Decoy Totem love

Put your Decoy in a Poet's Pen...cheap and easy +1/2/3/4 gem levels for your totem, which is the most important thing for scaling their damage since levels also add to their base life. Add in Empower support for more +gem levels.

Add Enhance to further boost the increased life from quality, or Second Wind to drop 2 totems quickly. And don't forget your Decoy Totem increased life helm enchant. If you're not able to multi-totem to start with, the Multi-Totem support is another option.

If you want to forego the defense/utility of a shield, also equip a +1 all spell skill gems weapon.

I've maybe played around with this a bit already... :)

Decoy Totem felt better a long time ago when the game was slower. I can't imagine using it consistently with the current pace of the game outside of reflect totems.

Oh I see you basically need those boots to make this build work? The build sounded fun and unusual. I can't see the build, any link to it?

I set up a character with this build. The only thing I've changed so far: Clarity isn't needed after endgame lab gets 2 minor points each with mana regen. So I replaced Clarity with a Discipline. This required me to also pick up a master mana reservation node (12% improved mana reservation efficiency) and replace the withered support gem with a blind support gem on the Herald of Purify.

The build is really tanky. The character rarely gets attacked and has almost 5,000 XP and almost 2,000 ES. It can take a while sometimes to take down a monster as the OP mentioned.

(If interested it's the TemplarSilveradoLegion character in my account.)