Let's (actually) go over the history of 'Devourer' (Item line)

(I am not googling/wiking any of this but rather going off of memory, like the incredibly [insert forbidden words here] that I am)

In the old days, aprox. S2, there was a significant lack of AD / auto attacking junglers, a combination of NO jungle exclusive items with somewhat weaker monsters was too overwhelming for champions like which Riot wanted to be strong junglers. This was in an era where junglers like were extremely dominant and ever-present. Riot wanted more variety and thus sought to change the paradigm.

To this end, in order to boost the viability of these unplayed jungle characters , an item called "WRIGGLES LANTERN" was created. This item had some life-steal, AD and armor... but also a special proc 20% of the time which did 500 physical damage to minions and monsters, this gave it huge boosts of sustain while fighting since you could lifesteal from the 500 damage proc. On top of that, it held 1 , 3 minute duration ward every 3 minutes (right?).

Because of the combination of

• Life steal (Amplified by minion/monster proc)
• Free ward coverage
• AD/Armor combination

It became a staple for pretty much every TOP LANER in the game since it effectively won you lane every time.

Thus, Wriggle's Proc was nerfed to NOT be physical. Later, Wriggle's Proc was nerfed to NOT affect minions but only monsters. Later, Wriggle's AD/Armor were both nerfed. Later, Wriggle's lifesteal was also nerfed, lowered to a flat value. Later, Wriggle's cost was increased.

And after all of those nerfs, it was finally slowing down its ubiquitousness... but of course, the nerfs piled on and the item became underpowered , unable to compete with the then new JUNGLE ITEMS like Elder Lizard, Ancient Golem, etc.

The item was insanely "problematic" and thus it had to be buried.

Because of this in S3(ish?) they 'reworked' into a transitional item which added stacks , almost identical to the modern "Devourer ----> Sated Devourer", back then it was "Wriggle's Lantern" (Utter shit stats) and after 25 stacks (or so ish) it became FERAL FLARE.

Feral Flare was an infinitely scaling item which gave 1 point of magic damage on-hit plus base value (40 initially but later reduced to 25) ... it also initially gave ONE HEALTH per stack , on-hit... meaning that at 50 stacks, you gained 50 health, it was not lifesteal but rather direct health gain similar to Xin Zhao's self-heal. This meant you could tank turrets indefinitely with enough stacks just by striking it over and over.

Naturally the healing portion was completely removed... but the damage was still very high and thus, it had to be curtailed by increasing the cost of the item, increasing the required stats and reducing the base stats of the item and the final form.

Eventually Feral Flare was outright removed because it was deemed impossible to balance.

However Riot wanted to try again and this occurred with a re-balancing of jungle items in S4/S5, this led to the creation of "Devourer" which was the spiritual successor to Feral Flare, minus the (flimsy but still present) sustain (5 health per strike) and the lovely ward.

Devourer was easier to balance because it was self-contained, it had only attack speed and magic damage but it was , once again deemed too powerful due to its infinitely scaling function and was eventually reworked into our modern day.

Devourer ------> Sated Devourer

By limiting the upper cap of the item they were able to prevent edge cases of abuse by hard-farming, hard-ganking champions that would scale harder than Riot intended. However to make the item have value they added a power spike upon reaching the stack cap. Sated Devourer's compromise was precisely that it would lose the infinite scaling in exchange for a power spike that has shown to be too powerful.

Because of this we will likely see the eventual removal of Devourer and have it reworked into yet another iteration of the same item that has continually shown to be nearly impossible to balance. It is always either brokenly overpowered or brokenly underpowered.

Basically what I'm trying to say is; NERF YASUO PLS ROIT. WTF. gg