Searing totem is a major problem for both shaman DPS specs and Im honestly wondering when the fix is coming. I will get into a couple of specifics for elemental since that is what Im most familiar with, but from what Ive read it seems enhancement needs it fixed as well.

1. The 20 yard range simply is not working. Blizz made nearly all damaging abilities 35-40 yards but leaves this one at 20. This causes several problems. One it makes elemental a 20 yard caster, there is no point in having 40 yard spells when you must be 20 yards away to deal the most damage. Searing isnt some trivial amount of DPS that can just be written off so shaman must deal with this broken mechanic. It makes spacing on bosses problematic. There always have and always will be bosses that needs the raid to spread out, to move around, to stay X yards apart, whatever. On these types of fights, using searing becomes either impossible or a major pain. Off the top of my head from just ICC hardmodes, using searing on saurfang, deathwhisper, festergut, putricide, blood princes, dreamwalker, and lich king are all challenging and sometimes impossible. I should be having fun playing my spec, not beating my head against the wall to find a place to stand for searing to work.

2. The AI is still broken. There will be times where I drop searing within range of the target and it does nothing. There are times where it will ignore the flame shocked target and hit something else instead. These are both major problems and I can only guess this is why searing is still 20 yards but that is a poor reason to leave it with that range. As bad as having the broken AI is, its even worse having a 20 yard searing totem. I still dont know why searing cant be put on "defensive" so it will only hit targets Im in combat with or just make it auto assist my target.

Blue Poster said:
As I said a few weeks ago, we're still working on the AI of Searing Totem. If we can chill out its latent homicidal tendencies, then we could consider bumping the range. Currently bumping the range would just infuriate your group leader more often.