Enhancement Shaman Review of Totemic Hero Talents – Totems in Search of a Cause

Our Enhancement Shaman guide writer, Wordup, offers an early review of the Totemic Hero Talents that introduce the new Surging Totem, but struggleto enhance the remaining totems or the core of Enhancement gameplay.

Totemic Enhancement Shaman Review

Hero talents are the new primary combat system for The War Within, with each specialization having access to two heavily themed bonus talent trees to choose from. As a reminder, unlike on our current class and spec talent trees, every single node on your selected Hero Talent tree is granted – you may choose between Stormbringer or Totemic and then have some additional smaller choice nodes on the tree selected. Following up from our initial reveal of Stormbringer, we quickly got the follow-up with a broader link to classic Shaman theming in Totemic. I’m going to rip the band-aid off at the start before getting deeper and say the tree is a big miss for me, and while it tries to be on theme, the execution and gameplay impacts it has are a complete flop – and it has nothing to do with the totem theme itself surprisingly enough. This entire tree lacks a cohesive direction, and due to that, it feels like it’s trying to include everything while doing nothing well, all while breaking down foundational gameplay aspects of “Enhancement” without replacing them with something interesting.

Totemic Hero Tree

Unlike the Stormbringer article and other Wowhead reviews, a large portion of this tree – particularly nodes that have gameplay impact – aren’t implemented. Instead in the breakdown section, for those that are implemented I’ll go through how they’re working, and for those that have serious gameplay implications will discuss what issues I think they cause.

As a quick primer, Enhancement generally has two build archetypes – Elementalist and Storm – in Dragonflight that are hard separated on the spec tree. The first heavily leans into elemental synergies and damage mixing, while the second is very focused on physical and nature attacks. Currently, the Stormbringer tree heavily leans into the Storm playstyle and talent options it trends toward by going all in on that portion of our design. Due to that, it stands to reason that Totemic needs to at the very least support, if not strongly lean into the Elementalist. The first iteration of the tree does not manage this, and instead gets lost in the weeds trying to gesture towards both aspects of the spec tree at the same time, all while achieving neither.

Hero Talent Breakdown

Here I’ll be going through the Keystone and Capstone as they’re functional and set the tone of the tree. Aside from that, I’ll be going through some clusters of talents that deal with certain themes and have particularly high gameplay or build decision impact.

Totemic Keystone

spell=444995 Surging Totem – Keystone

The Totemic Keystone, Surging Totem, comes in two parts. The first causes our Windfury Weapon imbue to radiate our Windfury Totem aura to allies within 30 yards, finally removing the pesky maintenance of dropping it every two minutes. The second, more important part replaces Windfury Totem itself (requiring the talent point to gain access to it) with a high damage autonomous AoE totem with a lot of components:

• Surging Totem deals Physical damage instantly to the nearest enemy within 30 yards when dropped, and every 5 seconds after until it expires. This pulse isn’t localized to the totem itself but rather dictates the range limit for the Tremor cast it performs.
• The totem lasts for 20 seconds, and has a 30 second cooldown. This cooldown is reduced by Totemic Surge on the class tree, but the radius is not affected by Totemic Focus. It can also be moved via Totemic Projection, and reset with Totemic Recall.
• These pulses deal AoE damage in the area chosen, with a soft cap of 5 then square rooting after.
• It doesn’t scale with either Mastery (due to being Physical) or Haste in any way.
• The totem inherits 40% of our maximum health.
• Currently the totem ignores whether enemies are in combat or not, so has a habit of pulling things on its own.

To be absolutely clear, that this is a totem isn’t a problem, it’s themed and it’s pretty cool to have one back that does good damage without needing much babysitting, and I applaud the effort for trying to “fix” totems being boring here. The issue is, having a totem that’s not always active that also has a 30 second cooldown with extreme weight tied to pressing it immediately on cooldown in a spec that has a huge amount of active GCDs and resource management present already does not fit. That it also deals Physical damage but is likely going to be a quite strong source of damage itself creates a big signposting issue – if it’s strong enough to be the highlight of the tree then it calls into question the value of Elemental Spirits, and once that domino falls Elementalist builds start pulling a lot more talents, ones that don’t have a place in our other hero tree either.

I’ll go into much further detail about these build issues in the analysis portion when more of the tree has been explained, as everything paints a similar picture.

Totemic Capstone

spell=445024 Whirling Elements – Capstone

The Capstone for Totemic leans very heavily into Surging Totem itself and has some good theming around totems and their link to the elements. Its execution on the other hand is pretty complex on the surface without really providing much in the way of gameplay impact:

• Every time you cast Surging Totem, you are granted 3 independent Elemental Motes that affect specific abilities:
• Air Mote increases the damage of your next Stormstrike by 25%, and causes it to strike a nearby enemy at 75% effectiveness. This is treated as a unique Stormstrike cast, gaining the effect from talents taken and triggering things like Crash Lightning.
• Fire Mote increases grants your next Lava Lash or Fire Nova 15% increased critical strike chance, and 30% increased critical strike damage.
• Earth Mote causes Elemental Blast or Sundering to reduce their respective cooldown by 12 seconds when consumed.

Motes are consumed whenever you use one of the abilities the element it relates to, but you get all 3 at once. They are also removed if the totem despawns or is destroyed.

The effect itself is very evocative of Unleash Elements from the past, giving us elemental empowerments sourced from the totem – this part is awesome and it’s both visually cool and on brand. Where the problems lie is how many different abilities it hooks into, and how low impact each of the motes really are. There’s a lot of words to do not very much here, and looks like a case of overengineering things. Of the three, the most interesting is the Earth Mote that effectively drops Sundering to a 30 second cooldown synced with each totem, but the Elemental Blast side often leads to charge overflow and a feeling of waste. The biggest thing is immediately noticable – it hooks into a lot of different abilities with conflicting priorities, and some of those have talent requirements that either don’t mesh together, compete, or simply require too much investment to even have.

The idea here is good, the execution is linked directly to some of the problems with Surging Totem itself, as this is one of the big drivers that cements dropping the totem as it’s ready. The buffs themselves are (mostly) invisible or, when they try to be active, they don’t comfortably fit into the tree – but it always feels bad to waste something that’s supposed to be a benefit, especially a “big moment” in your hero tree. In the analysis section there’s a few things I think could alleviate both this and the keystone section without major work, because I think fundamentally the theme and feeling of the totem buffing us and “communing with the elements” is a good one worth keeping. Also, there’s no Frost mote!

Rotational Impact Nodes

Here there are two very specific nodes I want to highlight in tandem because they put on display a very direct conflict in how we currently build our tree. While both of these are NYI currently, from the way these read it’s very important to get this on the table when discussing the entire tree. This assumes the current spec tree – this MAY be a case of “fixed with reworking”, but as of right now this problem is immediate and drives a lot of the build & playstyle dissonance the tree is causing:

spell=445025 Totemic Rebound and spell=445034 Lively Totems

Totemic Rebound grants Stormstrike a chance (currently unknown) to launch an elemental bolt at your totem, increasing its damage (we assume until the totem expires) by 10%, and then sending the bolt to your current target. Thematically and conceptually, this is one of the coolest talents on the tree – sending a boomerang at my totem that swings around it and catapults at a target is awesome, it interacts with the keystone and has flexibility in damage.

Lively Totems on the other hand grants Lava Lash a chance (currently unknown) to spawn a Searing Totem that deals damage to your current target for 8 seconds. Once again, thematically for the Totemic tree, it stands to reason it needs more than just one big totem to really sell it and I think this is an appropriate angle to go for – Searing Totem is an old staple that went away for a reason, but coming back as a non-invasive proc is a nice homage.

That positivity aside though, the key problem here lies in the activation methods. Stormstrike and Lava Lash are, by and large, mutually exclusive buttons that builds spend a large number of talent points (in the 6-7 range) powering up, and these are not talents that can realistically be mixed together – every build will heavily lean to one or the other as its “primary” strike. Stormbringer very explicitly enables this via Awakening Storms for Stormstrike, but here Lava Lash has to fight to activate its effect. This is one of several of conflicts on the tree, but it stands to be the most divisive because there is absolutely no way you can build your tree to create parity between these buttons or fit them flush together – based on your talent tree one is always going to be a priority. I think, fundamentally, Totemic Rebound stands to get the same treatment as Elemental Assault did in Dragonflight – add Lava Lash and Ice Strike to it.

spell=455590 Earthsurge and spell=445036 Totemic Coordination

Earthsurge causes your Sundering casts to make your Surging Totem fire an additional Tremor at the target location for double damage, and it’s one of my favourite talents here. Adding direct interaction to Sundering which is a pretty cool button, but often ends up falling behind due to its cooldown is a nice idea, and linking it to the totem is smart. The problem here is a bit more overarching – it requires yet another active talent and the alternative is Totemic Coordination. This looks significantly more modest as a 15% increase to critical strike chance and 30% increase to critical damage of Searing Totem, but due to being NYI this may or may not be an issue.

spell=445035 Reactivity

Reactivity causes your Searing Totems triggered via Lively Totems to launch a volley of bolts when you consume Hailstorm or activate Fire Nova while one is active. I get the idea here – convert the Searing Totem into an AoE option so long as you use a cornerstone of our AoE during the window. I also quite like the interaction between a proc and actives that integrate parts of the kit, feeling like you’re capitalizing on a window by playing correctly when it happens. The major issue though is that to use this talent at all, it once again requires four talent points to get any use out of due to requiring pathing down the Lava Lash side. Even if after being implemented it’s strong, considering the rest of the tree has dubious support for these talents it seems like this is the kind of place that needs a choice node. That also means there’s room to fix the theming problem here since there’s no good reason for Frost Shock to be launching fireballs.

spell=445030 Oversurge

While on a choice node, Oversurge is extremely out of place causing Ascendance to increase the damage of Surging Totem by 150% while active. Issues with Ascendance as an effect aside, this node is a complete wildcard, as that entire section of our tree is razor-focused on one build (Storm) due to the way the talent operates, and in turn, the way the build plays. Considering Stormbringer leaned extremely strongly into effects built from the Ascendance line, it begs the question why this has to be here at all, or why it can’t simply activate a short window after casting Primordial Wave which currently has no support on either tree despite being a capstone leaf. The alternative node here does at least make the talent point requirement more palatable, due to Amplification Core granting a flat 3% damage while Surging Totem is active which is universally beneficial (if a little boring).

The “Imbuement” Nodes

Both of the following nodes are things that come under the umbrella of affecting our weapon imbuements – something that’s been made explicitly clear is a big part of Enhancement’s fantasy. Due to that, I’ve separated them into a section here because the situation needs highlighting.

spell=445028 Imbuement Mastery and spell=445033 Supportive Imbuements

Both of these nodes are on the third row of the tree, with Imbuement Mastery increasing the trigger chance of Windfury Weapon by 10%, and its damage by 15%. Supportive Imbuements shares a node with Pulse Capacitor (a 25% damage increase to Surging Totem option which is fine) that boosts Flametongue Weapon critical strike chance by 15%, and critical strike damage by 30% (you might be noticing a theme here).

First and foremost, this was a chance to do something interesting with our imbuements and it is thematically appropriate on a tree leaning into the elements, but this is not the execution it needs. Windfury Weapon having a flat damage increase only signposts to players to move away from elemental theming – it’s much more “physical” oriented there – when it could just have easily provided something more universal that Elementalist could have leveraged (like allowing it to trigger from off-hand strikes, or a portion converted to Nature as examples). Windfury Weapon itself also requires a huge number of talents to get much use out of – the Forceful Winds, Unruly Winds and Doom Winds trio – alongside mandating main-hand attacks, which starts to push out portions of our toolkit when that happens as we see in Storm archetypes. These are talents that are effectively traps that exacerbate the leaning away from the elemental theming elsewhere, because there’s nowhere near enough points to fit them and they further disincentivize parts the rest of the tree is trying to push you toward.

Supportive Imbuements on the other hand is a nothing node – Flametongue Weapon does virtually no damage whatsoever no matter the build you’re playing and a bit of critical strike chance won’t change that. This could have leaned into the Lava Lash amplification, Hot Hand trigger chance, or done something similar to Restoration by adding a new dual element Frost/Fire or Frost/Air imbuement, but instead we have a node that may as well not exist. Considering it’s our core part of the class theme, it’s crazy that the nodes dedicated to that do effectively nothing for us either from a theme, gameplay, or performance perspective. Finally, imbuements have no direct link to a “totem” theme naturally, this could have tied them together but instead it left them stranded on their own on the tree as another example of trying to fit everything in.

The Utility Nodes

spell=445031 Wind Barrier

While the wording is a bit strange here, it effectively just means whenever you drop a totem you gain an absorb shield for 6% of your health that lasts for 30 seconds, with a 30 second internal cooldown. When the tree first appeared, I was a big fan of having a bit more survival here that was potentially on demand, but due to the frequency of Surging Totem casts this will always trigger on cooldown so there’s not really a way to hold it for important moments. That said though, that initial excitement went away when it turned out to be a 6% health shield, which is such a low amount that the cooldown seems pretty unnecessary. Conceptually though, this node could work and be a cool effect if it was a little stronger and was activating from either a specific totem drop (to prevent wasting it) or multiple totems (to prevent Surging Totem from automatically granting it). Failing that, reduce the cooldown of the shield significantly and make it a passive trickle of shielding similar to the equivalent intermittent damage reduction from Nature’s Protection on Stormbringer.

Choice Node – spell=445026 Oversized Totems / spell=445027 Swift Recall

spell=445026 Oversized Totems – increasing the radius of totems by 15% is a very slight utility boost to some of our control options, and the Surging Totem aura effect for Windfury Totem. While this isn’t particularly exciting, it does have the potential to interact with any updates that may come to the class tree involving totems, and it’s a pretty on-theme node to just give more of a visual bump to the idea behind the tree.

spell=445027 Swift Recall – compared to the above, this effect is virtually useless. We have a very similar talent in Static Charge for Capacitor Totem that, at 4x the strength is still remarkably niche, and the additional totems this works with aren’t likely to be on a razor’s edge for cooldown use to get value out of it with 5 seconds less – if that’s ever the case we have Totemic Recall. I really don’t like this node nor see the use in it, and think it could stand to just be scrapped entirely to open up a choice node elsewhere.

Totemic Analysis & Feedback

Totemic Doesn’t Have a Direction

The first thing to touch on is that Totemic as a tree doesn’t have any core direction. It does something I think is at odds with Hero Talent trees as a whole – it stops me feeling like I’m playing Enhancement, and the gameplay style it creates isn’t much of anything. The talent tree is well signposted, and pathing through it feels like you’re building up a fantasy of elemental synergies and focuses, while this tree gets in the way and tells you to stop doing that, and grab these other conflicting things instead. No matter how I navigate through there, it always ends in the same thing: either I’m neglecting the hero tree effects, or, I’m creating a playstyle in the spec tree that doesn’t fit together. I’m not playing Totemic Enhancement, I’m playing either Totemic with an Enhancement skin, or I’m playing Enhancement with a Totem next to me occasionally doing something.

The core idea of weaving combos of the elements together in a coordinated dance, with occasional mix-ups that keep me on my toes is lost. While some of the NYI talents like Totemic Rebound and Lively Totems may inject some of that back in, it still evokes the feeling of breaking up a core that marries together and replacing it with something that’s just strong (until it gets retund), and not fun. I don’t see any unique totems or feel like my repertoire of options from the class tree have any new reason to be used nor is there any stronger pull to focus on elemental attacks, and I can’t get that fantasy from Stormbringer either.

It was stated in this blue post that the goal for Totemic was to “reduce maintenance without adding extra abilities, and a meaningful totem to pay attention to“. I don’t use these words lightly, but the tree has failed utterly at doing that – Surging Totem requires additional maintenance compared to Windfury Totem (indirectly adding in an active button rather than a fire-and-forget keybind), and I don’t have to pay attention to the totem at all when it’s down, it just does its thing – raw damage. I want to say that I felt more like I was engaging with totems while playing Totem Mastery from BfA, because while they were really boring, at least there was a variety of them present doing something without interfering too much.

The Tree That Broke Enhancement’s Back

While I spent a lot of Dragonflight praising the Enhancement’s tree design and I stand by that – it was created via some very careful tuning of the point costs to create friction at just the right places. Unfortunately, that idea isn’t futureproofed, and adding anything into the mix causes such an overwhelming amount of point strain that the design begins to burst at the seams, as evidenced by the Season 3 set bonus pushing Storm out. While this issue isn’t directly the fault of the Totemic tree itself, it does expose how strict the point limitations are when it starts to ask for things you simply cannot fit into the build. It doesn’t feel good to have to miss out on key talents you want to play because they’re gated, but it feels even worse to know you have hero talents active you have absolutely no way of interacting with. That’s even further exacerbated by having talents like Totemic Rebound and Lively Totems signaling completely different fundamental directions that require a lot of talent point investment to enable, and Imbuement Mastery misdirecting players to options they will never be able to afford comfortably.

The issue starts right out the gate from Surging Totem itself requiring Windfury Totem. This was a talent that was routinely dropped to fit in relatively expensive AoE tools for Mythic+ where its value was lower, with that now being mandatory it has a knock-on effect of meaning we have to sacrifice immensely powerful tools to even use the tree at all, and some of those sacrifices would be things like Sundering or Elemental Blast, but the tree happens to hook into those as well! This caps off with the damage types as well, with Surging Totem being physical. Depending on what portion of our damage this is intended to be (due to the nodes relating to the direct damage, I assume it’s a large budget of the tree), it begs the question “Is Elemental Spirits worth it?” If that answer ever comes back as no, several dominos fall throughout the tree and it effectively kills one build outright. This is an issue that the Totemic tree could be altered to not run into, but I think fundamentally this is a problem that probably needs addressing before it comes up again with a serious look at the overall spec tree structure itself instead of kicking the can down the road.

Linking into this as well, that Totemic tries to reach at supporting both sides of the talent tree in varying degrees, it ultimately failing at both of them is a very serious issue to me personally. I love the dual build nature of the spec and the remarkably well carved out themes, and for that to really continue I think it’s mandatory for the hero talent trees to pick a horse in the race and stick with it. Stormbringer did that with Storm, but if Totemic doesn’t do that for Elementalist, that could potentially mean an entire portion of our talent tree – 10+ nodes – has no place whatsoever in The War Within, which I think is catastrophic for the spec going forward. We already had fixed archetypes that didn’t need playstyle separation like the majority of other specs in the game, so the foundation was there to do this without much effort. While the ideal world of “both trees work for both” is great, sometimes there’s a thing as too much choice that leads to player confusion, so I’d much rather they at least work for one first.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I think fundamentally, the idea of bringing totems back to the forefront as elemental conduits for us is a good one and can work, but the current implementation needs a good amount of work to make that a reality – not just number tweaking and sanding the edges. I generally don’t like making hard suggestions here, but a problem this broad feels like at least an example of how I’d picture it playing out is helpful. The root issue is the core of Surging Totem and Whirling Elements, and there are two directions you could go:

• Knock it down completely – It’s not impossible for a hero tree to be fundamentally different between the two specs, and we both have completely different goals. Turning it into a passive proc for us to remove the high GCD requirement is a start, but it leads down a path of restructuring the entire rest of the tree and removing the cross-spec aspect of the tree. Due to Restoration liking the implementation of the tree, I don’t think this is likely (or a good idea).
• Restructure Surging Totem and Whirling Elements – This begins by making Surging Totem into a mirror of Windfury Totem itself, a 2-minute duration conduit we drop and maintain, but aren’t beholden to a cooldown we have to immediately press when ready. The fundamental issue is the totem has to last a reasonable duration longer than the cooldown for it to fit into our gameplay loop.
• This means the motes from Whirling Elements need to be altered. I’d propose leaning heavily into the conduit aspect, let us charge the totem with elemental energy to change its damage type through abilities (alleviating that problem) with a chosen one. Let it accumulate separate “motes” from this, and alter the totem as it “powers” up with simple themed stat buffs. If it’s a problem of being too strong for too long, make them temporary. It also lets us keep the mote visual, and see it grow over the duration into something awesome! This could be done for Restoration too, or leave us with an inverted relationship to the motes, we generate them while they consume them.
• Failing that, just let the motes trickle in one by one every 5 seconds for the duration, altering them to just be static secondary buffs for a brief window based on the element. Anything to pull it away from specific abilities and decision paralysis.

Unlike Restoration, we don’t have an equivalent ability that can be removed to let it stay as a low cooldown, high demand ability. That means fundamentally the ability needs to operate in a different way – much like the Call of the Ancestors activation on Farseer. I don’t think there’s any reasonable replacement on the tree for it either with how we work, and we are well known as one of the highest button requirement specs, please do not make this issue worse.

Following that, a singular focus needs to be chosen. I would personally like and strongly recommend that Lava Lash is the pillar (considering Stormbringer’s Awakened Storms link to Stormstrike) and Lively Totems suits, especially as it’s the main way of generating additional totems onto the field. Totemic Rebound can then be retooled to include all strikes like Elemental Assault, and we have a solid foundation for the loop to build around. Reactivity could then be converted to a choice node that links directly into Fire Nova (perhaps turning Searing Totem into a conduit for additional novas, or empowering it into Liquid Magma Totem), and be given a choice node that’s more universal to avoid that point friction – preferably Frost themed – and to make room for that cut Swift Recall. Revisit Imbuement Mastery and Supportive Imbuements, either removing them to add things that further cement totems as the core theme, or make a concerted effort to make Imbuements more impactful for Elementalist, ideally with some Frost theming.

While it was datamining, for a very brief period an original draft of Totemic contained something called Spire Totem – procs that built up a “totem pole” and a button we’d press occasionally to cap it off when it was set to go, launching a powerful elemental attack. The idea of building a totem up is very cool, and it would work as something that accentuates what we’re already doing while having totems come along for the ride. While completely reworking it to that is unlikely (it was probably scrapped for a reason), the core idea and feeling it would evoke is something I think could be achieved with a bit of work.

Feedback Summary

• First and foremost, the problem is not that it’s related to totems. That part is fine and can definitely be made to work, the problem is everything else this tree is trying to do.
• Totemic needs to establish a core gameplay theme and goal, and an expected angle to build and play around it. It’s trying to do too much at once, and the spec gameplay is lost in the process.
• Cut or retool talents that aren’t in service of this theme – ideally, that would be our Elemental theming on the spec tree considering the space Stormbringer’s carved out. It currently feels like it’s trying to do everything, while succeeding at nothing because there’s too much friction.

Extra button presses aren’t something the current rotation can realistically support. Despite replacing Windfury Totem, quadrupling (and sometimes more) the required casts is extra maintenance, not less, and it gets in the way of the things that make the spec feel like Enhancement.
Cut down on the number of mandatory talents. Right now Windfury Totem, Hailstorm / Fire Nova, Sundering, Elemental Blast and Ascendance are all mentioned by name alongside heavy hooks into abilities that need broad talent support to be valuable. Pick one, and lean into it more strongly.
Despite being a totem themed tree, our regular totems on the class tree aren’t really improved in any way here. I don’t feel like a Totemic warrior using them to channel the elements. Instead, I feel like a jumbled imitation of past Enhancement that has a totem that does big damage tacked on.

• The utility nodes are a big offender in this. Aside from the novelty of bigger totems, none of the other effects lift our existing toolkit up to make them do anything interesting (and they’re struggling with that already for Enhancement).

Whirling Elements is a very thematic idea and is cool, but the execution is convoluted and invasive while also managing to be largely invisible. This could do with a second pass to be more conducive to the gameplay style that exists and further solidify the idea of totems being extensions of our elemental bond.
Surging Totem being physical damage and a big driver for damage itself raises huge questions regarding build direction that may result in players relying on sims to resolve them, and potentially cause an entire portion of the tree to crumble. A way to interact with the totem to convert it to an element would be very thematic and alleviate this problem. It having no interaction with either Haste or Mastery (historically our best stats) and nothing unique to other stats here either poses a long-term problem.
Imbuement talents need to be either scrapped or redesigned, they’re thematic only in name, not by nature, and have no impact on gameplay or tangible effect on performance. They also have nothing to do with totems.
Putting huge quality of life by converting Windfury Totem to an aura feels awkward for a hero tree when it’s a hugely requested feature, and making the Totemic tree have the same consistent number of active totems as Stormbringer is also weird.

Final Thoughts

Totems have been missing from Enhancement for a long time, and this did manage something that was extremely unlikely – made them reasonably desirable. The theme of totems isn’t an inherently bad one (especially here where it’s just a reskinned DoT), and it can absolutely work. Alongside that, the theme of elemental synergies is incredibly cool and at the core of Enhancement. Those two things are the perfect thing to hone in on, all of the other parts – especially those that conflict with that goal – either need to fall in line or go. Stormbringer did a lot with very little – just Maelstrom Weapon in fact – while Totemic does very little with every single other component of our spec, and it feels like that’s just down to spreading itself far, far too thin.

The spec this creates doesn’t represent either fundamental pillars of how each Enhancement archetype has played in Dragonflight, it only serves to erode it. What it replaces it with isn’t really fun or engaging compared to what’s lost in the process either. It makes creating a cohesive build for your character too difficult due to the amount of directly opposing friction, it doesn’t feel like the spec you currently know, and it actively gets in the way of previously intuitive decisions. Either some redesigns need to happen to enable it, or you make that feeling go away by nerfing Surging Totem to irrelevance. Unfortunately, then there’s nothing of substance left on the tree because the only successes are linked to the damage it does, taking us back to square one.

I think ultimately, while Totemic was successful in design for Restoration, the execution for Enhancement does not map on one to one. It needed a lot more time in the oven to find a way to make this fit without overriding core gameplay and theme goals, and unfortunately what we got fell into that trap immediately. I don’t think changing everything entirely is helpful considering it’s successful for one, but it definitely requires more effort here than trying to force something where it doesn’t fit. I understand that designing around Enhancement’s rather esoteric gameplay loops is very difficult (doubly so when trying to map onto a healer), but in this case, the tree is actively pushing against what makes the spec work, and I’d rather not have hero trees at all than have that happen.

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