Legion M+ vs BFA M+ Which was Better

[Matthias]

I recently came back to BFA, the state of the game is far better now and I'm enjoying dungeons once again.

Was having a discussion with my friends over which M+ iteration they prefered BFA or Legion.

What I noticed about BFA and heavily disliked initially is that various trash mobs fortified or not need to be addressed. Legion for the most part it felt like save for a few certain packs you could just AoE stun and mow them down.

Many classes lost utility since Legion so you need to be more calculated with interrupts/dispells/CC etc which is engaging. However I also found that this (along with Awakening) puts far more oweness on the Tank since they have kept most of their disruption utility. The difference a between stellar tank and an average one is extremely noticeable between mob control and pathing. While it feels great on my tank to know exactly how to handle each pack, it's quite the under taking as there are so many mobs over several dungeons that I need to learn about which makes me avoid some places for now.

I could be wrong here but it also seems that most damage in BFA dungeons is avoidable. I noticed on my healer if I'm in a very good group I can spend most of my time dishing out damage. There have been times where I've died on boss encounters at 50% and suddenly my group is suddenly barely taking any damage. It's as if they know their life line is gone and can't recklessly tunnel . Not sure how I feel about this. It feels like healers are just an insurance policy there to cover mistakes, but the personal responsibilty is also great.

Legion on the other hand I found the boss fights far more difficult and engaging. There are only a few bosses in BFA where I wonder if my pug group can get through clean on Tyrannical. Whereas Legion you had several bosses where you really need to pinch your cheeks, Helya and Hymndall require more then just boss mods, you need to be spatially aware, mitigating damage with Lord Ravencrest and Melandrus (or having Prydaz). Dresaron, Wrath of Azshara, Cordana I could go on.

My understanding is that the bosses in BFA had to be designed with MDI in mind hence why they aren't as interesting or challenging.

Anyway thoughts?

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

BFA for sure.
The difficulty of Legion dungeons were wildly imbalanced especially week to week.

Talking about boss difficulty is an odd subject, because there was nothing "engaging" about how bosses were handled in Legion.
If it was a 20+ tyrannical on certain dungeons, you physically could not survive abilities that were not dodgeable.
You were forced to switch to defensive trinkets, legendaries, or even talents.

This expansion, they have done a MUCH better job keeping those potential one shots out of the slew.
The only real dungeon that might have them was Freehold and they nerfed it all this season.

Tyrannical will always be harder because a single wipe on a boss means you just lost all CDs and made no progress, where as a single wipe on trash often means half the pack died, and the rest is being kited back to the entrance.

In the end, the designs were quite different, but the inclusion of the seasonal affix has made me really enjoy BFA's Mythic+ especially now with S4.

[Ragnarohk]

BfA. Seasonal affixes were a cool addition.

[Ladey Gags]

Legion. Only for the fact that BFA dungeons are so fucking terrible that blizzard should be ashamed for ever putting them in the game.

[Nevcairiel]

Its a mixed bag, honestly. Overall, I have to go with Legion.

I preferred the Legion experience overall. Dungeons just felt better to run, they weren't so extremely overcrowded with trash abilities for MDIs sake.
Legion did generally mess up the balance of adding new dungeons to the pool though, most newly added ones felt a lot harder.

In BfA I like the idea of the seasonal affixes, although the execution of some of them was also poor.

Overall, I feel like the difference between Tyrannical and Fortified could use a bit of reigning in, if not nerfing Tyrannical flat out a bit. There is a huge difficulty disparity between these two affixes as a whole. Maybe put a bit more scaling onto the base difficulty and reduce the scaling from those two affixes. Something I didn't feel quite as strongly in Legion, either.

The problem with Tyrannical is of course that you don't usually get an option to approach a boss differently. With trash, you can pull less, and you can even decide to CC if you must, but with bosses, it just gets harder with no gameplay options to counter it. And on high enough levels various boss abilities will simply one-shot you now - and as mentioned above, a wipe on a boss is a full reset (even worse, with all CDs gone now), while with trash you can often at least kill a bunch of them before that happens.

[Twdft]

BfA is way better. All of the one shots are avoidable whereas in Legion at a certain key level some abilities just scaled too high.

Legion. Only for the fact that BFA dungeons are so fucking terrible that blizzard should be ashamed for ever putting them in the game.

You should provide some examples of what you find so terrible. I think they've done a great job with dungeons. King's Rest is pretty much perfect in my eyes, a lot of different boss and trash abilities = many puzzles to solve. Hard but never unfair as some in Legion (Hyrja Xavius etc).

[Matthias]

Its a mixed bag, honestly. Overall, I have to go with Legion.

I preferred the Legion experience overall. Dungeons just felt better to run, they weren't so extremely overcrowded with trash abilities for MDIs sake.
Legion did generally mess up the balance of adding new dungeons to the pool though, most newly added ones felt a lot harder.

In BfA I like the idea of the seasonal affixes, although the execution of some of them was also poor.

Overall, I feel like the difference between Tyrannical and Fortified could use a bit of reigning in, if not nerfing Tyrannical flat out a bit. There is a huge difficulty disparity between these two affixes as a whole. Maybe put a bit more scaling onto the base difficulty and reduce the scaling from those two affixes. Something I didn't feel quite as strongly in Legion, either.

I'd like to see Tyrannical and Fortified go away imo and just combine the two. I often don't learn a mechanic until I'm slapped with it with the corresponding difficult.

[Volitar]

BFA had better balance and affix but I think the Legion dungeons themselves were better.

[Morgaith]

Legion m+ being better is just a fact but i'm not sure how much of that is just because Legion was a much better expansion in general or if BFA actively made m+ worse.

[Asrialol]

Legion m+ being better is just a fact but i'm not sure how much of that is just because Legion was a much better expansion in general or if BFA actively made m+ worse.

You appear to be misunderstanding the difference of "fact" and "opinion". Happens a lot around here.

[srathgar]

Legion felt a lot better to me, the massive influx of abilities in BFA dungeons on trash mobs was in my opinion way overdone.
I do think the seasonal affixes were nice and the dungeons were probably better tuned in BFA, but unlike in legion the bfa dungeons just feel very tedious to do.

[froschhure]

not comparable, sorry

both had their ups and downs and i loved every aspect of it - more to come in SL

[Argorwal]

BfA dungeons are harder pretty much all around except for unavoidable 1 shots.

So naturally the easy modes usually get the most support. Pulling mass packs and aoeing them down with little worry is popular sadly. Legion trash and reaping affix.

[Sámsa]

Legion:

Step 1: Bring a DK
Step 2: Massgripp into Stun
Step 3: Spam a few abilites
Step 4: Kite while mobs are doing nothing but running behind the tank
Step 5: Profit

#somuchfun

And there were a lot of bosses where you ran into 1 shots relatively early. You could get around with stacking avoidance/vers/stam but I personally think they handeled that part much better in BFA.

Same with trash. HoV for example where you had to kite the whole time or the grp gets mowed down but random target casts that hit for a ton.

At least as a tank it was no fun running up and down the bridge for 2 minutes....

[Monkiy]

BFA for sure. They learned from Legion and made the dungeons/mobs considerably more engaging on the whole, and the seasonal afixes are a fantastic concept.

While I understand that it's part of the inherent design of the content, I still wish that M+ wasn't quite so repetitive, because even with seasons, you're still making 99% of the same pulls for months at a time, and that just gets so boring so quickly. I wish weekly afixes had more to do with the actual flow of the dungeon, but I think that would require that dungeons adopt a more spread out, and less linear design, that allows for multiple possible routes from start to finish (even if only in sections, not necessarily the entire dungeon track). Then perhaps from week to week you'd say, "ah, Explosive means the left side of this courtyard is easier, but next week with Necrotic we'll stick to the right side." Or something to that effect.

[Mmid]

Legion, solely because the dungeons were more fun. BFA wasn’t bad, though. Fingers crossed for fun dungeons in Shadowlands!

[Sevyvia]

Legion. Absolutely no question.

[Monkiy]

In BFA, I would bet that the vast majority of keys below +15 are failures. Legion was far more forgiving to less experienced players. I don't like the whole "1 mistake = fail" when I'm in a learning group (and let's face it, if you're in anything below +15, you're in a learning group).

Holy hyperbole, Batman. This is an enormous stretch to claim/hypothesize.

[Shakhar]

BfA of course, more balanced and it is not centered around tank(like it was in Legion) just picking aggro with 2 skills and then kiting until mobs are dead.

[Arararagi]

Legion felt a lot better to me, the massive influx of abilities in BFA dungeons on trash mobs was in my opinion way overdone.
I do think the seasonal affixes were nice and the dungeons were probably better tuned in BFA, but unlike in legion the bfa dungeons just feel very tedious to do.

This is basically how I feel about it as well. The dungeons felt way more fun and rewarding when doing them in legion. For me its a combination of the dungeons in general feeling more boring while classes also arent as enjoyable as they were in legion. At least the classes I play. ^^ They also removed something I liked in m+ which was changing gear depending on the pull.