Enhancement Shaman Review of Totemic Hero Talents - Totems in Search of a Cause

The War Within Criado 26/5/2024 em 17:32 por wordup

Hero Talents are an extension of the Talent system designed to explore class fantasy with a third talent tree, separate from your class and specialization. With the release of Alpha, Blizzard has previewed most Hero Talents Trees coming in the next expansion, The War Within.
The War Within Hero Talents Overview

Our Guide Writers have provided initial first impressions on the Hero Talent Trees revealed so far. Check out all of our released Hero Talent reviews in our new Editorial Section.

Wowhead Editorials

Totemic Enhancement Shaman ReviewStormbringerTotemicStormbringerTotemicnothing Totemic Hero Tree

Totemic attempts to reintroduce totems as a more central theme, using them as conduits for elemental energy to unleash powerful attacks on our enemies. The keystone, , provides a lot of damage in itself, but the remainder of the tree lacks direction and focus - trying too hard to pull in conflicting aspects of the spec tree and ultimately getting in the way of our elemental synergy fantasy rather than elevating it.

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deals Physical damage instantly to the nearest enemy within 30 yards when dropped, and every 5 seconds after until it expires. This pulse isn't localized to the totem itself but rather dictates the range limit for the Tremor cast it performs.

The totem lasts for 20 seconds, and has a 30 second cooldown. This cooldown is reduced by on the class tree, but the radius is not affected by . It can also be moved via , and reset with .

These pulses deal AoE damage in the area chosen, with a soft cap of 5 then square rooting after.

It doesn't scale with either Mastery (due to being Physical) or Haste in any way.

The totem inherits 40% of our maximum health.

Currently the totem ignores whether enemies are in combat or not, so has a habit of pulling things on its own.

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Every time you cast , you are granted 3 independent Elemental Motes that affect specific abilities:

Air Mote increases the damage of your next by 25%, and causes it to strike a nearby enemy at 75% effectiveness. This is treated as a unique cast, gaining the effect from talents taken and triggering things like .

Fire Mote increases grants your next or 15% increased critical strike chance, and 30% increased critical strike damage.

Earth Mote causes or to reduce their respective cooldown by 12 seconds when consumed.

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Whirling Elements Visual

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Knock it down completely - It's not impossible for a hero tree to be fundamentally different between the two specs, and we both have completely different goals. Turning it into a passive proc for us to remove the high GCD requirement is a start, but it leads down a path of restructuring the entire rest of the tree and removing the cross-spec aspect of the tree. Due to Restoration liking the implementation of the tree, I don't think this is likely (or a good idea).

Restructure and - This begins by making into a mirror of itself, a 2-minute duration conduit we drop and maintain, but aren't beholden to a cooldown we have to immediately press when ready. The fundamental issue is the totem has to last a reasonable duration longer than the cooldown for it to fit into our gameplay loop.

This means the motes from need to be altered. I'd propose leaning heavily into the conduit aspect, let us charge the totem with elemental energy to change its damage type through abilities (alleviating that problem) with a chosen one. Let it accumulate separate "motes" from this, and alter the totem as it "powers" up with simple themed stat buffs. If it's a problem of being too strong for too long, make them temporary. It also lets us keep the mote visual, and see it grow over the duration into something awesome! This could be done for Restoration too, or leave us with an inverted relationship to the motes, we generate them while they consume them.

Failing that, just let the motes trickle in one by one every 5 seconds for the duration, altering them to just be static secondary buffs for a brief window based on the element. Anything to pull it away from specific abilities and decision paralysis.

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First and foremost, the problem is not that it's related to totems. That part is fine and can definitely be made to work, the problem is everything else this tree is trying to do.

Totemic needs to establish a core gameplay theme and goal, and an expected angle to build and play around it. It's trying to do too much at once, and the spec gameplay is lost in the process.

Cut or retool talents that aren't in service of this theme - ideally, that would be our Elemental theming on the spec tree considering the space Stormbringer's carved out. It currently feels like it's trying to do everything, while succeeding at nothing because there's too much friction.

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The utility nodes are a big offender in this. Aside from the novelty of bigger totems, none of the other effects lift our existing toolkit up to make them do anything interesting (and they're struggling with that already for Enhancement).

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This guide is written by Wordup, a long-time Enhancement player and moderator on the Shaman Discord server, Earthshrine. I've played every iteration of Enhancement since Sunwell, and played in Echoes on Laughing Skull (EU) since Warlords of Draenor. You can catch me on Twitter, or in Discord if you have any guide related questions!

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