I don’t have any issues involving Pyro or playing Legend that need answered at the moment. I think on Legend and Champion, you will find really good party members, and really terrible party members. Similarly, you will easily win a lot of games on Champion and Legend without much of a struggle, and other times lose 3+ matches in a row due to what feels like cheap-shot RNG or poor responses to hostile spawns by the party. Playing on Legend certainly doesn’t ensure you get allies who are paying attention or playing cohesively as a team. I often get the impression I’m playing with people that queued Legend by mistake based on how they react when things start heating up.
For me, what decides the success of Legend runs, more than anything else, is the awareness and positioning of the 4 party members. Simply checking 360 degrees around yourself every few seconds, and being aware of your positioning in relation to the other 3 party members, is going to make or break runs most of the time. It’s entirely necessary when RNG feels it’s appropriate to spawn 1-3 disabler specials out of thin air, mere meters from the party. If you’re playing Legend, just operate as if you’re always seconds from behind hit in the back, especially playing as pyro/beam staff sienna.
With this build, I think of her as mobile artillery, in that she can devastate a lot of whats in front of her before it ever comes into range of being a threat, at the risk of needing to eliminate nearby threats before you can safely do so. It’s a risk-reward play style where even a moment of not paying attention while casting could result in a pink rat poking you twice in the back, resulting in going down on Legend. Someone can make the point that “now everyone has to protect sienna, sigh”, and while it is nice to have someone watching her back, it’s ultimately Sienna’s responsibility to cast the beam wisely and remain aware of her surroundings, and not doing so makes her a detriment to the team. No amount of CC, damage, or flaming skulls from sienna is worth repeatedly going down because they can’t pay attention to their own surroundings.
You can use beam/resourceful sharpshooter pyro in Legend, do 10k+ damage, and still get outdamaged and outkilled by other players, so even though it is very good, other classes can compete. No build will ensure success every Legend run. But I think this ties in to the point you make about broken classes becoming essential; they won’t ensure Legend success, but if you don’t bring them to the table, it seriously undermines your Legend runs. Should the firemage be able to solo a horde of pink rats? Probably not. But then it can be argued no class should be able to stun lock a boss, or single-handedly take out half its HP in seconds.
If you nerf out this pyro build, there are still other cheeses available, and if you fix/balance them all, Legend either needs tweaked down in difficulty, or Legend rewards need boosted, because if you do anything to make Legend harder, it’s just going to make the veteran item grind that is the end-game more tedious than it already is.
