Rip DH devourer

In Development Midnight: 12.1.5 Public Test Realm
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Wth These Devourer Changes?

It honestly feels like Devourer is being changed without considering how the spec actually plays. It feels like the spec hasn’t even made it out of beta, and every change is just a shot in the dark. The poor design becomes obvious with every new change they release.

To be clear, Collapsing Star is not a bad ability. It fits Devourer’s fantasy extremely well, and the quality of life changes are welcome. The problem is that the talent tree is increasingly being built around forcing synergies with Collapsing Star instead of giving us enough points and flexibility to properly combine the spec’s core abilities.

This affects both melee and ranged Devourer. The problem isn’t one particular playstyle; it’s that the talent tree doesn’t have enough points to make the different mechanics work together.

For example, if you try to take the Apex talents to properly synergize with The Hunt or you end up sacrificing Eradicate. But if you instead take Eradicate and try to build around Collapsing Star, you don’t have enough talent points to properly to take The Hunt.

And this is especially disappointing because Apex talents are supposed to be one of the new and exciting gameplay features of the expansion, yet for Devourer they currently feel almost useless or extremely restrictive because they benefit a specific ability instead of giving the spec meaningful new ways to play.

So we’re left with a ridiculous choice:

Do I build around The Hunt, or do I build around Eradicate?

You can’t properly support both because there simply aren’t enough talent points, and the position of the nodes makes the problem even worse.

Then the new Demonic Intensity interaction makes Collapsing Star reset The Hunt, which sounds good on paper, but doesn’t solve the actual problem. It simply adds another forced interaction to a talent tree that already doesn’t have enough room to accommodate all of its important spells

The changes(nerfs) to Violent Transformation, The Hunt, and Monster Rising make this even more confusing, because instead of fixing the underlying structure of the tree, we’re getting more effects that compete for limited talent points.

On top of that, the constant nerfs make it feel like Devourer is slowly being pushed aside. It gives the impression that the class is being buried rather than properly supported, especially when each new change adds more restrictions while the spec continues to lose power and flexibility.

The spec that feels like it’s being pulled in several different directions at once, without enough points to make any of those directions work properly.

Collapsing Star should remain an important part of Devourer. The problem is not the ability, the problem is how the talent tree is forcing it to interact with everything else.

Please reconsider the talent tree and give Devourer enough flexibility to build around its core abilities without having to sacrifice another essential part of the spec just to make one synergy work.

the talent tree doesn’t give us enough room to actually use them together.

And Please more nerfs until the spect it’s completely unplayable.:pleading_face:

5 Likes
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Until further changes, Voidscarred is dead and were back to pressing 2 buttons on Annihilator. While its not alot of time, the last couple hours of me trying builds on PTR none of them even come CLOSE to feeling good to play, let alone competitive.

Our spec tree needs a complete overhaul if they want us to have a melee hybrid playstyle. We simply do not have enough points to get all the talents that are needed. Why is Devourer the only DH spec that has to talent into meta?

Its incredibly frustrating because while I like Annihilator, it just gets very old very fast only pressing consume until a void fall proc so i can reap or i have enough souls to press Collapsing star. Voidscarred actually had a semblance of a rotation at least with the constant weaving of Reap at 4 souls and using The Hunt and Voidblade almost on CD.

The best suggestion ive seen comes from Jhazy on the DH discord, where VS only gets one Collapsing star and it ends meta early and keeps rolling torment stacks. That would keep the current gameplay completely intact while also making Voidscarred want to press star every meta and remove the AFK that happens in AoE.

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I would also LOVE for the Hunt to be replaced by Spinning Death and Abyssal Flare. These two alpha spells are much more thematic than The Hunt for Devourer and keep the mobility without the downside of having a channel that can drop meta. Ofc they would have to be rebalanced, as both spells give way to many souls and fury.

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The talent trees are a mess, this change makes absolutely no sense. Getting extra hunts inside meta is useless when it doesn’t grant additional voidsurges for Void-Scarred, and it doesn’t do enough damage for Annihilator to even care about it. The only thing this is doing is killing the meta cycling playstyle.

I second that idea of using Collapsing Star to instantly end meta as VS, it would both improve the current gameplay pattern and give more of an identity to the melee combo build.

3 Likes
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Being locked into an 8 dash animation on a fixated target makes you incredibly vulnerable to mechanics half the time, it just gets you killed. Havoc feels way better because you actually have the freedom to move while dealing damage, rather than just spamming Felblade or The Hunt many times. It’s sad that they completely killed Devourer this season, forcing everyone to jump ship to Havoc. Those early sims were a total bait, and I don’t understand how Blizzard hasn’t realized the actual in-game performance isn’t even close to what was simmed.

But hey nerf our tier set again or our entire build…

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yall gaslighted me during beta
well some of you did. devourer kicked butt. never gettin fooled by yall gaslighters again.

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I personally wanna know what in the world their thinking here. They made these changes and now Void-Scarred is flipping dead, a spec I truly enjoy playing, like I love the blind changes only to be met with zero explanations what so ever

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honestly i think that instead of doing whatever they just did to void scarred, they should instead look at the disaster that is the spec tree.

There’s so much wrong with it that it genuinely needs a rework as soon as humanly possible and the focus should be on the spec tree before the hero talents.

Theres not enough points to get all of the necessary talents, instead there’s multiple 2 pointer nodes with useless crap like “increases rotational ability damage” or straight up secondary stats, or even stuff that’s arguably worse, and that is talents that just break up what base abilities should already have just so you CAN spend points on something, the best example i can think of are predators thirst, umbral blade and the whole of Apex: Midnight. which screams to me that the spec was pushed out way before it was truely ready.

Devourer does not have a real talent tree. most of if not all of the specs dont have to invest this many points just to make their basic rotation exist. thats usually all top to top middle of the tree stuff.

All 3 capstones are too important to the design of the class to be capstones if it was any other spec.
Eradicate is basically all of our aoe outside of void ray and could easily be combined with moment of craving as they both have the same trigger condition outside of the current tier’s 4 set bonus, to me it feels as if it’s like if frost scythe on frost dk was a capstone. its not. its an important rotational button!

Soul Glutton and Emptiness are the kinds of “major cooldown altering” talents you’d normally see directly underneath said major cooldowns in the talent tree. They’re extremely necessary pickups for literally every single build of devourer that being said, i think they’re the only capstones i’d be okay with remaining at the bottom middle of the tree.

The Hunt isnt a capstone on Havoc. i get that since it’s build defining, you wouldn’t take it on a ranged build, but it’s so important to the melee build identity that being a capstone makes it difficult to get to long with limiting how much you can actively interact with it on the rest of the tree, it would be nice for example if it was higher up on the tree and had more passive interactions on the left side, even if it really only makes leveling slightly more interesting.

Devourer’s Bite is not really a very fun talent at least in my opinion. while it does make hungering slash worthwhile, i think that its kinda toxic to have all the power in this short window of time where you’re at high stacks of devourer’s bite instead of actually in hungering slash, void blade and the hunt. i’d much rather see this talent replaced with one that upgrades hungering slash to hit multiple times or something that looks visually interesting.

Going back to what i was talking about before with our Apex: Midnight, i really detest it’s design. instead of an apex being a strong “cherry on top” kind of talent, it’s simply so necessary in order to make Collapsing Star function??? i dont understand why collapsing star at base doesn’t automatically crit and why the rank 3 version of midnight isn’t in the middle of the tree under collapsing star itself. If anything on the spec needs to be completely gutted and reworked, it’s the Apex. i would instead have our apex do something interesting like be a proc that makes us temporarily summon a void simulacrum that copies our casts at reduced effectiveness or something else that’s noticible, interesting and good.

all of this mostly boils down to:

  • Remove uninteresting filler talents (Voidrage, Predator’s Thirst, Gift of the Void, Demonic Instinct, Devourer’s Edge)
  • Move our rotational stuff further up the tree/combine it with the base skills so we can take them easily (Eradicate, Apex: Midnight, The Hunt)
  • Make new and interesting talents that evolve the gameplay instead of degrading it.
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The only way for this to POSSIBLY work is to remove talents that we point into an make them baseline.

The Hunt here is a GREAT CANDIDATE because, we would have access to The Hunt as both specs, the only difference is Annihilator just wouldn’t use it. This makes The Hunt baseline, removing a point for us to add somewhere else. You can add a new capstone if needed.

Void Metamorphosis is also a GREAT CANDIDATE because why is our main ability, a talent point? Havoc doesn’t have this problem so why does Devourer? This is straight forward, no explanation is needed, make that baseline.

Moment of Craving honestly could go baseline too, with how much we’re reaping now, it should be at this point.

Collapsing Star, also lol a GREAT CANDIDATE, its one our main abilities, why do we have a talent point for it, as Void Scarred, there is no use for it for us, yet we’re having talent into it as well as Impending Apocalypse, make CStar baseline.

Hungering Slash also needs to be baseline as its part of the Core Void-Scarred kit, why talent into it.

Entropy is another great example of this, this is our passive generation, yet we have to talent into this, this SHOULD be baseline and its not. Thats a problem.

And im just scratching the surface here, these alone, would give us the space to correct the spec, but, im also watching paint dry because we’ll never get any kind of ACTUAL explanation from these devs.

Maybe someone whos attending Blizzcon can speak up for us.

3 Likes
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One other thing i would do at least temporarily to help alleviate the talent point pressure on void scarred melee is to swap the positions of eradicate and impending apocalypse, and maybe rebuff impending a little to compensate.

I’d still like to see eradicate combined with moment of craving but if we need to go for quick bandaids while we have to wait for the whole tree to be redone, i’d do that and cut at least 2 of the 2 pointer gates at the bottom of the tree

1 Like
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Just woke up from a dream where Devourer was reworked to a healer spec
Wow that was weird
Point is it can always be a lot worse

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I thought we’d get some changes today but i suppose not