Is Devourer Demon Hunter completely broken or what? I hardly do any damage and I cant heal for the life of me….feels unplayable. Can only imagine how horrible it must be to level as a Devourer….
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Not completely broken, but they do seem to need some rework.
At the moment they’re a bit like the mages and rogues. With a lot of classes you can be confident that you can handle most situations, with mages and rogues and now devourers you have to be more careful of the fights you pick.
Been in-game with an Evoker, just did 4 levels, so level 20 now (ilvl 17).
The Evoker is much better, more fun.
So it really does need an overhaul, no two ways about that.
How the devourer plays at 80 and 90 I don’t know. What I do know as it stands, it will be a poor leveling experience. The fact it is new is its only saving grace.
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It’s a misserable experience until you understand that being able to move while casting consume is not a QoL feature, it’s how it’s played.
Once you forget about reap outside of meta and just run around collecting souls, you’ll get more frequent void rays and metas, that means more damage, better self-heal or at least things die faster, so you’ll normally be safe.
It is really fun once you get used to that, but i have to agree that it still needs more work. And i don’t think any dev tried to level one from 10 to 80, because if they did… well… collapsing star would probably be at the end of the talent tree and soul glutton somewhere at the start.
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Leveling as Devourer feels really bad, and honestly, they hardly have any buttons at all and their rotation is very bare bones at 80 so you don’t miss out on anything if you level as Vengeance or Havoc instead.
Then at 80, the only “fun” build this pre-patch is the Void-Scarred Raid Cleave/M+ build on Wowhead. It has both the melee weaving and the AOE Reap after Void Ray. If you’re lucky you might even be able to press Collapsing Star sometimes.
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TLDR; spec is fine, spec is great. But the spec is “easy to feel you’re playing it right” and “hard to know if you’re actually playing it right”. Because spec is new.
I absolutely love the spec. Every criticism i’ve read so far was “lack of skills to press”, “dies too easily”, or the ramp up time. Well all these issues are tied to lots of players having poor stats optimisation, mismatched expectations, or simply because the spec is new and the playerbase hasn’t had time to understand how easy it is to fail.
When you get it right, it’s a lot of fun, because you’re playing a spec that allows you to enjoy the game without the hassle of managing tons of ressources or cds or procs, and to simply focus on doing the encounter right. This isn’t a gameplay that will satisfy every player. But there’s an audience for it. I don’t really enjoy any of the warlock spec, i’m not calling for a rework tho. Some people like it the way it is.
I agree the ramp up time could be improved, with something like “first reap in a fight grants you 100% more fury”. But once you’ve reached the first 30 stacks threshold, it all flows pretty easily. It’s a pretty easy spec on paper, fury > void ray > soul stacks > meta > collapsing star.
But more than anything else, i feel like the spec is deceptively easy. It IS easy to understand. and it IS easy to fail, but it’s reallly hard to understand how much of an impact failing can have on your overall. What the spec doesn’t tell you is how delayed the punishment is when you fail your cycle, movements/positionning, or when you simply just use Meta a bit too early.
Let’s say you’re at 100 fury and 30 stacks. You just used reap before Meta, because of the 3 voidfall stacks.
You can go Meta > Reap > Void ray > Reap > Consume. You’re not too far from your first Collapsing star.
But if you Reap before you go into meta, you loose fury AND stacks, and suddenly you’ll need three more consume, or you’ll need to strafe and walk over orbs, just to reach your first collapsing star. And because the spec is a min/max spec, it is littered with hidden occasions to fail.
There’s a huge gap between how easy the spec feels, how easy it makes you feel like you’re playing it right, and how hard it is to actually understand if you’re doing something wrong.
Granted, i might be completely wrong. But i’m having a blast and just… please give the playerbase some time to learn the spec, before calling it wrong, unplayable, etc. Give it time, and let people decide if they like it or not. Some people might.
Engame - you might be correct with some of the points.
But the real issue starts on level 1 
it feels horrible to play this spec. It might change with minmax gear - but they way to this point is also part of the game.
I dont have a max-gear-mytic-raid DH, I have a now lvl60 one. And it is a PAIN to play.
And sure, I could just level Havoc or Vengance… would be easy and quick. But just “go around” it, does not fix the problem.
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What tilts me about the spec is that when you have finally managed to pick up enough orbs to get a collapsing star, the cast time is soo long, and if you interrupt it for any reason you lose all the stacks. I don’t know what kind of zen level game skills you need to time the collapsing star window when you have to preempt meta form, allow enough time to gather orbs while not letting all your fury drain, and hit the window where you can get off a collapsing star cast without either dying from aoe you should have moved from or getting knockback or needing to pop a cd or whatever hundred things can happen.
Also, if you are trying like hell to get 30 stacks to you can fire off a collapsing star, and you get to 29 stacks and your fury runs out, those 29 stacks are wasted.
I agree, it is a fun spec when it works. But the penalty for when it doesn’t work, regardless of if it was because of something you did or some external thing, is just too severe. I am not sure some work is what this spec needs, so much as a complete revamp.
If the spec relies on gear to be playable its a failed spec.
Sure, some specs rely on gear to be competitive, which is different. You can still enjoy the gameplay while leveling and gearing. This spec is horrible without gear, and only slightly better with.
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