Totemic Feedback Thread

Classes Shaman
1

Hello all! This is a thread for feedback about latest Totemic hero spec. Here are also links to spec versions for Enhancement and Restoration for people who did not see it yet:

The post will analyze each new talent with possible suggestions for improvements or changes and feedback.

Surging Totem
Instant 20 sec cooldown

Restoration:
Summons a totem at your feet that immediately and every 5 sec casts Healing Rain within 30 yards where allies are present, healing for 30% more than a normal Healing Rain. Lasts 20 sec.

Replaces Healing Rain.

Enhancement:
Summons a totem at your feet that creates a Tremor immediately and every 5 sec within 30 yards where enemies are present for (400% of Attack power) Physical damage. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets.

Replaces Windfury Totem.

Passive: Your Windfury Weapon enchant grants the effects of Windfury Totem to nearby party members within 30 yards.

Unnoted info:

  • Totem has around 20-30% of your health
  • Healing Rains from it don’t stack (can only have 1)
  • Tremor is an instant AoE hit with about 5-8 yds radius

This is an interesting ability with some potential, but it definitely has oversights. Firstly, Tremor does Physical damage which makes it have zero scaling with Enhancement’s Mastery. Secondly, there should be a way to specify main target / center of area for the totem’s spell, otherwise it can potentially break breakable crowd control effects or drop Healing Rain on wrong targets. Thirdly, its Windfury Totem effect is QoL and should not be gated behind picking a specific hero spec.
Suggestions:

  1. Make Tremor deal Nature or Flamestrike damage to improve synergy with Enhancement’s Mastery
  2. Make Surging Totem drop Tremor centered on last enemy hit by Shaman (if any) or Healing Rain centered on last ally healed by Shaman (if any). This will allow to have a bit of control over its cast zones.
  3. Move Windfury Totem aura effect to just become a choice node with Windfury Totem itself or a part of its baseline effect.

Totemic Rebound

Restoration

Chain Heal now jumps to a nearby totem once it reaches its max targets, causing it to bounce an additional time to a nearby injured ally.

Enhancement

Stormstrike has a chance to unleash a Surging Bolt at your Surging Totem, increasing the totem’s damage by 10%, and then redirecting the bolt to your target for Nature damage. The damage bonus effect can stack.

Decent talent, but its value for Restoration is quite low - it is pretty much Ancestral Reach, but without healing bonus and only if you have at least 1 active totem. Should get some boost.

Amplification Core or Oversurge

While Surging Totem is active, your damage and healing done is increased by 3%.

or

While Ascendance is active, Surging Totem is 150% more effective.

Interesting choice, but it is much more valuable for Resto, who can take both normal Ascendance and DRE. Might need a boost for Enhancement or changes to how Ascendance works for Enhancement in general.

Lively Totems

Enhancement

Lava Lash has a chance to summon a Searing Totem to attack a nearby enemy for 8 sec.

Restoration

Your Healing Tide Totem, Healing Stream Totem, Cloudburst Totem, Mana Tide Totem, and Spirit Link Totem cast a free, instant Chain Heal when you summon them.

Option of Enhancement being RNG based is not good - it adds even more RNG to the spec and can make following talent Reactivity not even work when needed if RNG is bad and you did not get a totem proc. To address that, consider changing it to just make Lava Lash summon a Searing Totem with some internal cooldown attached, so that it is more reliable, but also with preventing Hot Hand getting out of hand (pun intended).

Option for Restoration is decent, no suggestions here.

Oversized Totems or Swift Recall

Increases the size and radius of your totems by 15%, and the health of your totems by 30%.

or

Successfully removing a harmful effect with Tremor Totem or Poison Cleansing Totem, or controlling an enemy with Capacitor Totem or Earthgrab Totem reduces the cooldown of the totem used by 5 sec.
Cannot occur more than once every 20 sec per totem.

First option is interesting, but 30% health increase often would not matter much, as many totems would remain one-shottable. Consider changing it to have a form of totem destruction protection effect too like “your totems have X% increased health and if you totem is destroyed, attacker takes Nature damage and does X% reduced damage for Y seconds”. That would make this effect more useful and reliable no matter how much base health the totem has.

Totem CDR effect is decent, but like mentioned by other people should affect bigger variety of totems (Grounding / Static Field / Counterstrike / capstone totems etc) to be more in line with first talent, which affects all totems, so that there would be a choice between totem protection / area increase and totem frequency.

Wind Barrier

If you have a totem active, your totems grant you a shield absorbing damage for 30 sec every 30 seconds.

Can be useful, but should be more controllable by player, so that you are more likely to get a shield when you need it and not just when 30 seconds internal cooldown expires. For example, it could be changed to something like “Summoning a totem grants you an absorb shield for X damage, can occur only every 30 seconds”.

Reactivity

Enhancement

Frost Shocks empowered by Hailstorm and Fire Nova cause your Searing totems to shoot a volley of fireballs at up to 5 nearby enemies.

Restoration

Your healing spells cause your Healing Stream Totems to heal a nearby ally immediately at 50% effectiveness.

Cloudburst Totem stores 25% additional healing.

Enhancement can have an issue with this talent when using Hailstorm or Fire Nova when getting bad RNG and no summoned totems and wasting the effect, solution was suggested above - make Lava Lash guaranteed to summon a Searing Totem, but with internal cooldown.
Restoration effect is decent, but heal from Healing Stream Totem should be applied to the same target as the healing spell (if any) for their better synergy.

Imbuement Mastery

Enhancement
Increases the chance for Windfury Weapon to trigger by 10% and increases its damage by 15%.

Restoration
Increases the duration of your Earthliving effect by 6 sec.

Enhancement effect is decent, but since Totemic tree buffs mostly elemental build and this talent buffs imbue for storm build, it is a bit contradictory unless of course Windfury Weapon would become baseline (which is possible based on tree changes in alpha).

Restoration effect is controversial though - it buffs duration of heal over time effect that is frequently refreshed anyway, often making its effect wasted. Consider making it also buff healing value of Earthliving.

Pulse Capasitor or Supportive Imbuements

Increases the damage and healing of Surging Totem by 25%.

or

Enhancement

Increases the critical strike chance of Flametongue Weapon by 15%, and its critical strike damage by 30%.

Restoration

Learn a new weapon imbue, Tidecaller’s Guard.

Can only be applied to shields. Increases your healing done by 2% and increases the duration of your Healing Stream Totem and Cloudburst Totem by 3 sec.

Buff to Flametongue Weapon seems underwhelming, as it barely does damage on its own. Consider changing it to just make Flametongue weapon provide X% damage increase while active.
As for Restoration effect - it is decent, no suggestions here.

Totemic Coordination or Earthsurge

Restoration

Chain Heals from your totems are 30% more effective.

Enhancement

Increases the critical strike chance of your Searing Totem’s attacks by 15%, and its critical strike damage by 30%.

or

Restoration

Allies affected by your Earthen Wall Totem, Ancestral Protection Totem, and Earthliving effect receive 10% increased healing from you.

Enhancement

Casting Sundering within 40 yards of your Surging Totem causes it to create a Tremor at 200% effectiveness at the target area.

Totemic Coordination for Enhancement is more niche, since it is heavily reliant on crit stat, while Restoration version does not have such issue. Consider making it just buff damage of Searing Totem to address that.

Earthsurge is decent, no suggestions here.

Whirling Elements

Enhancement
Elemental motes orbit around your Surging Totem. Your abilities consume the motes for enhanced effects.

Air: Your next Stormstrike or Windstrike deals 25% increased damage and damages 1 nearby enemy at 75% effectiveness

Earth: Casting Sundering or Elemental Blast refunds 12 seconds from its cooldown

Fire: Increases the critical strike chance of your next Fire Nova or Lava Lash by 15%, and its critical strike damage by 30%.

Restoration

Elemental motes orbit around your Surging Totem. Your abilities consume the motes for enhanced effects.

Water: Your next Healing Wave or Healing Surge also heals an ally inside of your Healing Rain at 100% effectiveness

Air: The cast time of your next healing spell is reduced by 40%

Earth: Your next Chain Heal applies Earthliving at 150% effectiveness to all targets hit

Undocumented info:

  • Even though orbs swirl around the totem itself, you don’t need to contact them and they are consumed when you just use relevant spell or ability.
  • All these buffs have duration to use.

An actually interesting capstone and effect, but still could use improvements:

  1. Make Totem summon motes of all 4 elements instead of different 3 for different specs. After all, both Resto and Enhancement are masters of all elements. Water mote for Enhancement could for example buff Ice Strike / Frost Shock and Fire mote for Resto could for example buff Lava Burst and / or grant a Lava Surge proc.
  2. Fire mote effect for Enhancement is underwhelming, since it provides a small buff and only to 1 usage of Lava Lash. Consider making its effect stronger.
  3. Air mote effect for Restoration has very small effect too and could be buffed. Consider letting it also make affected spell cast while moving, providing a bit of mobility for Resto with which it can struggle.

This sums up my feedback about Totemic. Feel free to add your own and thank you for reading!

4 Likes
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This is literally a garbage node and far off from being decent in literally any capacity. Windfury Weapon accounts for less than 1% of your damage profile now. They could literally delete this node and make it so totemic only had 9 talent point and you wouldn’t even be able to perceive the difference is how worthless this choice is for enhance. Same can be said for the Flametongue choice. They should just change it from Windfury Weapon to Windfury Totem itself making it an even stronger raid buff.

This alongside the Flametongue node is clear proof who every designed this talent tree made it for resto initally, woke up the 10 minutes before the enhanced version needed to be done, AND THEN hastily came up with the enhance version.

3

Since Supportive Imbuements provides an additional imbue for Resto, maybe it could provide an additional imbue for Enhancement too. Since his imbues are already covered by Windfury and Flametongue, it could also allow to have 1 additional imbue applied.
Something like “Your main hand weapon can now have 2 imbues simultaneously. You also learn Frostbrand Weapon imbue which gives your melee attacks X% chance to deal additional Frost damage and snare enemy hit” - such effect could allow Shamans to get a solid dps boost in this hero talent both from imbue itself and Elemental Weapons in PVE and help with their melee uptime in PVP (and Stormbringers are not left behind as they have their own snare proc). It will also provide at least Enhancement Shamans with currently missing Ice imbue.

4

The things I would do to have frostbrand returned…

5

What? It’s like 6-8% of mine.

6

For Elementalist Build Windfury Weapon damage is extremely forgettable.

1 Like
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Additional feedback based on latest changes:

  • Totem now has 30s CD and is affected by totem CD reduction and reset talents.
    A decent change that brings it in line with most other totems. It also kinda makes 6 sec totem CD reduction node in general tree mandatory for better output, but since this is the totem themed tree it is not surprising and maybe fine.
  • Wind Barrier provides 6% health shield every 30 seconds.
    That is very low and should be adjusted. 10% of health shield is likely minimum to matter at all, but since it also has 30 seconds internal cooldown 15-20% seems more fitting.
  • Tremors should likely deal Flamestrike damage - that would make the tree compatible both with Mastery (which includes Fire damage), Elemental Spirits (which include Fire Wolves) and base Feral Spirits (which buff Physical damage that is a part of Flamestrike damage type).
8

Totemic hero tree highlights how bad our talent point squeezes are. We have to spend 11 points in gate 1 then spend Elemental Blast, Overflowing Maelstrom (mandatory) and Sundering. This is 13-14 points and we still have another two points nodes like Elemental Weapon (should be replaced with something) and Hot Hand. Totemic is trying to do way too much at once.

Surging Totem being physical damage so they don’t work with mastery and Elemental Spirits. Elemental Spirits are one of the most important talents in Elementalist’s core. If we are playing storm, we completely ignore talents such as Lively Totems and Reactivity. I wouldn’t surprised if Blizzard takes their sweet time like they did with DF talents, DF talents were not working until DF beta.

9

Resto totem would be way cooler if it casted Chain Heals instead.

Also it would be cool if Totemic caused most totems to be carried on your back, rather than placed in the world.

10

Feedback about latest changes and implements:

  • There should still be a way to direct Surging Totem’s target or center of AoE for better control, otherwise it can heal wrong targets / drop Acid Rain in wrong areas in PVE and break breakable CC in PVP.
    Suggestion: Make it prioritize and center Tremor upon last target hit by Shaman if any (for Enhancement) and drop Healing Rain centered either on itself or last target healed by Shaman if any (for Resto).
  • Summoned by Lava Lash Searing Totem with 5% of your health is too squishy for PVP. It needs at least double amount of HP, preferably even more, otherwise it will be just easily and passively destroyed by cleave.
  • Supportive Imbuements even with the buff to 25% crit chance / 100% crit damage still provides too low value. It is also extremely generic and just a tuning knob even compared to Resto’s variant.
    Suggestion: In analogue to Resto version, make it instead enable Frostbrand Weapon enchant and allow to apply 2 imbues to main weapon for Enhancement, pretty much providing both access to missing ice enchantment and 1 additional imbue like Resto gets. It will allow this talent to provide meaningful value both in PVE (where it can also provide a damage buff from Elemental Weapons) and in PVP (where Frostbrand snare procs can help with Enhancement’s melee uptime).
  • Wind Barrier still has too low value for 30s CD (6% of your maximum health) and it should be boosted to 10-20% to match it better.
  • Since both Enhancement and Resto are masters of all 4 elements, Surging Totem should provides 4 elemental motes instead of current 3 to match that. Currently missing Fire Mote for Resto could provide a Lava Surge proc and a boost to damage of affected Lava Burst (to help with dps and mobility) and Water Mote for Enhancement could provide a boost to Ice Strike or Frost Shock (to match Fire Mote that boosts Lava Lash or Fire Nova).
  • Change to Reactivity for HST for Resto was not good, since now it is useful only for AoE healing and loses to bonus to Cloudburst which affects both ST and AoE healing. To address that, consider either making HST heal main target for more if no additional targets require healing or revert to its previous version.
11

Stating the obvious- this hero tree has an identity crisis that needs solved. Is it elemental or storm? If you truly want to go down the route of both then ALL talents need to be equally usable by both specs and be useful. That would require the devs to know how each spec plays like that elemental doesn’t do much phsyical damage or use stormstrike often or, more likely, at all. Or that storm builds might not use lava lash. or most builds can’t afford sundering given all the required talents to make either build work.

Required talents- It requires(forces) you to have too many talented abilities to function. IMO hero talents shouldn’t require any talents at all for functionality. Being forced into talents instead of choosing them just feels horrible.

RNG- Seriously? You’re adding more RNG to a spec(enhancement) that already has WAY too much rng? The damage swings between getting a fire feral spririt and searing totem vs getting neither is going to be huge. On top of that AoE is something you need on demand, not RNG. The same goes for the stormstrike one, the damage difference when everything lines up and when it doesn’t isn’t going to feel good and makes it undependable.

Surging totem- Lasting only 24s feels super bad on enhancement. Windfury at 2 minutes is already annoying so having to cast this every 24s(after the now mandatory class talent reduction) feels incredibly bad. The fact it even has a cooldown is bad as any movement intensive fights can leave you without it if timed wrong. 34yds is absolutely nothing, even taking the class talent one that only brings it to 40yds. 40yds in some of these boss fights doesn’t cut it, especially on a 24s cooldown. Can you imagine on smolderon trying to run towards mid everytime you drop it so you don’t lose uptime during p2? Sorry I dropped that geyser there but my totem… Others you simply won’t have that luxury like Fyrak where you go from one end to the other.

Also, 6s pulsing? Really? Lower the damage and make it 2s. At 6s there is too much wiggle room for not getting that extra tick of damage off. When it comes to AOE you want either burst or quick/consistent, this is slow/consistent making it not great.

Imbuement talents- Elemental build both imbuements are like 1-2% of our damage, which is nothing so buffing these is still absolutely nothing and a waste of a talent. You could double triple or quadruple them and it still wouldn’t be enough to be worth a talent. Storm gets some use out of windfury(6-10%) so it’s okayish for them but the flametongue one is still useless. Instead of buffing the effects of the impuements how about making them trigger a buff to other abilities that benefit both builds OR synergizes with other hero talents. Like flametongue could cast lavalash and windfury stormstrike for example(probably OP). As it is right now no one in their right mind would take the flametongue one over boosting their totem damage by 25%.

Whirling elements- Where is the frost option for enhancement? You use hailstorm in a previous talent but the fact that there is firenova mentioned in this but not hailstorm means it’s more beneficial to take firenova, thus removing more talent choice.

As a capstone it’s pretty bad. It’s entirely possible for a build to only use 1 of the 3 parts of this, which is not a good design. Didn’t take sundering? Well that ones gone. Don’t use stormstrike? Gone. Even if elemental build uses stormstrike the damage boost is absolutely nothing because base stormstrike without a ton of talents hits like a wet noodle.

PvP wise, I don’t pvp often, this spec cannot be taken. As soon as the totem drops it will be killed, thus negating an entire hero talent tree. There is no other hero talent tree that has this problem so the surging totem should be immune to damage. Then we hit the range issue again, oh the enhancement shaman dropped his totem? Run out.

IMO Totems is still an absolutely terrible idea to base a hero talent tree around, especially for enhancement. Totem gameplay isn’t very enjoyable and having the QOL to make it slightly better locked behind talents is flat out terrible.

3 Likes
12

I like that you made a feedback thread for Totemic because the devs couldn’t be bothered,

2 Likes
13

Just wanna throw it out there that Resto’s Surging Totem can target player pets. If there is a demo lock in your group… i’m sorry. I wanted to put this in the beta feedback thread, but I can’t reply there for some reason.

1 Like
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Try manually logging out of the forums, then logging back in. That should update your access permissions.

1 Like
15

Oh that sucks, poor restos.

Could you imagine stepping into a M+ group and seeing a demo lock, a BM hunter, and an unholy DK? I’d have to nope right out of that one.

1 Like