Can the devs look into giving Searing Totem a buff? It's such an anemic totem at high level, even outside stacking spell power, that it becomes functionally useless.
Even into WOTLK, noone uses Searing Totem even tho on a single target boss, where the duration should be the deciding factor, it's so inferior to Magma Totem that you may as well not bother.
I suggest either halving the cast time, so its a single target version of Magma Totem with a longer duration at better mana efficiency and thus it delivers the same impact every second rather than every 2 seconds, or increase the scaling of Searing Totem so that it becomes a viable totem to drop for Elemental Shamans/T2.5 shamans and thus buffs their DPS since at the moment, It's functionally worthless in every possible situation.
For example, a top end searing totem is worth all of 25 DPS on a single target, even if hit capped. while Magma Totem is worth 37 DPS on single target. That seems ridiculous that a single target totem, even talented with 15% damage, be outdone by a pure basic AoE totem.
Searing Totem buff.
Re: Searing Totem buff.
I like your idea of decreasing the casting time. Could even be done through the already existing searing totem relic, https://database.turtle-wow.org/?item=51803, which is completely useless right now. Would be a nice buff to levelers finishing their grind to 60 as well.
for comparison, paladins get https://database.turtle-wow.org/?item=51804 (actually only increases duration by 1 second), which is one of the most useful librams available, ESPECIALLY in pvp, and its level 39 so useable in that twink bracket unlike shaman relic.
shaman relic is even more useless now that totemic recall exists, when I heard about a low level shaman relic I was excited because lightning totem is insanely expensive and shock totem and healing wave totem never drops for me. When I saw what it was I thought it was a joke, and then when I saw the pally libram I thought it was either malice or incompetence
for comparison, paladins get https://database.turtle-wow.org/?item=51804 (actually only increases duration by 1 second), which is one of the most useful librams available, ESPECIALLY in pvp, and its level 39 so useable in that twink bracket unlike shaman relic.
shaman relic is even more useless now that totemic recall exists, when I heard about a low level shaman relic I was excited because lightning totem is insanely expensive and shock totem and healing wave totem never drops for me. When I saw what it was I thought it was a joke, and then when I saw the pally libram I thought it was either malice or incompetence
Re: Searing Totem buff.
I mean shamans need buffs across the entire board but from a Vanilla perspective, it's not really going to happen through gear. There's a big reason that in WOTLK, a fairly large amount of Enhancement talents were spell power/AP from Int and so forth and without those, shamans can't really compete without dual wield WF on some basic level.
If they were to nerf the WF buff so it was just 2 extra attacks without AP and allow shamans to dual wield, it might make Enhancement more viable as DPS. We'd still not be on par with warriors and rogues but then at least the white damage value would go up and mana dependency go down.
The only other real buff would be to allow totems to provide their weapon buffs to shamans regardless of their current weapon buff, so Shamans would get WF totem and WF weapon buff, obviously non-self proccing for some degree of balance, so Shamans operate like paladins with seals and so Shamans can either use a totem or use an oil without losing one of their primary core abilities.
If they were to nerf the WF buff so it was just 2 extra attacks without AP and allow shamans to dual wield, it might make Enhancement more viable as DPS. We'd still not be on par with warriors and rogues but then at least the white damage value would go up and mana dependency go down.
The only other real buff would be to allow totems to provide their weapon buffs to shamans regardless of their current weapon buff, so Shamans would get WF totem and WF weapon buff, obviously non-self proccing for some degree of balance, so Shamans operate like paladins with seals and so Shamans can either use a totem or use an oil without losing one of their primary core abilities.