Class Changes
Before we begin, here are the changes for Devourer off of the first PTR.
DEMON HUNTER
Demon Hunters can now equip daggers.
Developers’ notes: This will allow Devourer Demon Hunters to acquire and use daggers with Intelligence on them.
Devourer
Developers’ notes: We’re reducing the scaling of Devourer’s Mastery: Monster Within to help other stats to compete and compensating with an overall ability damage buff. Between that and a few more targeted changes, we expect damage during Void Metamorphosis to be slightly reduced while damage outside of Metamorphosis is significantly increased.
Mastery: Monster Within has been updated – Bonus damage during Void Metamorphosis reduced by 66%.
All ability damage increased by 20%.
Void Metamorphosis now increases Void Ray damage by 40% (was 67%).
Impending Apocalypse now causes each Collapsing Star to grant 20% increased damage to the next one (was 30%).
Consume damage increased by 60% (does not affect Devour).
The dagger change lets us use the new cantrip daggers from the new dungeon and the new raid, but is otherwise uneventful. Weapon types haven't really mattered for a while, and while they do have a faster auto attack speed, our auto attacks do not matter. So this is just a fun little bonus for more weapons and cantrips to use.
Now for the real changes. In 12.1, Blizzard went to MANY specs with the intended goal of rebalancing the power between in cooldowns and out of cooldowns. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has played Devourer in the first season of Midnight, but Devourer did virtually no damage outside of Void Metamorphosis, and did virtually ALL of our damage inside of it.
This change attempts to fix that, and does so in a multitude of ways. Firstly, the reduction in power to Impending Apocalypse works to lower the high end damage of our ramps. While this doesn't impact our upfront burst, as your first Collapsing Star is unimpacted, it does cause each subsequent star to do significantly less damage. For instance, on live, should you get 5 stars in a Void Meta window, your final star will be doing 120% additional damage. On 12.1 PTR, that final star would be doing 80% additional damage. This does put less emphasis on extending your Void Meta's and affects Annihilator more than Void-Scarred, which is a theme we'll explore later. While this is a nerf on the high end impact, Collapsing Star is still very powerful, and should we play these ramp builds, you will still want to remain in Void Meta for as long as possible.
The other major change is the reduction to our mastery, Mastery: Monster Within. This is actually quite a large change, and will have some knock on effects to both the talents we potentially play (i.e. Voidrage loses value) and how we gear. Our mastery is fairly unique where it essentially has two components, the base value, which applies at all times (the top number if you hover over your mastery in your character sheet) and the "Void Meta" value, which applies only while inside of Void Meta. This is incredibly powerful as it applies on top of the base value, essentially scaling off of itself. To illustrate this, if you have something that deals 100 cosmic damage, and have a 25% base value, it would deal 125 damage outside of Void Meta. Whenever you would enter Void Meta, that would be increased by an additional value, in this case 29%, and would deal 161.25 damage. While the numbers are small in this example, our mastery values are often MUCH higher, and this effect is much more noticeable the more mastery and the higher the base damage of the spell is. This change reduces the in Void Meta value by 66%, which is quite a substantial reduction to our mastery. My character on live has 38% base mastery currently, with an additional 45% mastery inside of Void Meta. On PTR with the exact same gear, that secondary number is down to 15%. This is obviously a large nerf to the damage difference inside of Void Meta, but i do want to stress that we still do more damage inside of it.
The other changes don't really necessitate much discussion. The Consume buff and the Void Ray nerf from Void Meta both just serve to reduce the delta between the two forms again. Finally, the 20% spell buff is honestly a GIGANTIC buff, an aura buff of this size is incredibly rare, and does do a lot of heavy lifting. With literally nothing changing, this equates to roughly a 10% loss for Annihilator, but things WILL change.
All in all, Blizzard did achieve their state goal of reducing damage in Void Meta, while increasing damage outside of it, while also making other stats more valuable for Devourer.
Tier Set
Here's the announced Season 2 Tier set for Devourer.
Devourer
2-Set Bonus: Harvesting 4 or more Soul Fragments with Reap has a 20% chance to cause your next Consume to be instant cast and explode in a Soulburst, dealing Cosmic damage to nearby enemies.
4-Set Bonus: Soulburst generates 8 Soul Fragments and grants Moment of Craving. Reap deals 20% increased damage.
This tier set is AWESOME and I am a huge fan of it, but let's break down how it works. Both pieces tie into a new proc which the tier set creates, Soulburst. This proc is an aoe proc which causes your Consume to instantly cast, giving similarities of the pvp talent Beckon, and also deal AoE damage to your target and surrounding enemies. As best we can tell, the proc functions on a deck of card system, with 2 "hits" in a 10 card deck of rolls. Imagine if you will, that each time Reap consumes 4 or more souls, a card is drawn from a 10 card deck. Inside of this deck, 8 of the cards are blanks, and 2 of them are procs, and cards are drawn each time you consume 4 or more until the deck is emptied. Once the deck is empty, the cards are reshuffled and it begins again. This is great, as it's a method of reducing variance. While you can't have huge chain procs, you also wont have large periods of droughts. The proc itself does not scale with our mastery, and as far as we can tell, cannot proc Shattered Souls, but can crit and does scale with other damage bonuses, such as Feast of Souls. The 2pc accounts for 1-2% overall due to this, with some very minor quality of life bonus due to the instant cast.
Most of the interesting things from this tier set comes from the 4 piece, which gives Reap a flat 20% bonus, and additional causes Soulburst to generate 8 Soul Fragments and a Moment of Craving. This is incredibly impactful, and turns this proc into one of the most efficient Soul Fragment generators in our kit! It's also very fun to play with, as seeing 10 Souls spawn all at once is just cool. This bonus, coupled with the large buff it gives Reap, will have us pressing Reap as much as we possibly can, as close to cooldown as possible whenever it will consume 4 or more soul fragments. This is great rotationally, as we have a new button to play with, and will also likely have us take the Second Helping and Umbral Blade talents, for even more Reaps. This tier set is more impactful for Void-Scarred as they have naturally higher damage from Reap due to Burning Blades, but is nonetheless a buff for Annihilator as well.
While this set is powerful, and likely changes our rotation and our selected talents, it does have a significant bug associated with it, Eradicate cannot currently proc Soulburst. This results in a significant decrease in procs in aoe or cleave, and needs to be fixed ASAP as it makes selecting Eradicate feel quite bad. I am assuming this is a bug, as currently Eradicate works with every other effect which works with and buffs Reap (including the 20% buff that the 4pc provides). Overall though, I think this tier set is powerful, and is rotationally transformative.
My Thoughts
To sum everything up into one sentence: I'm having a LOT of fun on PTR.
I think the new tier set is really the largest catalyst for that. I've long been a fan of Reap, and the tier set buffing it to such extremes and making it such a main focus has made for some really engaging gameplay and adds another active button to our rotation. Ramping to big collapsing stars is still (potentially) there, but we also have this other source of damage, which is great.
I do think the changes to balance Void Meta vs out of Void Meta damage are healthy for the spec overall, but it is sad to lose the gigantic stars we were getting before. Part of this is the loss of our current 4pc bonus (Demon Hunter Devourer 12.0 Class Set 4pc), where Stars do scale less, and our Mastery being nerfed has reduced their damage. On the topic of the Mastery nerf, this is less serious than it seems. Crit is already a very powerful stat for us after the buff to Enchant Ring - Eyes of the Eagle, due to Calamitous and Midnight. As such, we'll likely look to swap our gearing to Haste/Crit or Crit/Haste come 12.1. These changes also do affect Annihilator more than Void-Scarred as Void-Scarred is less reliant on Collapsing Star and damage inside of Void Meta, which will likely necessitate a swap off of Annihilator, although that may change with more testing and refined sims.
Unfortunately, Void-Scarred has its own problems which have not been addressed. This hero talent tree has two main variants, Caster and Melee. Caster builds play exactly the same as Annihilator builds, taking 4/4 in the apex talent and focusing on Collapsing Star, benefiting from the passive bonuses found in the Void-Scarred tree such as Burning Blades, Monster Rising, and Blind Focus. It does not play ANY of the melee suit of talents, only using Voidblade once at the start of Void Meta to proc Voidsurge and obtain the amp from Devourer's Bite. Conversely, the melee builds fully flex into the Hungering Slash and The Hunt, with most of its damage coming from Voidsurge and the amp from Devourers Bite. This build fully ignores Collapsing Star and the apex talents, and looks to NEVER cast it. The problem with these builds is that there is no synergy with them. You either ignore the hero talent and its melee lean entirely in the caster builds due to how weak the individual melee abilities are, or ignore Collapsing Star fully in the melee build, leveraging how strong multiple stacks of Devourers Bite is. Either way, it feels unsatisfying and you're largely ignoring one part of the spec. Linking the melee abilities more seamlessly with the rest of our tree, and giving Void-Scarred some synergy for using Collapsing Star, would go a large way to fix this. Additionally, Devourers Bite existing means the melee talents themselves cannot be that strong. This talent needs to go, it changes how we play with the melee talents, only using them once per Void Meta at the very start to amp our Voidsurge damage, and due to how powerful Voidsurge and the damage amp is, the melee talents are not powerful on their own. Thus, it feels next to impossible to find a way to sink 4 points into them.
All in all, i think our tier set is incredibly fun, and makes the rotation super engaging in 12.1. Many in the community that I've had a chance to talk to have echoed this sentiment, and assuming that Eradicate is added to proc the tier set, I think Devourer is going to be in a great spot come 12.1. The changes make your damage outside of Void Meta much more impactful, while still granting increased damage inside of your cooldown, and many of the negatives can be offset by stat and playstyle changes. With targeted changes to Void-Scarred and bug fixes, Devourer will be in an awesome state come 12.1 launch.
