Devouring Totem

Huh, now doesn't this sound interesting. Seems like it might be good with a mage/blood rage character against those pesky necromancers.

Reminds me of the Carrion Vine Druid skill from Diablo II.

It might be more useful and intuitive if the skill returned life proportional to life of the corpse consumed, making it work more like Detonate Dead. As it is, Devouring Totem is far more useful when spawned into lots of small mobs, and less useful for sponging up a pack of blues.

problem with that is that mobs might actually have extremely low hp.
although this totem is perfect against necromancers.

This totem still crashes my game regularly. I can't identify exactly how and why it crashes, which only makes things worse since I can't actively prevent it.

I mainly use devouring totem to get rid of undead corpses, so it may have something to do with necromancers.

Feedback after recently looting and using DT: It's an interesting skill, but one that I can't see being a main skill of any capacity. It's a skill I can see being used against necros as well as people using Vaal Pact (like me on my lvl 52 VP/RT Marauder) or Ghost Reaver.

Also wondering, how would one increase the amount of life leeched with this skill asides from leveling? Iron Will? I've noticed that using DT standalone, it gives me the same amount of HP listed in the tooltip. It may be a spell, but I can't tell what kind of spell it is because it's not a damage spell.

I'd expect it to be a buff.

The animation for this Totem is very cool and it makes me sad that it's usage are very limited, currently. I believe that if the Totem could also Leech Mana in addition to Life per corpse consumed.

While fighting monsters, the Player uses up Mana and loses Health. This Totem would be summoned by such a Player to alleviate these losses by consuming corpses.

It feels as though it's lacking somewhere in its current form.

not quite sufficient for the intended purpose, you can use it as an after-battle mint (heheh) if for some reason all of your potions are low, or as means to remove corpses from necromancers to prevent them from coming back, but the healing isn't really enough to make me bring it to any fight over, say, a detonate dead totem, which removes corpses to a much greater effect.

i feel like it should also generate a small amount of mana with each corpse, or heal a fair bit more to be more useful during combat. feels like a weaker, clunkier rejuv totem (which is also pretty bad), but it does have a very cool animation so props for that.

reminds me of the vine from d2, that druids used? the ones that followed them around eating corpses and healing the druid's life and mana. not a lot, but enough so that you'd cast the buff and forget it. totem doesn't really do that though, since you cast it, it eats some corpses and heals you, then you move on and have to rinse repeat every time you encounter more enemies.

i dunno, just doesn't feel like it packs enough oomph.

Personally I would like this totem to do a little more. Just some ideas:

1. Have the totem return a % of your total health pool with each corpse consumed. Making it more valuable to tanks and higher life builds.

2. Have to totem link to something like Detonate Dead, so that each time is consumed a corpse it made the corpse explode and returned health. Obviously at a reduced dmg compared to Detonate Dead by itself, but still something.

3. Let the totem curse corpses so that any enemies using the corpses suffer dmg, making it even more of an anti-necro tool.

Just my thoughts, but it does seem like Devouring Totem needs a bit more love.

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DJMantiss wrote:

Just my thoughts, but it does seem like Devouring Totem needs a bit more love.

Just compare it to Rejuvenation Totem. It has to eat 1.33 corpses per second just to keep par. Personally I think that corpses being such a limited resource should make it MORE powerful than rejuvenation totem in its optimal case, and that it being a counter to necromancers should just be an added bonus.