Holy Flame Totem

Well, it is creating a flame, arguably not shooting anything as the flame is not going anywhere.

€: I'm cool with the support gems mentioned working with it, I just find it unintuitive.

It's not just "creating" the flame, it's shooting it in a direction, otherwise the totem would just profoundly burn.
What's the difference of that and a fireball?
And isn't spark just creating an electric charge?

If some Sci-fi weapon shoots chrages of plasma, it's more or less the same and would still be called a projectile; After all the totem doesn't shoot a stream of flame, just 12.5 projectiles a second.

Next question: Has anybody figured out a way to use this to reliably chill opponents via added cold damage support? Right above the life cluster that you would (presumably) use to link Templar to the outside of the skill tree to reach the +1 totem cluster, is a chill duration cluster (2x +15% and 1x +22%) while added cold damage adds +44% at level 20, for a total of +96%.

Base chill duration is 138ms / 1% max life dealt as cold damage. This increases base duration to 270ms / 1%, and temporal chains extends that even further to 405ms / 1%. This would mean foes need to take a minimum of 0.74% of their max life as cold damage to exceed the 300ms minimum for chill to take effect.

Two problems though... First, I can't really see the little bit of damage granted by added cold being able to reach even that after the initial 10% damage effectiveness, and then the 50% less damage from gmp. Second, would it even be necessary after temporal chains? I've always wanted to combine the two to effectively freeze enemies, they'd be moving and attacking so slowly.. But if the cold portion were dealing 0.74% per projectile, they'd be taking 46% of their max life per second as cold damage, and likely three times that ad fire (dead).

Guess I just answered my own question. XD Now. Normally I'd delete my post at this point, but I'll leave it to show my extrapolations and conclusion: Flame Totem + Added Cold Damage = Useless, for status ailment purposes, considering TC's 50% more duration is almost necessary for any status ailment to stick after all the damage reductions per projectile, and the two effects are too redundant for such a short duration of effect. (Edit: meanwhile the base duration for shock is much higher, making it easier to proc, and also probably likely required to provide more damage to bring the cold damage high enough to actually chill... But again, they'd likely already be dead).

Edit 2: I will follow up with another question instead: unlike critical strikes, each projectile has an individual chance to proc status ailments (20% chance to shock from passives), and not each cast.. Correct? So if I were running a totem with GMP, it would cast 62.5 projectiles per second; is that 62.5 individual chances to proc the 20%? Or 12.5 chances to proc the 20% five times?

Look above in this thread.^^

Vulnerability adds a 10% chance to be stunned, apparently.
With 12.5 projectiles per second, or 37.5 with lmp, a close target should be permanently stunned.

So, does that mean each projectile has a separate chance to proc stun, shock, etc...? This is another case of trying to remember too many rules, while trying on too many different builds at once, with limited time available to play. Something I feel like I should know by now, but just don't remember >.>

Edit: also, just wanted to point out. If you want more damage per projectile, LMP is the way to go. If you want more dps, GMP takes the cake.

100% of projectile modifiers * "Less" modifier from Multi * Number of projectiles
1 * 0.7 * 3 = 2.1 (using LMP)
1 * 0.5 * 5 = 2.5 (using GMP)

Well, GMP just runs to risk of not hitting the target with all of them.

So.. I finally started using flame totem. I've been leveling up a Templar, but I've only had 2-4 hours a week and progress was slow.. So I decided to respec one of my witches with this latest patch. And I immediately regretted it. Within the ten minutes I played, I spent about half the time regenerating mana for its extreme mana cost. That's okay, though, I can work around that. What I can't work around is the fact that more than (guessing here) 50% of the time, I cast the totem, it either sputters or does nothing, takes a few hits, then dies.

I don't think it's an issue with the totem being stunned or anything, a few of the times I cast it I still had aggro, and the totem didn't take any damage, and went away when the timer ran out on it. It just sat there for 20ish seconds with plenty of enemies within range, and simply failed to acquire a target. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed because I was getting excited to test this skill out for the past two weeks... And right now I feel like I would have been better of speccing as a faster cast / crit spark witch and testing the new fork gem.

Edit: Tested again outdoors, didn't have the same problem as I did before.

@CanHasPants

I feel you dude, I was dissapointed too.
I'm currently using 'Freezing Pulse + LMP + Cold to Fire + Spell Totem'
instead of 'Flame Totem + LMP + Added Lightning' and having a blast.

Damage is great, mana cost is much lower, once I get an 5 slot item
I will add + Lightning into the mix - there ya go 'elemetal totem'.
Combine it with elemental weakness curse = profit.

Totems are often bugged indoors - they ignore enemies close
to the wall. (As I noticed.)

i have that with player projectile based casting. couldn't cast at a necro even though my mouse was directly on it. although at same time it couldn't move.

I was recently told on global that flame totem doesn't work with Fork or Chain. Can anyone confirm/deny this?