Devourer and Associated Thoughts

The topic of much controversy from its first incarnation in Feral Flare, Devourer has been causing headaches for a long time now. The introduction of Sated Devourer only complicated the problem, and gave rise to a host of new problematic interactions with its "phantom hit" mechanic. Why is the item so volatile? What makes Devourer junglers hated and loved in equal parts and for different reasons?

Primarily, Devourer is either a win-more snowball item, or a late-game insurance policy item. Unfortunately, the jungle role has been pigeon-holed into early- and mid-game map pressure for the past two years. A power-farming, non-interacting jungler is a useless player (until 20-25 minutes or so, when Sated Devourer turns on). With the meta becoming even faster and more aggressive in season 6, there's almost no good reason to play Devourer junglers if you want to succeed at a relatively high level of play. That said, Devourer feels massively unfair at low levels of play, since unskilled players don't understand how to aggressively control the map and prevent Devourer junglers from freely farming their way to 60 magic damage on-hit and 3 auto-attacks for the price of 2.

Another problem is the uninteractive, unfun build that I'm you've all seen before: Sated Devourer -> Guinsoo's -> full tank. Devourer's massive on-hit potential, as well as Guinsoo's unreal gold efficiency (at 96.57% gold efficiency at 2nd stack, which is a single AA from a melee champ; and 192.2% gold efficiency at 8th stack, not factoring in the AoE cleave damage) enable this Devo-Guinsoo full tank build to succeed---but only on champions who can use both Devourer and Guinsoo's. At lower tiers of skill, these champions are essentially a free win, and don't even have to interact with the map to succeed.

There's a three-step solution to this:

1. Devourer no longer gives magic damage on-hit, and instead grants flat armour penetration (both base and per-stack).
2. Sated Devourer no longer grants magic damage on-hit or a phantom hit, but gains % Total armour pen (like the old Last Whisper). It retains the flat armour pen from Devourer's stacks.
3. Instead of champion kill/assists giving 1 stack (equal to large jungle camps) and Baron/Dragon giving 5 stacks each, all of the aforementioned (kills, assists, Baron, and Dragon) grant 3 stacks each. This encourages more interactive and proactive play on the Devourer jungler's part, instead of thinking of how to min-max their stack gains and eschewing their duties as a jungler.

Converting Devourer from a "buy me to instantly become a hybrid champion" item to an armour penetration item kills two birds with one stone: it forces the Devourer jungler to actually build damage (instead of two hybrid items into full tank), and it enables tanks to actually stack significant amounts of armour effectively against Devourer junglers (no more Master Yi or Xin Zhao insta-shredding a full-build Rammus or Malphite). It still allows Sated junglers to do massive amounts of damage to squishies, but it also allows tanks and peelers to more effectively itemise against them.

It has been a long time since Devourer was fully addressed, and I'm not sure why (likely because the item and its champions are cancerously awful at any level higher than Gold). I'd like to see it actually become a decent option that meshes well with the jungle role, instead of the shambling abomination of exclusivity and circumstantial unfairness it is right now.