What Have They Done to My Totems?

My Elemental Shaman, Zoeie, is not at all pleased with the changes to the Shaman totems. She’s over there either screaming in frustration, or singing The Lament of the Totem-less Shaman. I’m certain the lyrics to this (non-existent) song would go something like this:

“What have they done to my totems?
I used to have four, but they are no more.
Why, why, WHY?”

This week, I have been spending most of my “game-playing time”, (what little I have), in Diablo III. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone who listens to Shattered Soulstone. I absolutely love D3. However, this does not mean that I have stopped playing World of Warcraft. Every so often, something motivates me to log in, run around Azeroth, and find something that amuses me for a while.

Recently, I heard that patch 5.0.4 included some changes that weren’t very nice to Shaman. Rumor had it that the totems were gone. This distressed me greatly. After all, what is a Shaman without her totems?

Those sparkly, glowing, fonts of mana and destruction were the most impressive part of being a Shaman. Get into a battle. Pop! Four totems at the same time! Whatcha gonna do against that? Um… ok, probably try and kill the totems as fast as you can. But still, they looked all kinds of awesome while they were up. Take a look at Zoeie fighting Ganz’rilla.

She’s got four totems, all at the same time, surrounding her. One totem throws a fireball at the monster, while a second one is generating mana. Another totem is ready to “eat” the first spell thrown at me, and the fourth one is making me a little bit stronger. One click, and I was ready to take on dragons!

Then, 5.0.4 hit. It included wording that sounded rather ominous:

“Shaman: Totems no longer provide long-term buffs. Some of the old passive effects are now innately provided by the shaman. Totems instead have short-term situational benefits. In light of this the totem multidrop UI has been removed, through all totem spells are now sorted under draggable elemental flyouts in the Spellbook.”

After trying out the new changes for a while, I managed to figure out how to have three totems appear at the same time, (but still can’t figure out how to get the fourth one). The difference is that I have to click each one manually, and that their duration has gotten shorter. The new configuration does not look as impressive as it used to.

I miss my Mana Spring totem already. Where did it go? I’m hoping it’s in the Spellbook, somewhere, and that I somehow didn’t see it. It is going to take me a while to retrain my hands to click several different buttons for totems after being so used to clicking “one button to rule them all”. Eventually, I will get used to this change, just like I have gotten used to all the other changes in WoW since “Vanilla”. Right now, though, I miss the vivid visual representation of what it means to be a Shaman.