning totems provide more agency to play than entering a lottery.
A number of abilities can be converted into totems thematically. I don’t even like half the ideas here, but yeah I could see some ways of making totems passively spawn.
Lightning Rod being a literal Lightning Rod Totem in the ground that causes targets in the area to take the funneled damage.
Dying causes an Ancestral Protection Totem to spawn from your body.
Master of the Elements sprouting totems from the combinations akin to Surge of Power such as LMT from Lava Burst followed by Earthquake.
Stoneskin spawns upon activation of Plane’s Traveller (since it’s talented value is being integrated). Tranquil Air spawns from Spiritwalker’s Aegis.
The last bit of an example provides space for a better capstone to reintroduce say Vespyr totem, which is arguably a spirit I guess, but it could be fire totem in a pinch (just to get back to the OP topic). The damage and healing echoed by the totem could be changed to the fire school for the thematically pedantic.
I think the problem mechanically and thematically with fire totems is that we try to associate it with an offensive ability. The main defensive abilities that buck the trend are Cauterize, Fire Shield or Living Flame now that we have Evokers.
The core problem of converting abilities to totems as we currently see them, is that it only opens the abilities up to global removal in PvP.
Totems used represent a kind of alternative casting pathway, something you’d be able to cast while silenced. Not quite a school of its own. Akin to Magic the Gathering’s categorization of Instant, Sorcery, or Ritual spells, except for WoW’s Shaman it was like Instant, Cast, and Totem. Imagine you’d physically take a totem from your pack and throw it down.
The vulnerability of a weak stick on the ground was balanced against the option of being able to do so regardless of state of the caster in some cases. I still remember being able to cast grounding totem while frozen in ice by a mage during MoP, and it was as glorious as it sounds.
We kind of, maybe achieve that with Ancestral Wolf Affinity, since ghost wolf is a self-imposed silence. Though it’s certainly not the same.
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I am actually surprised there is no baseline flametongue totem for resto/ele, with it upgrading to Windfury for Enhance.
You can’t cast totems while silenced. Totems were only physical for a small duration of time during the game. Even in vanilla, you could not place them while silenced. That’s why smart mages who talented into Counterspell+silence for 4 seconds opened on shaman with a blanket CS to prevent them from even getting the ball rolling.
It is difficult to balance both PVP and PVE because the totem design is an object that can be broken.
Blizzard eventually began to create a weak totem that didn’t need to be broken, and this has continued until now. Look at Stun totem. I don’t feel any reason why this has to happen late.
I want a totem that is powerful with a long CD and can be in big trouble if the enemy can’t break it.
Magma Totem seems to be a good baseline. Another ‘strong’ totem is required. Stoneskin totem or tranquil air totem is like trial and error for this. Blizzard is making a ‘weak’ totem that can be broken. In the end, Blizzard created useless totems, and I doubt their intelligence very much, but I believe it will be fixed someday.
Totems have always been a horrible design.
Maintenance totems means you spend too many globals not doing damage.
Offensive totems mean you routinely have to spam them…since you are always progressing through a dungeon.
Throw in PVP…and they’ve always hindered shaman more than helped.
Totems were fine in a slower paced game that had zero rotation (Classic) and they themselves had nearly no cooldown.
Totems now show the faults of that design, because the game is fast paced, and totems aren’t nearly as useful for the impact they provide (outside resto) compared to how easy it is to destroy them.
We also have no totem protection.
We should definitely have a talent that stuns/fears/ccs/hexes someone for 2-3 sec when they destroy a totem.
This is why I dont like Ele anymore and like ENH instead. Its more lightning based. I remember the commercial of Captain Kirk daring me to cast Chain Lightning for big dam. Now CL is more like a nuisance than anything meaningful. Sad.
Agreed 100%. Shaman were the “bard” class, and its why a new bard class cant work, when designed traditionally (lots of buffs). Being a buffbot with lower personal dps isnt as useful in a faster paced combat system. Heck, even windfury totem is vastly over rated for the effect it actually brings vs other buffs. I look for every chance not to spec into windfury totem.
The rest of your comment is pvp based, and while I agree…its not my area of strength. So I am really just looking at it from a PVE perspective.
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Yeah … either that or they are unkillable.
removed and they were going to be back but blizzard scrapped getting searing totem back. Then they started taking our totems and giving them to monks and putting them as use abilities for trinkets.
scrapped because everyone saw how horrible searing totem is.
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For all the cases you want searing totem, elemental has access to Fire Elemental. The cooldown is easily 2 minutes in cases with the numerous cooldown reduction from talents, but in many aggressive situations it can be as little as a minute.
Should it count as a totem, yes. Should the pets count as totems? Yes
Do the devs still refer to them by their vestigial totem names? Seemingly, yes.
Does the game? no. 
I played a shaman for a bit way way back, during TBC and WOTLK.
One of the fun things was dropping all 4 totems in an area with lots of mobs and pulling them back into your big buffed kill zone, one after another, with your totem chain gunning firebolts and you dropping out big windfury hits while your health regenerated and you had buffs to your strength and defenses… And you’d get back enough mana to do it again and again.
That was a big piece of the class fantasy for me and I’m kind of sad that it’s gone.
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The game no longer support slow playstyles like this. Fortunately, that is why classic exists…so you can still experience this.
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I’d be fine if we just had a raid buff that looked like totems, just let me see my cool class specific totem icons for more than a few seconds.
I read some of the comments but I agree there should still be a fire totem. It’s one of those iconic things I remember from making a shaman back in the day. Could simply make it a passive talent where the totem just pops out every now and again as a proc.
Here’s an idea. Reskin Primordial Wave to Searing Totem. Make it burst for damage and then fire continuously at all targets with Flame Shock on them, and give haste for its duration. For the Maelstrom generation, make the talent a choice node for either the instant 10 stacks or steady generation for the duration of the totem.
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All totems, yes every single one, should be baseline… even the PvP ones.
Not talents, baseline.
They are or should be the key to the class identity.
And the effects should be raid and/or party wide.
And older ones that have been removed should be returned.
I dont want to be a watered down mage… when we put out a totem people should react to it, instead of largely ignoring them as they do today.
Im fully aware this is not going to happen, but its what i would like to see personally.