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Ideas to make Legion upper mid-tier, more interactive and fun/threatening to play against

Arkirron Arkirron
in Feedback and Suggestions

As both a killer and survivor player The Legion update was a welcome addition to the game for me. However, as survivors are now taking the legion more seriously due to his ability to down survivors on the fifth chained hit, his inherent weaknesses and limitations are now a lot more apparent.  

This is going to be quite a long post but bear with as I think these ideas would make the legion both more fun and potentially rewarding to play, but also more interactive and fun to go against. If you would like to skip to my main idea regarding making legion more interactive/threatening to go against skip to paragraph three, however they are all connected in a way so I do recommend reading all of them if you have the time, interest and patience. 

  1. Firstly, the entire aim of his power as it currently stands is in chaining hits to multiple survivors, and with this purpose, in my opinion the 10 seconds duration is just too short. Even if you catch survivors working on the same generator, if they start running away from each other, by the time you hit the first survivor, the second survivor is already too far away for you to chain the second hit to them if they just keep running in a straight line away from you (see not otzdarvas video on countering legion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raChfQ1SA1o at 1:36). As if you have one stack in feral frenzy (5.4m/s move speed base kit) you will only gain 14 meters running towards a survivor as they are running away from you in the entire duration from a full power gauge to depleted. Therefore, it is for this reason I think that legion needs more duration than he currently has in his base kit, to make the principle aim of his power more achievable. I suggest a 2-4 second increase to this base kit duration. This may sound like a lot, but as it currently stands it is just too easy to hold w and get away from the legion as he attempts to chain attacks, this is not even factoring in when the legion is running low on his power and the survivor stands at a pallet, which is an additional way for a survivor to prevent chain hits, either by dropping the pallet and stunning the legion out of his power, or mind gaming the drop when the power is low and making his power deplete that way.  
  2. Although the update did address some of the unnecessary punishment surrounding his power, there are still a lot of aspects that do not make sense, especially when compared to other killers and factoring the immediate strength of legions power. The update removed the power gauge depletion on basic attack, but the power gauge still depletes entirely if you pick up a survivor whilst in your power, which is just unnecessary, IMO it should just begin recharging from the point when you picked up the survivor. Further, missing an attack or getting stunned in his power, as infrequently as it should happen, still doesn’t make sense with regards to how much it punishes the legion. There isn't another killer that gets punished as hard for missing an attack or getting stunned as legion does, every other killer just has a short cooldown and can then resume using their power, such as Nurse and Oni who can actually down survivors and insta-down survivors, and legions power isn’t even lethal (unless in the very specific scenario of getting the fifth chain hit which is very situational). And yet he has to wait a full 20 seconds till he can use his power again which is just ridiculously crippling and incomparable to any other killer in the game. I think this should be changed so that the legion either loses a portion of his power gauge (for instance ¼) on a missed attack but stays in his power, or goes through the fatigue but retains however much of the gauge he had left. I believe the same should also happen if he is stunned at a pallet in his power, so he is kicked out of his power but retains what he had left or just loses a small portion of it. It really doesn’t make sense to me the way it is currently implemented, imagine if the huntress or trickster got locked out of their power for 20 seconds if you stunned them, and the main use of legion's power is just in injuring survivors, not downing them. Which brings me to my third point regarding the utility of legions power.  
  3. Currently if survivors stay in deep wound legions power has essentially no utility on them whatsoever (apart from the highly situational and easily countered scenario of chaining hits between all 4 survivors). This feels a little baffling from a realism perspective in game (let me ignore this deep wound so the killer can’t do anything to me in their power) but I do realise it is a game and many things are like this so I will address the uninteresting and non-interactive aspect of it from a gameplay perspective. Previously to the update, legion had two add-ons that when used together allowed the depletion of a survivor's deep wound timer that would make them go from healthy to downed in 4 feral frenzy hits (franks mix tape and stab wounds study). When legion was first released these add-ons were arguably his strongest but after he was initially reworked (back in patch 2.7) this was no longer the case and they were essentially useless add-ons, and just previously to the most recent update to the legion, they were not particularly strong add-ons. I believe there is a way to implement the original idea for allowing the legion to deplete the deep wound timer of survivors in his power, that is both more rewarding and fun for killers who use information and juggle survivors well, and also more interactive and threatening for survivors. Instead of just playing “mending simulator” as some survivors who loathe this rather one-dimensional aspect of his power sometimes call it. I believe that these two add-ons should be added as base kit. This would allow the legion to focus on one survivor and down them in his power, but it would require two full power recharges (40 seconds) in order to do so. Plus the time it takes to hit the survivor and hit them again, and then vault the pallets and windows in order to reach them and hit them additional times, you’re looking at about a minute minimum in order to down one survivor, this is obviously not strong and would be largely suboptimal for killers who opted to play this way and I think that’s fine, because I think the more interesting and effective aspect to it would be in giving the potential to catch survivors off guard who let their mend timer deplete whilst sitting on gens, healing others, or just holding off the mend in order to avoid giving legion additional chain hits. The amount of deep wound timer depleted by hit should scale with the amount missing already, meaning the first hit doesn’t deplete much but if a survivor lets their deep wound timer tick down to under a half whilst repairing a generator for example and you find them again, you can instantly down them with your power, adding a risk to survivors ignoring deep wound and doing other actions. I think that alongside this the ability for legion to see deep wound timers should be brought back. This would be nowhere near as oppressive as before as there would be no moonwalking waiting for someone to go down, but would add an extra layer to legions power and instead allow killers who use information well to have some threat to survivors in their power who they had earlier deep wounded if they find them and if the survivor had not mended and allowed the timer to tick down whilst they did other actions. Lastly to go along with this change I think that the mend progress should deplete at ¼ or ½ of the time it takes to mend, to avoid survivors just safely 99ing the mend and being able to finish the mend in a split second and cheesing the mechanic. In effect this change would force survivors to create distance from the legion so they could finish the mend safely, instead of just sitting on a gen in his face; due to the threat from his power, which makes more sense from a gameplay and realism perspective. Although this forces the survivors further away which is not ideal for the chain downs, it does so because this change makes the legion a threat in his power in more ways than one (just the chain down) and adds layers to his power that would make the gameplay both more interesting and challenging from the killer's perspective but also for the survivors.  
  4. And finally, my last change is in rewarding the legion for getting multiple chains by making him a more immediate threat to the survivor when coming out of his power, the current reward for chain hits of extra speed in his power isn’t really going to do anything to help you get the down if the last survivor is on the other side of the map. And ending your power after injuring two survivors to try and down one of them leaves you with a feeling of “great, now what” much as before if there are a lot of strong pallets or the survivors know how to loop as you have literally nothing else to help you get the down. Now I'm not saying the legion should become the strongest anti loop killer in the game, but I think he should have some reward in his power that helps him to secure a down, outside of the very specific scenario of hitting all 4 survivors. I think the easiest way to address this is to make the extra speed gained per feral frenzy hit apply to the fatigue state and maybe a second afterwards (0.2m/s or 0.3m/s per frenzy hit). Additionally, the legions fatigue could be reduced by 0.25 seconds for each frenzy hit. The legion currently moves at 2.07m/s in his fatigue, so this would just give a slight boost allowing him to catch up a little faster when ending his power. And his fatigue is currently 3 seconds, meaning he could have down to a 2 second fatigue, but in that case, he has already hit 4 survivors so he may as well just go for the down in his power. Currently when you hit someone in your power and decide to go for the down on them if there aren’t other survivors nearby, if they just run in a straight line they’ll gain a speed boost from the first hit, you run back up behind them in your power to close the distance, cancel your power, and it’ll take a further 12 seconds approximately to catch the survivor and down them once you cancel your power (they gain approximately 6 meters during your 3 seconds fatigue which it takes you 10 seconds to make up moving at 4.6m/s but you can lunge the last meter or so) this will give the survivor 48 meters distance from where you cancelled your power, plus the distance they moved when you hit them and caught back up to cancel your power and it’s enough distance to make it to basically any strong loop on the map. With these changes, if the survivor is by a pallet or window, you’re still going to have to chase them as a normal m1 killer without much assistance, but these changes would make it so that if they are in a dead zone you can capitalise on that and catch them out. 

I took quite some time in coming up with these ideas and suggestions and I hope that anyone reading them takes the time to consider the possible benefits to gameplay, both for survivor and for the killer as well. As an avid legion player, as well as playing other killers and survivor I think any of these changes would be a welcome addition. And all of them together would IMO put The Legion around the mid-tier/upper mid-tier of killers with Demogorgon, Nemesis, Dredge etc. and would mean that more thought was required in order to counter the legion instead of just the straight forward "split up, don't mend in his terror radius".

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