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Riot is nerfing devourer wrong. Falling behind on a Devourer jungler is now a death sentence

Yimmortal·3/1/2016, 2:21:16 AM·4 votes·588 views

I hope Meddler or some other Rioter in the balance team sees this before the changes are final. Imagine a situation where your team is behind. You've lost all outer turrets and can't contest dragon/rift herald. The enemy team has wards all over your jungle and is taking your camps left and right. As for what little camps that remain, your other teammates will be trying to take them as well. It's already hard enough to come back from this kind of situation right now and if the Devourer changes go through you are pretty much donezo. I an understand why Riot thinks Devourer might be too strong currently. Meddler stated that Devourer junglers were getting sated too early into the game and this change was designed to slightly push their powerspike back to the mid game. This is a fair analysis but I also believe that rewarding good plays that bring you back from a losing game is also an integral part of this game. Increasing the amount of stacks to get stated takes that possibility away. The right way to nerf Devourer is to decrease the amount of stacks dragon/herald/scuttle gives, possibly from 5 to 3 and 2 to 1. That way, Riot can have their desired result of delaying the powerspike of devourer junglers and still give the ones that are behind some breathing space.

5 Comments

Hayaishi23/1/2016, 2:24:32 AM2 votes

As it should be, because the amount of power it gives Yi and company is oppressive.

48983507DEL13/1/2016, 4:01:28 AM1 votes

Well the idea of the item is to give junglers a risky option of being farm heavy instead of focusing on ganking.

If a jungler looks at both teams and thinks he/she will be safe farming the jungle instead of applying pressure, then he should be rewarded or punished based on making a good decision or a bad one.

For instance, if you have laners that will most likely play safe and do fine without a whole lot of ganks, then stacking the Devourer would be a good idea. However, if your laners are going to be aggressive, and the enemy has someone like Lee Sin or Elise (heavy gankers), then taking Warrior would probably be a better option since your team will need counterganks.

In that situation, if you still decided to go Devourer, it seems a bit unfair that you should be able to farm endlessly until its stacked (which certain junglers can do VERY quickly), then emerge from the jungler stronger than the enemies the enemy jungler worked so hard to get fed.

Basically, what the Devourer does is put the ENTIRE game on the opposing jungler's shoulders; if he ganks a ton and gets his laners fed, then MAYBE he'll have a chance to over-power Sated Yi/Xin/Shyv or whoever it is. If he can't the enemy jungler wins by doing basically nothing all game.

This change gives the opposing jungler more time to get ahead before the Sated jungler takes over the game. Riot wants the players to be interactive, meaning ganking lanes to create pressure and win the game with teamwork. The Devourer is in the game to be a high risk - high reward item based on good decision making. Right now, there's very little risk if you actually know what you're doing.