What difference between bear and great mother totems?

[Dorok]

Bear totem: Cooldown 3 heal all friends of their most recent attack.
Great Mother Idol: Cooldown 3 heal all friends of their most recent wound.

Lol I wonder what means wounds vs attack.

[Elysion]

They are the same. Basically just depends on what kind of treehugging hippy you wanna be.

[Dorok]

lol thank you, I was looking to get the Eagle or one of those two. The Eagle seems rather good but range of 3 around the shaman is very restrictive.

[Elysion]

Totems arent really that good. Some people consider them almost mandatory because essence loss doesnt effect their cooldown much, but the way i look at it, main character AP is worth a lot more than the other characters AP, because the main character usualy has a decent character build.

SO lets look at the healing ones;

3 turn cooldown of essentially a PBAOE heal spell. Its not bad sure, but consider: its close range PBAOE nature means you need to be standing next to the target if its anyone but you, and thats just asking to get aoed, i never bunch characters up playing on very hard mode because all it takes is one 30 damage aoe crit and you are boned.

SO its a heal spell for yourself. Considering the player is often the main damage output, its only worth healing yourself if you have taken a huge hit:
1. If you are a mage you can just take the mage heal spell, which is useful because it can target other people at range.
2. If you are not a mage, you have a mage on your team, who has a heal spell

The few situations you must absolutly use the PC to heal something with their AP you can just use a med kit, particularaly since having biotech of 4 or whatever is so useful in DF for checks (and i always take it to 2 anyway just to see enemy hitpoints).

The eagle is potentially more useful, but again you are probably only buffing yourself since clumping up is a VERY BAD IDEA I CAN NOT STRESS HOW BAD A BLUNDER IT IS TO STAND NEXT TO OTHER PEOPLE IN COMBAT THIS IS ALL CAPS BECAUSE I AM YELLING IT ITS SO IMPORTANT IT MUST BE SHOUTED. Its a 15% hit bonus, which is nice, but again, thats 1 player AP. If youare a player mage you dont need to hit chance since mages should use aoe spells anyway for 100% hit chance, and if you are not a mage you do the big damage and if you do need more hit chance its better to have your teams mage buff you with his 0 cooldown aim 2 or aim 3 spell.

So basically my advice is dont bother with a totem unless you are going spirit summoning. On paper it looks good for some builds but 6 points is 6 points. An extra body is probably better.

the 0 chance for spirit break one for a summoning build may be interesting. Im not sure how it works. what its duration/cooldown is. If it lets you basically drag a ranged spirit pet around with you for an entire fire safely that would be pretty awesome.

[Dorok]

I think the hit chance for 6 AP seems worth it for many builds that benefit use it for own aiming, the point is you'll quickly lost more AP with lower ToHit. For the healing totems I agree it seems not that great for healing yourself. I don't know, at my first play I played it rather pure Decker but wanted a weapon skill too. So I started with the idea of Decker/Shotgun/BioTech. Then didn't tried the classical totem/haste/basic heal.

[Elysion]

Its certainly worth using for someone actually playing as a shaman, but non-mages can get the +6% eyes and use a smartlink. Thats almost an always-on eagle totem effectively. I play on very hard and i never have to-hit issues with combat characters i build. I wish they would have done totems differently, make them a ground targetable thing that you put down. That way you can have team members like eiger benefit with out baiting an aoe. Though eigers sniper rifle rarely missess if you can position her far back enough, really the person who needs to-hit help is always glory :3

shotgun decker with biotech is classic, it was how i did DMS. Though i really skimped on the decking and invested in no esp. in DF it feels like decking is a little harder in the matrix now so a heavy combat slanted decker is probably a little harder to pull off. All the more reason not to spend points on a totem tough, you could get 3 ESP control or something instead to round that out, as i find esps are more required with some of the timed-decking missions in DF, exploders work great at clearing clumped up things out for a single AP.


As i see it there are two optimal ways to play a character.
1. A full kickass support character whos basically spending all their effort on controlling the situation and making their team mates do the killing for them. - In this case the totem is bad because of how its centered around you.
2. A full combat character. In which case i maintain you do not need a totem to get pretty much 90+ accuracy in most situations. Keep in mind support mage characters that will be tagging along if you arenot one yourself have a 0 cooldown aim buff, and other than hasting someone every few turns, and healing crits, they have nothing better to do than stand there buffing the rest of the team all day.


The situation i see a totem being useful in is if you are trying to do like, a solo playthrough. Such a playthrough is going to require a lot of dancing around, and a lot of ended turns just waiting for abilities to refresh, probably a lot of sitting inside shadow also. So i guess if people view the object of the game as playing it solo then its fine. Ive always viewed the point of min/maxing to be about speed and efficiency, not potential capability, so ill take a full team winning in the fewest rounds over a single person soloing everything.

That all said, it occurs to me that throwing weapons only have two stats they need, strength and throwing. If someone wanted to make a throwing character with out any secondary skills like decking, im sure they would have the points to throw into all sorts of things. Ive not tried throwing but it looks to be the cheapest ranged combat option if its competitive.

Following that further, does essence loss penalize spirit summoning? How about a spirit summoning throwing master cyberzombie?