Why are we making DoA skills?

Serious GGG, why?

You just made spell totem use charges and we all know it's not viable to play it like that.

In order for any totem skill to work the player need to cast 3 to 4 totems very quickly so that it has enough power to do what needs doing and with charges this is not possible.

Let's look at 0.3 changes to totems and what it did to them.

Many totems changed to use charges and no one used those totems. There were attempts to make them work but everyone had to give up because it was not possible to play them. This alone already shows that spell totems are DoA. We've been there, we tried it and it just doesn't works.

The rest of the totems were heavily nerfed but were supposed to compensate for that nerf by scaling with weapon damage but the reality was that every single totem even with absurdly good weapons were doing nothing and were completely unplayable. The result was that, much like the charge totems, people tried, people gave up, it was impossible to make them do any kind of passable damage (and you aren't even buffing them).

Mortar was introduced and for once there was one totem that worked however the only way to make it do good enough damage was to recast it after it fired to bypass the reload time leading to the totem play style not really being a totem play style but rather a much more clunkier attack play style since you are getting one attack per totem cast which is just worse than simply using grenades directly which will do even more damage due to not using a totem as a support. So again, it works but it's worse than the alternative and it doesn't even plays like a totem. Play it because they like totems but it's not good.

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Now let me make a case for why you are wrong that without charges no one will play self cast because totems are just better.

When players cast a totem, the totem rises from the ground and waits a moment before starting to attack and also a single totem doesn't do as well as a self cast in terms of damage because they don't have penalties associated with being in a totem as well as having one extra support. So if we are mapping, self casters click once, everything dies and they move on to the next pack. The totem player clicks 3 or 4 times needing more mana as a result, waits usually a second or more and then everything dies which he then proceeds to the next pack.

This means that overall self casters will clear maps at least 50% faster than totems making them far superior for mapping.

On bosses the self caster will need to cast many times and have some downtime dodging but the amount of downtime is actually pretty low. Totems will just keep blasting for as long as they are up but with the time it takes for the totems to start casting and needing to replace them especially as they often die from large AoE attacks so downtime should be about the same in reality but because there are multiple totems, while individually the self caster has more damage per hit and casts faster, there are just multiple totems which make the bossing damage higher.

So here we have a classic tradeoff that has existed forever in PoE 1 and also exists in PoE 2 because this is a good way to approach balance. Some skills or even play styles are good at bossing and worse at mapping, some are good at mapping and worse at bossing and some are balanced in both cases, they are never as good at bossing as bossing builds, they are also not as good at mapping and mapping builds but they do better than those builds do on the weak point.

So is spell totems going to make self casters obsolete just because they boss a little bit better? No, it's a trade off. If you want to use spells you can pick self cast for faster mapping or totems for better bossing. This not to mention that just because one is better than the other in a particular are it doesn't means it's bad to use them for those scenarios. Self cast will still be plenty viable for bossing and totems will still be plenty viable for mapping.

So GGG, you have no real argument to make any totems require charges but especially spell totems since it's a new skill you are releasing and if you want a way to turn players off is by giving them DoA skills.

I was excited to play spell totems this league. Even with no new endgame stuff I could overlook that because I wanted to try that and now I feel like I'll probably play for a week, feel disappointed with both totems and the end game state and then just quit. Like me there are many others feeling the same and you already have plenty of people not really feeling like they will play 0.4 for long because the end game didn't got improved so the least you can do is at least offer us as much as possible for us to bite into.

Also from your interview with talkative tri (which is where I based this thread from) you said that the thing you took the most from the community feedback is giving people as much build diversity as possible. Totems are currently dead. Mortar is the only working totem build and even then it's worse than just grenadier which means you aren't really doing that. You aren't giving people build diversity if you have one entire play style that despite having skills for it in the game it's completely dead in it's current state. Maybe put your money where your mouth is and give us build diversity. Give us totems we can play. Don't make spell totems DoA.

I think one of the problems they have is whenever they're testing they're not testing in an environment with competition and an economy. So they're essentially screwing around. When you're doing proof of concept type work in a vacuum and say. Aha this finally works, ship it. You're not really considering if its a waste of time to play on the live game or not.

At least that's what it seems like to me.

I don't get their comments about player feedback and build diversity. Feels like we don't have devs, we have politicians. They say one thing and their actions speak the opposite. Very frustrating.

“Self caster clicks once and everything dies”
So the solution is to nerf caster spell dmg then, how do you incorporate totem into combo philosophy without builder spender XD

Back to lightning arrow again I guess