So basically what happened here is that they focused too hard on preserving what old guillotine had but failed to realize that old guillotine was designed when mystic class identity wasn't fully established and general gameplay mechanics were simple and basic. What we have now as a result is a champion that has no place when put side to side with most modern mystic class champions.
Whether this end result was due to incompetence, laziness, time constraints or simply a lack of understanding we will probably never know, but if no action is taken to amend this situation, it would be a huge disservice to the community considering this was a community voted buff.
Hercules was done amazingly well and widely appraised by the community, do guillotine justice please!
Look like a Black Panther kind of buff. His damage is better with a lot of bleed but still can't use him anywhere. He doesn't possess any meaningful utilities or immunities to cope with endgame contents.
Black Panther is awesome. Very reliable -100% DAAR, nice debuff removal for suicides, and for non damaging debuffs (it does of course work for damaging debuffs, but it’s a little unreliable if you need to intercept to get rid of a massive bleed)
If I was handed Guillotine three months ago and told to update her, I would most definitely done something more dramatic. However, fixing an update and making an update are two different things. Think about the Hood update. Even though Kabam accepted the feedback for Hood 2.0, they couldn't just scrap 2.0 and make a totally new 3.0. They had to find the minimum changes necessary that would make Hood 2.0 into a workable Hood 3.0. It is in that context that I suggested possible changes to Guilly 2.0 that could theoretically make Guilly 3.0 at least reasonably useful.
I was honestly hoping for way more, because I knew they would have to overhaul the Souls mechanic and I thought that allowed for a lot of creative latitude. I still believe that, but Kabam just didn't take the opportunity.
oh ı absolutely get it and for them to take our feedback and salvage the buff , the ideas are great.
1. sig heal increase would be wonderfull you can get the rupture %100 from sig level 1 so a gem can easily give value for any guilly lover and constant scaling for her heal in later sig levels.
but ı highly doubt this one, this new lifesteal isnt an highly comlicated mechanic balance vise, its heaviliy limited by factors outside of the guillies control. the only thing you need to come up with is a percentage for it and they chose %2 and small values make a lot of difference in this one so they just didnt want it to be any good. rank 3 guilly has 37k health, you will lose around %11 percent from bleed portion and lets assume you throw two specials other than sp3 along the fight with recoil thats a %10 more so thats around 8200 healt and with both poison reduction and heal increase from masteries you guilly will have 1.61% heal, this means 510k(250k/half for no SP fights) health to take away for your oponenet to get the health lost just from recoil and bleed. (she can barely neutralize suicides)
2. stagger chance for evvery soul gained is perfect but they must revert back the bleed chance interaction for the buffs (nothing more to say here its just great addition)
but the sad thing is we make these post to salvage buffs in our own way for every other buff. they must be exciting, these forums must be filled with "Guys ı cant wait to play with this new 'X', she loocks sick" or "Thank god for these buff, my mystic roster/6stars pulled sucked but with the new nulifies and power control ı can finaly use my 'Y' for these, all solved " or "Damn the 'Z' had such an empty kit, its was a clear canvas that you could take it almost anywhere and they delivered, ı cant wait for the buff!" rather than all this
Can i join ? For me i want to make Unshackled into a mode rather a boost to sps only, like enhance all Guilly's ability futher.
At the risk of getting this insightful post exiled to Suggestions or some other forums backwater, let me applaud your analysis and thank you for putting so much effort into detailing your objections.
I agree with most, if not all of it.
What I’d like to lay out is a brief set of what you outline here—first principles, more or less, for champ updates.
I’ve been mulling them over in my head since Rags dropped, and I wish the team would emerge and articulate what their (new) first principles for updates are after they curtailed the scale of their update program.
You may have set yours out in another post—if they are what you walk through here, I think we are in agreement that things like preserving the core mechanic (contra: Hood), consistency within class abilities (contra: Guilly), and improved utility/usability (see: Howard, Venompool) are paramount.
Other than these (assuming I’ve gotten them right), what are your other key principles for champ updates?
Dr. Zola
I know I was not the intended recipient of this question, but it’s a good question so I want to contribute my two cents.
Wholeheartedly agree with the three principles you have listed. I would say that there can be an exception to the class ability one in the rare circumstance that they have some other, unique, practical piece of utility (for example, Hercules doesn’t have the armor break that is so prevalent in Cosmic champions, but has plenty of other unique utility to compensate for that).
I would also add that the rotation needs to be practical. Gamora actually has a fair bit of utility in her kit, but it’s locked behind her sp3. Original Recipe Diablo could do some genuinely cool stuff, but like only once per quest. Odin's Odinsleep mechanic on release that just made him worthless for doing two fights in a row. A lack of practicality dooms a champion, no matter how great their potential.
And finally, just how fun they are to play. I mentioned in conversation about the Thor buff that if his playstyle is satisfying to execute, that can be enough to justify a rank up. It’s why I think BWDO is a popular character, she’s just extremely fun to play and firing off that sp2 to watch the opponent’s health bar fall off by chunks is great.
Those are the two ideals I would add to your list when considering a buff.
It wasn’t meant exclusively for @DNA3000 and I would welcome your or anyone else’s thoughtful input.
There should be at least a loose set of guidelines or first principles for champ updates—that would help clarify what the intent is and perhaps set expectations for the community.
You may have set yours out in another post—if they are what you walk through here, I think we are in agreement that things like preserving the core mechanic (contra: Hood), consistency within class abilities (contra: Guilly), and improved utility/usability (see: Howard, Venompool) are paramount.
Other than these (assuming I’ve gotten them right), what are your other key principles for champ updates?
Dr. Zola
I would consider those three the minimum requirements for a good champion update. If you don't meet those, something went wrong. It is an open discussion as to what constitutes "preserving the core capabilities of the champion" because of course every update is going to have to change things, but I think the principle is something everyone can generally agree to. And while class consistency is not 100% absolutely essential, I think if you decide to drift away from that you have to have an *overwhelmingly good reason* to do so. I would characterize the last one as not improved utility in general, because "utility" is kind of hazy, but more specifically utility in the sense of "does the champ do something that seems to be useful in higher end content, or the kind of content we're likely to see in the future." Consider that Pain Link is a rather unique ability, but no Variant or Act 6+ or Cav-tier content benefits from it, nor is it easy to conceive of content that would ever make a player want to bring Pain Link with them on the team. On paper, Colossus' utility can seem rather pedestrian: it looks like just some immunities and some armor. But we all know that Colossus is useful in the post Act 6 game. He has *the right* set of little things.
Beyond that, if I had to make a list of guiding principles for what makes a *good* champion update, and not just a "not bad" one, I can think of two at the moment:
1. If you're going to spend the time to do an update, try to add something new. Either an ability that is rare or currently absent from the game, or a specific set of abilities that are rare or non-existent among the current champions. Something useful.
If you want to make a champion more valuable to the players, you can just crank up the numbers until it hits harder or heals more or whatever, but I think it makes more sense in the long run and generates better returns from the players in terms of being genuinely happy to possess the champ if they can do something unique. Guillotine 1.0 was actually the perfect example of that, once upon a time. She didn't really have good damage. She didn't really have super strong mitigation. Her bleeds were not stellar. But one upon a time she was unique in her ability to strongly reverse regeneration. She was a potent special tool that people may not have used often, but were happy to have in their bag of tricks. In the modern MCOC, you can be good everywhere, or you can be very special somewhere. So if you're not going to just buff the champ into insanely strong territory (cf: King Groot) you should ask the question "what would be useful, but most players don't have in their roster?" And try to have your champion fit into that gap.
I often praise Venom for being one of the best utility champs, and here's one way in which Venom does that. How many champs can a) nullify buffs, b) heal enough to be highly sustainable, and c) aren't mystic? And that's not just a random set of abilities: content exists that would benefit from that set, and we can easily imagine future content that would as well. Even if Venom was not a great champ (and he is), he would at least have that one unique place where he could shine (instead, the dude shines like a supernova, but still, its the best example i could think of before morning caffeine kicked in).
2. Pick a player agency profile, and make sure the champion fits it.
This takes a little bit of explaining. In my opinion, champions should have a kind of player in mind when it comes to skill. We have all kinds of players playing MCOC. Some have tons of skill, some are not highly skilled. Some want crazy challenging champions to play, some don't. No champion can serve all of them equally, so every champion should have a "style" to them that at least appeals to some of them. Examples would probably explain better. Some champs are easy to play: they aren't complex, you just play them. Their performance tends to be fairly consistent across players. You can't do much better, and you can't do much worse, than just swinging away. That's a valid champion design. Think maybe Hulk Ragnaok. He has all sorts of stuff going on in his abilities, but fundamentally he plays very simply. Just hit stuff. Compare to a more complex champion, like say Sorcerer Supreme. You can just tap away, but you aren't going to get the same performance out of her that a player who thinks about how to play her does. She has a lot of options: which passives to bank, which specials to use, etc. SS has a much more strategic element to her play. And then we have a champ like Proxima, who has missions to complete that require certain specific gameplay skill, particularly intercepting.
I think a good champion update (or design in general) should pick a style, and then lean into it. If you want the champion to be simple, make their toolbox something that just works, and the player doesn't have to think about it much or at all. If you want the champion to appeal to thinking players, make sure the abilities present a lot of interesting options to the player for them to choose from, and make it worth the players time to think about them. If you want the champion to reward skillful play, make sure their abilities have good bonuses that can be skillfully unlocked, and make them worth the skill it takes.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain this rule is: make the reward for learning how to play the champ well worth the effort. With the one exception being: it is okay to sometimes make a champion that doesn't reward the player for learning anything because there's nothing to learn, and there's no penalty for just playing the champ out of the box.
And now I'm going to add one which some people might not like, but I think other people will recognize the importance of. I personally would always do this if it were me doing the work:
3. Make sure the champion has a weakness large enough to drive a truck through.
Champions have to have Kryptonite. And it cannot be a tiny pinhole of a problem either, because at some point you're going to want to make content that this champ cannot just steamroll over. For some champs that's not a problem: you don't even have to do anything deliberate. Using my favorite example again, Venom has a huge toolbox of good stuff, but he does have one blatant weakness: he has no immunities. So he's never going to become a content balance problem. There will always be a wide range of content he won't be able to do, or won't be the optimal option to do. We didn't have to go out of our way to make a weakness, we just had to make sure there was one.
The best champion designs have a wide range of areas they are good at, and at least some nominal range of areas they are weak at. The former is necessary to make sure they are worth investing in. The latter is necessary to make sure they don't create problems for the game or need implicit nerfing down the road. If you want to make a champion that has very valuable strengths, you need to protect those strengths by making sure there are no reasons to take them away in the future.
You may have set yours out in another post—if they are what you walk through here, I think we are in agreement that things like preserving the core mechanic (contra: Hood), consistency within class abilities (contra: Guilly), and improved utility/usability (see: Howard, Venompool) are paramount.
Other than these (assuming I’ve gotten them right), what are your other key principles for champ updates?
Dr. Zola
I would consider those three the minimum requirements for a good champion update. If you don't meet those, something went wrong. It is an open discussion as to what constitutes "preserving the core capabilities of the champion" because of course every update is going to have to change things, but I think the principle is something everyone can generally agree to. And while class consistency is not 100% absolutely essential, I think if you decide to drift away from that you have to have an *overwhelmingly good reason* to do so. I would characterize the last one as not improved utility in general, because "utility" is kind of hazy, but more specifically utility in the sense of "does the champ do something that seems to be useful in higher end content, or the kind of content we're likely to see in the future." Consider that Pain Link is a rather unique ability, but no Variant or Act 6+ or Cav-tier content benefits from it, nor is it easy to conceive of content that would ever make a player want to bring Pain Link with them on the team. On paper, Colossus' utility can seem rather pedestrian: it looks like just some immunities and some armor. But we all know that Colossus is useful in the post Act 6 game. He has *the right* set of little things.
Beyond that, if I had to make a list of guiding principles for what makes a *good* champion update, and not just a "not bad" one, I can think of two at the moment:
1. If you're going to spend the time to do an update, try to add something new. Either an ability that is rare or currently absent from the game, or a specific set of abilities that are rare or non-existent among the current champions. Something useful.
If you want to make a champion more valuable to the players, you can just crank up the numbers until it hits harder or heals more or whatever, but I think it makes more sense in the long run and generates better returns from the players in terms of being genuinely happy to possess the champ if they can do something unique. Guillotine 1.0 was actually the perfect example of that, once upon a time. She didn't really have good damage. She didn't really have super strong mitigation. Her bleeds were not stellar. But one upon a time she was unique in her ability to strongly reverse regeneration. She was a potent special tool that people may not have used often, but were happy to have in their bag of tricks. In the modern MCOC, you can be good everywhere, or you can be very special somewhere. So if you're not going to just buff the champ into insanely strong territory (cf: King Groot) you should ask the question "what would be useful, but most players don't have in their roster?" And try to have your champion fit into that gap.
I often praise Venom for being one of the best utility champs, and here's one way in which Venom does that. How many champs can a) nullify buffs, b) heal enough to be highly sustainable, and c) aren't mystic? And that's not just a random set of abilities: content exists that would benefit from that set, and we can easily imagine future content that would as well. Even if Venom was not a great champ (and he is), he would at least have that one unique place where he could shine (instead, the dude shines like a supernova, but still, its the best example i could think of before morning caffeine kicked in).
2. Pick a player agency profile, and make sure the champion fits it.
This takes a little bit of explaining. In my opinion, champions should have a kind of player in mind when it comes to skill. We have all kinds of players playing MCOC. Some have tons of skill, some are not highly skilled. Some want crazy challenging champions to play, some don't. No champion can serve all of them equally, so every champion should have a "style" to them that at least appeals to some of them. Examples would probably explain better. Some champs are easy to play: they aren't complex, you just play them. Their performance tends to be fairly consistent across players. You can't do much better, and you can't do much worse, than just swinging away. That's a valid champion design. Think maybe Hulk Ragnaok. He has all sorts of stuff going on in his abilities, but fundamentally he plays very simply. Just hit stuff. Compare to a more complex champion, like say Sorcerer Supreme. You can just tap away, but you aren't going to get the same performance out of her that a player who thinks about how to play her does. She has a lot of options: which passives to bank, which specials to use, etc. SS has a much more strategic element to her play. And then we have a champ like Proxima, who has missions to complete that require certain specific gameplay skill, particularly intercepting.
I think a good champion update (or design in general) should pick a style, and then lean into it. If you want the champion to be simple, make their toolbox something that just works, and the player doesn't have to think about it much or at all. If you want the champion to appeal to thinking players, make sure the abilities present a lot of interesting options to the player for them to choose from, and make it worth the players time to think about them. If you want the champion to reward skillful play, make sure their abilities have good bonuses that can be skillfully unlocked, and make them worth the skill it takes.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain this rule is: make the reward for learning how to play the champ well worth the effort. With the one exception being: it is okay to sometimes make a champion that doesn't reward the player for learning anything because there's nothing to learn, and there's no penalty for just playing the champ out of the box.
And now I'm going to add one which some people might not like, but I think other people will recognize the importance of. I personally would always do this if it were me doing the work:
3. Make sure the champion has a weakness large enough to drive a truck through.
Champions have to have Kryptonite. And it cannot be a tiny pinhole of a problem either, because at some point you're going to want to make content that this champ cannot just steamroll over. For some champs that's not a problem: you don't even have to do anything deliberate. Using my favorite example again, Venom has a huge toolbox of good stuff, but he does have one blatant weakness: he has no immunities. So he's never going to become a content balance problem. There will always be a wide range of content he won't be able to do, or won't be the optimal option to do. We didn't have to go out of our way to make a weakness, we just had to make sure there was one.
The best champion designs have a wide range of areas they are good at, and at least some nominal range of areas they are weak at. The former is necessary to make sure they are worth investing in. The latter is necessary to make sure they don't create problems for the game or need implicit nerfing down the road. If you want to make a champion that has very valuable strengths, you need to protect those strengths by making sure there are no reasons to take them away in the future.
This is the kind of discussion the forums needs more of, in my opinion.
If anything after reading this, I’m of the opinion many updates don’t go far enough in both directions—by strengthening champs and by making sure they have a glaring weakness.
One other qualitative consideration I would propose relates to the significance of the champ itself. Consider how you might approach updates to OG Spider-Man versus someone like DarkHawk.
All champs aren’t created equal. While DarkHawk may have fans, he’s nowhere near the icon Spidey is. Everything mentioned above garners more significance with a champ like Spidey (or Cap, or IM, etc.). Updating many of the OG champs would be like working to restore a Michelangelo, which may explain why they’ve changed perhaps the least of all the champs in MCoC.
One other qualitative consideration I would propose relates to the significance of the champ itself. Consider how you might approach updates to OG Spider-Man versus someone like DarkHawk.
All champs aren’t created equal. While DarkHawk may have fans, he’s nowhere near the icon Spidey is. Everything mentioned above garners more significance with a champ like Spidey (or Cap, or IM, etc.). Updating many of the OG champs would be like working to restore a Michelangelo, which may explain why they’ve changed perhaps the least of all the champs in MCoC.
I think most people would agree with this one, and I *kinda* agree, but there's a dark cloud lurking for me, that has to do with the fact that people aren't perfect, and design rules like this can interact with human limitations to create undesirable side effects.
Imagine you have a finite set of good stuff sitting in the developers' heads. We'd like to get top shelf effort every single time we touch a champion, but we know human beings cannot be dialed up to 100% all the time. Getting more today means getting less tomorrow. That's just human nature. So if we decide that we're going to ask humans to pay *special* attention when touching the most popular or iconic Marvel characters, that will mean that the champions that represent the most popular and likely sought after characters will also have the best designs. This will create a very stark dichotomy between the popular and powerful champions, and the less popular and also less powerful champions. And that might be a bad look, all other things being equal. (I say "powerful" but I mean better in some way players value: fun to play, cool looking, whatever).
From a game balance perspective we want all champions to be (roughly) equally powerful, but from game management perspective we want all champions to be equally desirable. And that means sometimes we need to pay special attention to the more marginal Marvel characters to give people a reason to give them a second look.
And I'm guessing that Marvel, the IP owner, would not want a game developer devaluing their IP. You might think they would want their bestest characters to be treated the bestest in every game, but maybe that's not what Marvel wants. Maybe they figure that Spider-Man can take care of himself, and what would be best for Marvel is not to pump even more sunshine up Spider-Man's mask, but spread the love among more Marvel characters, widening the appeal of more of their property.
After all, that is *literally* what the MCU did for them. The MCU took the lesser Marvel characters and turned them into a multibillion dollar juggernaut that is worth more than all the comic book companies (including themselves separate from Marvel studios) on Earth combined. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Black Widow, The Hulk? These *were* second tier characters before the MCU, no different than Guardian, Longshot, and Namor. Contest of Champions is not going to make Diablo or Vision Aarkus into household names, but they can draw attention to the depth of the Marvel roster. I have to believe there's an undercurrent of that going on, perhaps unspoken, between Kabam and Marvel.
@DNA3000 not going to quote because the thread will explode…
Interesting perspective— I can appreciate that point of view.
I’d also add that across multiple gaming properties, it’s probably more important for Spidey to not suck on his own console game than it is in a game with a couple hundred Marvel properties. There is a broad portfolio of Marvel gaming experiences and each can have very different elite champs. From an IP perspective, that’s beneficial.
And I suppose I’m even generally sympathetic to the niche characters, given that I’m still patiently waiting for Shuma-Gorath to make its MCoC appearance. One day..
That’s why I say the OG champs are probably going to remain untouched. Even if there were an explicit imperative to treat all champs the same, I imagine a game designer updating a Spidey or a Hulk would be hard pressed to not feel a little pressure to overdeliver.
Dr. Zola
PS: As a side note, I’d probably take issue with any characterization of the Avengers as “lesser” Marvel characters (excluding Hawkeye, who revels in his Everyman-ness)—they are, in fact, comic royalty and Grade A Marvel real estate. Most household name characters introduced by any comic house in the Silver Age would fit that description, even if screen adaptations never did them justice.
PS: As a side note, I’d probably take issue with any characterization of the Avengers as “lesser” Marvel characters (excluding Hawkeye, who revels in his Everyman-ness)—they are, in fact, comic royalty and Grade A Marvel real estate. Most household name characters introduced by any comic house in the Silver Age would fit that description, even if screen adaptations never did them justice.
Oh, they are grade A properties. They are just not grade S properties.
Wait wouldn’t guilly regen back the damage take from pain link cause of her passive regen ability? It say she heals 2% of all the damage she deals and her sp1 turns DOT damage into Physical Damage on the opponent, therefore you should at at least gain some sustainability if the damage isn’t too huge, right?
Wait wouldn’t guilly regen back the damage take from pain link cause of her passive regen ability? It say she heals 2% of all the damage she deals and her sp1 turns DOT damage into Physical Damage on the opponent, therefore you should at at least gain some sustainability if the damage isn’t too huge, right?
Even if it does 2%is basically useless 10k -200hp so 600k fight will get 12k in return so basically useful for pros as on avg ill lose 20-30% just in parry/block damage simgle mistake will take me to 0-30% so all in all its not sustainable unless you can rack up 50k bleed dmg then it'll be stable but she doesn't look capable
What I would have loved to see from this update would have been to add a way to remove buffs that isn’t a stagger/nullify/fate seal, similar to Venom’s Om Nom. This would give Guilly a unique position in the Mystic class, and would allow her to shine in modern content.
They could have allowed Pain Link to remove buffs in a unique way among Mystic champs. Heck, they could have gone crazy and allowed this ability to boost the Pain Link damage shared to the opponent, decrease the damage Guilly takes, add some pseudo-immunity, or even generate unique damaging debuffs upon certain buff removals.
I’ll wait until I test her out, but I agree with lots of OP’s points. The only positive to Guilly’s regen is that it removes RNG from the equation.
Honestly, I still am active in-game, less so on the boards. The original post — which I agree with in spirit, for the record — lured me back.
This buff is a talisman of my frustration with the buff program right now, and believe me, I strongly support buffs. Always have.
First: The one thing I need to get out of the way: Guillotine was never a good candidate to be buffed in the first place, beyond a numbers adjustment. Because they were NEVER going to make that kit much better. It was always a DPS-Healing kit — she was basically X-23 with Heal Reversal.
It was NEVER going to be much better than that. I always knew it would be net neutral or frustration, or even a bit of a nerf. I could smell it coming.
Should have always been Ant-Man.
Second: I hope Kabam takes note of this: Buffs are so important. But it feels like they just aren’t being taken as seriously the last few months, and honestly, that lessens my enjoyment of the game.
What I would have loved to see from this update would have been to add a way to remove buffs that isn’t a stagger/nullify/fate seal, similar to Venom’s Om Nom. This would give Guilly a unique position in the Mystic class, and would allow her to shine in modern content.
They could have allowed Pain Link to remove buffs in a unique way among Mystic champs. Heck, they could have gone crazy and allowed this ability to boost the Pain Link damage shared to the opponent, decrease the damage Guilly takes, add some pseudo-immunity, or even generate unique damaging debuffs upon certain buff removals.
I’ll wait until I test her out, but I agree with lots of OP’s points. The only positive to Guilly’s regen is that it removes RNG from the equation.
Venom's Om Nom is considered a nullify. I tried it on Civil Warrior.
What I would have loved to see from this update would have been to add a way to remove buffs that isn’t a stagger/nullify/fate seal, similar to Venom’s Om Nom. This would give Guilly a unique position in the Mystic class, and would allow her to shine in modern content.
They could have allowed Pain Link to remove buffs in a unique way among Mystic champs. Heck, they could have gone crazy and allowed this ability to boost the Pain Link damage shared to the opponent, decrease the damage Guilly takes, add some pseudo-immunity, or even generate unique damaging debuffs upon certain buff removals.
I’ll wait until I test her out, but I agree with lots of OP’s points. The only positive to Guilly’s regen is that it removes RNG from the equation.
First: The one thing I need to get out of the way: Guillotine was never a good candidate to be buffed in the first place, beyond a numbers adjustment. Because they were NEVER going to make that kit much better. It was always a DPS-Healing kit — she was basically X-23 with Heal Reversal.
It was NEVER going to be much better than that. I always knew it would be net neutral or frustration, or even a bit of a nerf. I could smell it coming.
Should have always been Ant-Man.
I don't understand the logic of this, because any problem Guillotine can face due to dev tunnel vision Ant-Man can suffer just as well. Worse: Ant-Man's most interesting ability is arguably Glance, and focusing on Glance would make Ant-Man a more annoying defender but not so much a better attacker.
Guillotine suffers from a problem many pre-2016 champions have: her kit is practically empty. How you choose to fill an empty kit is honestly designer discretion. And the precedent has been set many times that designer discretion allows them to expand a champion concept to make them useful in lots of ways. Perhaps the OG version of this is another mystic champion that had a thin kit: Magik. She was originally just all nullify. Nowhere in her original champion design was the idea that she should be the power control Queen. They just said "her soul blade does that' and that's that.
There's a certain odd irony that the devs did a better job updating Magik years ago back at a time before we knew that's what we wanted from updates, and they basically faced the exact same challenge in another sword swinging mystic with low utility and in my opinion did much worse when they should know better now.
Whether the devs would have made the same mistakes with Ant-Man is an unknowable. But I don't see a reason to believe Ant-Man would have been less vulnerable to them. It is equally likely he would have been more vulnerable to them, and a glance monster could have been the next Bishop on defense.
I know it’s unlikely, but I’d love to hear from somebody on the Kabam team who could explain what the goal here was.
Buffs have missed the mark in the past, but this one (with the exception of the original Hood changes) might be the most egregious. The fact that her heal is worse in 99% of cases now is baffling. Her damage is certainly better, but I don’t know how her new sp3 will compare to her original one.
But again, there is no added utility here. It’s the original kit repackaged with some bigger numbers and some smaller numbers and that’s it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more disappointing it becomes.
I know it’s unlikely, but I’d love to hear from somebody on the Kabam team who could explain what the goal here was.
Buffs have missed the mark in the past, but this one (with the exception of the original Hood changes) might be the most egregious. The fact that her heal is worse in 99% of cases now is baffling. Her damage is certainly better, but I don’t know how her new sp3 will compare to her original one.
But again, there is no added utility here. It’s the original kit repackaged with some bigger numbers and some smaller numbers and that’s it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more disappointing it becomes.
To be fair to the devs, the way I would characterize the update is that the devs a) made spectre work properly, which in the modern MCOC is a necessity (whereas back in 2015 it was just goofy), b) made her healing worse overall even though it has some nifty mechanics (some would argue her *overall* survivability is better because she kills faster, but that doesn't alter the fact that the heal was reduced), and c) gave her a ton of bleed damage (there are some other small things, but that's the main focus).
The net result is more damage, and arguably less utility. You could argue it is a tie, but a tie is just as bad for a champion that was supposed to be updated to be much better. And how do we know she's supposed to be much better, and not just a little better? Because if she didn't need much then a) she could have been just numbers tweaked and b) she wouldn't have been high on the priority list to get updated in the first place.
I'm completely setting aside the valid point that if you ask the players to vote on something like this, you have to consider the ramifications of under-delivering. It is pointless to engage the players with something they will be disappointed with. It would be better to not engage the players at all, so they don't feel invested in something they will then become disappointed in.
I read more of this thread than my wife was comfortable with. Most of the posters/commenters seem to have better insights than what I’ve seen from Kabam lately.
I know it’s unlikely, but I’d love to hear from somebody on the Kabam team who could explain what the goal here was.
Buffs have missed the mark in the past, but this one (with the exception of the original Hood changes) might be the most egregious.
WHAT!? There must be a rational explanation for this...
Hello strange traveler from a parallel dimension exactly like our own except in your world Nova didn't get a "buff". How did you pierce the boundaries between worlds? Only explanation because that "buff" was an insult to the concept of a buff.
I know it’s unlikely, but I’d love to hear from somebody on the Kabam team who could explain what the goal here was.
Buffs have missed the mark in the past, but this one (with the exception of the original Hood changes) might be the most egregious. The fact that her heal is worse in 99% of cases now is baffling. Her damage is certainly better, but I don’t know how her new sp3 will compare to her original one.
But again, there is no added utility here. It’s the original kit repackaged with some bigger numbers and some smaller numbers and that’s it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more disappointing it becomes.
To be fair to the devs, the way I would characterize the update is that the devs a) made spectre work properly, which in the modern MCOC is a necessity (whereas back in 2015 it was just goofy), b) made her healing worse overall even though it has some nifty mechanics (some would argue her *overall* survivability is better because she kills faster, but that doesn't alter the fact that the heal was reduced), and c) gave her a ton of bleed damage (there are some other small things, but that's the main focus).
The net result is more damage, and arguably less utility. You could argue it is a tie, but a tie is just as bad for a champion that was supposed to be updated to be much better. And how do we know she's supposed to be much better, and not just a little better? Because if she didn't need much then a) she could have been just numbers tweaked and b) she wouldn't have been high on the priority list to get updated in the first place.
I'm completely setting aside the valid point that if you ask the players to vote on something like this, you have to consider the ramifications of under-delivering. It is pointless to engage the players with something they will be disappointed with. It would be better to not engage the players at all, so they don't feel invested in something they will then become disappointed in.
Not sure how giving heightened significance to a champ who won a community-vote is that much different than giving heightened significance to an iconic, OG champ, but I’m in agreement with you on the principle.
Comments
Whether this end result was due to incompetence, laziness, time constraints or simply a lack of understanding we will probably never know, but if no action is taken to amend this situation, it would be a huge disservice to the community considering this was a community voted buff.
Hercules was done amazingly well and widely appraised by the community, do guillotine justice please!
His buff was really good IMO
For me i want to make Unshackled into a mode rather a boost to sps only, like enhance all Guilly's ability futher.
like, during Unshackled and when Bleed Curse is active, Guillotine's hits (have a chance to?) nullify a buff and replace it with a Bleed.
As it is now, Bleed Curse is... just a Bleed that gives her more Bleed on Special Attack hits?
There should be at least a loose set of guidelines or first principles for champ updates—that would help clarify what the intent is and perhaps set expectations for the community.
Dr. Zola
Beyond that, if I had to make a list of guiding principles for what makes a *good* champion update, and not just a "not bad" one, I can think of two at the moment:
1. If you're going to spend the time to do an update, try to add something new. Either an ability that is rare or currently absent from the game, or a specific set of abilities that are rare or non-existent among the current champions. Something useful.
If you want to make a champion more valuable to the players, you can just crank up the numbers until it hits harder or heals more or whatever, but I think it makes more sense in the long run and generates better returns from the players in terms of being genuinely happy to possess the champ if they can do something unique. Guillotine 1.0 was actually the perfect example of that, once upon a time. She didn't really have good damage. She didn't really have super strong mitigation. Her bleeds were not stellar. But one upon a time she was unique in her ability to strongly reverse regeneration. She was a potent special tool that people may not have used often, but were happy to have in their bag of tricks. In the modern MCOC, you can be good everywhere, or you can be very special somewhere. So if you're not going to just buff the champ into insanely strong territory (cf: King Groot) you should ask the question "what would be useful, but most players don't have in their roster?" And try to have your champion fit into that gap.
I often praise Venom for being one of the best utility champs, and here's one way in which Venom does that. How many champs can a) nullify buffs, b) heal enough to be highly sustainable, and c) aren't mystic? And that's not just a random set of abilities: content exists that would benefit from that set, and we can easily imagine future content that would as well. Even if Venom was not a great champ (and he is), he would at least have that one unique place where he could shine (instead, the dude shines like a supernova, but still, its the best example i could think of before morning caffeine kicked in).
2. Pick a player agency profile, and make sure the champion fits it.
This takes a little bit of explaining. In my opinion, champions should have a kind of player in mind when it comes to skill. We have all kinds of players playing MCOC. Some have tons of skill, some are not highly skilled. Some want crazy challenging champions to play, some don't. No champion can serve all of them equally, so every champion should have a "style" to them that at least appeals to some of them. Examples would probably explain better. Some champs are easy to play: they aren't complex, you just play them. Their performance tends to be fairly consistent across players. You can't do much better, and you can't do much worse, than just swinging away. That's a valid champion design. Think maybe Hulk Ragnaok. He has all sorts of stuff going on in his abilities, but fundamentally he plays very simply. Just hit stuff. Compare to a more complex champion, like say Sorcerer Supreme. You can just tap away, but you aren't going to get the same performance out of her that a player who thinks about how to play her does. She has a lot of options: which passives to bank, which specials to use, etc. SS has a much more strategic element to her play. And then we have a champ like Proxima, who has missions to complete that require certain specific gameplay skill, particularly intercepting.
I think a good champion update (or design in general) should pick a style, and then lean into it. If you want the champion to be simple, make their toolbox something that just works, and the player doesn't have to think about it much or at all. If you want the champion to appeal to thinking players, make sure the abilities present a lot of interesting options to the player for them to choose from, and make it worth the players time to think about them. If you want the champion to reward skillful play, make sure their abilities have good bonuses that can be skillfully unlocked, and make them worth the skill it takes.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain this rule is: make the reward for learning how to play the champ well worth the effort. With the one exception being: it is okay to sometimes make a champion that doesn't reward the player for learning anything because there's nothing to learn, and there's no penalty for just playing the champ out of the box.
And now I'm going to add one which some people might not like, but I think other people will recognize the importance of. I personally would always do this if it were me doing the work:
3. Make sure the champion has a weakness large enough to drive a truck through.
Champions have to have Kryptonite. And it cannot be a tiny pinhole of a problem either, because at some point you're going to want to make content that this champ cannot just steamroll over. For some champs that's not a problem: you don't even have to do anything deliberate. Using my favorite example again, Venom has a huge toolbox of good stuff, but he does have one blatant weakness: he has no immunities. So he's never going to become a content balance problem. There will always be a wide range of content he won't be able to do, or won't be the optimal option to do. We didn't have to go out of our way to make a weakness, we just had to make sure there was one.
The best champion designs have a wide range of areas they are good at, and at least some nominal range of areas they are weak at. The former is necessary to make sure they are worth investing in. The latter is necessary to make sure they don't create problems for the game or need implicit nerfing down the road. If you want to make a champion that has very valuable strengths, you need to protect those strengths by making sure there are no reasons to take them away in the future.
If anything after reading this, I’m of the opinion many updates don’t go far enough in both directions—by strengthening champs and by making sure they have a glaring weakness.
One other qualitative consideration I would propose relates to the significance of the champ itself. Consider how you might approach updates to OG Spider-Man versus someone like DarkHawk.
All champs aren’t created equal. While DarkHawk may have fans, he’s nowhere near the icon Spidey is. Everything mentioned above garners more significance with a champ like Spidey (or Cap, or IM, etc.). Updating many of the OG champs would be like working to restore a Michelangelo, which may explain why they’ve changed perhaps the least of all the champs in MCoC.
Good stuff.
Dr. Zola
Imagine you have a finite set of good stuff sitting in the developers' heads. We'd like to get top shelf effort every single time we touch a champion, but we know human beings cannot be dialed up to 100% all the time. Getting more today means getting less tomorrow. That's just human nature. So if we decide that we're going to ask humans to pay *special* attention when touching the most popular or iconic Marvel characters, that will mean that the champions that represent the most popular and likely sought after characters will also have the best designs. This will create a very stark dichotomy between the popular and powerful champions, and the less popular and also less powerful champions. And that might be a bad look, all other things being equal. (I say "powerful" but I mean better in some way players value: fun to play, cool looking, whatever).
From a game balance perspective we want all champions to be (roughly) equally powerful, but from game management perspective we want all champions to be equally desirable. And that means sometimes we need to pay special attention to the more marginal Marvel characters to give people a reason to give them a second look.
And I'm guessing that Marvel, the IP owner, would not want a game developer devaluing their IP. You might think they would want their bestest characters to be treated the bestest in every game, but maybe that's not what Marvel wants. Maybe they figure that Spider-Man can take care of himself, and what would be best for Marvel is not to pump even more sunshine up Spider-Man's mask, but spread the love among more Marvel characters, widening the appeal of more of their property.
After all, that is *literally* what the MCU did for them. The MCU took the lesser Marvel characters and turned them into a multibillion dollar juggernaut that is worth more than all the comic book companies (including themselves separate from Marvel studios) on Earth combined. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Black Widow, The Hulk? These *were* second tier characters before the MCU, no different than Guardian, Longshot, and Namor. Contest of Champions is not going to make Diablo or Vision Aarkus into household names, but they can draw attention to the depth of the Marvel roster. I have to believe there's an undercurrent of that going on, perhaps unspoken, between Kabam and Marvel.
Interesting perspective— I can appreciate that point of view.
I’d also add that across multiple gaming properties, it’s probably more important for Spidey to not suck on his own console game than it is in a game with a couple hundred Marvel properties. There is a broad portfolio of Marvel gaming experiences and each can have very different elite champs. From an IP perspective, that’s beneficial.
And I suppose I’m even generally sympathetic to the niche characters, given that I’m still patiently waiting for Shuma-Gorath to make its MCoC appearance. One day..
That’s why I say the OG champs are probably going to remain untouched. Even if there were an explicit imperative to treat all champs the same, I imagine a game designer updating a Spidey or a Hulk would be hard pressed to not feel a little pressure to overdeliver.
Dr. Zola
PS: As a side note, I’d probably take issue with any characterization of the Avengers as “lesser” Marvel characters (excluding Hawkeye, who revels in his Everyman-ness)—they are, in fact, comic royalty and Grade A Marvel real estate. Most household name characters introduced by any comic house in the Silver Age would fit that description, even if screen adaptations never did them justice.
They could have allowed Pain Link to remove buffs in a unique way among Mystic champs. Heck, they could have gone crazy and allowed this ability to boost the Pain Link damage shared to the opponent, decrease the damage Guilly takes, add some pseudo-immunity, or even generate unique damaging debuffs upon certain buff removals.
I’ll wait until I test her out, but I agree with lots of OP’s points. The only positive to Guilly’s regen is that it removes RNG from the equation.
This buff is a talisman of my frustration with the buff program right now, and believe me, I strongly support buffs. Always have.
First: The one thing I need to get out of the way: Guillotine was never a good candidate to be buffed in the first place, beyond a numbers adjustment. Because they were NEVER going to make that kit much better. It was always a DPS-Healing kit — she was basically X-23 with Heal Reversal.
It was NEVER going to be much better than that. I always knew it would be net neutral or frustration, or even a bit of a nerf. I could smell it coming.
Should have always been Ant-Man.
Second: I hope Kabam takes note of this: Buffs are so important. But it feels like they just aren’t being taken as seriously the last few months, and honestly, that lessens my enjoyment of the game.
Guillotine suffers from a problem many pre-2016 champions have: her kit is practically empty. How you choose to fill an empty kit is honestly designer discretion. And the precedent has been set many times that designer discretion allows them to expand a champion concept to make them useful in lots of ways. Perhaps the OG version of this is another mystic champion that had a thin kit: Magik. She was originally just all nullify. Nowhere in her original champion design was the idea that she should be the power control Queen. They just said "her soul blade does that' and that's that.
There's a certain odd irony that the devs did a better job updating Magik years ago back at a time before we knew that's what we wanted from updates, and they basically faced the exact same challenge in another sword swinging mystic with low utility and in my opinion did much worse when they should know better now.
Whether the devs would have made the same mistakes with Ant-Man is an unknowable. But I don't see a reason to believe Ant-Man would have been less vulnerable to them. It is equally likely he would have been more vulnerable to them, and a glance monster could have been the next Bishop on defense.
Buffs have missed the mark in the past, but this one (with the exception of the original Hood changes) might be the most egregious. The fact that her heal is worse in 99% of cases now is baffling. Her damage is certainly better, but I don’t know how her new sp3 will compare to her original one.
But again, there is no added utility here. It’s the original kit repackaged with some bigger numbers and some smaller numbers and that’s it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more disappointing it becomes.
The net result is more damage, and arguably less utility. You could argue it is a tie, but a tie is just as bad for a champion that was supposed to be updated to be much better. And how do we know she's supposed to be much better, and not just a little better? Because if she didn't need much then a) she could have been just numbers tweaked and b) she wouldn't have been high on the priority list to get updated in the first place.
I'm completely setting aside the valid point that if you ask the players to vote on something like this, you have to consider the ramifications of under-delivering. It is pointless to engage the players with something they will be disappointed with. It would be better to not engage the players at all, so they don't feel invested in something they will then become disappointed in.
I’m sticking by my Antman vote. #lilfolkmatter2
Hello strange traveler from a parallel dimension exactly like our own except in your world Nova didn't get a "buff". How did you pierce the boundaries between worlds? Only explanation because that "buff" was an insult to the concept of a buff.
Dr. Zola