If Guilly buff is a miss, then I expect AntMan buff to be a hit. Cause I don't think Kabam can actually make AntMan even worse when it's his time.
Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to these changes, I think we should learn that now. There could be no change at all, the champion could become the new meta, or they could come out worse than when they went in.
To be fair, most updates improve the champ, and more than half make the champ extremely useful. Sometimes the devs are a little too conservative, and that's understandable to some extent (the first Carnage buff was arguably that sort of thing, ditto Sentry). And sometimes they take chances and it doesn't work out, but that's also understandable. Sometimes they take chances and it is the *players* that misjudge and are later proven wrong (Magik is the canonical example here).
But Guillotine is none of these. While there's some fancy mechanics in Guillotine, there's no attempt to take chances in a useful way. There's a lot of conservative behavior (Pain Link in particular) but that's also extremely difficult to justify when compared to OG Guillotine's known performance. And we just had a community-wide discussion of what to do and not to do in a champion update when Hood came up, so there's no way this should come as any sort of surprise or unexpected reaction.
The fact is, Kabam isn't incapable of producing a good update. Most are. They don't need to get especially lucky or take exceptionally long periods of time or produce exceptionally innovative changes. They don't need to make the champ into an ultra powerful champ to make players like the update. Colossus was fine. Hulkbuster was fine. Angela was fine. Howard the Duck was fine. Kingpin, Hood (eventually), Falcon were all great. Even Old Man Logan, who is not seen as a super star after his update, is at least fine. They don't all come out great, but Kabam isn't bad at it, and they aren't even totally random with it. Odds are very good an updated champion will turn out at least better, if not very useful. And when they fail, there's usually some reason for why they failed. But with Guillotine, there seems to be no rational reason for why she ends up where she does.
I will bet anything that if I were to have *suggested* Guillotine 2.0 as a champion design, both the playerbase *and* Kabam would have been highly critical of it. It doesn't make sense for a mystic champion. It doesn't have interesting "RPG" utility. The mechanics are simultaneously complicated enough to be worrisome and yet not especially useful compared to peer champions. It would just look wrong.
Which makes this update almost uniquely inexplicable.
@DNA3000 just to clarify, I wholeheartedly agree that by and large, the buffs have been at the very least sufficient. Several of my favorite champions are these recent buffs.
I only leave in the possibility of champions coming out worse due to the first iteration of the Hood and (potentially) this current situation. This one is just particularly disheartening due to both the community effort that went into it and the fact that so many better ideas have been tossed around on the forums just in the time since her spotlight went live (yours included).
I don’t even have Guillotine as a 6*. But she was one of my first 3* champions and she got me through RoL Wolverine back in the day. I have a soft spot for her and it’s deeply unpleasant to see such an anticipated buff fall miles short of the mark. The continued silence on the matter doesn’t help either, but the Kabam team seems to have more fires to put out every day, so I don’t expect to hear anything about this.
@DNA3000 just to clarify, I wholeheartedly agree that by and large, the buffs have been at the very least sufficient. Several of my favorite champions are these recent buffs.
I only leave in the possibility of champions coming out worse due to the first iteration of the Hood and (potentially) this current situation. This one is just particularly disheartening due to both the community effort that went into it and the fact that so many better ideas have been tossed around on the forums just in the time since her spotlight went live (yours included).
I don’t even have Guillotine as a 6*. But she was one of my first 3* champions and she got me through RoL Wolverine back in the day. I have a soft spot for her and it’s deeply unpleasant to see such an anticipated buff fall miles short of the mark. The continued silence on the matter doesn’t help either, but the Kabam team seems to have more fires to put out every day, so I don’t expect to hear anything about this.
Fair enough. It is true we can never predict how an update will go: player predictions have been notoriously horrible in the past (anyone remember the "its a defensive tank so it will only be a strong defender and be horrible on offense?" idea before Hulkbuster got buffed?) and sometimes what one person thinks is great someone else thinks is stupid (even between two different players, much less between a player and a game dev) so there's that. And the devs have demonstrated that sometimes they can aim at the right target but shoot their own foot as they draw their pistols.
In this regard my point was that while I call Guillotine's update a miss, in fact Ebony Maw was a miss, Sentry was a miss, but Guillotine's update is the devs shooting in the opposite direction and hoping the bullet deflects off a tree and lands near the target. Which it did not.
1. Better damage. Better bleed damage and with her awakened ability causes rupture(which no one is immune to) instead of bleed if they are immune, as well as a potential 48 second degen on her SP3 if you use it at max soul charges. 2. Longer Spectre debuff when Unschackled. 3. More consistent regen at a reduced rate. She's going to be healing all the time, versus only some of the time. When I would actively use her, especially in higher health pool fights, her regen wouldn't happen all that often since it was a chance to perform a life steal. Her update seems like it'll be always on and since she heals from all damage, Pain Link will heal her, Spectre should heal her, Rupture/Bleed should heal her, Degen should heal her. Sure, you won't see that huge burst heal when she crits and regens 10k+ health, but she won't need to since she'll always be healing. It should be at minimum as potent as her old regen or close enough that it won't make a big difference.
So what we got was a pretty big step up in damage, an extremely long Spectre(when unshackled) and at minimum more consistent regen. Is she going to be at the top of the mystic class? Possibly not for endgame players, but for newer players? She is going to be a very good option for them.
Take all of this and throw it in the garbage. Her "buff" is pretty horrible. There are good ideas here, but everything falls short.
I think one of the things people are seeing in testing is something the math predicted but might not have been obvious outside of testing. G2.0's heal *seems* like it could be good because G2.0 heals from all damage whereas G1.0 only healed from direct attack damage. But the irony is the G1.0 mostly dealt damage from direct hits in the first place: her spectre would not generally work in long fights and was a burst trick more than anything else (especially with the way souls worked) and her bleed was infrequent. That meant that G1.0 *almost* healed from all damage herself, because "hitting" was almost all her damage. Healing from all damage is not something G2.0 does better than G1.0, it was what she had to do just to keep up with G1.0's original heal. Changing the mechanics to heal from all damage but *also* cutting the magnitude of the heal by more than half seriously nerfs her heal. And to reiterate an important point: even tie is a loss, because we're supposed to be buffing Guillotine.
Her damage did get better, but in my opinion it only went up to "somewhat above average." If that's the only thing you do, "somewhat above average" won't make you particularly useful compared to even high utility champs that outdamage you, much less actual damage-focused champs that blow you out of the water.
Spectre undeniably works better than before, but that is not as strong of a utility in the current content.
As it stands rn, I think I'd like to rank her down. And lemme just proactively state that I ranked her up before her buff was announced. Before the vote even took place. In an effort to avoid the "don't rank until buff is live" speech. 🙂
Seeing as how this was a community choice buff, I initially had hope for her buff. However, when the spotlight came out I began to have doubts about how much better she would be, and sure, she has quite a bit more damage on her base now compared to before, but that’s the only positive.
Her healing has been drastically decreased from its original potential. While it’s no longer RNG based, it’s become more of a way to heal chip damage from blocking rather than an actual method of sustainability. The fact that it limits the healing to 2% of the opponent’s max health just means that it’s a matchup with a mechanic where you’ll constantly receive damage and you need healing, it’s not going to be of much help.
The update also does next to nothing to address her preexisting lack of utility. She does now have the ability to inflict ruptures on bleed immune enemies, however this ability only becomes 100% reliable at max sig. The other new ability that was added, her new pain link debuff accessible via her sp1, just has no aspect of practicality. While it does allow her to inflict any non-physical damage she receives on her opponent, it offers her no way to mitigate said damage. For opponents with high health pools, any major damage she would take wouldn’t really do too much to the opponent if reflected, making the ability pretty much useless.
As for damage, she has definitely gotten a bump in that department, as her damage now is about a little lower than pre-buff with full synergies, baring the sp3. The souls can now make her hit fairly hard, however they have lost the ability to increase her critical damage rating. While her bleeds can get more damage once she starts ramping up, at their base they deal less damage than before and now have less of a chance to occur unless facing opponents with multiple buffs. Her sp2 can get some nice damage, however the main problem I have is that her specials require her to sacrifice her souls and ramp up, which can take a while to get back depending on RNG. The sp3 was the other main point changed in this area, and seems to be a point of contention for many. It used to be an attack that allowed her to take large chunks off of enemies with large health pools, whereas now it just inflicts an okay degen.
All in all, this update to Guillotine just feels more like a sideways buff than anything else. I wouldn’t really say she was buffed, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that she was nerfed as a whole either. I’m just really disappointed, as she had potential to get a very impactful and exciting buff, but instead got the opposite. If I had any idea that the update would be so underwhelming, I wouldn’t have gone through the arena grinding in order to vote.
I just smacked winter soldier to the ground with her. Used 1 sp3 somewhere in the middle of the fight. For testing purposes, collected 14 souls and did without exaggerating 1% damage, 1!! (For your understanding, a 6* r3).
Also healing feels very underwhelming, almost nothing at all..
Anyway, my prestige gotten a little bump, that’s cool..
It honestly depends. If you actually played her post-buff and you like her, rank her up. Ultimately, if you like her, that's all that matters. However, if you *used* to like her and you haven't really tested the buff yet, then the question is: why did you like her? If you liked her for her sustainability, I'd say wait to test first, because in my opinion sustainability is much worse. If you liked her for her bleeds and spectre, those did get better.
From an objective point of view, her sustainability got worse, and in my opinion when taken as a whole Guillotine ends up at best a tie with her former self and arguably worse in terms of higher game utility. If you're a brand new player pulling her as one of your very first champs, she's arguably better than she was, mostly because of her higher damage. You don't need utility in the early game, and when you have a tiny roster anything that can kill reasonably fast is useful. But beyond a certain point, what you want is champions in your roster that can perform non-overlapping roles. Meaning: they do something useful, and it is something you don't already have tons of champs doing.
Guillotine 2.0 does not satisfy that requirement, in my opinion. And beyond a certain point in game progress, that's really the overwhelmingly most important thing, at least in terms of performance value. If you like Guillotine because she looks cool or you like large swords, she still satisfies those requirements.
My rank 1 6* pre buff finished ROL WS in 50 hits.. now it’s well over 100 hits.
I even find her base damage harder to access and ramp.. crit less often cause you can’t get as many souls, less Crit bleeds.. inconvenient requirement to heavy soam..
Extremely disappointing.. I was stoked to use a rank gem and a bunch of expiring iso now I have to find another option
Comments
But Guillotine is none of these. While there's some fancy mechanics in Guillotine, there's no attempt to take chances in a useful way. There's a lot of conservative behavior (Pain Link in particular) but that's also extremely difficult to justify when compared to OG Guillotine's known performance. And we just had a community-wide discussion of what to do and not to do in a champion update when Hood came up, so there's no way this should come as any sort of surprise or unexpected reaction.
The fact is, Kabam isn't incapable of producing a good update. Most are. They don't need to get especially lucky or take exceptionally long periods of time or produce exceptionally innovative changes. They don't need to make the champ into an ultra powerful champ to make players like the update. Colossus was fine. Hulkbuster was fine. Angela was fine. Howard the Duck was fine. Kingpin, Hood (eventually), Falcon were all great. Even Old Man Logan, who is not seen as a super star after his update, is at least fine. They don't all come out great, but Kabam isn't bad at it, and they aren't even totally random with it. Odds are very good an updated champion will turn out at least better, if not very useful. And when they fail, there's usually some reason for why they failed. But with Guillotine, there seems to be no rational reason for why she ends up where she does.
I will bet anything that if I were to have *suggested* Guillotine 2.0 as a champion design, both the playerbase *and* Kabam would have been highly critical of it. It doesn't make sense for a mystic champion. It doesn't have interesting "RPG" utility. The mechanics are simultaneously complicated enough to be worrisome and yet not especially useful compared to peer champions. It would just look wrong.
Which makes this update almost uniquely inexplicable.
I only leave in the possibility of champions coming out worse due to the first iteration of the Hood and (potentially) this current situation. This one is just particularly disheartening due to both the community effort that went into it and the fact that so many better ideas have been tossed around on the forums just in the time since her spotlight went live (yours included).
I don’t even have Guillotine as a 6*. But she was one of my first 3* champions and she got me through RoL Wolverine back in the day. I have a soft spot for her and it’s deeply unpleasant to see such an anticipated buff fall miles short of the mark. The continued silence on the matter doesn’t help either, but the Kabam team seems to have more fires to put out every day, so I don’t expect to hear anything about this.
In this regard my point was that while I call Guillotine's update a miss, in fact Ebony Maw was a miss, Sentry was a miss, but Guillotine's update is the devs shooting in the opposite direction and hoping the bullet deflects off a tree and lands near the target. Which it did not.
Her damage did get better, but in my opinion it only went up to "somewhat above average." If that's the only thing you do, "somewhat above average" won't make you particularly useful compared to even high utility champs that outdamage you, much less actual damage-focused champs that blow you out of the water.
Spectre undeniably works better than before, but that is not as strong of a utility in the current content.
I was apprehensive even reading her abilities on paper.
Actually playing as her... I just have no words.
Guillotine was one of my first 4* champs, and one I took to r4 because I liked the character.
I want to like this buff.
I absolutely cannot.
Her healing has been drastically decreased from its original potential. While it’s no longer RNG based, it’s become more of a way to heal chip damage from blocking rather than an actual method of sustainability. The fact that it limits the healing to 2% of the opponent’s max health just means that it’s a matchup with a mechanic where you’ll constantly receive damage and you need healing, it’s not going to be of much help.
The update also does next to nothing to address her preexisting lack of utility. She does now have the ability to inflict ruptures on bleed immune enemies, however this ability only becomes 100% reliable at max sig. The other new ability that was added, her new pain link debuff accessible via her sp1, just has no aspect of practicality. While it does allow her to inflict any non-physical damage she receives on her opponent, it offers her no way to mitigate said damage. For opponents with high health pools, any major damage she would take wouldn’t really do too much to the opponent if reflected, making the ability pretty much useless.
As for damage, she has definitely gotten a bump in that department, as her damage now is about a little lower than pre-buff with full synergies, baring the sp3. The souls can now make her hit fairly hard, however they have lost the ability to increase her critical damage rating. While her bleeds can get more damage once she starts ramping up, at their base they deal less damage than before and now have less of a chance to occur unless facing opponents with multiple buffs. Her sp2 can get some nice damage, however the main problem I have is that her specials require her to sacrifice her souls and ramp up, which can take a while to get back depending on RNG. The sp3 was the other main point changed in this area, and seems to be a point of contention for many. It used to be an attack that allowed her to take large chunks off of enemies with large health pools, whereas now it just inflicts an okay degen.
All in all, this update to Guillotine just feels more like a sideways buff than anything else. I wouldn’t really say she was buffed, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that she was nerfed as a whole either. I’m just really disappointed, as she had potential to get a very impactful and exciting buff, but instead got the opposite. If I had any idea that the update would be so underwhelming, I wouldn’t have gone through the arena grinding in order to vote.
Also healing feels very underwhelming, almost nothing at all..
Anyway, my prestige gotten a little bump, that’s cool..
Because she badly needs it
From an objective point of view, her sustainability got worse, and in my opinion when taken as a whole Guillotine ends up at best a tie with her former self and arguably worse in terms of higher game utility. If you're a brand new player pulling her as one of your very first champs, she's arguably better than she was, mostly because of her higher damage. You don't need utility in the early game, and when you have a tiny roster anything that can kill reasonably fast is useful. But beyond a certain point, what you want is champions in your roster that can perform non-overlapping roles. Meaning: they do something useful, and it is something you don't already have tons of champs doing.
Guillotine 2.0 does not satisfy that requirement, in my opinion. And beyond a certain point in game progress, that's really the overwhelmingly most important thing, at least in terms of performance value. If you like Guillotine because she looks cool or you like large swords, she still satisfies those requirements.
I even find her base damage harder to access and ramp.. crit less often cause you can’t get as many souls, less Crit bleeds.. inconvenient requirement to heavy soam..
Extremely disappointing.. I was stoked to use a rank gem and a bunch of expiring iso now I have to find another option