Winter Orb Totems Losing Stages Under Various Conditions

Trying to make a Winter Orb Totem Hierophant, but I noticed that the spell behaves differently on a totem than when self-casting.

When supported with spell totem, the totem will lose all stages of Winter Orb when the mob it's targeting dies. This happens inconsistently in packs as the Winter Orb seems to still target independently of the entity casting it, but is more obvious when there is only a single target when placing the totem.

A Winter Orb totem also loses all stages if it is stunned while channeling. This is inconsistent with the behavior of Winter Orb on the player, as self-cast Winter Orb maintains stages when stunned during or after channeling.

Noticed this too. Shouldn't it keep its stages until the totem dies?

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2257245

Ruining the game for me now :(

Bought a Spire of Stone to see if it was just the stunning but you're right its random sometimes when it kills something it loses stages

Agreed. At the moment, winter orb totems are very weak because of all the resets :/

I did a little testing and I think I found a consistent reason as to when it breaks:

Fundamentally, if the totem stops channeling (you can tell when it's channeling by seeing when it is vibrating) at any time it will immediately lose all stacks. This is why it will disappear when it gets stunned, but doesn't explain why it still periodically disappears.

In the GIF below, I place a totem and it fires at surrounding enemies 5 times. The orb disappears every time except for between the 3rd and 4th shot. If you pay attention to the totem itself at this time, it is the only time it doesn't rotate before firing a shot.



This means that it's not the act of killing a target and re-targeting that removes the orb, but the act of the totem rotating. This is because in the moment it takes for the totem to rotate, it can't channel because it's "moving".

I also noticed that VERY rarely the totem will rotate and not lose its stacks, and that sometimes it will still fire consecutive shots in multiple directions without rotating in between shots (keeping the stacks). Both of these are rare occurrences that I had a hard time to replicate.

EXTREMELY! disappointed in the way Winter Orb works with totems at the moment :( they keep losing charges continuously, it almost brakes my will to play.

Please fix this fast GGG, just make them cast non stop after summoned, only stopping on stuns and stuff like this. And obviously, don't lose all charges instantly it's stunned :(

Using the "totems cannot be stunned" jewel helps a bit but still bugged


NEVER MIND :) AWESOME GGG you fixed it the very next hotfix! I love this company so much!!!