Project Lore

I am a shaman, like William Shatner, so totems are a big part of my in-game identity. Blizzard understands that totems are a class defining feature, but their current implementation is a little... lacking to say the least. Ghostcrawler, class designer and prolific blue poster on the official forums, recently posted a thread soliciting feedback from shamans on how totems should be revamped. To me, there are really two aspects of totems. Firstly, there is PvE, where they have great utility. It takes a minimum of four seconds every five minutes to cast them. Sometimes they can be set it and forget it, but this doesn't take into account fights where being mobile is very important, or where different totems need to be dropped in different phases of the fight. Also, my totems seem to get destroyed in fights quite often, so I have to keep tabs on my totem timer bar even if we aren't moving. In PvP, dropping all four totems is not a common occurance for me, unless I am defending some type of flag or node. While I am on some sort of offensive rush, using four seconds in a fight against a ret pally or death knight just to drop totems that will either be outranged very quickly or disappear when I die seems pointless. Exceptions to this are when I drop tremor, earthbind, grounding, maybe a stoneclaw to get treants off of me, or a magma totem to flush out rogues (which never seems to work). On to the actual totems themselves. Some of them have unique, very useful features. Two of my favorite totems in the game are tremor totem and grounding totem. Dispelling fear and absorbing spells, these totems can save fights singlehandedly. Unfortunately, there are also some totems that are not as useful. Sentry totem is the first one that comes to mind. Even things like Strength of Earth and Windfury, while great buffs for melee classes, are immobile and destructible versions of different Death Knight abilities. The original design of totems, as I understand it, was to provide stronger buffs than other classes due to the ease of removing them. With the consolidation of raid buffs and simplification of raid composition, this aspect was removed. I know it's difficult to balance against too many powerful buffs that come from a single class, so I can understand that some of the buffs need to have other sources. Unfortunately, the downside of totems remained while the benefit was reduced. While I know that totems aren't perfect, I am not a very good class designer. I leave it to those smarter than myself to solve the problems with totems, and it seems like GC and the class designers at Blizzard have come to a point where they need to know how the shaman community views totems. If you are a shaman (or even if you're not), let the developers know your opinions by posting in the thread. Shaman love is always appreciated here on Project Lore.

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