That title might sound extreme, but hear me out.
Revenant’s totem gets a lot of hate in the community because it’s often used for griefing, but lately, I feel like griefing is the only thing it’s good for. The risks to using it far outweigh the benefits. It’s only useful when your team is better than the enemy team, and in those cases, you don’t even need to use the totem at all, since if you’re better you can beat them in a normal fight. If the teams are equally skilled, or the team you push is slightly better, it offers no advantage whatsoever, and only prolongs the fight which invites more third parties. On top of this, the totem is easily countered, and there are many risks to using it.
Counters:
Runaway. If you get pushed by a Rev totem team, literally all you need to do to counter it is back up. Rev totem teams generally push pretty recklessly, since if they take too much damage they’ll just teleport back, so if you back up, either the totem timer will run out and they’ll be stuck in a bad position because they pushed too hard, or they’ll be forced to stop pushing and take up a different position.
Deal as much damage as you take. If you deal as much damage as you take, you’ll be able to pop a battery and by the time the totem team gets back, you’ll have more health than they do, since you’ll both be at full shields, but they’ll be missing 50 health.
Have a lifeline. No matter where you place your totem, if you don’t completely destroy the enemy team when you totem push and they have a lifeline, they’ll be back up to full health by the time you get back to them. If it takes more than 5 seconds to get back to the team, the lifeline time will have enough time to pop shield batteries and use lifeline’s drone, which will probably get their team up to full health. Even if you down someone during the totem push, the lifeline can have them back up by the time you get back and have the other teammate at full health by the time you get back, and if she has a gold bag, the advantage you gained by downing someone completely disappears.
Use the enemy totem. If you place your totem too close to the enemy, or if the enemy team has an octane/wraith/pathfinder, they can go over/around your push to get behind you and use your totem against you. If they do that, you immediately lose any advantage the totem might have given you, since the enemy team has it too, and actually it’s worse for you, because now if you get sent back, the enemy team will be waiting for you on the totem and you’ll get fully downed.
Risks:
The enemy team could send you all back immediately without you doing much damage to them, and now you’ve just wasted time and an ultimate and lost more health than the enemy. The gunfire and wasted time also invited third parties, which could put you in an even worse position
A third party could show up and camp on your totem to kill you when you get sent back, and you wouldn’t know about it until it was too late.
A third party could show up at the fight, and then take all the kills that you did the damage for after sending you back. Now you’re missing 50 health and another full health team just stole all your kills and all the loot.
You could get really close to killing someone only to get sent back, giving them time to pop a battery, when if you hadn’t been in the totem, you would have killed them immediately, and not prolonged the fight or given them a chance to heal.
The totem is only useful in 4 circumstances:
You are better than the enemy team, so you can deal a lot of damage to them and maybe even down a player or two before being sent back, and then you can return to finish them off and end the fight without losing much health, though in this scenario, you could have also beaten them without the totem and not used as much time
The enemy team is way better than you, and you now know it’s not safe to push them, though if this is the case, they’ll probably push you immediately after and you’ll end up needing to fight them anyways
You are on top of a cliff or a similarly tall position and your enemy is below you. This is really the only time that it’s actually useful because the enemy team won’t have time to heal up if they send you back
Your goal is to do a bunch of damage to one team while there are other teams around to make them lose a fight that they might have won out of spite
Your teammate’s banner is being sat on by enemies and you need to get in and grab it without dying
If you don’t have very good positioning on the enemy, you need to destroy the enemy’s shields and do more than 50 damage to them on flesh before getting sent back or down at least 1 player, or else they’ll just use a shield battery before you return and then they’ll have more health than you for the second push. And if you do manage to do this, that means that you just traded over 150 damage (in a lot of cases) for 100, which means that you are probably 1.5x as good as the enemy team and you didn’t need the totem in the first place.
The totem also makes 3rd partying worse, because it gives teams the confidence to push into a fight and make the whole fight more chaotic, dealing damage to players and getting sent back without getting kills. Most rev totem 3rd parties just end up griefing one team and don’t give the Rev team any kills. This is grieving, and it’s why everyone hates the Revenant ultimate, even though I would argue that it’s the worst ult in the game.
In most cases, the totem is completely useless, and actually provides more disadvantages than advantages to the team using it. When two equally skilled teams fight, the totem is probably more of a detriment than a help. I have no idea how to fix this, but this ultimate desperately needs a rework.
