Why Not Reduce Devourer's Damage by 10?
On the PBE,
is getting its on-hit damage gain decreased to 0.67 per stack from 1, giving
50 total on-hit damage. Perhaps this is more out of a dislike for decimal numbers than anything else, but I think a better solution could be to keep the live on-hit damage gain and instead reduce Devourer's on-hit damage to 20:
grants 10 on-hit damage, so there's ample room to tone down its effect, and the +20% attack speed gain is already a large enough power spike from Recurve Bow to Devourer. Since this would be an even bigger nerf than the one on the PBE, perhaps one way of making that change hurt less could be to increase the stack gain from champion takedowns to 2 from 1: right now, one of the biggest complaints surrounding Devourer is that it encourages hard-farming in complete isolation from what's going on in lanes, and the above kind of change would give junglers a bigger incentive to expose themselves a bit more.
Ultimately though, the biggest nerf the Devourer line needs is a buff to counterjungling and other anti-farming strats. One of the reasons Devourer is so popular right now is because the tools designed to support counterjungling are in a really poor state (
isn't too good an option even on potentially good counterjunglers like
,
or
, and
, which typically works well on early-game bully junglers, has completely fallen out of favor), which means hard-farming is still a strategy that carries a bit too much safety. If the meta were to shift to a spot where Devourer junglers were always at some degree of risk even when in their own jungle, the nerfs happening to the item right now would likely not even need to happen.