When will spell totems be playable again?

I believe this is a very fair question and it is strange as to why GGG decided to completly remove from the game an entire playstyle. It is one thing when an overperforming or an overly played style gets nerfed in order to introduce some changs to the meta but even if a skill is suddenly no longer worth playing, it doesn't means that the whole playstyle needs to be destroyed. For example, this league, minions are heavily nerfed, but there are still very good minion builds that will still be very good to play and amoung the most powerful builds, it's just that it's no longer mage skeletons.

However Totems have been unplayable for at least a year and if we were to consider being good then it hasn't been good for many years. Bear in mind I am talking about spell totems as ballistas are their own thing just like ancestor totems are also their own thing (granted ancestor totems aren't in a good place either).

Many years ago when the hiero was reworked it suddenly became a good build to play, it was definitly able to do all content. It didn't clear as fast as self cast builds, it didn't had the boss DPS that bossing builds had but it was at least good.

If we look at what kind of damage this build did by comparison, we are talking something like 5x less damage than other good league starters on low budget and at least 10x less damage than a high budget build.

Hiero also only ever had one league where it had a lot of players and comprehensively it was when it was reworked. When an ascendency is reworked, if it looks at least decent, a lot of people will play it, however next league and it wasn't anywhere near the top played ascendencies.

With time, hiero got nerfed, several skills that made spell totems viable got nerfed and to top it off, many items that spell totems use got nerfed. This despite the fact that hiero were played by 1% of the playerbase and if we consider that hiero was also used for brands then it's less than 1% that played spell totems.

Comparing this to when spell totems were still good even if nowhere anything any good player would likely touch, it had about 4% to 5% of the playerbase which is by no means a lot but it showed that there was enough interest in them from the playerbase (this was before the brands were introduced).

So I have to wonder why is GGG destroying an entire playstyle. It is so bad that even though spell totems have to give being able to attack themselves just to get that extra totem, Ballistas just get 2 extra totems from the tree without having to give up attacking themselves. This when ballista totems already have higher DPS indivudially (of if you prefer, per totem) than spell totems do (and they can still get the extra totem while giving up the abillity to attack by themselves).

Isn't it time the totems players are given something that actually makes totems really good and fun to play?

Here are spells that work great with totems in 3.18 after looking at it for ~3minutes:

- Spark
- Ice Spear (bossing) / Freezing Pulse (mapping)
- Shockwave Totem

Inquisitor seems to be the preferred ascendancy because crit.

Can play skelly mages. They're basically totems.

Assuming they survive the nerfs they got.

Spell totems are totally playable now.

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Scarletsword wrote:

Here are spells that work great with totems in 3.18 after looking at it for ~3minutes:

- Spark
- Ice Spear (bossing) / Freezing Pulse (mapping)
- Shockwave Totem

Inquisitor seems to be the preferred ascendancy because crit.

Perhaps you need to look at it for another 3 minutes then.

Ice spear and freezing pulse is what used to work, emphasys on used because it was nerfed to the ground. You lost the threeshold jewels which means you need to take severe damage penalties for the area clear when before it was already barely even playable. You lost the extra totem on the chest and that is just the most recent nerfs to it because it it has received many nerfs in the form of applying exposure and reducing resistances.

Spark has no appreciable damage by comparsion and even clear is a lot slower.

Shockwave was one of the alternatives introduced but it's actually very much on par with ice spear/freezing pulse however the budget is much higher to reach the same level of damage and efficiency which considering the current state is pretty terrible.

As for inquisitor. So you want to nerf the 3 totems we are using down to 2 (well, 4 if you use the extra totems support gem but that gem removes such an insane amount of damage that it barely pays for itself, in fact with 4 totems you will not gain any damage due to how absurdly bad that gem is).

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kaijyuu2 wrote:

Can play skelly mages. They're basically totems.

Assuming they survive the nerfs they got.

They didn't. They will still work on very high budget but they are nowhere nearly as good. I also didn't liked them as much, it's a lot harder to get any sort of survivability on a lower budget with most summoner builds while still having good damage. However what I didn't really like is how the screen becomes impossible to see anything with all the effects going on.

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TemjinGold wrote:

Spell totems are totally playable now.

You are right, they are totally playble, that is why 1% of the playerbase plays totems and out of that 1%, about 90% plays ballistas, not spell totems. Clearly this shows that spell totems are totaly fine and need no adjustments whatsoever.

i mostly stopped playing totems when they took Heirophants 2nd totem but left scion with +1

Synthesis i think was the last totem build i did a Sire of Shards + Winter Orb + reverse knockback + crit multi + aoe which was fairly decent.

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Elhazzared wrote:

Perhaps you need to look at it for another 3 minutes then.

Sorry, I forgot this is another echo chamber thread.

Here, have a shockwave totem Inquis anyway with a spark leveling guide on his channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5cw-nL6Qc

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Scarletsword wrote:

Sorry, I forgot this is another echo chamber thread.

Here, have a shockwave totem Inquis anyway with a spark leveling guide on his channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5cw-nL6Qc

Right, so what you are saying is that there is an extremely edge case where mirror tier can reach the 7.7m mark which do is better than freeze pulse/ice spear.

Under a high budget this will be performing just about as good as freeze pulse / ice spear which should be around the 4 to 5 million mark.

More importantly, on a low budget build it massively underperforms making not really that good of an experience both leveling up with and mapping until you start putting some serious investment into it.

For a build to be good it needs to be goo from the early stages of mapping, all the way through to the end because people don't start a new league with several mirrors in their pockets.

Now let's also consider that most mirror tier builds are not doing 4 to 8 million shaper DPS, they are not doing less than 50 million because guess what. It's not worth investing that much currency into a build for such a low return.

Just as it's not worth picking a skill that is doing very low damage at any stages when they could be easily doing 5x to 10x the damage with the same amount of investment.

So no, spell totems are not in a playable state. They do ridiculous low damage and though yes, this build manages to have survivability, that's because Aegis Aurora is unbelievably broken and should have been nerfed a long time ago (not that I mind it wasn't nerfed, I'm just saying that it's so broken good that there is literally no other choice because nothing else even comes close to even being half as good).

Well GGG really want to push caster meta. And because spells get buffs, totems must be nerfed otherwise people will play totems instead self cast because totem is more safe playstyle.

I'm league starting with spectral helix that uses spell totems with tornado. Tho it's a hybrid build. Not sure how full spell totem is, tho ye probably needs a buff.

Their was a poe build posted before Sent for Arc spell totems, seemed to get above average dps.

Either way spell totems sound worst shape than minion builds right now.