Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Right now Magma totem has no threat, which means it can be dropped in a raid with tons of tanked mobs and even though it will be doing some serious dps (especially for an Elemental Shaman) there are no concerns with pulling aggro off the tank. If it was changed so that the damage was applied as if the Shaman's (which would also give us the tag for looting purposes) then we would also get the threat which would not be such a great tradeoff in my opinion.

How can you say that Magma Totem is useless in a raid anyway? Our Elemental shaman runs in and drops his on AE packs and his dps for those packs is top 3 on almost all those pulls. Even Resto Shaman should be dropping their Magma totem for AE packs. It's a lot of damage with no threat so they could basically stand in the middle of the pack and heal without worries about aggro if the mobs are tanked properly. There is no way that Flametongue or ToW is giving the other casters enough spellpower to offset the damage the magma totem provides on an AE pack. 3 mobs or less then Flametongue and ToW is the right call but for more then that run in and drop Magma.

I've had my totem easily pull off 3000+ DPS during AoE packs and sarth 3drakes after the first drake dies (and 13000 dps in SM cath, there seems to be no cap on the aoe damage). You lose 136 spell power, with flametongue totem up, and 3% crit on whatever you're aoeing, but I'm sure that adding what is practically another member to the raid compensates for that. Well... atleast it does in our raids, we don't have the greatest caster DPS if you know what I mean.

There is no cap (unless it was added after I did my testing on the PTR).

I pulled everything in RFC (the low level instance in Org) and then dropped the Totem. First Tick was over 75k.

I am having trouble defining raid-wide and group-wide totems. From what I have seen there have not been many changes, but don't like relying on what the Blizzard tooltip says simply because they all say "party" except for Totem of Wrath. If anyone could share your insite I would greatly appreciate it. I have searched multiple forums for an hour now and can't find anything.

Post #45 in this thread has a complete breakdown.

The problem with Magma Totem in raids isn't its damage, which is great, it's that you have to:

1. Run into melee or near-melee range

and

2. If it hits anything first (such as an add that spawns a split second before one of its ticks), that thing will aggro it and kill it, so you have to keep throwing a new one down

Thank you

I think we're in agreement: if the totem gets into combat with something before you do, that something will kill the totem

So if you body pull a bunch of mobs to the totem, the totem will be OK

If a mob sees the totem before it sees you, though, the mob will kill the totem

You might be able to answer a question that my guild is coming up with. On Sarth, will totems spawn lava adds, or no? We seem to be getting a lot of lava ads when Flame Wall comes through. Would anyone happen to know?

First of all, this is more a question for the Sarth thread, second of all, lava adds don't spawn because the Lava Strikes (the fireballs from the sky) hit people, they just spawn randomly after a Lava Strike hits the ground. The wall has nothing to do with spawning them at all.

The only thing the wall does is enrages them.

It's easy enough to test what I'm saying

Just drop a magma totem in the middle of a bunch of yellow gorillas

The gorillas will kill the totem

When you drop the totem it becomes hostile to the yellow gorillas because it's pulse does damage to them thus putting them on their threat table the same as if they were just standing somewhere and something with a 20 yard aggro radius happened to get within 20 yards of it without having any aggro on anything else. You were not hostile to the gorillas since they are yellow, thus when you dropped it it became the only thing on their aggro table so it gets killed. Which fits perfectly with "the totem's only aggro generation is it's very existence".

The only time the totem's damage will seem to generate threat is if it hits a target that is so much lower in levels then you that it's body pull threat radius is smaller then the pulse of the totem. Because then the damage has put the totem on the thing's threat table, the same as if the totem had body-pulled the thing to it.

Yes, if something spawns within aggro radius and happens to be closer to totem then to anything else, then the totem will be killed. If that is really the point you have been arguing, it was already understood as part of the mechanic, so could we please stop with this line of discussion.

This is not the behavior I have observed in game. If you walk into a pack of hostile mobs, and without doing anything to them you drop the totem, it will pull aggro after 1 or 2 pulses. It seems like it still generates aggro based on the damage it does, it just doesn't have an aggro pulse like it use to is all.

I just, as in literally 1 second ago, flew down from Dalaran and body pulled a worg thing. No buffs active at all, no lightning shield, no thorns, nothing that could generate aggro. Then I dropped 2 magma totems with a fire nova chaser (he had 57 hps left after the magmas) and killed him without him so much as looking at any of the totems.

Just killed another one except I started with a Fire Nova and then moved on to the Magmas and again didn't look at the totems. Also couldn't loot either at the end but that part is working as intended according to Blizzard anyway.

I guess it happend just because some of mobs were out of your aggro radius. You still need to be sure that mob is attacking you before putting totem, even now.

The really boring thing is that mob killed by totem doesn't count in quests, so you also still need to hit each mob personally if you want to complete quest. However now you need only 1 hit, not override totems' agro as before.

How it ticks before?
Are totems still pet-macros destructable?

Yes.