Midnight Season 1 OverviewDevourer Demon Hunter Guide
The Collapsing Star Problem
For Devourer Demon Hunter, Collapsing Star is billed as one of your biggest and most important rotational moments. It's incredibly flashy, has multiple talents which build into it, and is the whole goal of your main cooldown, Void Metamorphosis. It is one of the key abilities that Blizzard has repeatedly highlighted when showcasing the spec, but is at risk of not being used at all by Devourers, at least in certain builds and situations. Currently, while the Annihilator builds DO make use of this ability, many Void-Scarred builds do not. The Annihilator builds are currently recommended, but bug fixes, and the eventual loss of our current 4pc (Demon Hunter Devourer 12.0 Class Set 4pc) could lead to this button not being pressed.
Why Collapsing Star Struggles?
Simply put, Collapsing Star is just not tuned well enough for Void-Scarred. Annihilator features significantly more hooks which buff Collapsing Star, namely Dark Matter and Otherworldly Focus, while also just generating more resources. These resources lead to even more Collapsing Stars, buffing their damage through Impending Apocalypse. Annihilator is also able to easily put points into the Apex Talent, with Midnight and Midnight again buffing the damage of Collapsing Star, and Midnight providing even more access to them.
Void-Scarred lacks all of these buffs to Collapsing Star, which severely hinders its viability as a button. Additionally, Void-Scarred leans heavily into the melee suite of abilities (Voidblade, Hungering Slash, and The Hunt), requiring them to be talented in order to get the most use out of Voidsurge and Violent Transformation. Due to this, their points are naturally spread more thin than Annihilator. This normally would not be a problem, as 4 new spec points were added in Midnight, to enable builds to use the Apex. Unfortunately, the two other capstones Calamitous and Devourer's Bite were buffed very late into the beta cycle, and are incredibly strong investments for Void-Scarred. Due to Void-Scarred's already low investment and damage gained from Collapsing Star, it's just simply better to put your new points into these abilities.
How can it be fixed?
While a simple fix would just be buffing Collapsing Star baseline, this could get out of hand for Annihilator. Instead, more hooks need to be added to Void-Scarred in order to make it care about Collapsing Star. A first suggestion I've seen thrown around, is to have the free Collapsing Star provided by Midnight be moved baseline, and something else which empowers Collapsing Star added to the apex. This would increase the availability of the spell, while also improving the leveling experience (which is another common complaint of Collapsing Star, you just don't get many of them while levelling). Unfortunately, this might take too much power out of the apex itself, which is fairly weak following the nerf to Midnight (it now always provides 50% crit damage scaling, rather than 50%/100%). Instead, I personally believe that Collapsing Star should just interact with the Void-Scarred kit directly.
My first suggestion to address this, would be adding the primary hit of Collapsing Star to Burning Blades. This would provide a similar damage bonus to what Annihilator gets in Otherworldly Focus, but without the AoE component. This would mimic the solution that Blizzard did to fix Havoc's issue of Fel-Scarred never using Blade Dance, whereas First Blood was added to the list of abilities which feed into Burning Blades. I'm specifically saying the Single Target portion here, as causing it to just leave a 35% dot on every target hit would likely be a bit too strong. The second thing that i want for Void-Scarred is for your first Collapsing Star each Void Metamorphosis to trigger a Voidsurge on your target. This would tie directly into the main mechanic for Void-Scarred, while providing that needed synergy to actually make the hero tree want to press Collapsing Star. I think this is personally a pretty nice solution, as it again ties into the theme that Void-Scarred has, where it wants to bounce into and out of Void Metamorphosis rapidly. It would also make the free Collapsing Star portion of our Apex (Midnight) much more valuable, assuming it isn't changed as I outlined.
In short, Void-Scarred just lacks a lot of the damage bonuses and synergy tie ins to Collapsing Star which Annihilator enjoys. This is VERY similar to the situation that Havoc went through in The War Within where Fel-Scarred never usedBlade Dance. More direct synergy and damage bonuses for Blade Dance were eventually added to the hero tree to solve it, so I don't see any reason why the same can't be done for Collapsing Star and \Void-Scarred! Collapsing Star is a truly awesome button, and it really would be a shame if half of the builds for Devourer don't even use such a core button.
Which Hero Talent version of Devourer Demon Hunter do you prefer, Void-Scarred or Annihilator? Is your guild running a Devourer in Season 1?
