Spell Totem Buff

I found my mara had his whole path reset, so I thought I'll have some fun and skill dual totems. Slapped on spell totem, lightning warp, cold and chaos dmg, and took the whole templar path with added lightning and elemental dmg.
Sounds good for a lvl 50, right?
WROOOONG!!! (having teleporting laser totems is kinda sweet but...)

My gems are lvl 35+ now and my loaded spell totem gem cluster does what? 65.8 dps !!!
I can not even kill jack fucking shit in normal! Takes 5 hours to kill a lvl 1 zombie ffs.
At lvl 30 you're suppsed to have a average 200-300 dps, I am 50 and can't even hit 70 dps.

Shouldn't any selected skill path be viable?
I am forced now to leech in parties to grind my gems up, which is ridiculously slow and boring.
It's like that dinosaur mechanic WoW once had, weapon skills, 1-500. Use weapon type X 10k times in combat and you get +1 point wo-hoo. Takes only 2 weeks, jesus, no wonder why they got rid of it.


So to fix things here, you need to:

A) Either make all totems immortal,
or give totems a brief indestructability, something like 1 sec for every 50 mana cost? So a 150mana totem would at least fire stuff for 3 secs before taking any dmg. That would be only fair, since they literally drop dead by ANY hit.


B) Buff the dmg.
Or, remove the "can't cast spells" from ancestral bonds.
The totem dmg is already so ridiculously low, having all other spells and skills disabled is just retarded. Allow them with a -50% dmg penalty?
Having 2 totems at the same time is not something that makes anyone just like that some OP facemelter who steamrolls through merciless in 5 minutes. Removing all skills to get AB is uncalled for.


C) Remove fixed gem levels.
This is more of a general issue. Someone may late in the game buy 100 regret orbs and reset his whole skill tree with a complete radical gear make-over, including gems.
Now he has to grind up gem levels like a farmer for no real reason.
Gems should scale instantly with whomever equips them lvl 1-99.
Leveling gems has no place.

bump *

I love how I always manage to post something during the epic forum sleepy time...

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Elemenz wrote:

Shouldn't any selected skill path be viable?

No.
Being punished for poor decision making is at the very essence of the game. Because on the flip side, making intelligent decisions is rewarded.
If your character was precisely equal (regardless of your choices) to every other character, then you lose any sense of gain or motivation. This genre has extremely crude gameplay. Without that sense of smartly developing your character and acquiring power, there would be almost zero interest in the game, and absolutely zero replayability.

so you expected to get high dps with a lightning warp totem? hmm... lol i'm sorry you have to see why this wouldn't work right?

Totems are just fine where they are.

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SkyCore wrote:

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Elemenz wrote:

Shouldn't any selected skill path be viable?

No.
Being punished for poor decision making is at the very essence of the game. Because on the flip side, making intelligent decisions is rewarded.
If your character was precisely equal (regardless of your choices) to every other character, then you lose any sense of gain or motivation. This genre has extremely crude gameplay. Without that sense of smartly developing your character and acquiring power, there would be almost zero interest in the game, and absolutely zero replayability.

You would only be right if I had taken nothing but str/dex/int stepping stones, and no actual skill nodes at all. But I didn't.
I took ancestral bond, all the lightning + elemental dmg nodes from the templar, and the rest is necessary life + res nodes.

I thought of working my way to the witch but even if I was there already it wouldn't change a thing, because the witch lightning nodes would grant me only 30% + 30% more dmg.
I'm doing 60 dps now with lvl 40 gems. Guess that would "buff" me to barely 100-200 dps by the time I got gems maxed at lvl 60.

So the problem here is that they (poe designers) can't just give me passive skill choices,
which after taking, are proven to be absolutely useless.
You can't give someone a choice and then say "bad luck, deal with it" as if that choice was a action equal to deleting your char.
I say again: I did not surf around str/int/dex nodes. I took viable sounding lightning dmg and life+res buffs. The totem skills/spells in the game are too weak. That is the problem.
My choice was just fine.
You can't argue that. End of discussion.

Now buff totems. Thank you.
Or, reset my marauders passive skills so I can play him again.

Some builds just don't work buddy, i'm sorry. Are the choices there? sure. But does every single build have to be viable? no not really.

Totems do plenty fine, trust me. They don't need a buffing any time soon lol.

Again, you're using lightning warp on a spell totem... that spell in the beginning isn't a good damage spell. It's basically a positioning spell that happens to have damage on it.

GGG will never give out "free" respecs, the obvious exception being changes in the passive tree that directly relate to the character, but i digress.

Wait, hang on, buff spell totem? When spork totem players can clear rooms with absolutely ridiculous speed? When every ranged class worth their salt ought to be saving the 2-3 slots to run Skeleton Totem pretty much regardless of what passives they have? What are you even -

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Lightning Warp

.....Oh. Well, that explains a lot. Look, we all know that Chain is a great support gem, right? But here's the thing - put it on the wrong skill (like, say, Spark), and you're not going to understand why it's good. And in your case, Lightning Warp is just plain bad. It's nifty-looking and awesome to watch the death totem teleport around the map... But it's liable to suck. Try going with Spork Totem and see if that changes your luck any.

Totems are insanely strong and boring and should in my opinion be nerfed.