I’m testing out a Shaman totem build with Thorn/Storm totem + Tempest Strike for the Gladiator of Lagon node. In theory, this node should essentially prove ~ 80 - 160 flat spell damage to totems (with 10 - 20 stacks) with the 50 intelligence requirement node, Scheme of the Architect. I noticed that my totem’s damage felt off though, so I headed over to the arena to do some testing, and noticed something about the Gladiator of Lagon buff that I hadn’t noticed before when testing Storm Crows Beastmaster.
The shared buff from Gladiator of Lagon isn’t actually shared. It’s not snapshotted or transferred over when summoning totems. Your totems only gain the buff after they are summoned and you gain Gladiator of Lagon. If you have 15 stacks of Gladiator of Lagon, and you summon a Storm Totem, it gains no stacks from the 15 you currently have. It only gains stacks when you gain stacks.
I expect this goes relatively unnoticed with Storm Crows, since they are always summoned, and should theoretically always have/gain the same stacks as you.
Problem with totem builds though, is that you are recasting your totems through every single mob pack that you pull. So on totem summon, they hit like wet noodles. Once you ramp to 12+ Gladiator of Lagon stacks, they start to smack. This takes ~6 seconds to setup on EVERY single mob pack (2 seconds for setup, 4 seconds for 12 Gladiator of Lagon stacks). You cast your totems in position and then move in to attack with Tempest Strike, while gaining no benefit of your current/previous Gladiator of Lagon stacks.
I’m not sure if this is intended behavior or not, but this causes the build I was testing to essentially be unusable. It just requires too much ramp time per pack to even be close to efficient for farming anything. Not to mention, it’s essentially a melee build, which has the obvious downsides of being within melee range of your enemies.
Let me know what you guys think and if you can recreate this behavior if you’d like to test.