Legion main for 5 years here - my thoughts on the buff and why it's so needed

Leon_Loves_Cheryl

Legion's fatigue is dangerous to buff because, if he's able to vault over pallets and immediately catch up to survivors, he basically becomes Diet Nurse because of the ability to invalidate pallet loops. His entire kit is balanced around how easy and simple it is for him to injure large numbers of survivors quickly and efficiently, with the tradeoff being that he has to rely purely on melee mindgames to earn downs. Giving him the opportunistic ability to vault a pallet and down someone immediately afterwards will make him overpowered in a way similar to Nurse, which is why they have to be SUPER careful when buffing his fatigue.

With that said, the 2.5 duration has sorely been needed. Legion, historically, has been treated and balanced by the devs as if he has a lethal power, when he does not. The irony is that his fatigue is longer than Blight's despite Legion's power being many multitudes weaker. BHVR has finally realized this, which is why they're buffing his power with such intensity. For a long time, Legion was balanced around the dev (and player) perception that his power is very deadly. In reality, what matters in terms of how good a Killer is is how efficiently they can get people downed, and Legion's kit and power are extremely ineffiicent at this.

But he doesn't have to be meta or have anti-loop or a chase power to be good. He just needs to not have debilitating inhibitors built into his kit, and these buffs are a step in the right direction towards achieving that. Without an anti-loop power or chase power, he'll never truly be among the best, but these buffs will at least potentially make him an actually decent Killer.

Legion doesn't need another rework. His power and kit design are perfectly fine. He trades his ability to efficiently get downs with being able to injure people ultra-efficiently while simultaneously having some slowdown via forcing survivors to mend. It's totally fine for there to exist a killer that emphasizes pure M1 mechanics. The more they make Frenzy a viable anti-loop power (vaulting a pallet into a down) the closer he gets to Nurse levels of anti-loop, yes, HOWEVER, they can achieve a balance with Legion's ability to vault pallets and self-stun than they can with Nurse because Nurse stuns herself AFTER the hit, whereas Legion stuns himself before. So you can fine-tune his numbers perfectly fine and get him into a position where he can use his power to help him down at some loops, making him less reliant on anti-pallet or anti-window perks. Counterplay would still exist as survivors who are aware of which loops are dangerous against his vaults will know when and where to run (and where to not.) You could even make his self stun 2.25 seconds instead of 2.5 and there would still be loops where he isn't guaranteed an M1 after a vault.

So overall, I'm exceedingly happy about the changes. I remember when you'd have to run two addons just to make his non-lethal power have a fatigue duration of three seconds instead of four, and now it's going to be 2.5 seconds without any addons. If you're a long-time Legion player, you would have been dreaming of a change like this. I strongly feel that this is a great direction for the killer, and although he's still not going to be good, he's at least going to not feel so sluggish and weak anymore. Mostly I'm glad that BHVR's balance team has grown to understand that Legion's power didn't deserve all the built-in limitations to be as severe as they have been up until now.