Spell Damage and Totems?

I understand there are many types of totems as well as the totem support gems. I've seen many people upgrading Spell/Elemental Damage passives to increase the effect of spells used along side the Spell Totem support gem, which makes a lot sense.

Seeing this I have two questions:

1) Do Spell/Elemental Damage passives work for Flame, Shockwave and Searing Bond Totems like they do for Spell Totems?
2) Am I likely to get more DPS using Spell Totem or using the regular totem skills?

1) That doesn't depend on whether it's totem or not, it depends only on its effect having 'spell' damage type or not. All effects that do not involve weapon damage are technically spells, some also do 'spell' damage and some do not.

There are four base damage types in the game, any damage you did can be only one of those.
attack
spell
secondary
damage over time

Flame totem does spell damage.
Shockwave totem does not, it's secondary damage, just like bear trap and detonate dead.
Searing bond is damage over time.

2) Depends on the spell, some perform better, some perform worse. Shockwave totem doesn't have high damage and it's hard to scale it so most spell totems will do more, its value is in utility. Incinerate spell totem is stronger than flame totem and costs less mana. On the other hand firestorm totem is most likely worse for single targets and small groups than flame totem but has more area. Native totems are not too versatile, either, they're only fire damage as it's associated with STR stat.

Thank you very much for your reply, I searched ages for these sort of answers before. I've also done some tests myself and seen how the regular totems are affected by spell/elemental damage buffs. I think I am likely to use the regular native totems in my build as it will save gem sockets and all :D

Bump!

@raics

Thank you for your detailed answer. Was wondering why all my +spell dmg gear and gems weren't doing anything to Searing Bond.

Thanks again

"

BrewWarrior wrote:

Bump!

@raics

Thank you for your detailed answer. Was wondering why all my +spell dmg gear and gems weren't doing anything to Searing Bond.

Thanks again

Since raics post spell totem has been nerfed a bit in patch 1.1.0: With those changes i would say that spell totem - incinerate is no longer stronger than flame totem as the former now has a multiplicative cast speed penalty which is especially bad for incinerate as its damage scales over time.
Chars with easy access to eldritch battery or blood magic to compensate the high mana cost of flame totem are better off using that instead of incinerate.

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Since raics post spell totem has been nerfed a bit in patch 1.1.0: With those changes i would say that spell totem - incinerate is no longer stronger than flame totem as the former now has a multiplicative cast speed penalty which is especially bad for incinerate as its damage scales over time.

Right, flame totem is stronger now, with the last nerf to spell totem support gem, incinerate not only does less DPS than before but also gains stacks slower.