Palpable hate on Lightning Warp totems

I have a spiffy triple warp totem scion. She's already about to get bent over the pommel horse by the awakening. I mean, a combination of existing shortcomings plus complete neutering from this patch

Awakening: Totem duration is going from ~26 to 8, crippling any build based on % reduced duration. A totem might go from 6-8 duration in 1.3 to 2-2.5 duration in 2.0

Awakening: Totem placement speed no longer being affected by cast speed, making totem builds based on high cast speed far more clumsy and requiring additional skill points sacrificed to recoup.

Awakening: Reduced duration gem changed from "reduced duration" to "less duration", which means you can no longer get ~0% duration lightning warps, utterly gimping the ability. Changes my final setup from -100% duration to -76% overall duration. Also ruins lightning warp as a mobility skill for all builds.

1.3: Lightning Warp applies its % reduced duration to spell totem's totem duration, not just its own spell duration, making totems last much less time. I'm not entirely sure this is intended, and not a bug. For example, a lightning warp totem with 26 base duration, -54% from reduced duration and -46% from lightning warp winds up having 0.00 totem duration instead of the expected 12 duration. It mandates that any build attempting this has to get a % totem duration node, as otherwise the totems experience a nihilistic critical existence failure

1.3: The totem duration nodes are few (2 in the whole tree right now, yet to be seen with beta) and inordinately hard to reach from the other totem branches (10+ skill points in stats just to reach +25% duration, without which the build is impossible as totems that last 0.00 seconds don't do much). Wouldn't it make more sense to put a *very* large duration node behind or near Ancestral Totem? Having 2 (3 with soul mantle) totems out is a lot more practical when totems have longer durations, and very impractical when they have almost as low duration than their bloody placement times.

1.3: Lightning Warp has a delay of being unable to recast until the previous cast's animation dissipates, which isn't scaled with cast speed, making it cast far slower than it should if it scaled linearly. This can halve the dps of high speed lightning warp on its own

1.3: Lightning Warp has another 0.1 delay for players (not totems) that only exists to help desync issues- when lockstep is active, it will be harming the skill even further for no real reason

1.3: Lightning Warp, as well as other movement skills, get hung up when targeted onto unpathable terrain, instead of casting at the nearest pathable point. This is a bad casting mechanism for player movement skills and most people I've heard from think it should be changed to the diablo 2 style, where it cast to the nearest pathable point in that direction- this applies to lightning warp, leap slam, mirror arrow, etc.This completely wrecks the AI of totems, which freeze up and fail to cast at all.

1.1: The previous nerf to Spell Totem from "reduced cast speed" to "less cast speed" hurt high cast speed builds quite hard already, while aimed at spork totems, it hit my funny business much harder in collateral damage than it actually hit spork

If everything *worked*, my build would be filling the screen with disco lights as totems flitted around killing everything before I could even see it onscreen, with nearly 20 hits per second. What they do right now is a sad portion of their theoretical dps, while still making a decent spectacle. In the awakening, they'll struggle to cast once or twice before expiring

To put it all together, 1.3 totems have:

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0.33 place time
0.33 cast time + ~0.3 animation delay + 0% lightning warp travel time (~0.63 total for a 3 second distance)
6.5 totem duration (0.00 without 25% node)
AI randomly decides to stop casting, yay

what they will look like with the same gear in 2.0:

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~0.6-1.00 place time- to recoup any, must sacrifice more skill points
0.33 cast time + ~0.3 animation delay + 24% lightning warp travel time (~1.35 total for a 3 second distance)
2.84 totem duration (1.94 without 25% node)
AI still farts in narrow spaces

How about some love for the ickle warp totems instead?
At this point, anything

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clan_iraq escreveu:

1.3: Lightning Warp applies its % reduced duration to spell totem's totem duration, not just its own spell duration, making totems last much less time. I'm not entirely sure this is intended, and not a bug.

It's intended, after all supports are linked the skill creates a totem which has a duration, and totem uses a spell which also has a duration.

There is a way to correct this, one I was meaning to suggest for a time. As it is now, movement skills are affected by attack speed, or in case of lightning warp, duration. Duration passives can mess up with lightning warp and attack speed is already valuable enough without this (besides, switching to Brightbeak for frogging around is kinda lame).

One solution to this would be to make movement skill execution speed unaffected by anything besides movement speed increases and also another multiplicative mod on a new, specialized support gem 'faster movement'.

Or lightning warp could be have its effect explicitly become "40% reduced movement duration" or some variant thereof
Everything else is really a drawback from leveling up, as far as it applies to spell totem duration, blind duration, stun duration, I don't know what works or not

its a little questionable that totems themselves are being affected by the reduced duration gem in the first place. While lightning warp says "Reduced duration" without specifying what, reduced duration support gem explicitly says "Reduced skill effect duration". And Spell Totem isn't an active skill, its not cast, and with 2.0.0, its being removed from cast speed on that logic, saying that placing a totem is not "casting". Yet its still affected by "reduced skill effect duration", something that won't affect non-skill durations like stun- stun has its own duration modifiers.

If this was taken to its logical consequence, we'd have totem duration be unaffected by skill duration nodes, items and support gems, so it would just be 8 seconds (2.0) / 26 seconds (1.3) plus any explicit totem duration modifiers from tree or whereever.

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clan_iraq escreveu:

its a little questionable that totems themselves are being affected by the reduced duration gem in the first place. While lightning warp says "Reduced duration" without specifying what, reduced duration support gem explicitly says "Reduced skill effect duration". And Spell Totem isn't an active skill, its not cast, and with 2.0.0, its being removed from cast speed on that logic, saying that placing a totem is not "casting". Yet its still affected by "reduced skill effect duration", something that won't affect non-skill durations like stun- stun has its own duration modifiers.

You seem to misunderstand how supports work. If you support a skill with spell totem creating a totem becomes a part of the skill, the skill creates a totem which uses the spell. It doesn't matter if the totem is cast, placed, thrown or shot into place, it's a skill effect and it has a duration, and the mod doesn't say 'spell effect duration' anywhere. It's similar to supporting the skill with elemental proliferation, the skill gains a 'spreads inflicted status effects in radius X' property, and that radius can affected by inc radius or conc effect supports.

I have a lightning warp totem build with one searing bond totem. So much fun. And like you i heavily dislike the drastically reduced totem duration of only 8s. Makes using lightning warp with reduced duration almost impossible on totems. :-(
Hopefully GGG finds a good middleground for us.

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entomogant escreveu:

I have a lightning warp totem build with one searing bond totem. So much fun. And like you i heavily dislike the drastically reduced totem duration of only 8s. Makes using lightning warp with reduced duration almost impossible on totems. :-(
Hopefully GGG finds a good middleground for us.

I'm not exactly sure what the reasoning is behind the 8 second duration totems. Totems in general are already fairly unpopular, and this is a big hit to all of them, but absolutely crippling to totems that benefit from staying alive a long time (LW).

What I find really jarring is the change to reduced duration. Some people might say, how many lightning warp builds are there? Does it really matter? But a gem like reduced duration is so very very niche that theres only a small few builds that use it for their main skill, and LW, whether totem or trap, and sunblast traps, are pretty much the only ones, maybe storm call. And *all* of these builds suffer very very badly due to this change, it poops all over their build. So maybe GGG decided that lightning warp getting used as a mobility skill in 0% duration setups was too much and had to be nerfed into the ground, and anyone who used it as a damage skill is just collateral damage.

But if its all collateral damage, yeesh, LW totems sure took a beating this time around

I think LW totems are a cool build. I do.

You just can't balance the whole skill around the very very few people who play that.

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clan_iraq escreveu:

So maybe GGG decided that lightning warp getting used as a mobility skill in 0% duration setups was too much and had to be nerfed into the ground, and anyone who used it as a damage skill is just collateral damage.

Right you just reminded me, before we got reduced duration Chris did say a few times he doesn't want players to have instant teleport skill. Maybe they just realized they made one.

^ That was my thought. I think they wanted to try and support LW (since it used to be a 1S skill or fit onto the third link on curse + faster casting), realized they might have supported it too well, but then left it go for a while to see how it'd turn out.

I've found the whole totem (support) situation unfortunate ever since AB first changed at the transition into OB, and it has only gotten worse since then. Flame Totems, Searing Bond, and more recently SWT have all received some much needed love, so I'm not opposed to all of the changes, I just feel like they made a lot of decisions surrounding the support gem that may be based on bad information. Or went the wrong direction..

There used to be a lot of talk about how OP dual totems were, that you could melt packs with relative impunity, and that totems needed to be much more fragile so they couldn't tank for you as well. The support got hit way too hard in terms of both survivability and damage output, whereas I believe the entire appeal of totemancing is that it allows a more laid back, less engaged style of play. That it would have been okay for them to be beefy so long as their damage didn't compete as easily and they put more pressure on other build constraints (like shifting the mana cost to a reservation while the totem is alive).

These changes seem to be moving even further away from the initial (CB) appeal.. so we'll just have to see if the other changes will help to bring them back in line damage-wise. Overall I don't think it will be bad, just different than I hoped.

Except for LW Totems.. I wouldn't abandon all hope yet, but the changes so far do seem very unfortunate /-:

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Barivius escreveu:

I think LW totems are a cool build. I do.

You just can't balance the whole skill around the very very few people who play that.

Theres always the throw-a-bone option of making a unique or notable keystone for specialized builds while reworking how it works for movement skills to get the best of both worlds. If GGG wanted to nerf LW as mobility, they certainly pooped on it as a damage skill

LW totems certainly have a lot going for them that isn't possible with normal totems and even minions- the LW totems can function autonomously like minions, but unlike minions don't have AI aggro leashes to return to the player and keep casting until deactivated by being offscreen. They have ten times faster startup and placement times than minions that needed a convoke gem added just to make shepherding them less onerous. Yet even the placement time is getting nerfed hard

But seems like every major patch brings more hate on LW totems. When sporks were nerfed by cast speed, it didn't really harm spork all that much as stacking cast speed isn't efficient for dps, but with LW totems, making them cast fast enough would let them dodge monsters attacks. When your totems change positions every 0.6 seconds, its hard for many enemies to hit them. If the skill worked as advertised and didn't have artificial limits and bugs and delays added, it would be jumping every 0.33s and totems could dodge basically anything non-AOE. Then the maximum totem range node was removed, and that shat all over LW again, because unlike other totems, the maximum range node was incredibly relevant. GGG removed it on the logic that it didn't matter for totem usage anyway since their aggro range was limited to cast range, but LW was longer than their aggro range and helped the totems search and destroy new targets offscreen.

Like what would be the *harm* in reattaching a 15% totem range node into an existing totem cluster, on some existing, weak node? Totems really have some lackluster passive skill tree clusters, stuff thats straight up worse than traversing an elemental branch unless you're running a specific handful of not-easily-scalable types like poison arrow or shockwave totem.

Its a build weighed down by oodles of bugs and neglect and regularly nerfed incidentally