Devourer Doesn't Seem to Work While Leveling

 Oh boy.

I've been putting in a lot of hours on my new Void Elf Demon Hunter. I've basically quested through the main campaign of each of the four main Dragonflight zones and gotten her up to 56.

Conceptually, there are cool ideas here. The problem is tuning and pacing.

Here is how, as I understand it, your Devourer is supposed to work:

You cast Consume as your primary filler. This generates Fury, does damage, and spawns a little void-y soul fragment. You can cast it while moving, and you're meant to, I think, be moving around to grab the fragments as you go (this is not a gameplay style I love, but it's a valid choice). Walking over a soul fragment heals you (though for an incredibly tiny amount - just 1% of your max HP) and also grants you some Fury and fills a bar under your Fury bar. You can also pop out soul fragments on any other damage you do, but you get one guaranteed from Consume.

Reap is an ability with a fairly short cooldown that does a bit of instantaneous damage and sucks up to four fragments near you.

Voidblade has you charge at the target and strike them, generating a fairly big amount of Fury as you strike them with damage.

Your first goal is to build up to 100 Fury, which you then unleash with a Void Ray - basically Devourer's equivalent of Eye Beam. This carves off a bunch of soul fragments, and with some talents, it resets your Reap cooldown and I believe has it suck in all nearby fragments, not just four.

Now, once you hit 50 fragments (you'll get this talent early, but you need Metamorphosis for it to work. I don't even know why this is a talent given that I think this is the only version of Metamorphosis you get,) you will be able to hit Void Metamorphosis.

This (I believe) sets you to 100 Fury and will enhanced the damage of your other abilities (Consume becomes Devour) and notably resets your soul fragments to zero. Your Fury will begin to drain, and drains faster the longer you're transformed, until you hit 0 and pop out. While channeling Void Ray or casting Collapsing Void, the fury drain is paused.

If you get to 30 fragments after transforming, you'll be able to cast Collapsing Void, essentially tossing a black hole at the target.

The goal, basically, is to try to get Void Metamorphosis to last as long as possible and to gather as many soul fragments as you can while it's going to shoot out as many Collapsing Voids as possible.

I have cast, in 56 levels of playing this spec, I think three or four Collapsing Voids.

It's rough. Basically, if you aren't gathering fragments and managing your Fury perfectly, your metamorphosis ends before you get to cast the spell. I've had several instances where I got 29 fragments right as the thing ended, but more often than not I'm under 20 before this happens.

It just feels like the tuning is off - and I'm not talking about damage (though I think I'm struggling - the NPCs in follower dungeons often out-damage me) but rather the pacing of the spec.

I think the Fury drain is far, far too punishing, and also, I think that Fury generation is too slow, and that we need to massively cut the number of soul fragments you need to gather. (Or we need a radical redesign of the spec, which I honestly could see happening early on in Midnight if the high-level talents don't fix and smooth this all out).

Unless I'm doing something terribly wrong here (and it's a new spec, so I could be - though given how they've redesigned old specs to be more approachable, I'm shocked at how complex the rotation is on this one) this feels just broken.

I feel like - and this should be true by like level 15, or 20 at least - that played reasonably, you should be able to get at least two Collapsing Voids off per metamorphosis. It certainly shouldn't be a struggle to get a single one off (there is apparently a talent later on that lets you do it immediately after using metamorphosis, but that's not going to be available until we can go past the current level 80 cap).

There's an interesting idea at work here: there aren't any long cooldowns in the spec. Metamorphosis could theoretically be used very frequently if you could somehow suck in tons of soul fragments, and likewise, Void Ray can be used as long as you have 100 or more Fury (except in Metamorphosis, when it doesn't cost Fury but instead does have a cooldown).

But it's just so frustrating to me that you can barely ever do the really cool thing the spec is supposed to do, and instead are juggling just like four abilities (Consume, Void Blade, Reap, and Void Ray) for the vain hope of being able to pull it off next time.

It does feel like the spec is built for the endgame, which, sure, is where most of gameplay in WoW takes place, but the leveling has been a slog.

Also, given that it's an Intellect class, it has become shockingly apparent how few one-handed intellect swords, axes, fist weapons, and warglaives there actually are in old content.

Aesthetically, the spec is cool as hell. But I think they need to really get in there and do some serious fixes, because right now it just feels like it is not working. My main DH is going to stick to Havoc (which he was probably going to anyway).