[2021] Feedback about Tempest Strike (and other similar skills)

Howdyho,

I'm a big fan of build diversity, theorycrafting and just trying out things. In other ARPGs I always liked the playstyle of builds making use of triggered abilities. Enter Tempest Strike.

At first glance I was excited when I first read about it, but that excitement quickly diminished when I realized that it has a fixed attack speed. You still get more damage from attack speed, which is nice, but I don't fully understand the decision to make abilities with fixed attack speeds in the first place...

Furthermore the biggest challenge of triggered abilities has always been damage scaling and Tempest Strike is no different, especially when you're taking the nodes into account that make you summon Totems on spell proc.
As far as I can tell Totems will only scale with Totem and Minion nodes.
The spells triggered by Tempest Strike only scale with global damage, spell/elemental damage or the corresponding specific element and with attack speed, which in itself is already very hard to properly scale, given that the base ability procs 3 different damage types.
The melee hit then scales with entirely different things again....

So at first I loved the idea of triggering Totems by just using Tempest Strike, but I quickly realized that it's just strictly better to self cast the totems, because why use extra steps? Literally the only benefit you get from using Tempest Strike over just self-casting the Totems is that it costs 0 mana, but in turn it makes it random, because you have to proc the right Spell to get the Totems to spawn and of top of that it makes it a melee ability.

Am I just looking at it the wrong way? Are there actual benefits to using Tempest Strike? Are there like actual legit kind of hybrid Tempest Strike + Totem builds? I like the idea of summoning my Spike Totem circle whenever I attack so I kinda desperately want to make this work...