I wish I was joking.
Liquid Magma totem gets most of it’s value from not just placing it, but resetting it’s cooldown using Totemic Recall + Call of the elements. If you don’t take totemic recall, Liquid magma totem has no way of reducing the cooldown and will do half that much damage over the course of a dungeon or raid. Looking at logs, it’s safe to say that LMT does about 5-8% of your damage but that’s only when you take your class tree capstone of totemic recall to essentially give you another charge.
This seems like a very weak capstone unless they dramatically increase the damage that Liquid Magma Totem outputs or gives it a better effect like spreading flame shock to more than just 3 targets. Maybe they can give it 2 charges on a 30 second CD? Due to it’s spell effect this will only be used in AoE anyway so with it being so costly to get to and doing almost no damage, it feels very bad if we were forced into talenting into this to get our flame shocks spread. It also feels bad without LMT because then we are forced into always taking surge of power and using flame shock after our spenders to apply 2 flame shocks max at a time and then primordial wave another target.