I’ve been leveling and enjoying playing a shaman, and now that Storm Totem is maxed at level 35, he is crushing much of everything and stuff in Veteran a few levels above my own pose no threat whatsoever.
What I don’t understand is what happens when I hit Ultimate or higher content in general with magic skills that deal flat base damage such as these. Unlike weapon % damage skills, which deal more when I get better gear, Storm Totem and Wind Devil and Storm Box, like most Devotion proc skills I have or plan on getting, only do more damage when I get better +% bonuses on gear - but those have diminishing returns. At level 40 I already have +500% lightning or so with all buffs on. Do I need to look for something specific to keep skills I have already maxed like these viable once the content gets much harder?
Much of the gear you’ll find has % bonuses to one or more damage types. These bonuses multiply the flat damage that a skill or weapon deals. I would think that, ideally, you want as much of both as you can manage without sacrificing your defenses.
2000% lightning damage doesn’t do anyone much good if they only have 10 flat lightning damage to multiply.
To answer your question at the most basic level, the way you handle elite and ultimate is to stack % increases to your damage type and grab flat damage where you can to benefit from the % damage.
- keep in mind that I’m no build or mechanics expert. We have several around here and any one of them could likely give you better, or more complete, info than I
For Storm totem specifically - but also non-weapon damage skills in general - a big part of your end game scaling comes from overcapping the skill. As an example while getting 26/16 in Cadence might be nice you can comfortably play Cadence with less points as long as you are getting high flat physical damage elsewhere but with Storm Totem the only way to get higher base flat damage is extra skillpoints.
If you check how skills scale into the ultimate levels in Grimtools you’ll notice that skills tend to fall into one of three categories in general (for overcap)
Poor Returns: Generally completely passive buff skills. Each point overcap gives less than the points undercap.
Medium Returns: Many %weapon damage skills and resist reduction skills would fall here. Returns tend to be less per point overcap than you’d get for the points undercap but still worth investing in. I suspect the lesser scaling is done to keep weapon damage skills from scaling silly high (sense medium/large amounts weapon damage already scales well with gear esp. weapons) and prevent us from shredding an inordinate amount of enemy resistances.
High Returns: Generally your skills with little to no %weapon damage component. The 10 points above cap will frequently give as much if not more damage than the 12 to 16 points that preceded them. This is because you cant scale these skills with flat damage on armor and/or high end weapons so they need the extra scaling to make up the difference.
TL: DR
Yes, you need to get +storm totem, all the way to 26/16 if possible, to keep your DPS up through ultimate. Also the MIs that increase the max number of storm totems/reduce the cooldown…although the offhand MI was nerfed (excessively IMO, sense there is no mainhand counterpart to also reduce the cooldown) so it isn’t feasible to maintain more than 4 storm totems now. Even with the old -3 sec offhand it was 4 50%/ 5 50%.