I'm sad the Shaman doesn't even seem to be on EHG radar

Primalist
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Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are both incredible authors.

I’ve always seen DND druids being the shape-shifting, speak with animals, binding with vines, etc. Fitting the plant and animal shapeshifter esthetic. EHG seems to agree given they have three shifter forms, spriggan companions, and entangling roots.

Shaman, again, doesn’t really have a theme it seems. The skills (Tornado, Earthquake, Avalanche, Storm Totem) scream “natural disasters!” but the passives (both innate and from the tree) are “use Totems!”, but even though we have lots of “convert to totem” nodes in Primalist skills (like Tempest Strike, Upheaval, Warcry, etc). Not a single Shaman skill becomes a Totem. So none of the skills inherently fit the class theme of a Totem user. So we fall back on natural disasters, but aside from Storm Bolts, they don’t have any synergy with each other.

Beastmaster has synergies with all of its companions working together and fighting as one, all buffed by Frenzy Totem. (plus the base Primalist synergies like Fury Leap and Warcry triggering your companion skills)

Druid has synergy with shifting from one form to another, Werebear triggering Entangling Roots, and the Spriggan Form’s Healing Totems working with Swarmblade’s Hives, (plus the base Primalist synergies like Thorn Totem and Maelstrom)

Shaman barely has any synergies between its class skills, they all work with Storm Stacks/Bolts in some way, but their best synergies are all with the base Primalist skills. Off the top of my head, there’s “generate stacks with Avalanche and spend them with Earthquake as Tornadoes cast Storm Bolts passively, using Storm Totem to buff Avalanche and for more passive Storm Bolts”, but I can’t think of anything else to tie the Mastery skills together in a cohesive way. I’m sure there are, but when the best Shaman build for Totems is a Spriggan Form build, you’re a pseudo-Druid, and when the best melee Shaman build is a discount Beastmaster, something is wrong with your class identity.

I don’t believe my class fantasy for Shaman is the best one. But I genuinely believe that all of Shaman’s skills need something to tie them together that’s not Storm Bolts.

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Out of curiosity, how so? I don’t seem to remember there being any nodes that give buffs per different companion or anything along those lines. Sure, you’ve got Wolves & their Howl, but isn’t that kinda it?

I’m kinda with DJ on Druids being more thematically linked with nature/weather than the Shaman in my experience so it does feel a bit odd that the devs went with that name. But then they chose a male name for a female class mastery… :person_shrugging:

And, if you’ve got 1 main fire DPS plus 4 other support skills, wouldn’t that make it a fire build? Why do you need every or many skills to be fire dps or fire converted? Where’s the threshold between a build with a main fire dps skill and a fire build?

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Yeah, I agree with the most part that Shamans feel a little off, especially with the lack of synergy choices you pointed out. But I still like it better now, and I think they should move forward, not regress and make it like 0.9 again.

That one’s easy… Instead of channeling storm bolts from the sky, the shaman channels earth spikes coming from the ground. It’s one of my favorite skill conversions in the game, since it actually feels like the skill gets converted into something else, not just recolored and changed elements.

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Not specifically that each summon affects the others in the same way that Druid’s forms interact, but more that having multiple companions synergizes with Beastmaster’s talents. Imagine if Beastmaster had all of its companion based passives but aside from Summon Raptor as its Mastery skill, the only other companions were wolves and the Spriggan from Druid. That’s how Totem Shaman feels to me

Almost forgot to cover this. Idk any build that only runs one offensive skill, usually there’s the main dps skill and then auxillary skills to enhance and support the main dps skill. Like, explosive trap falconer. I ran a build with Cinder Strike to attach traps on melee and to shred fire resistance and add more Fire Throwing Damage with Burning Daggers, acid flask converted to fire to shred fire resistance and stack burning, falcon to throw acid flasks passively and to buff me, and explosive trap itself would create more traps and throw more flasks when they detonated. If only Explosive Trap was fire and Cinder Strike was Physical and Acid Flask was Poison the synergies wouldn’t work. As it stands only Earthquake and Tornado can deal any fire damage and one of those deals pitiful direct damage anyway, so you have Earthquake… now, what skills do you bring to enhance your fire earthquake? There’s no innate fire shred from other skills, but warcry is a good general buff skill. Then you Fury Leap to gap close, Upheaval can buff Earthquake but it gives a buff to physical penetration and area, meaning only the area gets buffed, and that’s about it from a quick glance at solely the skills as there could potentially be some items that could improve synergies for a Firequake build, but at the forefront there’s not really a way to make Firequake a main dps skill that wouldn’t be better as a pure physical or Phys/Lightning spec

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Yeah, that’s totally fair & I agree with you on that.

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When the updated Tempest Strike came out I was hoping there would be a way to proc Maelstrom stacks, but no, we got tornado which can’t convert to cold. So my concept of a melee shaman in the heart of the storm running around blasting thing with cold and lightning is already off to a bad start. And it just go downhill from there. Maelstrom is a giant PIA to keep stacks up (which is a shame because haste is awesome for a melee char). So, that is the short version of my disappointment.

After decades of disappointment, I have learned that I don’t want to fight with devs about the fantasy of classes they put in their games. It just leads to me being very unhappy. So I try to start with what the devs tell me about a class and find something from fantasy that I think I could make work. I thought they were telling me I could be the above, but I couldn’t make it work in a way that was anything but extremely tedious. And fragile.

I think the devs are telling me that the Shaman uses totems and wields the forces of nature. Could be caster or melee. That’s what I think they are telling me, but maybe I’m not hearing them right. Here’s what I’m hearing;

Core
The Shamanic Infusion passive tells me that the Shaman’s core elements are physical, cold and lightning.

It’s my opinion that any skill that a shaman has, if it makes thematic sense, should have a core-conversion. Earthquake, for instance, has some lightning stuff. Cool, it’s a core damage type, and earthquakes definitely do have lightning strikes (in real life).

Cold Tornados should be thing simply because it’s a core damage type (my opinion). Conversion to fire exists within the Tornado skills tree. Cold does not. This implies to me that a drunken dev one night saw fire tornados on TV and convinced everyone else that fire tornados are cool, and that LE should have them. This annoys me.

Totems.
There are four totems (I think). One is unique to the Shaman (storm). One is unique to the Beastmaster (frenzy). One is common to the Primalist origin (thorn). And the health totem is a proc (I think?). Help me out if I’m missing something.

Note: I missed a few via conversion (warcry and upheaval) or proc (tempest strike). Thanks DJ and Scipo.

So based just on that, I’d say the Primalist is the ‘totem’ origin.

But then we get to passives. The shaman passive three has eleven passive nodes that light up when you search the shaman passive tree for ‘totem’, including all three of the of the tier 10 passives. So yeah, seems like EHG thinks the shaman should use a totem.

The Protective Circle node annoys the shit out of me because it scales for each active totem, but it’s a shaman-only passive node. And shaman aren’t great at summoning a lot of totems.

Skills/Melee
The primalist has five melee attacks available without spending any passive points. Two summons; wolves and thorn totem. It has one spell which is only doing damage if you are in melee range. The core of the primalist is screaming melee.

It’s at this point that I gave up. I mean, this shit is all over the place. Beastmaster - summons stuff. Druid - shapeshifter. Shaman - I have no idea.

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You can also convert warcry and upheaval into totems. So 6.

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And the Tempest Strike Totems, technically

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The problem is that totems seem to exist for shaman currently just as “Buff” tools. But none of the totems other then the beastmaster exclusive one(Which didnt used to be exclusive!) actually provide great buffs.

So shamans looking to make use of the big buffs at the end of the tree, or get lots of res, use like thorn totems with a “spined” idol i think its called, that gives a chance on any hit to summon thorn totem that respects its tree. So you can get 5 totems really quick.

As for totems as an archetype, they suck and are a meme. Storm totem is held together by its synergies which pretty much lead you linearly on how to play it and is a “single minion” style of build where its about buffing the big boss minion.

If you try and play a “Zoo” totem build, its a big ole meme because the totems have near 0 overlap.

A shaman can get thorn totems(these suck unless you a spriggan, which locks you out of all other totems outside of some jank storm totem stuff with that one relic) Storm totem, upheaval totems, and tempest totems.

Thorn totems suck unless you are spriggan to cheat mana, otherwise enjoy your 100 mana cost 5 totems :confused:

Tempest totems not only have 3 different damage types, but they also have 3 different shapes/damage avenues. one is a projectile, one is an aoe, and one is a DoT… And removing one of the types of proc, does not let you get more focused totems, instead you just get dead totems that shoot a piddly little ice spike for 0 damage 0 pierce 0 projectiles. Tempest totems are so hard to make use of it its insane. Atleast they are all spells.

Upheaval totems do melee damage, have 0 base damage(like actually, if you dont get flat added melee damage to minions somewhere, they cant do damage) and they also hinge on basically using their jank totem buff mechanic to buff themselves, these actually are pretty good. but work better on beast master who has more of a focus on melee minions and can get the good early totem stuff in shaman.

A long long time ago, before frenzy totem was beast master locked, there was a casual totem build that used 3 thorn totems a frenzy totem a storm totem, a warcry totem, and leap iirc.

its gameplan was plant down totems, buff them up with frenzy and warcry totems and just run around. it worked, and was fine. This build is actually worse then it was all those years ago, because we lost a huge source of frenzy and damage etc in frenzy totem.

like totem builds “work” but they are boring, build themselves, and have very little nuance. And almost all of them are “well im a tree now” so much for the big burly barbarian man carving totems. And the off meta ones are unplayable.

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I would mostly agree with all you’re saying, except that my Shaman that is using thorn+storm+upheaval+warcry totems and gathering storm is one of my strongest ones and the only that can kill Aby (I avoid the meta broken builds).
The only thing he’s missing is more defense, being kinda squishy in the 600c+ range, but I only die every now and then farming around 550c.

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I built a more defensive one that works really well for monos and was farming 1.3k corruption. Could have pushed further but lost motivation. And with a couple of gear swaps Aby was dead in 3 seconds. Definately my strongest character this season.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QJYzDWWA

Agree that other totems could use some love, but I love storm totem and had heaps of fun with it.

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Your build is similar to mine. In fact, I think I started my build when you talked about yours a few months ago.
The main differences I see is that I’m using Arek and not Cleaver and you seem to be focusing on health regen, which I’m not. A few other minor stuff as well. And you gear is more min-maxxed than mine.

To be honest, I’m fine with doing 500c and still being able to kill Aby most of the time. And yeah, that build is quite fun.

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Yeah, I swap to Arek’s for bossing, and a few other gear swaps. But for high corruption I went health regen vessel + ravenous void because the 1 shots were too frequent without them. Damage is still plenty for mono clears and nemesis.

But yeah, efficiently farming lower corruption is more enjoyable and less stressful hah

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Also Swipe’s Claw totems technically.

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This thread made me try and plan a melee Shaman for 1.2 and I just got salty again lol.

The idea was for Gathering Storm, converted to cold, to be my basic attack replacer. I tried to make dumping stacks with Earthquake work, but everything else was Cold damage. Maelstrom and Warcry are both easy to make work. Storm Totem I want to use as the Shaman passives kind of rely on having a totem, but I’d be manually summoning it until I get the Relic that gives a chance on hit to summon one (and even then I’d want to manually summon it at the start or to maintain it if I had bad RNG, which is fine). So now we’re back to Earthquake… it being Physical/Lightning doesn’t jive with the rest of the build being Cold (as even Storm Totem is converted to Cold through Storm Bolts+Blizzard). I could not convert Gathering Storm to Cold and run a Hybrid build by just accepting that the physical side of Earthquake is going to be a detriment, but then I should just drop Cold entirely and just convert Maelstrom to Physical and do a Physical/Lightning build, but that just feels wrong to me (I’m weird, I know). Alternatively, I tried to swap Earthquake with Tempest Strike for Stack Dumping, but fuck me does that skill have 0 identity as anything but a mana generator by shutting off the Tempests…

and at that point 4/5 of my specialized skills are Primalist skills so I might as well make it a Beastmaster or Druid and gain more benefits from something like Werebear or Frenzy Totem

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