So, I took the buffed Guillotine out for a spin

Since I'm in desperate need of gold, I decided to tackle the Cosmic Eclipse gold quest today. Tigra is normally my MVP there and I don't really need anyone else, but I figured, hey, might as well try out how Guillotine works in a quest where every champ gets a lot of buffs yet are not bleed immune.

My 5* Gully is r4 so she's not the beefiest there is, but my 5r5 Tigra frequently manages to solo the entire lane so I still felt like it should be doable if she is any good. She doesn't rely on nullifying buffs and she mainly deals bleed damage, which circumvents the buff protection that the opponent gets from the nodes. Gully also is awakened at low sig, but since no one is bleed immune anyway it doesn't really matter one way or the other.

I wasn't too impressed with her during the first fight vs Ms. Marvel. She got through it with about 70% health left since she was clipped by a hit from a special attack at one point early on in the battle. I had hoped that her regen would have allowed her to get back from that hit but that was not the case. She was constantly getting chipped down.

This constant chip damage got even more pronounced during the next fight vs Aegon. Since he gets fury buffs whenever you strike him and you don't have any means of dealing with them, the chip damage I took from my constant blocks was kind of bad. Actually, it was all kinds of bad. It did manage to throw an SP3 at max souls so I did get a long degen to trickle on the opponent, which in turn sped up my regen slightly, but even so I still ended up taking a lot more chip damage than my regen could keep up with. After a while, when I realized that my health went down quicker than his did despite the fact that he wasn't landing any hits while I was, I started to play a bit more aggressive in order to avoid blocking him all the time, and I eventually ate a hit that finally KO'd me.

However, just like in the previous fight against Ms. Marvel, I only took a single clean hit from Aegon. Meanwhile, Tigra took an SP2 and the accompanying bleed from it and just walked it off. The logical response to that is, "Well, Tigra has a way to deny Aegon from building up his fury buffs," but I honestly feel that the proper response to that is, just, "Well, why doesn't Guillotine have a way to do that too, then?" She belongs to the class whose very job it is to deal with buff-heavy opponents, yet even one of the most simple buffs in the game caused her so much trouble in that fight that one clean hit and a bunch of blocks knocked her out despite a near-constant trickle of her famously "improved" regen.

I was just really disappointed with this showcase. Sure, she wasn't fully ranked up. Sure, I probably could have player her better than I did with a little more practice. However, I still feel like this, on paper, sounds like a pretty ideal quest for her. The node gave her opponents a lot of buffs to fuel her ability to bleed them but didn't make them harder beyond that. None of the opponents were bleed immune. None of them interfered with her regen in any way. The only thing that could have benefitted her more was if they had had some kind of regen themselves that she could have reversed with her SP2, but that's too niche of a thing to be her only use in the game.

I feel like I'm starting to run out of doubts to allow her the benefit of. What am I missing that she could do really well? Where is she supposed to shine? Because the more I try her out in content she seems designed for, she comes out lacking at best and terrible at worst. It's disappointing.

Comments

Hector_1475

Thanks for the write-up, which is, I'm sure, appreciated by the community. You illustrate the problem(s) with "'buffed" Guillotine perfectly. I hope this doesn't fall on deaf ears with Kabam...

unknown

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te_dua_shum

Where is she supposed to shine?

Probably on nodes likes "Resistor" that gives the opponent a lot of bulk that guilly can bypass thanks to her bleeds/ruptures, or nodes combinations that require you to use a mystic champion and bleed the opponent; she might also be good for the mystic chapter in V5 since the global boost AA and bleeds for mystic champions.
She is a mystic that doesn't do any "mystic-related" thing, so she can be used in situations where a classic mystic would fail, even though I have yet to find a fight where I would want to use her ^^"

Terra

Where is she supposed to shine?

Probably on nodes likes "Resistor" that gives the opponent a lot of bulk that guilly can bypass thanks to her bleeds/ruptures, or nodes combinations that require you to use a mystic champion and bleed the opponent; she might also be good for the mystic chapter in V5 since the global boost AA and bleeds for mystic champions.
She is a mystic that doesn't do any "mystic-related" thing, so she can be used in situations where a classic mystic would fail, even though I have yet to find a fight where I would want to use her ^^"

There are far better and stronger options for Resistor nodes.
V5 also has way better and stronger options.
Guilly has been massacred, poor girl. She didn't deserve this, first OG character deserves more respect

te_dua_shum

@Terra I fully agree with you, there are better options for almost everything aside from a very niche combination of "mystic champions and bleeds", where i personally prefer her over sym supreme because she doesn't need MD at all to be played, probably the only thing that I like about her.
I was just trying to figure out some scenarios where guilly would have worked at her best, regardless of the fact that she isn't the best option for that particular fight ^_^

Ercarret

Thank you for demonstrating once more what we all have been saying, Guilly's nerf made completely useless in any type of gameplay, I have tried her in aq, arenas, quests, she is trash now, what a poor design. "Where is she supposed to shine?" I don't know what to answer to that, @Kabam Miike @Kabam Zibiit are you guys able to help here?

It feels like there should be some kind of content that she is designed for. We've seen many uses discover over time when you start using champs that have been recently either released or buffed, whose value to the game was not immediately obvious. However, in Gully's case, I don't see it. I don't think her bleeds are nearly strong enough for her to become a bleed damage-dealing machine when going into a buff-heavy fight, and she doesn't have much more in her kit beyond that.

I don't want to scream at Kabam to defend themselves but it would be really interesting to hear exactly what their plans were for her. Is this it? Is this her at her peak performance? Or are we all, collectively, missing something? They've been very quiet when it comes to explaining why they changed her in the way they did.

Magrailothos

Nice write up.

I think you're right in that the only place she might shine is going to be a niche environment where a Mystic is required, but her lack of of most Mystic abilities becomes an asset.

There are opponents (Mister Negative, Overseer,
Annihilus, Thing) who are immune to and/or actively punish for Nullifying buffs.
They can be problematic if for some reason you're required to fight them with Mystics. Node combinations like Empowered Immunity + Mystic Ward could do the same for other opponents.

However, (i) that's very niche, and (ii) you'd still be better off with the other non-traditional Mystics like Mordo, Mephisto or Tigra ; all of whom have multiple other utilities and means of interacting with buffs that Guillotine lacks.

I still think Guilly's 'buff punishment' with increased bleed per buff is a tragic afterthought of an ability. A five percent chance of an extra bleed on each critical hit, per buff?
Her base critical chance at 5/65 is 26%. That means a crit approximately every four hits.
A five percent chance of a bleed is 1 in 20 critical hits; therefore one in eighty hits you actually land.

A long fight in MCOC is probably a couple of hundred hits. So for a strong opponent with a permanent buff, that's going to be maybe three extra bleeds per fight? Woo hoo!

Ercarret

I agree. It didn't feel like she was stacking bleeds like crazy even when those opponents had 10-15 buffs on, and the bleeds that she was putting on them didn't seem to do all that much damage anyway. It was just a very lackluster performance overall even under more or less ideal circumstances.