Dead by Daylight: The Legion First Impressions
The latest Dead by
Daylight chapter – Darkness Among Us, released a couple of days
ago, giving players the usual mixture of a new Killer and Survivor to
play as. The Killer is The Legion, a multiple-personality killer with a
Feral Frenzy attack that allows them to race forward at speed, vault
pallets, and also give them a sense of where healthy Survivors are.
Sounds pretty decent on the face of it, but as is often the case,
things can be different in practice.
My first session spent
playing as The Legion was purely designed to get used to him. (I`ll call The Legion him for laziness purposes from here onwards). I expected to
lose, and lose hard, as I was comfortably in the red ranks when he
released. It took a little while to get used to his “ice skater
turning” when frenzying. It felt like a milder adjustment process
than getting used to Hillbilly and his own turning arcs, but it
wasn’t wholly dissimilar. I messed up a number of tight vaults due
to this, but I soon settled to his eccentricities.
As far as his power, it
was fun, but it didn’t do much to win me the match. I still felt
like I was being looped for just as long as other Killers, even with pallet vaulting and deep wound timers ticking down on a number
of the Survivors. If I’d formed my opinion after my first
experience with The Legion, I would have likely branded him “A bit
shit!”, even allowing for his newness to me. Thankfully the next
session I played him, I did much, much better, and that was partially
helped with finding some complementary perks for his play-style.
One of the main
criticisms levelled at The Legion is how his ability takes so long to
down a Survivor. He has been dubbed a “5 hit killer” and other
labels like that. Married to this is his low general movement speed,
and the way that even his normal M1 attacks deplete his power gauge
if they connect. Not very sexy. To me though, The Legion is an ambusher/stalking
Killer, maybe even more so than our friends The Shape or The Pig. The Legion needs to
get his licks in, then hold back, circling for the chance to end
things later. Perks that aid this play-style make this a lot easier.
I’ve been making
great use of BBQ & Chilli, Monitor and Abuse, Enduring and
Bloodhound. The two that started making a big difference were M&A
and Bloodhound. M&A lets me get closer to the Survivors on gens
before they know I’m approaching, which is just generally helpful.
The expansion in terror radius when in a chase also aids my Survivor
locating power, so it gives in two ways. Bloodhound proved most
effective for me though, and even at level one, the boost in tracking
ability it gave me was immense. Certain maps have very bad
scratch-marks right now, and even the ones that don’t, they can
often send me the wrong way. Glowing blood puddles though.. much
easier to track, and blood shows when you are running in frenzy, whereas scratchmarks don't. I’ve
seen others use Stridor and say that it serves them well, but I’ve
yet to unlock that for The Legion.
As I said above, I
found The Legion to me most effective as an ambusher/stalker. I get my feral frenzy
off, hit as many people as I can if others are clustered, or get two
hits on one person. I then let myself fall back far enough that the
chase breaks. Some streamers have been advocating the “turning away
and following them backwards” gimmick. Fair play if they can do it
but I don’t bother, it feels pretty cheap to me, but that’s just
my opinion. Once I’ve broken the chase by dropping back or going in
a different direction, I can then follow the injured Survivor at
leisure, following their glowing blood and pressuring them at distance while they need to Mend. If I don’t lose them, there is
little they can do. They are going down, either to another attack
from me, or their timer running out. Since adopting this play-style,
I have 3 and 4 K’d quite consistently as The Legion, with the odd
narrow loss thrown in here and there. The enjoyment I’ve gained
playing in this way is substantial, even in those losses.
It is very early days
with The Legion, with both Survivors and Killers still getting to grips
with him, so it’s hard to know what he’ll be like once people are
more experienced, and he gets his inevitable patches to tinker with
his stats over time. People worry about how viable Killers are at the
higher ranks, and where Legion will fit into this, but in my
experience, all Killers can do decently well at Rank 1, even Freddy,
it’s just a matter of tactics, RNG and who you are facing. You
can’t win every game. The Legion doesn’t feel over powered at the
moment, nor terrible. I’m just hoping to carry on having fun with
him for as long as I can.
