Legion M+ vs BFA M+ Which was Better

[Nak88]

Legion for sure. BfA dungeons are all terrible, except Atal'Dazar and Freehold.

[Muh]

Hmm the Dungeons in Legion were by far better but less balanced so from a m+ standpoint definately bfa

[Usernameforforums]

Bfa dungeons are trash and filled with trash. Legion dungeons were better overall in atmosphere and aesthetics.

[D3athsting]

Legion excluding seat of triumvirate, the most overtuned dungeon ever!

[apelsinjuice]

I'm not the biggest fan of Mythic plus in general, but I prefer Legion. The Legion dungeons just felt more organic while the BFA ones may be a bit more balanced, but I found the dungeon design to often be very sterile. Motherload is one of the worst dungeons I have ever done in a long time.

Even Mechagon, which is supposed to be the cool "mega-dungeon" was a disappointment. Half the dungeon is literally the same place where you do dailies. So blizz made BFA dungeons more balanced and better for the MDI, but at the price of losing a certain coolness factor that many Legion dungeons have that BFA lacks, except for perhaps Waycrest and KR.

From the success of m+ in Legion its easy to tell all the dungeons in BFA were clearly desgined with m+ and MDI in mind, making them very linear and almost "forced" skips you have to do to not get way over the mob count

[Hoeth]

The only thing about BFA M+ that is better is the lower number of unavoidable one-shot mechanics. They are still there, but not as bad as Legion (looking at you Hyrja, Xavius, etc...). The early BFA seasons were also plagued by the near necessity of having a rogue, along with much more rigid meta comps in general.

Going forward the dungeon designs NEED to be much more open, like Freehold and Junkyard are now. Being forced to fight certain packs is just a recipe for having a couple of classes/specs heavily favored, and if you don't play one of those...good luck trying to PUG anything.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

BFA wins tbh.

There are a lot of ppl are saying "Legion hands down, no competition" and shit like that, without any arguments or explaination. I understand that ppl enjoyed the expansion as a whole more, but that has more to do with stuff like class design, theme, current guild at the time and who you were playing with, than the actual design of the dungeons and M+.

If you compare them both objectively, the only real argument in favour of Legion is that you could swap gear back then.

- The BFA dungeons have more trash mobs that actually do something
- The unavoidable oneshots of Legion Tyrannical bosses are gone in BFA
- BFA Seasonal affixes spiced things up after a while, compared to Legion where you did the same exact dungeons for the whole expansion

In Legion, the biggest bottleneck to your progress was if you could survive the unavoidable oneshots by the bosses, aka, do you have good enough gear/the required immunities, compared to BFA, your general performance (Dps, interrupts, avoidable oneshots) is the bottleneck. That should be a clear indicator of which expansion had the better designed dungeons for M+.


On top of that, I do find the BFA dungeons to have better layouts and nicer backgrounds/graphics, but that part is more down to opinion.

[meekus]

Legion. My favourite spec was playable back then, good times.

Besides that I think I have liked BFA dungeons better. The seasonal affix was a good addition.

[RobertMugabe]

BfA's M+ system and balance is much much better than Legion's. Especially at the end of Legion, the comps became too stale.

I too have to agree though that the Legion dungeons in general were much better. I actually loved all of them. I also like most of BfA's dungeons, but there are some horrible ones too.

[AntenoraDK]

Legion excluding seat of triumvirate, the most overtuned dungeon ever!

Cathedral was worse for tuning for a large part of the expac.

[RobertMugabe]

It was better to be a tank in Legion because you didn't need to learn and memorize cycling routes. In BFA, no exaggeration, everytime I tanked Atal the route would change, people would question me every single time and when I would say "shoot" the route would be different from the last group that complained. My brain literally could not keep up with it; I was just second guessing every single pull I would make, it was like being a tank again for the very first time, except class skill is now replaced by memorization.
"The skips aren't that hard"
Is what people say and then you attempt to do the Motherlode skips and pull the mobs right next to the obelisk because if you move 1 inch too close they aggro. Almost every dungeon will have little quirks like that that you need to memorize.

Tanking in BFA was like 30% skill and 70% memorizing dozens of overlapping procedures, almost not fun whatsoever. Which helps bring to perspective now why tanks are allowed to just run around and Twilight Dev everything to death. They deserved it after this expansion.

I'm sure M+ was great for you as a DPS since you basically didn't have to think at all, all you had to do is show up, mirror the tank and learn what things to interrupt, which you can kinda learn from the tank as well (getting carried by the tank anyone?).

I've quit tanking m+ in BfA solely for this reason. DPS and healing is fun tho.

Having open dungeons with many choices wasn't that much of a great idea after all, at least not to that extent.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Legion, and it isn’t even close. Bfa has seasonal affixes which were hit or miss, but it also put tyrannical and fortified way too early which drags the dungeons out

In legion, Those were only 10+ so you could practically solo lower keys without those affixes. Also, the dungeons were just designed better for it since it was their main idea for pve content.

M+ feels like it was an afterthought for some bfa dungeons

Assuming you meant it the other way around?

M+ was just slapped on top of the Legion 5mans after they were done, but the BFA dungeons were obviously designed with it in mind.

[Arainie]

Trash is there to push your dps numbers and see how much you can pull in one go.

If I had an image of a confused man scratching his head in complete disbelief open in another tab I'd link it as a response, but unfortunately I don't.

[ID811717]

This is a scaling issue. As the dungeon level goes up, the damage requirements and damage taken requirements scale the same, but our ability to mitigate damage grows faster than our ability to do damage. Our ability to do damage scales up as our gear gets better, but our ability to heal scales up as the healer's gear gets better, AND as the entire group's gear gets better and mitigates more damage. This is why high level keys sometimes depend on healers doing dps - the more gear you get and the higher you go, the more important dps is and the less important hps is. This existed in Legion too - I remember the first time I healed an EOA +15, my hps on the last boss fight was significantly lower than it was the first time I healed it on +10.

No, no, the bolded part is completely wrong. Our damage always increases faster than our survivability (certainly for non-tanks... I am not sure about tanks, your claim might be true for them). That is the main reason one-shots were a problem in Legion - everyone had to stack avoidance and make special gear sets to survive certain bosses. In BfA Blizzard tuned the dungeons to avoid one-shots, but we start running in the same problems at very high key levels. Playing at the 20% avoidance cap is becoming important again.

In BfA healing is often less intense in higher keys because that's when groups start to do more optimal pulls and learn to avoid the avoidable damage (there are of course huge exceptions, such as tyrannical Temple boss fights). The overall incoming damage still scales up exponentially, and nothing helps us mitigate the increased damage, but groups have everything planned and under control, so healing becomes seamless. It usually has nothing to do with healer though - it's more dependent on tank doing good pulls and on DPS players controlling all dangerous casts. So the healer can focus on dealing damage more if they trust the group. In comparison, low key pugs are usually full of fiesta, and healers need to out-heal a lot of avoidable damage every other pull.

It actually felt quite different in Legion: dungeons had a lot of unavoidable damage throughout the run (trash included). So healing was always very intense, even in very high keys. That's the reason healing DPS meta was not prominent. Yes, holy paladins could always do insane damage (and that was important in some very limited parts of the dungeons, such as the necessity to burst the Mana Devourer in Upper Karazhan on tyrannical 24/25+ keys -- holy paladin's damage in the 30 sec burst window on Mana Devourer was very often higher than the burst damage of actual DPS classes, even crazier than it has ever been in BfA). But healers spent most of their time healing unavoidable damage, so their ability to deal damage was considered a luxury, not yet a necessity.

As someone who mostly plays healer specs, the above is the reason I consider Legion M+ much better. In Legion, healing was a full-fledged, hard role. All the way up to +26 tyrannical keys, every time I progressed 2-3 key levels up, I ran into a boss that forced me to rethink how I heal (going from "I can yolo it" attitude, to actually understanding every little detail about how boss timings interact with my spec and abilities). In contrast, in BfA healing has become a rather passive mini-DPS&support role, requiring little to none healing expertise (with some exceptions, as usual). And this design change goes hand-in-hand with Blizzard fixing the much touted Legion "one shot" meta.

I agree that Hyrja and Xavius were too random on very high keys, but Blizzard certainly overshot in removing too much unavoidable damage from the dungeon design. For example, even Hyrja could actually have been salvaged in multiple ways. Many parts of that fight were very interesting healing wise: such as spreading quickly after Eye of the Storm is over (so that Arcing Bolt does not chain), while having the awareness to spot who's targeted by the Arcing Bolt cast and making sure you can top up that target (from the Eye of the Storm damage) to 100% HP within a second so that Arcing Bolt does not one-shot them. This type of avoidable "one-shot" is fine, and the combination of movement+awareness+cooldown planning (along with, inevitably, on-spot communication) from healers is a very good design. The only problem arised when Arcing Bolt started to one-shot from 100% HP through a personal or external damage reduction cooldown, just because of the scaling. I think the above example is indicative of what most people call "one-shots", at least at the key levels they experienced. Even a one-shot from 90% HP to 0% HP is not really a design problem yet if it can be outplayed by merely making sure that healer tops you up to 100% (which ideally overlaps with multiple other boss abilities, to make it an interesting gameplay mechanic for both the healer and the player who is targeted by the incoming damage).

[Matthias]

In BfA healing is often less intense in higher keys because that's when groups start to do more optimal pulls and learn to avoid the avoidable damage (there are of course huge exceptions, such as tyrannical Temple boss fights). The overall incoming damage still scales up exponentially, and nothing helps us mitigate the increased damage, but groups have everything planned and under control, so healing becomes seamless. It usually has nothing to do with healer though - it's more dependent on tank doing good pulls and on DPS players controlling all dangerous casts. So the healer can focus on dealing damage more if they trust the group. In comparison, low key pugs are usually full of fiesta, and healers need to out-heal a lot of avoidable damage every other pull.

It actually felt quite different in Legion: dungeons had a lot of unavoidable damage throughout the run (trash included). So healing was always very intense, even in very high keys. That's the reason healing DPS meta was not prominent. Yes, holy paladins could always do insane damage (and that was important in some very limited parts of the dungeons, such as the necessity to burst the Mana Devourer in Upper Karazhan on tyrannical 24/25+ keys). But healers spent most of their time healing unavoidable damage, so their ability to deal damage was considered a luxury, not yet a necessity.

As someone who mostly plays healer specs, the above is the reason I consider Legion M+ much better. In Legion, healing was a full-fledged, hard role. All the way up to +26 tyrannical keys, every time I progressed 2-3 key levels up, I ran into a boss that forced me to rethink how I heal (going from "I can yolo it" attitude, to actually understanding every little detail about how boss timings interact with my spec and abilities). In contrast, in BfA healing has become a rather passive mini-DPS&support role, requiring little to none healing expertise (with some exceptions, as usual). And this design change goes hand-in-hand with Blizzard fixing the much touted Legion "one shot" meta. I agree that Hyrja and Xavius were too random on very high keys, but Blizzard certainly overshot in removing too much unavoidable damage from the dungeon design. For example, even Hyrja could actually have been salvaged in multiple ways. Many parts of that fight were very interesting healing wise: such as spreading quickly after Eye of the Storm is over (so that Arcing Bolt does not chain), while having the awareness to spot who's targeted by the Arcing Bolt cast and making sure you can top up that target (from the Eye of the Storm damage) to 100% within a second so that Arcing Bolt does not one-shot them. This type of avoidable "one-shot" is fine, and the combination of movement+awareness+cooldown planning (along with, inevitably, on-spot communication) from healers is a very good design. The only problem arised when Arcing Bolt started to one-shot from 100% HP through a personal or external damage reduction cooldown, just because of the scaling.

I feel similar on my healer though I only really go up to 15s. I've heal on a Paladin and going crazy to DPS on boss the boss fights that is just a burn race is super fun for Epeening. But you felt necessary as a healer. Where as in BFA I feel like an accessory since so much damage is avoidable and your teammates can heal or mitigate damage their own way.

Still torn though. Legion for DPS was just a numbers game. However I noticed on my tank I take an excessive amount of damage when I bring in DPS with lower IO scores, this is because they aren't interrupting. Having the ability to finesse the trash I know some people like this. Once again though I realized that on my tank if DPS aren't interrupting.....I can. My Warrior has an Interrupt, and AoE stun and an AOE fear, I can reflect whatever else gets through. When I rotate those abilities the mobs are normally dead by then. So I feel like tanks hold so much more weight now.

Legion good/high DPS could carry mediocre healers/tanks no problem if they just kill everything quick enough. Also if they had a problem with your pace they would pull for you. I never see this in BFA because it's an understanding that the tank does the route and pulling for them could screw up what they had planned. The pulls/skips in Legion were far more obvious. Even before Awakening I struggled with the skips.

[OFiveNine]

Outside BFA having awakened affix which is cool

Legion >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> BFA

[ID811717]

Agree that the damage done increases more than mitigation, but the amount of healing put out by healers increases as well. That’s why the scaling is off - two sources of defense against damage (mitigation scaling up plus healer hps going up) but only one source of extra dps. I guess that wasn’t clear in my initial post.

Oh, I think I see your argument now. Both of us are correct, though.

We can think about it this way. Let's look at the scaling (I'll ignore the tyrannical and fortified damage&health multipliers for simplicity, since they do not change my argument).

If you play a +5 key, then everything is scaled 133% compared to +2 keys, so:
* everything deals 1.33x more damage than in +2 <----- This part is compensated by ever improving healer gear.
* everything has 1.33x more health than in +2 <------ This part is compensated by ever improving DPS gear.
But our health pools also went up a lot (even compared to the start of this tier), so in fact (in an ideal world) healers can AFK 1 min till everyone is down to 20% HP, then heal everyone up back to 100% HP in a couple of GCDs, and go AFK again. Our defense double-dips in terms of health pools and healing throughput.

But if you play a +24 key, then everything is scaled 814% compared to +2 keys, so:
* everything deals 8.14x more damage than in +2 <----- This part is compensated by ever improving healer gear.
* everything has 8.14x more health than in +2 <------ This part is compensated by ever improving DPS gear.
And even thought our defense double-dips, some dungeon abilities begin to one-shot, so healers have little time to be AFK, and in fact people sometimes have to use 20% avoidance cap to even survive one hit.

So, in a way, very low keys constantly become easier to survive even if healer is AFK or is focused on DPS. And very high keys constantly become harder to survive because the incoming damage increasingly exceeds the safety buffer of our health pools. And then somewhere in between the two extremes (very low vs. very high keys) is a sweet spot, a comfortable key level for the masses that slowly keeps going up with our gear levels.

Basically, the healer throughput does not outscale the key levels, but our health pools add a big safety net on lower keys.

[Zantera]

It's fine to prefer one over the other as it's all opinions but with threads like these I see a lot of people who just seem hell bent on not giving BFA any credit. If you think it's the worst expansion that's fine but I've seen so many people gloss over things that were worse in Legion that got improved BFA and brush it aside in favor of shitting on BFA some more.

[Doffen]

Legion was way better. And for the sole reason that the Legion dungeons was way more fun and interesting than the BfA ones. I also prefer that Tyrannical and Fortified should be the last affix. It's been pretty much hit and miss with the keystone level 10 affixes in Bfa. Festering bad, AoE good, Emissary bad, Awakening good. And you could change gear inside while doing the run so you could swap for bosses vs trash. Miss that option.

And, Court of Stars >>>>> any dungeon.

- - - Updated - - -

It's fine to prefer one over the other as it's all opinions but with threads like these I see a lot of people who just seem hell bent on not giving BFA any credit. If you think it's the worst expansion that's fine but I've seen so many people gloss over things that were worse in Legion that got improved BFA and brush it aside in favor of shitting on BFA some more.

Whats improved in BfA when it comes to mythic +? Its all opinions, so if people think Legion m+ was better than there is no objective argument against that.

[Orwell7]

After we all vomited our guts out from farming Maw in legion AND STILL THINK it's better than bfa it speaks for itself