Bring The Legion To The Legion's Trial

starpilotsix

One of the things that bothered me about the Legion is... the killer's unique concept is that, unlike other killers, it's a group, rather than just one killer. Yet in terms of gameplay, there's no sign of this... it's basically entirely cosmetics. And it's a cool feature for cosmetics, but it feels like a huge waste of potential. Once you've entered the trial, The Legion is just one dude. When I saw the previews of the killer, I was excited at possibilities that having more than one killer active could involve... maybe you'd switch between killers on the map, with the others hiding in lockers, or maybe it'd be a magical swap and each individual would have different powers. Instead, no matter which Legion member I choose... I get to run fast and stab people ineffectively.

Now, a huge rework at this stage is obviously not going to happen. So, I started to think of a 'minimum work' method of incorporating the Legion's group-status in the trial itself.

Here's what I'd like to see. It's fairly simple, and would buff the killer, but I don't think it's even enough of a buff that the Legion wouldn't need MORE buffs beyond this (since I think most people are agreed right now that they need buffs).

You choose one of the Legion members to play, as normal. The other three? Are on the map. They're stationary hazards. They're CAGED, in 'entity' cages (spawning like Jigsaw boxes). Lorewise, you can think of the killer as being in the 'being tortured' phase. Whoever's the active killer in the trial is being tortured by their friends, their family, the only ones they have left to care about, being used as hostages in the trial.

As I said, these function as stationary hazards. Keep in mind that there are only three of these on the whole map, so they're not THAT dangerous overall, and depend a bit on RNG for their placement. But even if hypothetically all three were right beside different generators, assisting a 3-gen strat, it wouldn't be a game-ender. What they do provide is some extra fear for the survivor's side, and an opportunity for the killer to intelligently use them, herding vulnerable survivors towards them. If the cages are subtle (maybe they're manacles instead of cages) you can even mind-game a bit by standing still and pretending to be just one of the phantoms. Regardless, the killer sees the auras of their fellow Legion members at all times.

So, let's say a survivor gets too close to caged Legion members. Normally it's an alert hazard. There's a short-range audio alert (a whistle maybe), letting the killer, if nearby, know there's someone within 8m (say) of one of their teammates. Maybe it's like the Frenzy-sense, only you don't actually have to be in frenzy when it happens.

When a survivors gets close enough to touch the Caged Legion members (within the same range as an object interaction), what happens depends on their status:

If a survivor is in a Deep Wound state, upon passing by the Caged Legion members they reach out with a weapon and slice a chunk off the survivor's bleeding timer.

If the survivor passing near them is Exposed, upon passing too close to a Caged Legion member, the Legion member reaches out with a weapon and the survivor is instantly downed. This addresses one of the big problems of the killer, that, mostly, one-hit down perks (including one of their native perks) are wasted since they don't work in Frenzy. Now, these powers can extend through their friends.

If the survivor is downed near them, their aura is revealed.

If the survivor is otherwise healthy or injured, they reach out and grab at the survivor, giving them the hindered status and the sound alert goes map-wide. So, you don't want to loop next to a caged Legion member.

You can extend these abilities with add-ons... I'm thinking the smiley-button add-ons should be reworked, because they were pretty underwhelming as-is, from what I've seen. I didn't get to extensively test them because of how long killer-lobbies took in the PTB, but... as I understand it, all they do is make it so a non-Frenzy hit doesn't drain much of your frenzy-power? Usually if you're hitting someone outside of Frenzy you don't want to get back into it right away anyway, because either they're downed and you want to hook them, or they're injured and if you frenzy to hit them next they don't go down. So instead, change it so the buttons enhance the powers of the rest of the group, one can make it so the auras are revealed map-wide if people go too close to the cages, or allow them to injure healthy/down injured survivors who pass nearby, or have their own small terror radiuses (which could potentially be default behavior) or other cool effects. Maybe one could even let the killer swap places with one of the cages (and so, gradually place the team in advantageous positions).

This isn't the only potential proposal to add more of a cool group dynamic to the powers, but I do believe it's one that's relatively easy to implement and while I don't think it FIXES the Legion, I do think it helps both in making them both more competitive and interesting to play. I know it'll probably not happen, but it is the Wishlist category, so why not wish?