Legion still sucks.

[Byrth]

Now that we have figured out some of the tricks, this event isn't quite as bad as it initially seemed (in that we've become more successful with essentially the same strategies).

It still has some pretty fundamental flaws though:
1) It still lacks really useful equipment. When people get excited about this minor of an upgrade, you know something is wrong. Meteor is useless until you add an event that we can BLM burn and has a time limit. Arise is much more useful than I initially thought... in Legion.
2) It relies on Perfect Defense or stun-locking monsters to circumvent the broken damage systems. When the only way to avoid damage is to totally negate it, there is something wrong.
3) It relies on heavy buffs, which means Embrava.
4) Hall of Mul relies on either luck and stun locking or Wild Card landing, and for some reason contains more than half of the desirable drops.
5 re:2~4) This relies on 2-hour abilities but is a half hour event. Why should I have to farm Resheph pops because you guys can't design an event properly? Make our 2-hours reset when we exit.

[Theytak]

What I'm honestly most disappointed about is that legion seemed to be the first event that showed promise for breaking the "nothing but zergs" nonsense we've had to deal with forever, but in the end, the best way to do it is still zerging. I'm so sick of zerging. Everything is zerging. Give us an event that can't be zerged, but is reasonably doable through other methods, good lord. It can't be that hard...

[Luvbunny]

Zerg seems to be the way to do it, or kiting the add and what not. What other strategy? Skillchain + Magic Burst? Seems like most used strategy is always damage mitigation, stun the annoying tp moves, enfeeble (LOL), DOT. Looking back at CoP it is always the same deal, kill one mob at a time while a few others kite, zerg it fast and hard with all your two hours, tank it and whittle down the mob's hp and use SC+MB, have each tank and back up tank face each NMs, crowd control while BLMs start casting all the ga spells.

[Mirabelle]

What I'm honestly most disappointed about is that legion seemed to be the first event that showed promise for breaking the "nothing but zergs" nonsense we've had to deal with forever, but in the end, the best way to do it is still zerging. I'm so sick of zerging. Everything is zerging. Give us an event that can't be zerged, but is reasonably doable through other methods, good lord. It can't be that hard...

Exactly all it would require is that the monster be immune to ohysical damage but take damage from SC, MB's. Require certain types of actions to give clues as to which skillchain/MB is favored. Have the mob change their SC weakness at 75%, 50% and 25%. Make it so the mob can be effectively tanked in the meantime. Then have a mob that is immune to WS and requires specific actions or abilities to break that immunity.

To me NM's don't necessarily have to be "high risk of deathga" hard to be entertaining. As long as they keep you on your toes and require shifting strategy.

As long as SE insists on putting mobs in there that can one shot everything right away, they've pushed the populace to a zerg strategy. The only other option is zombie DOT'ing the thing to death which has never been an expeditious way to do anything.

[lllen]

Based on what I have read here and other places I haven't had the inclination to try Legion. Since it came out I have seen one shout in Jeuno for it and they shouted for hours and no one I know knows anyone who has done it, or is even willing to do it. We are not a bunch of new players, we have been around for years (I'm the baby, only playing 6 years), if you can't get the die hards in there something is wrong.

[Mahoro]

Now that we have figured out some of the tricks, this event isn't quite as bad as it initially seemed (in that we've become more successful with essentially the same strategies).

It still has some pretty fundamental flaws though:
1) It still lacks really useful equipment. When people get excited about this minor of an upgrade, you know something is wrong. Meteor is useless until you add an event that we can BLM burn and has a time limit. Arise is much more useful than I initially thought... in Legion.
2) It relies on Perfect Defense or stun-locking monsters to circumvent the broken damage systems. When the only way to avoid damage is to totally negate it, there is something wrong.
3) It relies on heavy buffs, which means Embrava.
4) Hall of Mul relies on either luck and stun locking or Wild Card landing, and for some reason contains more than half of the desirable drops.
5 re:2~4) This relies on 2-hour abilities but is a half hour event. Why should I have to farm Resheph pops because you guys can't design an event properly? Make our 2-hours reset when we exit.

I don't really mind the drops. Many of the useful ones are incrementally useful but that is par for the course for most SE events post-Abyssea, including VW, Neo-Limbus, and WoE back in the day. For better or for worse, we are in minor upgrade/sidegrade territory until Seekers of Adoulin, and Legion is no more egregious an offender here. Sure, it's got its share of minor upgrades like Fulad-Zerah (although we all know people pay multi-millions for minor upgrades and spend days/weeks seeking that perfect Tatter augment), but it's also got some best-in-slot stuff for certain jobs. And now that people have discovered almost 100% of the Honor augments, getting those means a lot more. Pretty much every melee in my LS wants a Corvine Feet abjuration and an Honor now that we know the augment is crit hit dmg +9-10%. I would never suggest people do Legion over pursuit of Neo-Nyzul gear, but it's the place to go when you've got EVERYTHING else and you are looking to do those final min/maxes of your character.

I agree with everything else on your list though, wholeheartedly. I guess for me, I have the most fun at this event than anything else I do in game now, and while I see the event's glaring flaws, I have been able to overlook them because of that.

[Sparthos]

Zerg seems to be the way to do it, or kiting the add and what not. What other strategy? Skillchain + Magic Burst? Seems like most used strategy is always damage mitigation, stun the annoying tp moves, enfeeble (LOL), DOT. Looking back at CoP it is always the same deal, kill one mob at a time while a few others kite, zerg it fast and hard with all your two hours, tank it and whittle down the mob's hp and use SC+MB, have each tank and back up tank face each NMs, crowd control while BLMs start casting all the ga spells.

There were once endurance fights in this game.

CoP Wyrms weren't a zerg.
Dark Ixion / Sandworm's Doomvoid BCNMs weren't zergs.
Ouryu Cometh wasn't a zerg.
KS99 at 75 weren't zergs.
Proto-Ultima/Omega weren't zergs.
Khimaira/Cerberus/Tyger weren't zergs.

There's a pretty big difference between the game during CoP-WOTG and post-WOTG where the former had some zerg battles but there were also standard endurance fights with your DD tanks, support line and mages. Nigh everything since Abysseas conclusion has been a zerg where TP moves incinerate your front-line, attacks ignore shadows, time limits constrain you to a zerg and balance has been thrown in the rubbish to be replaced by Fanatics Drinks and wanna-be Fanatics Drinks (Perfect Defense).

If you missed one Gates of Hades back at 75 Cerberus the odds are if you didn't panic you could recover and the same went for other endgame instances but at 99? One TP move going through effectively means game over, lie down and SE is making sure that you aren't recovering.

[Zhronne]

KS99 at 75 weren't zergs.
Khimaira/Cerberus/Tyger weren't zergs.

Wyrm BC was! And I guess you meant Hydra, not Tyger?

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. What matters most to me is a keyword:

V A R I E T Y

I'm all fine with Zerging, I'm not so fine with it's not ONE of the strategies and ONE of the things we do, but the ONLY thing we do.
It gets boring.
But I could say the same about XP pts and many other things.

One single thing, back then we didn't have the powerful buffs we have today, buff jobs were more scarce as was players' jobs options, sometimes you just had to do what you could with the jobs you had available in your group.
Jobs had worse WSs, worse gear options, hard to get haste cap, etc etc
Also no Embrava and... well, we had Perfect Defense, don't remember exactely whe it was added but I seem to recall people underestimated it for a long time?

With the same possibilities and the same "powers" we have nowadays, people would have probably zerged a lot more stuff even at level 75
(we all remember what happened with Kclub and DRKs before the nerf, rite?)
I think it's... I dunno, the nature of players.
The first times you enjoy a hard, challenging and endurance fight.
After a while you don't enjoy it anymore and all you want is the loot that mob drop.
So if you can kill it faster and minimizing the risks, why not doing it? I think this is, overly simplified, what drives people into wanting to Zerg.
But over the last 2 years we zerged SO MUCH that, really, I think we all need a bit of variation now.

[saevel]

Exactly all it would require is that the monster be immune to ohysical damage but take damage from SC, MB's. Require certain types of actions to give clues as to which skillchain/MB is favored. Have the mob change their SC weakness at 75%, 50% and 25%. Make it so the mob can be effectively tanked in the meantime. Then have a mob that is immune to WS and requires specific actions or abilities to break that immunity.

This wouldn't work. Being "immune" to physical damage means 0 damage melee hits and thus no TP to do those WS's which would have most of them do 0 damage and 0 SC damage. Would be better to have your BLM's kite and chain nuke. Mana burn it. Don't try to resurrect SC's, SE screwed them up so badly for implementation that any attempts to implement them would immediately lead to just zerging.

Making endurance fights wouldn't be hard, first thing they would need to do is GTFO with tight time limits. Second is to nerf the sh!t out of every single 90+ NM's offensive power. That is the single biggest reason we zerg, the faster we kill it the less time it has to kill us. Killing something that dangerous slowly would just result in you wiping and dieing as it went around killing everyone.

"Hate" is broken in that damage generates way to much hate. "Tanks" tend to be defensive in nature yet with damage being the single greatest hate source for 300 to 500%, this renders all defensive class's utterly useless at tanking. This rotates around to having a fast fight where damage is turned to maximum (kill it before it kills you), with the tanks unable to tank the damage dealers now become the tank. To give them enough defensive power to not get destroyed we are forced to resort to Fanatics / Perfect Defense spam.

A real good HNM boss fight would be one that had 300,000 to 500,000 HP (or even a million) yet didn't have moves that would instantly ruin the run nor a stupidly tight time limit that you had to race against. That type of fight would turn into a long drawn out affair of whittling its HP down (assuming hate mechanics were fixed) while trying not to strain healers MP supply.

[Luvbunny]

I think it's... I dunno, the nature of players. The first times you enjoy a hard, challenging and endurance fight. After a while you don't enjoy it anymore and all you want is the loot that mob drop. So if you can kill it faster and minimizing the risks, why not doing it? I think this is, overly simplified, what drives people into wanting to Zerg. But over the last 2 years we zerged SO MUCH that, really, I think we all need a bit of variation now.

That statement hit the nails in the coffin, why would anyone wants a long drawn up fight when you can brew/displacer it so that it become a few mnts fight. At the end of the day we all just want to peek at the possibility of loot and could not care less about artificial challenge etc... The first 5-10 times may be ok, after that it's just become a torture.

SE could also create NMs that has alternative damage weakness depending on the state of the mob, which can change from blunt, slashing, piercing depending on the elemental sign (which is random), and also weak to certain SC + MB, and can alternate between taking reduced physical damage or magical damage (ex: Melo melo, Turtle Kindred Seal), or it will be healed with physical in one mode, and magical in another mode. This way people cannot zerg this, and you need a variety of jobs with different weapons, and DOT become important again, so is Paladin as tank, and the group really need to listen and have strategy otherwise the mob will not die. Though as I recall, most people HATE this kind of mob!! HATE it since it takes so much co-ordination that PUG would just heal the NMs to oblivion.