yea this seems super basic but it just isn't working. i've used displacements before and they've worked fine.
set feature set to experimental in cycles, switch the material to displacement or both, use the displacement node in the editor, make sure that there's enough geometry, result!
but my texture seems to have no affect on the mesh other than applying the texture as if it were a normal map.
and in case you cant see theres 512 vertices in this plane
i realise that the noise texture is plugged into the normal instead of height in the screenshot above but belive me when i say it literally did nothing when i changed it so...????
and this screenshot is just to show that displacements using the modifier does work
(the displacement modifier works fine but I * NEED * to use it in the node editor.)
edit: oddly enough when looking around some for for an answer, i found out andrew price apparently had a similar problem but no one in the tweets seemed to actually answer the question asked.
https://twitter.com/andrewpprice/status/1017715665032003587?lang=en