This might be an unpopular or controversial idea, but I’d prefer shamans always had access to 4 totems: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth totem, and then all the current totems we have were simply added as functionality to each of those baseline elemental totems.
E.G. The base Water totem would be what Healing Stream is now. When you talent into Poison Cleansing, then it would just say: Water totem now ALSO removes all poison effects from a nearby party member (…). When talented into Mana Tide, it would add that effect too (obviously balanced around the 30 sec CD instead of 3 min CD) and it could say: Water totem now also grants 30% increased mana regeneration.
And so forth for any additional totems of each element.
That greatly reduces button bloat, is consistent with the lore, AND makes each totem feel much more impactful.
It’s similar to the way that Berserk talents work for druid.
Obviously, there’s no way that could happen for TWW, but… just throwing the idea out there. What do you guys think?
Blockquote E.G. The base Water totem would be what Healing Stream is now. When you talent into Poison Cleansing, then it would just say: Water totem now ALSO removes all poison effects from a nearby party member (…). When talented into Mana Tide, it would add that effect too (obviously balanced around the 30 sec CD instead of 3 min CD) and it could say: Water totem now also grants 30% increased mana regeneration.
I always imagined a totem rework would be like giving the four elements a mini talent trees much like our hero talents. A few this or that situations.
Instead of a single button to summon totems different shaman spells can summon. E.G. a flame shock will summon a fire totem at the feet of the caster and do flame totem stuff. If the totem is already on the field it’ll either resummon closer to the shaman or refresh the duration.
Maybe riptide also summons a water totem that’ll do healing stream. A separate button for healing tide that trigger the water totem to do a big healing AoE (also summons the water totem if it’s not on field more too far from the shaman)
Nah. Think of it like this: Imagine when you cast blink on your mage you also use (and put on CD) barrier and Invis. Despite them being the same elemental theme, totems will have very niche and differentiated use. In most cases, if you are concerned about button bloat then just don’t talent into things you don’t need. I have a talent load out for Volcoross that doesn’t take Cap Totem so why would I even have that on my bars?
The issue is that unless it’s 100% predictable then it can never have too many gameplay elements tied to it so it would be by design essentially worthless. If it was impactful in away way then moments where it doesn’t proc are going to be terrible.
Blink has been giving a barrier for years, so, it already does that. Regardless, mage button bloat has been addressed and minimized significantly for TWW. Shaman, however, has way too many redundant buttons.
And again, it really depends on the functionality of the spells. Water totems are exclusively healing based, so, it would be easy to condense them in one ability. Fire totems all do dmg in different ways, so they could easily be condensed too. Air and Earth totems are the ones that tend to be the most diverse in functions and it would still be possible to condense them if the developers are clever about it.
Not giving Barrier…I’m saying its putting 2 different buttons essentially on CD.
I don’t think it’s button bloat. I do not believe the issue is that you need a lot of binds (you don’t if you’re smart and prepare enough). It’s more action bloat. Like people talk about Pwave being button bloat for enhancing and will follow up with chain harvest being in. But you’d quite literally have the same amount of buttons. The difference is (besides Chain Harvest being bad and shallow) is that Pwave involves using multiple GCDs to use it’s effect vs Chain Harvest you just hit and done.
The thing is that I don’t view a lot of the totems as “totems”. They’re just spells so it seems weird to shove multiple spells into a single button. I’m also taking this from a PvE perspective which doesn’t match with PvP since somebody can target your totem to kill it to disrupt the effect.
yes, they are spells. No, it’s not weird for a spell to have multiple functionality. That’s literally what talents do.
E.g.
Fire Breath is a dmg spell but with talents it also heals and/or causes Living Flame to hit more targets.
Mage Barriers are defensive spells, with talents they also heal and/or give you Pyro/Missile/Lance procs.
Grove Guardians are functionally identical to Healing Stream Totem, but with talents they also cast a heavy AoE heal, reduce CD of Tree of Life, can dps, empower your next heal, and/or increase overall healing done.
If Grove Guardians can do 5+ things with talents, why can’t Shaman totems?
Having 5 different buttons that only do slightly different things from each other just leads to button bloat. It’s much better to condense buttons based on their function.
a. Those buttons don’t have multiple functionality
b. all spells are mandatory in all in all forms of content.
c. They all serve the same function (not just based on the tool tip)
d. scaling is the same
And again: Button bloat is a subjective thing. There are a lot of players that are able to get by and perform as is. Also gonna throw out there mage is the worst offender of “too many buttons to track in order to play optimally”. Button bloat also comes about from not understanding how a class/spec works.
I think the devs (and a considerable amount of people) don’t want Shamans being reliant upon totems and it’s because the current design is poorly implemented.
The idea that totems are spells is valid but they shouldn’t be, at least thematically, since it should be the totem providing you the ability to use a [elemental type] spell.
Placing multiple current totems as stackable effects into a singular totem can easily be thought of as gaining more mastery of connecting with the elements and is lore consistent.
The biggest hurdle in such a totem re-work are situational totems that can be placed away from the Shaman like Cap, Earthbind, Earthgrab, Windrush and the health of current totems. This and the balance between PvE and PvP totem usage.
This IMO, would be a game-changer QOL improvement for Shaman and adding (much needed) class fantasy back only if they get the rework correct.
I like this idea a lot too. But I think maybe exclude the healing tide cooldown from it as that’s a major spec cooldown. Mana tide could tie onto healing tide totem maybe?
But it would be cool if shaman had one base totem for every element, and then utility effects were talented but just added onto those totems.