This is why Sated Devourer is actually fine and doesn't need nerfs

Greetings Gameplay and Balance,

Your friend HateDaddy here with another insightful, thought provoking thread. Today I'm going to talk about sated devourer and why, post Kayle nerfs, it's actually in a really great spot and doesn't need any changes. Before dismissing this, I urge you to read all of this as it thoroughly explains the checks and balances the item has innately, whether these were intended by riot or not is up to your disccression, I think it was.

For starters, let's get this out of the way, dated devourer is not a good item in competitive play. Why? Because in competitive play, Junglers are rarely afforded the opportunity to power farm to get the gold to acquire it, stack it and then add additional items so they aren't a walking ginger bread man that crumbles when you look at it wrong but wields the final upgraded master sword from legend of Zelda: a link to the past (yeah that fucking carrot sword). They sacrifice too much of their farm and exp to their teams for it to ever be reliably good, competitive has had it in its patches now for awhile and it hasn't been touched. Simply put, the style of play for junglers in competitive play does not cater to the heft demands of what is required for a sated devourer Jungler to be good.

Okay, so I must be nuts right? I must not have seen what a sated Yi does or a sated Shyv does, right? Oh, I have. Believe me I have. But I also realize that most of these champions are squishy melee champions, many of whom lack the ability to gank as strongly as the mets junglers and they often times will spend a lot of time during early-mid game farming for the item and farming it up, leaving a pretty disgusting discrepancy in map pressure between what a sated jungler will output and a standard output jungler will output. That's a big deal, that's a very big deal.

But I also realize it's solo queue and not every game is this simple, leaving more junglers the afforded opportunity to farm them easier than most people realize. But that's the name of the game, gank like a mother fucker while they're farming and force them to pick between applying map pressure themselves and sacrificing their farm and hard delaying their scaling or beat their team down while they try to farm. But quite honestly, that's not untrue for a lot of champions in general, especially in solo queue. So why is this looked upon so differently? It really shouldn't be quite frankly.

Let's also talk more about the majority of these melee junglers. What defensive stats does sated devourer often? None. Does it contribute to burst the way warrior does for many AD junglers that give them safety in the sense that they build warrior, go in and burst and force the enemy to either die or be incapable of fighting back? No, it most certainly doesn't. Many of these junglers will remain incredibly squishy and prone to being easily bursted prior to them buying 4 items because their first two items are typically sated/BoTRK or sated/Trinity. Some of them are also incredibly snowbally junglers, sated didn't really change it. Yi was always a snowbally jungler, Xin was always a snowbally jungler (who also fell off the face of the earth late game). They also he good synergy with other enchantments before this, which is why many of their winrates havent budged at all since sated was added.

So a summary of this: these are champions that typically need to snowball hard to not have themselves or their team fall behind as they farm their devourer item and acquire gold to be durable so they don't insta-die when teamfights happen due to being incredibly squishy. This wasn't untrue for them prior to sated being added and sated is capped so it doesn't get to a point where they farm forever either. This changes very little about many of their play patterns and in reality, sated just gives champions like Xin a bit of a better late game. Sure sated Yi does redonk damage but Yi with warrior did redonk damage, too. A 6-item sated Yi or a six item warrior Yi probably kill you just as fast regardless but both of them at their respective jungle item spikes do roughly the same thing regardless: kill or be killed due to how squishy they are. This principle honestly applies to basically every standard melee jungler as well.

So the next part of this talks about Kayle, because there was quite a bit of an uproar when riot nerfed her, but not the item. Well, for starters, jungle Kayles winrate skyrocketed when sated came out (I think it was as high as 58% at one point).

But why was it so good on her? What made her broken with it but others not so much (as I've implied)? Quite frankly and simply put, Kayles kit. Kayle is basically a ranged champion with her E and offers pretty good gabks with her powerful slow and onslaught of raw damage early-mid game. She was the only sated jungler who could safely get a MASSIVE power spike because she applied it from range in AoE. And she has an ult that makes diving her an impossible task. Dive Kayle and wait out her ult? Yeah you'll kill her but you'll die to the rest of her team. Don't dive sated Kayle? Rip. This isn't bias or anything either, Kayle with just a sated got such a ridiculous powerspike and could safely apply it that basically no other jungler could because they weren't ranged and they HAVE to be in the thick of things.

This is honestly why she was broken with the item, and while the item probably did break her, the reality is, Kayles kit is a cluster fuck of a nightmare issue balance wise and needs pretty big changes (it's why she's been nerfed so hard repeatedly, again this isn't bias, history shows us this). And the item didn't change the play pattern or power spikes of its other uses, it's just giving many of them a better late game or huge dps champions like Yi who already did a fuck ton of damage an alternative item. It didn't break them, and since we will never have competitive play as a reference for this, at most all we can do is look at winrates and while certainly many of them have a higher winrate than average, I wouldn't be concerned about it because their play style is the same and you have lots of opportunities to punish them for going sated.

So tl;dr buff Nasus, buff Jax, nerf lux and buy me pax jax. Thanks for the read again, friends. Until next time!