Shaman thematically, is one of my favorite masteries. It was the first mastery I ever played, my first mastery I got to level 100 on, and ultimately, the first character I ever deleted. I have also brought Shaman back with the latest patch and am having fun with it for the most part, I think 0.8.4 brought some relatively good changes, particularly with Upheaval.
However, for a mastery in which the mastery skill is a totem and 2/3 of the master passive bonuses are totem related, there are a grand total of TWO mastery only passives that offensively augment totems.
Rune of Awe: +2 adaptive minion spell damage per point (including your own)
Eternal Storm: When you kill a frozen enemy (key word being you and not a totem), you randomly refresh the duration, heal said totem, and its damage is permanently increased by 25% per point.
Outside of that, a sizeable chunk of Shaman’s mastery tree is trying to make lightning strike work (creating two different avenues of generating lightning strikes and to buff the damage of them) while the rest are largely defensive/utility/stat modifier passives.
Now, I know I am leaving out two of the most offensively potent passives, Ascendant Circle and Storm Blade. These are fine passives, however, they only benefit the player and the only aspect that totems come into play on those is serving as the scaling component of those passives. Totems do not benefit in any other way outside of just existing to buff you.
The biggest aspect that Shaman fails at compared to his brother passives is that Druid and Beastmaster both expand upon and continue to build their mastery mechanics extremely well.
For Beastmaster, you have the introduction of two new Aspects (Lynx and Viper) along with the continue strengthening of Aspect of the Shark and the ability to possibly add one more companion or augment the one companion even further.
For Druid, this is done more so of the newly introduced Point Bonuses, but it also introduces some very strong buffs such as Primal Shifter as well as additional support for minion use that are heavily used in the various forms. But the point bonuses for Druid’s mastery passives is where that support really shines in terms of continue to strengthen the core mechanics of the mastery (form shifting and unlocking additional modifiers for those forms or minions).
Shaman seriously lacks that same support in terms of offensively strengthening mastery mechanics or unlocking new ways to play with totems. Because of this lack of support/interesting gameplay, there really isn’t a reason to play the Shaman at all for totem builds. In fact, I largely play only Druid or Beastmaster when it comes to totem builds. Why? Because outside of lightning damage, those two masteries currently have better tools (whether that be passives for Druid or Frenzy Totem access with Beastmaster) available to make effective totem builds. And what’s worst in my eyes, you are not missing out on anything special if you do opt for Druid or Beastmaster instead for their mastery passives.
