Totem Management

Now that my shaman has been level 80 for a while, I feel I can talk about the way I manage totems. I’m not entirely sure of the details with the 3.2 totem bar, but I imagine it’s still important to have quick access for totem switches.

First off, I’m going to introduce OPie. This is an incredibly powerful addon that allows you to bind keys to a “ring”, which will essentially pop up a radial menu when pressed. You can then move your mouse to the appropriate “slice” of the screen and let go of the button to act upon whatever was in that slot. It’s also worth mentioning that you can move the mouse cursor to the correct “slice” and then tap the bind to get the corresponding effect. It’s very similar to usual key binds, but with a little bit of extra work.

Playing a shaman without OPie and trying to bind all of your totems is not something I want to think about — I switched to using the addon at about level 16 and haven’t looked back since. However, you’ll still need to organise totems for easy access within OPie. Whilst leveling my shaman, I made the big mistake of creating binds for each element of totem. It took me a long time to select the correct totems, and I never really got used to it.

The trick is to really break them up according to the way you work. The setup that I found to make sense involved using two major rings and popping a maximum of four totems in each. 1-2 of these totems would be of a certain element, while the other 1-2 would be of one other element. These two rings comprise of the totems I use the most by far, and so I rarely have a use for other totems. Of course, the others still need binding and sorting out.

There’s another ring for resistance totems, a ring for cooldowns (fire/water elementals, mana tide), quick access (cleansing, tremor, earthbind, stoneclaw, grounding) and miscellaneous (magma, searing, fire nova).

Once all rings are sorted out, you’ll want some sort of timer addon so you can see when a totem is destroyed or about to expire. There are a couple of these around with varying features, so I’ll leave you to WoWInterface’s Shaman addons section. I use oUF_TotemBar, plugged into my oUF setup.

I don’t foresee me removing all of these rings and switching to the totem bar in 3.2. As I understand it, the totem bar is there for quick access to mostly a full set of totems. Sure, it’s definitely going to be nice to pop them all down within one GCD, but it’s also not something that you can change around on the fly. Totem binds are just not going to disappear.

If you’re having trouble with your totems, give this setup a try. It’ll take some getting used to, but I can certainly recommend it!