So I was tooling around on a shammy alt I have (literally dinged 120 got some benthic then abandoned) Does ele use any totems at all anymore? The only one I even see is the healing totem.
That was my favorite thing about shammys were the totems. I leveled as enh and had totem mastery? (i think is what it was called) but as ele I dont see any totems or talents that I would use on a normal basis.
Am I missing something?
They got rid of them because they were annoying to maintain and there was too many gcd’s to set up before doing any actual damage.
There is plenty , we have healing stream , sky fury , counter strike , grounding , earth bind , cap totem just for Ele. All useful totems instead of having to maintain a bunch of ones wasting GCD
Totems are relegated to being utility cooldowns, rather than a necessary global before combat. This is fine, in my opinion, as those were always the more interesting totems.
Blizz also doesn’t seem adventurous enough to make larger cooldowns totemic abilities for the DPS specs in particular. I really wish they would.
AMEN YES
totems work well as utility items or raid/group buff
not self
they have done a bit of this in the past and it’s been a dismal failure. imagine having a big CD tied to something that’s fixed in place and is 1-shot, and when it misses - because it always does, you are gimped beyond belief. it’s no good.
FE and EE use to be totems and have been DPS CDs. The problem with big dps CDs is range of totem and the need to replace the totem due to range.
If you have spent any time as shaman you can remember the glorious days of FE and EE despawning because you left the range of the totem.
Big DPS CDs tied to totems will always be problematic. And the solution of having the shaman carry the totem on their back isnt a realistic option. You might as well just have it as an aura which is not shama like. And the whole just poop a totem when you move out of range is just lazy.
Where are your imaginations? You’re limiting yourselves to long duration cooldowns that risk having to move. Have neither of you tried Resto? Imo Earthen Wall, Spirit Link, and Healing Tide are wonderful examples of solid cooldowns tied to totems.
What if Fire Nova was a totem that exploded for damage and applied Flame Shock to every target, on a minute CD or whatever? What if Windfury Totem was instead just the Doom Winds legendary effect, buffing WF for 10 seconds? You can’t tell me you aren’t able to plan around something like those even if they are stationary.
And if you don’t like having to work around abilities that function from totems them you don’t have to play the Totemic Warrior spec. Why can’t something be unique in WoW?
Those are PVE 5-man and raid utility and healing totems, for groups. Sometimes modestly useful for (solo) pve too. Perfectly good. cap totem, tremor, earthbind? Also pretty darn good.
Try it in arena or to some extent battlegrounds, see how perfectly good it is then. it’s a differnt story. The problem is, the second people talk about making totems great again they start trying to put dps and core features in them, which is crap.
100% a problem, yes. Been playing long enough to learn to hate necessary functions in totems. But love them for raid utility, buff other only.
I remember Blizards first swing at this, I think it was a fire totem that you could put combo points on. Yes, combo points on the 1-shot fixed-in-place totem. It was the most useless thing in the world. Eventually, and I mean like a long time eventually, that morped into the flameshock spreading fire nova crap. Which certainly didn’t feel like a shaman but it was a tool and we used it. It only bloomed as a useful idea when they separated it from the totem.
Its always the people that have a dusty shaman alt wanting things back for the shaman class that would neuter it.
They’re incredible in arena, imo. Massive team savers. They suffer from having to use them correctly and asking teammates to coordinate with you, which isn’t suffering at all. It’s unique, engaging, and rewarding.
You seem to live in Blizz’s past failures, and you’re using them to justify limiting the main unique quality of a class. If dropping totems doesn’t feel like a shaman in WoW, I don’t understand what you even think a shaman is.
Could be, what has been cringe-worth has been strong. I’m open to things that work. Love to be proven wrong, in practice. I’ll tell you what I don’t like, having to drop 1-4 miniscule-micro-buff totems per solo-fight to be functional.
… But maybe if it was worth it? if it did something worthwhile on top of making other players have to make a real choice if they want to re-target to kill the totem AND re-dropping didn’t eat all my mana? I guess that could work. Haven’t seen that totem yet though. and as I said, I’d be open to it.
That’s basically what I’m saying. Design them so people want to press them, and so they don’t break the shaman’s resource back. They could even bake other mechanics into totems on death, so if someone decides to instantly kill a Grounding Totem they get silenced for X seconds, or Counterstrike Totem applies a 2 second stun, or whatever.
I can’t help but feel like they could do so much, and seeing them not even really try for this long gives me some sads.
Well, it is a not-bad idea.
I guess I just jump to realism though, if we haven’t seen that in 15 years and they still can’t give us survive-ability? Given that, I guess my ask falls back to “please don’t screw us with non-stop every-fight annoying GCDs”.
Sure, in BFA we had two 15 second weapon buffs … that was … definitely a process getting used to that again. Thank goodness for haste corruption there. But -> they triggered 3x natural harmony and provided a frequent platform to trigger azerite essence effects (not trivial good things) and azerite armor effects (also not trivial good things) as well as give us something to do when closing range. (by comparison, dropping and re-dropping windfury totem every fight … well it’s just not that sexy. Been there done that)
and just to also mention, earthbind, tremor, and cap don’t fall into this annoyance. those are situational use, and great. I suppose healing stream falls in to that too now.
after maining a shaman in classic for the last 14 months, im glad to not have to worry about dropping totems every second. It was beyong annoying to deal with that.