[Tactician] Embankment auras are a extremely bad (and impossible to scale)

I will start by saying that when they were revealed I was all in for embankment auras. I already really like auras in this game and it was the perfect occasion to try a totem build, something that I did not do on my previous characters (played 3 mercs since 0.1). I like to make builds and I like to come up with unexpected uses for things, the different buffs given by the totems seemed to be a really interesting addition.

Oh boy was I wrong.
Some ascendancy nodes are meh, some are weak, some are bad but this one takes the cake when it comes to uselessness.

Let’s dive in the absolute mascarade of an ascendancy passives that these auras (not really auras) are:
-Complex to set up: in order to use them you must allocate them in your ascendancy tree, create a totem gem for each buff that you want to use, keep in mind that you won’t be able to use a lot of them since every buff means a totem slot so let’s say I want to dark effigy buff becaue DoT, if I have a mortar cannon totem build I’ll have to use one less totem. You’d think that to compensate that the buffs would be powerful but no their worth is at most a few passive points. They also take a gem slot, which as a Tactician I use a lot because I have a lot of spirit reservation and can slot a lot of spirit gems. Then you need to cast the totem and keep it from being destroyed.
-Weak: The buffs they offer are just… bad? For 4 ascendancy points you’d expect powerful buffs but they are just really weak. All the buffs to damage are increased. Like yay 50% increased damage to immobilized targets, I already have 400% from tree. The mortar cannon one is obviously a joke since a jewel can give double the extra damage and other benefits
-Impossible to stack: You’d think that ok they are weak but that’s because this ascendancy path is about stacking totems, so they must stack right? It’s about putting together totems, making sure they survive and reaping the benefits right? No they don’t stack, the 15% extra fire is just that, 15% extra fire, and it does not matter if heart of the well can give you more than that.
-Impossible to scale: Then if they don’t stack you’d think about scaling them, after all the are embankment ‘’auras’’ so they must be affected by aura magnitude? And GGG likes to make players solve problems, a thing can be weak but really busted if you invest in it. Once again they are not affected, I mapped for 76% increased auras magnitude for another build and I still had only 15% damage fom the totem
-Hidden between a node that makes totem hard to use/makes them useful only in a few situations: the condition to have the 30% more skill speed is only if you shootprojectiles. It could be ‘’if you used a projectile skill i the past 5 seconds’’ or just no condition, but the obligation to constantly use projectiles skills is just not a good idea for totems builds that have to care about other things.

So every one of the role these buffs seem to have is better fitted by another part of the game, and always at a much lower cost. Here you have to give up HALF of your 8 ascendancy points just to gain some hard to use and very weak buffs.
The cost of these is enormous for the benefit they offer.

They do not fit any power fantasy at all, and it’s extremely hard to see how the discourse about some ascendancies being weak and needing a buff rather than nerfing the meta ones gave these embankment auras as a result

do you still think same after the patch notes reveal, ofcourse without aura magnititudes effecting them

A BIT less bad because some changes are okay but still weak for something that costs 4 ascendancy points. 25% extra fire damage still feels increadibly weak when you know what others ascendancies (or even some tactician nodes) bring to the table.

The fundamental design stays the same. We still can't stack or scale them so they feel extremely statics.
And that's the main problem because playing around a weak thing to make it strong is what buildcrafting is about but we can't do that, they don't bring any fantasy with them when we play totems, they do not modify the way we play the game at all other than ''use totem and keep it alive to get weak buff''


If they reach 5% play rate on POE ninja Tactician it will be almost a miracle