I’m working on a shaman build and I was curious about damage scaling on the Blizzard talent for the Storm Totem skill. The talent states “A Blizzard now forms around Storm Totem; enemies caught in the blizzard take cold damage over time and have a 25% chance to be chilled each second.” Holding alt reveals scaling tags “Cold” and “Spell” for Blizzard.
Due to the wording “A Blizzard now forms…” I’m having a hard time telling if the Blizzard itself will scale off my own spell/cold damage, or if it requires minion spell/cold damage to get any benefit. If the totem itself casts the ability, I would have expected something along the lines of “Storm Totem now also casts a Blizzard…” in the talent description. This leads me to believe (based on the description alone) that the Blizzard would scale off regular spell/cold damage. However, it seems unlikely that a talent for a totem skill would add an ability that didn’t scale off minion/totem damage.
Does anyone have a concrete answer for this? I tried testing it in-game, but unfortunately the Blizzard doesn’t trigger on the test dummy and I can’t clearly distinguish the Blizzard damage from other sources when testing out in the wild. The best result I can find is that regular spell/cold damage modifiers affect the Blizzard tooltip DPS, but I’ve found tooltip DPS to be unreliable for other skills so I’d like confirmation.
Because it’s a spell cast by a minion it’s affected by minion stats. So you would need something like ‘minion spell’ or ‘minion cold’ to affect this cast.
Just a heads up though, totem builds are really weak end game. I’m doing the same thing as well at the moment levelling up a Shaman and unfortunately, totems have poor damage scaling.
Is there a certain spot where you can tell that it’s the totem that’s casting it, though? Or is it just a rule that any spells in a minion tree will be cast by the minion itself? That’s where my main source of confusion is coming from - there’s no explicit line stating that the totem casts the ability even in the image you linked; just a nebulous “A Blizzard now forms around Storm Totem” line. Generally ARPGs use very explicit, carefully selected wording so I wasn’t sure if this was an intentional choice.
Also, it’s not a totem build. I’m considering storm totem for some of the utility it gets in the tree, and blizzard scaling off non-minion damage would just be a happy bonus.
Yeah, the way it’s written could be better. It is the totem casting it though as minion stats affect it. You can try story campaign bosses to test out how the damage scales depending on your stats VS minion stats.
