Devastation is the epitome of a sheepster skill.
Between praying that you haven’t found an Impaired Aim spot on the ground, praying that the rocks choose to land on your target, and then waiting for the rocks to actually land in the first place, the applied uptime of dps from Devastation is not very high at all. It’s quite unique in that regard; it’s probably the only skill you can use and then have to cross your fingers that any consistent damage comes out of it.
And that’s to say nothing of the uptime of the buff vs the its cooldown, which is a whole other can of worms.
There’s a reason why GrimArmory’s Devastation set is also a Blade Trap set, and why the set narrows down the targeting of Devastation to a single meter. And even then, this only suffices to make the skill do the sort of damage you’d expect it to in the first place:
On a class like Battlemage, a skill/item/set needs to be doing everything in order to be competitive*. Spellscourge does not do everything. No Battlemage item does; for fear of archetypal overlap/being used in off-classes, item support for Battlemage is only barely statistically better than that of other classes. Lack of RR, lack of innate sustain, lack of archetypal scaling, etc. all contribute to keeping Battlemage down, and item support needs to address all of these (and more) to make the class competitive*.
* Of course, the question is whether everything needs to be competitive, to which I’d argue not. Seeking to make everything top of line is how you get powercreep over time. It’s fine for some things to be weaker/slower if they provide other advantages, such as ease of access (Krieg/Dark One builds) or improved defensive comfort.
In that regard, I’d still argue that Battlemage does not provide any greater comfort than other classes. Nullification/Mirror are potent skills, but you can get those without taking Soldier. And if you do take Soldier, Overguard is not far off from Mirror, and Cleansing Waters is not far off from Nullification. So what’s gained by Soldier+Arcanist?
My Spellscourge build, trying to lean in equally to Devastation and Blade Arc:
It’s…alright, I guess? Sure as hell isn’t breaking any speed records. But I wouldn’t call it too comfy; even with every defensive option in the book, incoming damage is still very spikey and the healing from 2% (2%??? Seriously?) ADCTH on Devastation is literally not noticeable. Again, see this post’s opener - Devastation does not hit often (or hard) enough, even on crowds, for 2% lifesteal to actually make a difference. Blade Arc winding up with 8%, all said and done, also doesn’t amount to much.
Build can still double-tank SR boss rooms and YOLO through SR, but damage AND sustain falls apart when you find a single Poison Hero with any Fumble/IA.
There’s three ways I’d seek to improve Spellscourge Battlemage, and two of them have nothing to do with Spellscourge Battlemage:
- Tone down on Fumble/IA from non-boss sources.
- Reset mastery-skill cooldowns (so, not item/Devotion skills) when moving from Chunk to Chunk in SR. Needing to wait around and do nothing for Mirror/Devastation to be up because you blew your load on a mobpack at the end of one chunk when there’s a Nem at the start of the next just feels bad.
- Increase the projectile speed AND projectile AoE of Devastation so that they hit the ground faster upon spawning and don’t need to hit directly as often to apply their damage.
TED Talk over.