Totems made simple!

Hey everyone, I'm a PoE1 veteran newbie, which means I played since beta, but never really pushed to end game, just play early league days and get overwhelmed by the complexity.

Decided to try out PoE2 and I'm loving it, so I picked a mechanic of the game I liked a lot on PoE1: Totems; And now I'm trying to learn how it works.

The objective of the post is basically to have a place I could write down what works and what does not work with totems. I could've just made a notepad with it but I feel like posting it will both help other people and also made it more complete as people pitch in with their findings.

I'll start with what I found out so far.



What works:

Totem passives on the skill tree, naturally.
+# to level of all melee skills
Global Adds # to # physical or elemental damage to attacks (Iron rings for example)
Global Skill effect duration
Increases to melee damage and/or physical damage on the passive tree
Global damage conditional increases. (Enemy's on low health, enemy's armor is fully broken, heavy stunned, etc)
The "Causes #% increased Stun buildup" affix on weapon works.
Accuracy rating from anything except your weapon (This seems odd, but I tested passive skills, weapon and gloves with accuracy rating, and the weapon was the only that did not update the tooltip on shockwave totem)
Attack speed from any source except your weapon
UPDATE: Resolution Technique does work on totems!
UPDATE 2!: You can slot TWO shockwave totem gems in your skill tab. How is that useful you ask? Well, you can slot the second with Overabundance so it does not override the first, and use support gems for utility, like armour break, maim or jagged ground.
UPDATE 3!!: Totems keep the skill level they had when summoned, so if you summon a totem and weapon swap to other weapon set or a shield, totems remain with the +skill of the weapons you used when they were summoned.



What does not work:

Weapon Damage/Speed
Any flat or percent increase in physical or elemental damage on your weapon
Gain Life / Mana on Hit / Kill on your weapon
Increased attack speed on your weapon
Critical Hit Chance of your weapon
Accuracy Rating on your weapon




Conclusion:

Basically your weapon is there to be a stat stick, and the most important stat is +# to melee skill levels.

Important notice here: 1h weapon caps at +5, while 2h weapon caps at +7. So using 2 1h will often be better than using 1 2hander. And this makes the keystone Giant's Blood the single best damage increase skill point for any totem build since it allows you to dual wield two handed weapons for a massive +14 skill level.

Amulets cap at +3 skill points

Gloves cap at +2 skill points

So you can have a total of +19 to totems from gear. (excluding any uniques that might show up)

Don't sleep on the flat damage increases from gear ( # to # physical for example)

And preferably have attack speed on gloves, it is the only source of attack speed on gear for totems




Random Slightly off topic reminder

I've seen lots of youtubers playing Titan (for the 50% passive increase) or Warbringer. And most of them are running into the same issue: Mana.

Mana costs increase the higher the skill level is, and at +19 skill level, and 5 supports, the mana cost of a single totem is just ridiculous and will force you to heavily invest in max mana and mana regen.

The reminder here is: Do not sleep on the gemling legionnaire; Here's why.

They can make all gems requirements your highest attribute, so you can just STR stack and completely neglect int and dex. They also DOUBLE the inherent atribute bonus, meaning you get FOUR HP for point in STR.

+14% quality for your totems is MASSIVE (10 from the big node, 4 from a couple small nodes)

And while everyone will be looking at the +1 to all skills for more damage, the 30% -less- (not reduced) cost of skills is -massive- for totems.

So think with me: Str stacking, double HP for STR, you'll have a huge HP pool. Probably over 5k. This along with the 30% less cost, makes Blood Magic quite viable. You can get easily 5% hp/s regen (1% with totem, 1% from vitality, and 3% on the tree)

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MorganPain#1351 wrote:

Thanks for this great info! Could you or anyone list support gems that work with shockwave totem? preferably in order of usefullness :)

Without PoB it is hard to tell exactly what is better.

And "useful" is relative

Por PURE damage on a single totem, I think the order would be:

Shockwave Totem > Brutality > Concentrated Effect > Heavy Swing > Heft > Martial Tempo


But if you are no Gemling Legionnaire (for the 30% less cost to skills) you might need to use Inspiration to deal with the cost.


Overabundance allows for a 4th totem, it might be more damage to have 4 shockwave totems without martial tempo than 3 totems with it. But the duration goes down and mana/life can become a issue.

You can use overabundance on Ancestral Warrior Totem, so you can have the 4th totem anyway, but the downside is when it summons 2 ancestral warriors, you lose one shockwave.

I've seen people using sunder for the garanteed crit. But other than boss killing, it is a massive damage loss not having Resolute Technique, and downright annoying sometimes to summon a totem on a fast mob, it slams and misses so you need to summon a second one.

Personally, I've been just using Armour Breaker on my Ancestral Warrior Totem. I'm a Gemling Legionnaire, so I don't have the Warchief's break armor. Instead, I just have a totem to break boss armor for me to increase my 3 shockwave totems damage.

I also don't think Warchief is better than Gemling, in fact, I think Titan is better than warchief, but since most of Titan's power is on the 50% increase passive skills, it is a very late bloomer that scales with the most points you have in the tree.

Between Titan and Gemling I am not sure which is better; Gemling brings +14% quality, which is kinda insane on shockwave totem to have 34% quality and a "free" 6th Gem, Inspiration. That allows you to slot martial tempo. Both Quality and Martial Tempo speed up the slams of the totems, and it feels really good.

Titan would get about... 7 to 9-ish percent increased attack speed from 50% bonus to small nodes, but would greatly increase the damage from all the other passives. My final build on Gemling has 224% increased totem damage, and only 20% of that is a Notable Passive. Which means you'll get another 100% increased totem damage from Hulking form alone. This is why I think Titan is better than Warbringer. And that is without counting the other damage nodes like melee damage, area damage; Or survivability nodes such as increased armour.

Is it better than martial tempo and 14% quality? For a static target such as a boss, quite likely. For clearing? Speed can be the difference between a fast mob zooming past your totem between slams or not. So I dunno!

Gemling gets more HP too, which makes it slightly better for Blood Magic. (15% max HP isn't better than double STR bonuses) Titan can choose between more survivability (50% more armour from chest piece, and 15% max HP) or go full heavy stun more damage for boss killing.

UPDATE HERE TOO: Since my main goal was to use shockwave totem, I overlooked Warbringer quite hard. But there are great builds for Warbringers as well such as the totem/shout one where you use Ancestral Totem with Earthshatter to create earth spikes on the area, and then shout to destroy them.

thank you for posting all this!

I am definitely going to try Legionnaire with Shockwave totems to see how it feels. I will start early on

If you're playing it too and wanna share findings add me 'netoprax' ign :)

Great post. Thx for all of ur hard work testing!

I'd guess for the Ballista totems your findings still apply but replace "melee" with "projectile" for skills and bonuses?

That's what I've found so far. It makes comparing weapons easier, I guess. The only stat that might be worth sacrificing levels for is the xbow with +1 ballista implicit.

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LordBobbot#1185 wrote:

That's what I've found so far. It makes comparing weapons easier, I guess. The only stat that might be worth sacrificing levels for is the xbow with +1 ballista implicit.

Sadly this crossbow is not in the game yet :(

Have you tried Splinter support to get totems to break armour?

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neto_conrado#7516 wrote:

Have you tried Splinter support to get totems to break armour?

Totems break armor when you have the warbringer ascendancy, so i assume this works as well.

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neto_conrado#7516 wrote:

Have you tried Splinter support to get totems to break armour?

Totems deal a surprisingly amount of stun build up and heavy stun, I recommend using Devastate support instead, because it takes less time to break armor through stun than it does using Splinter Support.

As per last patch notes, armour break lasts 12 seconds instead of 6, so this got even stronger.

Do you know if any of the runes work for totems? I am assuming they would be all local to the weapon and not apply