After a thorough deep dive of all the classes, something started to concern me about the Dev’s focus.
In the spirit of faction balance, it appears they focused on the good side of things and didn’t consider the cost of them. I’m going to compare some abilities;
Tremor Totem < Inspiration Exemplar. Tremor totem is considerably worse because it’s stationary and destroyable. Unknown if Inspiration Exemplar is dispellable.
Grace of Air/Strength of Earth < Horn of Lordaeron. Same problem, Buff is relegated to specific area.
Windfury Totem < Wild Strikes. Wild Strikes doesn’t imbue weapons allowing the use of poisons, stones, and oils. It’s mobile and is an aura not needing to be reapplied every 9 seconds and scales because it provides a % based increase instead of a flat number. Wild Strikes is also available in the first phase of SoD while Windfury is not. Really annoying.
In the spirit of providing effects to the opposite faction what essentially happened is a class, my favorite class, was for lack of a better word, trivialized, by better abilities. The cost or downside of the ability wasn’t factored in.
Not everything is known about Season of Discovery, I understand, but It’s small things like these issues that make me think SoD will be balanced poorly.
Just my 2 cents.
Tell ya what I see, enhance being back of the bus again. Meanwhile Ele scales like crazy because spell damage stats on gear are still 50% over budget and bonus healing on gear is over budget by 75%.
Net results of this are PVE that becomes too easy because healing and casters scale too well. (yes this is a healer pala), and I am well versed in healing across the board.
The problem is that because healing is too powerful we are able to use tanks that aren’t sword and board, and as a result of that DPS and healers and tanks can gear more aggressive than early wow, and so fights are over in moments as a result of the overbudget of healing and spell power stats on gear.
Healing too stronk! (its the gear dummys)
Yeah, totems are more of a flavor thing. In effect, it is annoying to have to replace totems constantly and have them risk pulling mobs. Buffs and auras are so much better. The only way to make totems more worthwhile compared to those buffs (they’d still be worse, mind you) would be to make them have a 60 yard range and cost less mana.
They took the least played class on the less played faction, took all of its iconic abilities and gave them to other classes and the other faction in superior formats, and basically gave them the middle finger.
Since the devs are from retail they’re probably trying to correct a horde imbalance.
oh thats a feature. not a bug 
i hope you like pushover raids.