Totems are better than minions in every way possible even after patch

To be specific, I am talking about artillery ballista totems. I am an avid minion player on all ARPG's and occasional totem enjoyer.

Here's my reasons:

1. Inherently tanky totems with no passive tree investment.
2. Can be instantly summoned/resummoned.
3. Place them anywhere you want, change their location at any moment
4. You get nodes which enhance placement speed rather than having to invest all your nodes into minion life, minion speed, minion respawn, etc.
5. Incredible number of AoE increasing, damage increasing nodes all very clustered together, whereas minion nodes are spread all across the top left half of the board. All useful nodes are very clustered together in general and allows you to go for a lot of tanky (max res nodes) because of lower overall passive skill requirement.
6. Viable with gemling and smith of kitava, high dps variant for softcore or highest tankiness ascendancy in the game for HC.
7. Insane damage, AoE and single target.
8. Starts doing damage immediately when summoned, fires over mountains, broken walls, etc, and has no movement speed hinderances (waiting for minions to get in position to attack). it's a 1 button build where you hold down movement and press it over and over. whereas vaal guard spectres and skeleton actives and SRS all require ramp up or have a activation delay requiring you to backpedal often.
9. Only need to apply curse and exposure, no need to kill your own minions and invest tons of gems/jeweller orbs into utility skills as is the case with pain offering.
10. You can use your spirit for defensive auras rather than needing to invest in SRS, withering presence, etc. You also don't need to stack spirit as a stat for minions like on amulet/body armor. the totems are stronger than 500 spirit worth of minions.
11. Overall much superior damage. Tested minion leveling post-patch buffs and totems was still significantly easier.
12. can use the 1ex cost blueflame bracer gloves that converts fire to cold which freezes everything you fight giving you much more survivability.
13. way easier to get +7 proj crossbow than a +spirit +minion skills +auras scepter.
14. only really requires 1 skill gem and 2 spirit gems. only requires 1 perfect jewellers orb to be completely optimal, rather than needing to 6 socket all kinds of different minions.
15. more effectively uses HP/life regen which is much better imo than ES now that grim feast is removed.

this is the PoB (not mine) which I followed. Only deviation I would recommend is to swap to totems immediately at 31, don't wait for 37. they're so much better than any other skills.

https://poe2.ninja/pob/18a3

I may have missed even more reasons but these are the ones I could think of off the top of my head. Do not be tempted to play minions this patch regardless of what you see on streams. they're trash and totems is way better in every way not only in raw damage output but in many other ways. you will feel so relaxed playing this compared to minions.

shout out to Tati the totem guy, been loving this build. getting to level 31 was the real struggle.