Totem Shaman Build...Now more Shamantastic!

Hey all,

Wanted to share a totem build I’ve been running and having success with so far. It’s obviously going to be a work in progress as I haven’t hit empowered monoliths yet, but it’s a fun build nonetheless.

NO UNIQUES REQUIRED TO PLAY BUILD!
Leveling Friendly

This is currently what I am running.

For clearing, you really only need to drop storm totem and buff it up with Eterra’s Blessing. Drop thorn totem as needed for more aoe or rare monster clears. For bosses, drop thorn totem, storm totem, frenzy and buff up frenzy with Eterra’s for increased attack speed to your other totems. You can buff up your other totems as you feel is needed.

Some interesting interactions…
With the way Eterra’s is built, you will be dropping 2 healing totems if you are at >85% hp. If you use Eterra’s on a totem, the healing totem will prefer to heal the totem until it goes away then heal you. All buffs granted from totems apply to healing totems and they synergize extremely well with this build. With all the healing generated, it is very hard to die unless you get the unfortunate 1 shot. I was able to tank Lagon’s claw attack without taking much damage, if any. His breath attack is still deadly if you follow it and you will be dropped down to less than 25% hp with his big AOE in the center.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be most helpful! Enjoy!

Build Plan/Guide

You want any/all adaptive spell dmg to totems you can find, and primalist and shaman trees provide this. Getting it on equipment is a bit more difficult/hard to find so use it when you are sure you are going for an upgrade and not wasting shards.

Primalist:
Natural Attunement
8/8

Gift of the Wilderness
2/6

Wisdom of the Wild
6/6

Gift of the Wilderness
4/6 - Finish filling it out

Elder Branch
5/5 - Adaptive Spell dmg. You can play around with this using Tempest Maw axe as it releases Storm Sprites that receive buffs via minion dmg increase. They also annihilate packs of mobs stupid fast.
Going dual wield is possible if you want to squeeze out more dps instead of defense.

Hunter’s Restoration
5/5 - Health. Plain and Simple.

Rotbane
1/5 - Totems won’t melt to poison and can be used as distractions for those mobs.

Ursine Strength
8/8

Boar Heart
5/5

Procine Constitution
5/5

2/2 points to place wherever
This grants us some more much needed defense via damage reduction and health regen. We move onto the shaman tree from here.

Shamanic Infusion
8/8

Silent Protector
2/8 (this can be increased/decreased as you like)

Tempest Form can be used here if you are having mana problems, but you really shouldn’t be as all your costs are very low.

Fate Carver
8/8

Ancestral Speed
5/5

Earthen Supremacy
?/8 As many as needed/you can spare.

Protective Circle
?/8 Up to you. You’ll have 7 totems at max always up so plan from there. Healing totems from Eterra’s Blessing apply to this as well and are not accounted for in the aforementioned 7 totems.

Rune of Awe

8/8 - Bread and Butter. Adaptive spell dmg.

Elemental Shrines

8/8 - Mana regen so you don’t need a mana regen skill and can focus only on dmg. More dps, more healing, etc.

Ironbark

1/8 - Totem stun immunity

This is just a basic outline of what you need. From there, I would max out “The Chase” in the BM tree for attack/cast speed for minions.

Playstyle

I’ll record a few videos and upload them here once I figure out how.

Until then…

I play with totems as an offensive weapon in that I will drop them into packs of mobs ahead of me to grab aggro. Storm Totem does wonders for this. Minions inherently have 50% dmg reduction, and with how we are building our totems they are going to be immune to poison and stuns. Drop a ST, cast EB on it for a healing totem to proc and pop up continuously healing it and giving it a HOT via EB. Frenzy totem if needed. Packs should be dead at this point. My totems never die quite honestly. Very handy.

Another use is dropping Frenzy Totem to grant haste via Symbol of Haste in the FT tree. Can also be done with ST via Ancestral Speed node we have put points in via Shaman tree. Fury Leap can be used to clear massive distances if used/positioned right. Yes, it is slow and plodding compared to zoom zoom Rogue or Sentinel (VK), but you can add more movement speed if you don’t like that, but will sacrifice defenses.

Another use is defensively. Drop ST to slow packs via Blizzard or, my personal favorite, proccing Thorn Totems via Tempest Strike for 150 healing each time they are summoned due to the “on death” effect of the Death Rattle ammy. You basically bunker yourself in with TT and cast EB a few times on yourself to proc Healing Totems and HOTs to give yourself massive over heal for about 6 seconds.

Use/abuse EB as much as you can to find fun interactions. Since it’s instant cast, you can cast it on all 7 of your main totems in about 3s to buff them all up and get a healing totem for each.

Updates

9/14/21

I’ve updated the build planner.

Been running lvl 90 monos without any trouble at all. Honestly, you can drop frenzy totem for your haste and storm totem to clear when needed as it will wipe out mobs. Use leap to get around after the haste effects wear off.

Keep in mind, this build is very fluid and am using what I like/enjoy. You can certainly add more moves speed to make it more zoom zoom. Also, please play with your minion attack speed and added damage. I am finding that more attack speed results in more dps rather than adding on %increased damage right now, but can’t get calculations to show my gut feeling to be correct.

Uniques Required

None.

Nice to have
Death Rattle

If going a more cold variant route:
Frozen Eye of Formosus

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Hi,
ty for totem build. I loved playing totem build in poe.
Is it viable to play from leveling ? I am new in LE.

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My last shaman totem build was mainly DOT based. Storm totem stacked frost bite very fast and killed stuff ,mainly bosses or hard rares, quickly. Thorns totem was fully bleed and did the trick for trash mobs.

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Can you share a build Plan for this?

Thank you for sharing!
I played PoE BECAUSE there were totembuilds there, now I’ll try it in LE and use your build as a template to learn!
Thank you and good luck with it!

I only did mid level endgame and there is a lot of potential when adding more ailment chance since your totems have fast cast speed. You can squeeze way more dps depending how much gear or shards you have.
Good luck

1 Like

Looks interesting! Thanks for Sharing!

Hey all,

Thanks for the kind words and I’ll update my post as I thought it was lost to the void.

This is how I am currently specced.

Hello and welcome to the game!

Yes it is viable. Your main interactions are Tempest Strike dropping Thorn Totems and therefore buffing your Thorn Totems dmg without worrying about the added mana cost. Once you get storm totem, rush for the blizzard effect and you’re golden. After that, it’s building into your defenses and going beastmaster for the 20 points to get you frenzy totem, then going back to shaman and filling out the tree. You really want the 1 point in primalist to make your totems invuln to poison and the 1 in shaman later on to make them stun immune.

The only unique I would recommend is Death Rattle ammy since it buffs your minions dps considerably and gives you a 150 heal everytime you drop new totems with Tempest Strike.

Build Plan:

You want any/all adaptive spell dmg to totems you can find, and primalist and shaman trees provide this.

Primalist:
Fill out the Natural Attunement line. We are stacking attunement where possible as this increases our mana efficiency with Eterra’s Blessing, provides more healing with EB, and also increases dmg across the board for our totems. Oh, and it provides increased frenzy effect to minions per point of attunement (your totems).

You can add or subtract points in Primalist from there; however, I build the way I did for more HP and HP for my totems so they never die. From here, we’ll fill out 20 points into the BM tree.

Ursine Strength
8/8

Boar Heart
5/5

Procine Constitution
5/5

2/2 points to place wherever
This grants us some more much needed defense via damage reduction and health regen. We move onto the shaman tree from here.

Shamanic Infusion
8/8

Silent Protector
2/8 (this can be increased/decreased as you like)

Tempest Form can be used here if you are having mana problems, but you really shouldn’t be as all your costs are very low.

Fate Carver
8/8

Ancestral Speed
5/5

Earthen Supremacy
?/8 As many as needed/you can spare.

Protective Circle
?/8 Up to you. You’ll have 7 totems at max always up so plan from there. Healing totems from Eterra’s Blessing apply to this as well and are not accounted for in the aforementioned 7 totems.

Rune of Awe

8/8 - Bread and Butter. Adaptive spell dmg.

Elemental Shrines

8/8 - Mana regen so you don’t need a mana regen skill and can focus only on dmg. More dps, more healing, etc.

Ironbark

1/8 - Totem stun immunity

This is just a basic outline of what you need. From there, I would max out “The Chase” in the BM tree for attack/cast speed for minions.

Could I ask for making leveling lastepoch planner after 10 levels for example ? ( lvl 10 , 20, 30 , … )
<3

Take a look at the first post I updated. The skills listed in each tree essentially correspond to the level you will be at around that time. Also, depending on fun and skill level, once you get your totems set up you can really put points how you like as long as you get the core nodes =D

Yea already leveling :slight_smile: its cool … ty.
Another question - do you have item filter ? :slight_smile:

Hello!

Interesting, I just started out a totem shaman a few days ago and found this thread. Realized we’ve built them very similarly.

One thing I’m a little interested in is the gear choices. For helmet/body armour I feel there are a few attractive offensive options;
+Thorn totem and dmg for totems
+Storm totem and dmg for totems
+totem adaptive spell dmg
+totem cast speed
+totem increased crit chance
+totem dmg

I’m currently running
On helm: +thorn totem and totem adaptive spell dmg
On armor: attunement and increased totem crit chance

I’m not really sure what the optimal choices would be tho, but maybe;

+storm totem and totem adaptive spell dmg on helmet
+totem cast//totem adaptive spell dmg and totem crit chance on armor

I would think totem crit chance would be good because we get quite a lot of crit multiplier “for free” from turquoise rings and death rattle, but it feels like it’s a bit underutilized unless you try to get some crit chance in.

+thorn totem and +storm totem is also a bit interesting. I think both of them open up interesting options.

And between totem adaptive spell dmg vs totem cast speed I’m not really sure. I don’t feel there is any easy way to test these things since we have no dps tooltip for the totem skills :confused:

You have any ideas on what are the best prefixes for helm/armor that you should aim for in this build?

Isn’t this item a good addition to your build?

So, about totem damage and why I use minion damage affixes for the most part.

  1. Minion damage affixes apply across the board to any and all minions including totems
  2. Blizzard damage from the Blizzard node in the Storm Totem tree only benefits to minion damage and not from totem damage. Also by gaining that node we convert all shock chance to chill chance. Totem damage would only apply to the lightning strikes around the totem, but if you try to add shock chance it would get converted to chill chance.

You are correct there are some optimizations to be made by adding attunement to my body armor and dropping minion health. There is a sweet spot where totems will never die with the added HP and natural 50% damage reduction they have.

A +2/+3 thorn totem or storm totem helm would really be better, I just shattered mine at T4 and haven’t seen an exalted one of those drop yet. I am adding a lot of spell physical damage so I went with thorn totem, but you can easily change that around depending on your playstyle.

Armor would have to be Shamanic Garb ilvl64. Increased minion damage. Others would be viable depending on your needs if you already have enough damage.

Helm is going to be Darkwolf Pelts. Increased minion physical for that thorn totem damage. I am kinda iffy on that tho, but the other prefixes just aren’t all that beneficial.

Yes and no.

Blizzard changes storm totem damage to cold and all shock to chill. If you didn’t go the Blizzard route, then this would be a great addition.

I do but it is one of the first ones I came across and started modifying. I would take a filter that you already use and switch it up to match stats you are looking for on this build.

Blizzard is not a conversion node. It only adds some cold damage. So the Storm totem still does lots of Lightning damage too. And it doesn’t change shock to chill. Again - it is not a conversion. Base lightning damage of Storm Totem is 9. And then Blizzard adds 5 cold base damage.

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Hi I am very interested in your build. Do u have a guide on leveling to your build? Please help

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