Legion still sucks.

[Mahoro]

You're tasked to gather up 18 people, fight multiple NMs that spam their most powerful attacks out of the gate with no time extensions while receiving little to no incentive to throw yourself against the wall that is the event.

Is the gear good? Sure, a few pieces are collectable and have some value but nothing is 'wow' enough to deal with an alliance event where one ill-timed Fulmination means you've just wasted everyones time.

What is the incentive for strangers to team up? There is none. FFXI isn't the clique-fantasy it used to be and much of endgame now centers on pick-up groups yet the developers are creating content like its 2009. Why? So the handful of linkshells that can bother to cater 18-36man events can have fun? Is that a good use of dev resources? No.

Why is everything centered on abusing Embrava and Perfect Defense?

I know these abilities are powerful but seriously? Players ask for old school battles (largely turtlefests to make RDMs and PLDs feel good) and instead what we're given is an event where you can't inhale the content before monsters are launching off AOEs that oneshot everyone.

So lets sum up this joke of an event and end on a constructive note:

-If you're going to require 18 people then make the rewards worth it. Heavy Metal, Currency, Rare synthesis materials amongst other valuable loot or no one will care. This event has been dead since day1.

-This idea that hardmode = massive AOE dmg everywhere isnt challenge, it just winds up being brava, alex and zerrrrg till you run out of steam and wildcard it back. Abyssea had more finesse for crying out loud.

If Legions HNMs even rare dropped items of value like say...

Wyrm dropping a Honey Wine or Sweet Tea (because wyrms love it and players love wyrms)
Zilant dropping VNM materials (currently asked for in new 100+ synths and a nod back to Yilbegan)
Harpeia dropping items related to previous harpy battles (another shot at obtaining Anhur Robe, Ephemeron, Athos' Tights)
Dweorg dropping pops related to the ZNM system (he is a pandy warden clone afterall)

people would at the least be interested in giving it a try but who cares about that? Lets just make content that fails to fail.

In summary, a video of Legion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7wBN-U2KXI

I agree with most of your points about the problems with Legion. The effort:reward ratio is one of the biggest problems to me, and I would love if they put in the rewards you suggested (mm Anhur Robe!). Someone on another forum counted up every single current Legion drop that can be classified as useful or great, and came up with only ~20%. Which I guess is in line with events like WoE and VW, and if these drops were in those events people would eventually go after 'em to round out their jobs. Except they put these particular drops behind what is hands-down THE hardest event in the game, and which requires THE most boneheaded of strategies (PD/Embrava zerg). Their dev notes of "oh you must change strats and adapt based on what happens" is simply not borne out by reality when you have an incredibly restrictive time limit for 7+ HNM.

I am actually getting really sick of their time limits on events lately where their balance justification is "oh well, the drop rates are better, but we just designed it so you will hardly ever reach the final mob". It's not even like Legion drop rates are as good as Nyzul. They are better than VW but sufficiently behind Nyzul. And for the amount of effort required for Legion, by all rights the Nyzul drops should be in Legion and vice versa.

I disagree, however, that the devs shouldn't have devoted resources to this event. People complained about individual loot pools in Voidwatch and people asked for this sort of content, and they catered to this demand. While I won't get into the Abyssea/LS debate, I will say there are a significant number of LS's left in both NA and Japan (moreso in Japan if you ever hang out in Provenance for an extended period of time) to justify at least the IDEA of the content. However, I WILL agree that if they wanted to increase its popularity to PUGs, they should add individual chests at the end in addition to the pooled loot (i.e., to make it like Prov Watcher).