Devourer weaker than feral flare, rip farming playstyle, so much for strategic diversity.

Why flare was stronger: Feral flare gave 30% attack speed, 12 ad, 25 (+stacks) magic damage on hit (triple vs monsters for extremely fast clear times), 30% increased gold from monsters, 10 health on hit, a free ward to place every 180 seconds, and cost 1800 gold.

Devourer costs 450 gold more, loses the 12 ad, loses the triple magic damage vs monsters, loses the 10 health on hit, and 30% increased gold all for being able to straight up buy devourer 2 - 4 minutes before you'd have feral flare, a passive that gives far less sustain/clear speed, 20% more attack speed (worth about 168 gold more than the 12 ad you lost), and 30 extra gold/large monster.

However, the biggest thing that makes devourer worse is that you can only get ~half the stacks/minute because camps have double the timers they used to (with the exception of the buff camps of course). The only way get the stacks you used to is to snowball and get 2 stacks/champion, but devourer is a difficult item to snowball off of considering everything it lost in the first place. You also get far less gold off its passive because camps spawned twice as fast so you made use of the 30% gold increase twice as much.

How the 100 second jungle respawn timers ruin strategic diversity:

If you (the balance team) want junglers to have different strengths and weaknesses associated with a play style of ganking, farming, and counter jungling, why would you make it so that the jungler who constantly farms barely gets ahead in cs of the jungler who constantly ganks? That's effectively what happens when you have 100 second respawns on jungle camps and anyone with a decent clear speed has time to clear their entire jungle and gank. You just can't get a noticeable cs lead anymore unless you tax laners.

Strategic diversity =/= tanks, 3 bruisers, and Nidalee since they all can clear the jungle and stay healthy enough to gank (and have strong ganks, as opposed to a traditional farm jungler like master yi who has very weak ganks due to no cc and low damage early game)

So.... Why was an item that was considered underpowered, (as it prevented jungler presence for your team early game and some of mid game) nerfed so hard?

tl;dr The root of the jungle problems lies in the issue that there is no reward for focusing on farming when other junglers can keep up in farm just as much and snowball themselves or their laners off ganks easily. In other words, there is no reward for picking a different play style, as there is only one play style that works in the jungle and that's farming everything and ganking everyone hard.

EDIT: It seems most people agree that a diversity of strategy and play styles is not a good thing if it means little interaction with other players.

However, interacting with players via ganks on most devourer junglers guarantees little kill pressure unless the enemy was over extended so heavily and your laner has cc. Also, you would lose most 2 v 2s if the enemy jungler counterganks on a tank/bruiser.

So what if devourer was given a tool to increase gank pressure? I was thinking maybe after killing "x" large monsters the next champion you hit (or make it an active) will be rooted for x second(s) (could be a flat amount of monsters, or proportional to the stacks you aquire to make it weaker as the game progresses (although that'd be awkward because it'd also take more camps to charge the root as you gain stacks), it could even be a flat/proportional amount of stacks gained to gain root charges in team fights although that isn't what this buff is intended for, it's intended for ganking early and only that).

This would also make devourer jungler's ganks predictable if the enemy could see how many stacks they have, similar to an annie stun however, which could be good or bad depending on how strong the root would be.

tl;dr of edit: give devourer an active/on hit passive to root a champion for x seconds, active's cooldown resets after killing x camps or gaining x stacks (flat amount or proportional to stacks for either option).

Thanks for discussing whether you agree or disagree :)