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.
The reason I cited Hood and not Nova is because the original Hood changes actively gutted one of his key pieces of utility. Players who previously liked the champion and used him for his fate seal were now unable to do so. Nova’s buff, as meager as it was, didn’t *remove* anything from the character. He may not be better in any meaningful way, but he’s certainly not worse.
It is too early to say right now, but I fear that Guillotine may come out worse for this overhaul. The reduction in healing potential and the change to her sp3 have me deeply concerned. Again, it’s too early to know, and she certainly will have more damage and a better spectre mechanic. But giving her an Electro-like effect on her sp1 isn’t exactly the kind of utility that we were clamoring for.
Yes the sad thing is we went through the grinder on this one. we had a long voting, then a painful arena voting, then waited 6+ months for this. This? Really this? This is what the team worked for that long? a half baked, nerfed guillotine? What a waste of time and effort for this long drawn out process. The next time the team tries this out, expect not much enthusiasm from he playerbase if this is the product we receive at the end of it. Looking at the buff, it seems like a half an hour job of cobbled abilities. Feels like the devs spent more time flairing up the descriptions than working on the abilities. sad indeed. Color me disappointed.
People voted for Ant-man anyway ... don't think many are invested in this vote anyway ...
the bad stuff started with asking to grind arena for a vote ...
any bad buff is a loss for the community.
That's not disputed .. i was just commenting on people talking about her being the community vote when actually she wasn't. Ant man won the vote. Then they put another vote in an arena grind which put me off (and I am sure a lot of other people).
Eh, Ant Man won 39% of the initial vote. Leaving 61% scattered between the 5 other options, that were then available to vote for Guilly in the arena. That, and the arena itself was why Guilly won.
Hopefully when ant man gets buffed he’ll have a better reception
If they just gave her SP1 some kind of power control like a power leach to go along with her kit she could work out as a mystic. Her SP1 1 is already lacking so it could be perfect and per her in lines with a Magik type Mystic. She could easily be great.
Yes the sad thing is we went through the grinder on this one. we had a long voting, then a painful arena voting, then waited 6+ months for this. This? Really this? This is what the team worked for that long? a half baked, nerfed guillotine? What a waste of time and effort for this long drawn out process. The next time the team tries this out, expect not much enthusiasm from he playerbase if this is the product we receive at the end of it. Looking at the buff, it seems like a half an hour job of cobbled abilities. Feels like the devs spent more time flairing up the descriptions than working on the abilities. sad indeed. Color me disappointed.
I think there are a lot of cool ideas present.
Like her new healing mechanic would be super cool on a new champion. It’s just not good as a replacement for her old mechanic.
Her new sp3 is also very interesting mechanically and has the potential to be a powerful tool, but it doesn’t add anything to her kit and it feels weird to have her old sp3 replaced with this.
Pain Split… is incredibly niche from an attacker’s perspective. It’s a defender’s tool, seemingly only viable when she has a health pool large enough to shoulder the burden of the damage being taken. I can think of some uses for it, such as the Shang Chi challenge or Life Transfer nodes, where you have an additional outside source of healing to offset the damage you are taking. But even then that means foregoing the utility of her sp2 or the damage of her sp3.
Her kit lacks practicality. It lacks any dimension where it can excel. I can’t think of any matchups where I’ll be saying “I wish I had a Guillotine to use here!” and that feels bad. When she was released she had that, as the only champion at the time who could really reverse healing. I want to be excited for her. I want her to have a thing she can do that makes her special. And that’s just not here.
Yes the sad thing is we went through the grinder on this one. we had a long voting, then a painful arena voting, then waited 6+ months for this. This? Really this? This is what the team worked for that long? a half baked, nerfed guillotine? What a waste of time and effort for this long drawn out process. The next time the team tries this out, expect not much enthusiasm from he playerbase if this is the product we receive at the end of it. Looking at the buff, it seems like a half an hour job of cobbled abilities. Feels like the devs spent more time flairing up the descriptions than working on the abilities. sad indeed. Color me disappointed.
I think there are a lot of cool ideas present.
Like her new healing mechanic would be super cool on a new champion. It’s just not good as a replacement for her old mechanic.
Her new sp3 is also very interesting mechanically and has the potential to be a powerful tool, but it doesn’t add anything to her kit and it feels weird to have her old sp3 replaced with this.
Pain Split… is incredibly niche from an attacker’s perspective. It’s a defender’s tool, seemingly only viable when she has a health pool large enough to shoulder the burden of the damage being taken. I can think of some uses for it, such as the Shang Chi challenge or Life Transfer nodes, where you have an additional outside source of healing to offset the damage you are taking. But even then that means foregoing the utility of her sp2 or the damage of her sp3.
Her kit lacks practicality. It lacks any dimension where it can excel. I can’t think of any matchups where I’ll be saying “I wish I had a Guillotine to use here!” and that feels bad. When she was released she had that, as the only champion at the time who could really reverse healing. I want to be excited for her. I want her to have a thing she can do that makes her special. And that’s just not here.
She would be a beast in cav EQ. But balancing her around a niche node is bad
Yes the sad thing is we went through the grinder on this one. we had a long voting, then a painful arena voting, then waited 6+ months for this. This? Really this? This is what the team worked for that long? a half baked, nerfed guillotine? What a waste of time and effort for this long drawn out process. The next time the team tries this out, expect not much enthusiasm from he playerbase if this is the product we receive at the end of it. Looking at the buff, it seems like a half an hour job of cobbled abilities. Feels like the devs spent more time flairing up the descriptions than working on the abilities. sad indeed. Color me disappointed.
I think there are a lot of cool ideas present.
Like her new healing mechanic would be super cool on a new champion. It’s just not good as a replacement for her old mechanic.
Her new sp3 is also very interesting mechanically and has the potential to be a powerful tool, but it doesn’t add anything to her kit and it feels weird to have her old sp3 replaced with this.
Pain Split… is incredibly niche from an attacker’s perspective. It’s a defender’s tool, seemingly only viable when she has a health pool large enough to shoulder the burden of the damage being taken. I can think of some uses for it, such as the Shang Chi challenge or Life Transfer nodes, where you have an additional outside source of healing to offset the damage you are taking. But even then that means foregoing the utility of her sp2 or the damage of her sp3.
Her kit lacks practicality. It lacks any dimension where it can excel. I can’t think of any matchups where I’ll be saying “I wish I had a Guillotine to use here!” and that feels bad. When she was released she had that, as the only champion at the time who could really reverse healing. I want to be excited for her. I want her to have a thing she can do that makes her special. And that’s just not here.
She would be a beast in cav EQ. But balancing her around a niche node is bad
A niche node that isn’t even used every month. It’s like one of three rotating niche nodes at this point. Any more than that and she’d obviously be too powerful
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.
Dr. Zola
The difference comes down to the point of the exercise. The devs are perfectly capable of picking champs to buff, they don't need our help to do that. The only reason to ask us to vote on it is to engage the playerbase. The entire process is an engagement tool. But there's not only no point in trying to engage the players in the buff process and then significantly underdeliver on that buff, it is worse than nothing because it can easily backfire and cause disengagement instead.
I'm not saying that every champion the players vote on must be a top performing champion after the update. What I'm saying is the players have to think it was a good idea to even vote on the champion in the first place. It should look like the voting was meaningful, and the agency handed to the players to decide on who gets buffed wasn't trivial. If this makes even a small number of players hesitant to vote their favorites next time, that would be a net negative for the game.
Would focusing on the OG iconic characters also create that sense of engagement? I don't think that's obvious. For one thing, we don't all agree on who the iconic characters are, and if we put it to a vote I suspect the winners would not be the comic book classics but rather the MCU mainstays. Far more people know about Marvel through the MCU than the comics, and in fact we often see people post complaints on the forums about the game focusing too much on the MCU characters over the wider Marvel property. There's no consensus there, where as there's presumptive general consensus in an actual vote. The winner is presumed to have wide spread support in the community. Heck, even the loser is presumed to have wide spread support in the community just to get into second place.
But giving her an Electro-like effect on her sp1 isn’t exactly the kind of utility that we were clamoring for.
Anything that damages the opponent instead of us is an offensive ability. Anything that damages the opponent and also us is a defensive ability. The only time sharing damage is interesting, outside of corner case node combinations, is when we have more health than the defender. In that situation, a one to one trade of damage hurts them more than us. But we're generally fighting things with more health than we have, at least past Act 3 or so. In those situations, trading damage one for one is a net negative. So Pain Link makes Guillotine a slightly more dangerous defender, but not a particularly more powerful attacker. If Pain Link is contributing significant damage at all to us on attack, that means we're probably also dead.
Even if you're facing Aspect of Nightmares, I don't know how interesting Pain Link is going to be, since by the time you can land it the node will probably be over. So you'd need something like Aspect of Nightmares and Power Start 1 on the attacker to make full use of this. Which is not an everyday node combination.
But giving her an Electro-like effect on her sp1 isn’t exactly the kind of utility that we were clamoring for.
Anything that damages the opponent instead of us is an offensive ability. Anything that damages the opponent and also us is a defensive ability. The only time sharing damage is interesting, outside of corner case node combinations, is when we have more health than the defender. In that situation, a one to one trade of damage hurts them more than us. But we're generally fighting things with more health than we have, at least past Act 3 or so. In those situations, trading damage one for one is a net negative. So Pain Link makes Guillotine a slightly more dangerous defender, but not a particularly more powerful attacker. If Pain Link is contributing significant damage at all to us on attack, that means we're probably also dead.
Even if you're facing Aspect of Nightmares, I don't know how interesting Pain Link is going to be, since by the time you can land it the node will probably be over. So you'd need something like Aspect of Nightmares and Power Start 1 on the attacker to make full use of this. Which is not an everyday node combination.
10k damage to you is a third of your health.
10k damage to a defender in 7.2 is about 2.5% of their health.
You can do it 3 times to take off less than 10% of the opponents health.
@DNA3000 (not quoting for the sake of keeping the chunks of text more manageable) and even in that best case use, a 6* R4 Guillotine has about 42,000 health (according to Auntm.ai). That means you can do about 21,000 damage if somehow done perfectly. That’s just not impressive.
The best case uses I can come up with for it are Life Transfer and Close Encounters, as they allow you to take damage but also offset that damage within the fight. But these are extremely niche and, again, not going to result in any really impressive numbers.
It’s a cool piece of tech, but not useful in any meaningful way.
I really liked OG Guillotine before the buff. Have a duped 6* and ranked 2 her way before they announced the buff.
Than I made the horrible mistake by R3 her as I already liked her and I imagined it would be only better, because it is a buff, right.. but after reading the spotlight I have found out that the main reasons why I liked her (pre-buff) are as good as gone after the buff goes live..
Don’t need the rank up recourses back, that’s the risk I took by taking her to R3 just because I already liked her before the buff and the life steal + killer sp3 wouldnt be taken away! Well I was wrong.. haha
However, because of the life steal sig ability I gave her around 70/80 sig stones. Do you guys think there is any possibility of getting at least the sig stones back? I gave it to her because of the life steal, as this will be standard in her kit right now I feel like it has been a waste of sig stones i gave her over the past year..
I really liked OG Guillotine before the buff. Have a duped 6* and ranked 2 her way before they announced the buff.
Than I made the horrible mistake by R3 her as I already liked her and I imagined it would be only better, because it is a buff, right.. but after reading the spotlight I have found out that the main reasons why I liked her (pre-buff) are as good as gone after the buff goes live..
Don’t need the rank up recourses back, that’s the risk I took by taking her to R3 just because I already liked her before the buff and the life steal + killer sp3 wouldnt be taken away! Well I was wrong.. haha
However, because of the life steal sig ability I gave her around 70/80 sig stones. Do you guys think there is any possibility of getting at least the sig stones back? I gave it to her because of the life steal, as this will be standard in her kit right now I feel like it has been a waste of sig stones i gave her over the past year..
anyone experience with a situation like this?
Thanks!
Did you give her the stones before the buff was announced or after?
Uhmm, don’t really remember.. Beginning of the year maybe, also don’t really know when the buff was announced. But I have her at sig 90 for a long time already. Started to rank her and invest stones into her when that venom variant came out
Other stuff? Eh, maybe a little. Fun to discuss, though—shame we can’t do it over an adult beverage.
I suspect unlike on the forums, the longer the discussion lasted, the more likely consensus would arrive in some form.
That's usually how those things go. You need to stop drinking and go home at blood brothers though. Keep it up too long and you'll find yourself at, "Man, **** that dude! He likes Hydrox better than Oreos and his toilet paper roll pulled under. Our enmity is forever."
Other stuff? Eh, maybe a little. Fun to discuss, though—shame we can’t do it over an adult beverage.
I suspect unlike on the forums, the longer the discussion lasted, the more likely consensus would arrive in some form.
That's usually how those things go. You need to stop drinking and go home at blood brothers though. Keep it up too long and you'll find yourself at, "Man, **** that dude! He likes Hydrox better than Oreos and his toilet paper roll pulled under. Our enmity is forever."
Here the discussion would have to terminate at the point I could no longer functionally perform mental arithmetic. Which for me happens somewhere between the fifth and the seventh kamikaze.
Guillotine buff is a joke. The champion buff was selected by whole community. But it seems Guillotine will still be an useless character because you can always find a better one to cover her use. If that makes no difference between community vote and Kabam selected, then why are we wasting our time to vote? Really make no sense.
Other stuff? Eh, maybe a little. Fun to discuss, though—shame we can’t do it over an adult beverage.
I suspect unlike on the forums, the longer the discussion lasted, the more likely consensus would arrive in some form.
That's usually how those things go. You need to stop drinking and go home at blood brothers though. Keep it up too long and you'll find yourself at, "Man, **** that dude! He likes Hydrox better than Oreos and his toilet paper roll pulled under. Our enmity is forever."
Here the discussion would have to terminate at the point I could no longer functionally perform mental arithmetic. Which for me happens somewhere between the fifth and the seventh kamikaze.
I’ve always had respect for you due to the level of research, thought, and detail you put into your posts here. But this is the post that sealed it for me.
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.
Comments
It is too early to say right now, but I fear that Guillotine may come out worse for this overhaul. The reduction in healing potential and the change to her sp3 have me deeply concerned. Again, it’s too early to know, and she certainly will have more damage and a better spectre mechanic. But giving her an Electro-like effect on her sp1 isn’t exactly the kind of utility that we were clamoring for.
we had a long voting, then a painful arena voting, then waited 6+ months for this.
This? Really this? This is what the team worked for that long? a half baked, nerfed guillotine? What a waste of time and effort for this long drawn out process.
The next time the team tries this out, expect not much enthusiasm from he playerbase if this is the product we receive at the end of it.
Looking at the buff, it seems like a half an hour job of cobbled abilities. Feels like the devs spent more time flairing up the descriptions than working on the abilities.
sad indeed. Color me disappointed.
Hopefully when ant man gets buffed he’ll have a better reception
Like her new healing mechanic would be super cool on a new champion. It’s just not good as a replacement for her old mechanic.
Her new sp3 is also very interesting mechanically and has the potential to be a powerful tool, but it doesn’t add anything to her kit and it feels weird to have her old sp3 replaced with this.
Pain Split… is incredibly niche from an attacker’s perspective. It’s a defender’s tool, seemingly only viable when she has a health pool large enough to shoulder the burden of the damage being taken. I can think of some uses for it, such as the Shang Chi challenge or Life Transfer nodes, where you have an additional outside source of healing to offset the damage you are taking. But even then that means foregoing the utility of her sp2 or the damage of her sp3.
Her kit lacks practicality. It lacks any dimension where it can excel. I can’t think of any matchups where I’ll be saying “I wish I had a Guillotine to use here!” and that feels bad. When she was released she had that, as the only champion at the time who could really reverse healing. I want to be excited for her. I want her to have a thing she can do that makes her special. And that’s just not here.
I'm not saying that every champion the players vote on must be a top performing champion after the update. What I'm saying is the players have to think it was a good idea to even vote on the champion in the first place. It should look like the voting was meaningful, and the agency handed to the players to decide on who gets buffed wasn't trivial. If this makes even a small number of players hesitant to vote their favorites next time, that would be a net negative for the game.
Would focusing on the OG iconic characters also create that sense of engagement? I don't think that's obvious. For one thing, we don't all agree on who the iconic characters are, and if we put it to a vote I suspect the winners would not be the comic book classics but rather the MCU mainstays. Far more people know about Marvel through the MCU than the comics, and in fact we often see people post complaints on the forums about the game focusing too much on the MCU characters over the wider Marvel property. There's no consensus there, where as there's presumptive general consensus in an actual vote. The winner is presumed to have wide spread support in the community. Heck, even the loser is presumed to have wide spread support in the community just to get into second place.
Even if you're facing Aspect of Nightmares, I don't know how interesting Pain Link is going to be, since by the time you can land it the node will probably be over. So you'd need something like Aspect of Nightmares and Power Start 1 on the attacker to make full use of this. Which is not an everyday node combination.
10k damage to a defender in 7.2 is about 2.5% of their health.
You can do it 3 times to take off less than 10% of the opponents health.
The best case uses I can come up with for it are Life Transfer and Close Encounters, as they allow you to take damage but also offset that damage within the fight. But these are extremely niche and, again, not going to result in any really impressive numbers.
It’s a cool piece of tech, but not useful in any meaningful way.
Than I made the horrible mistake by R3 her as I already liked her and I imagined it would be only better, because it is a buff, right.. but after reading the spotlight I have found out that the main reasons why I liked her (pre-buff) are as good as gone after the buff goes live..
Don’t need the rank up recourses back, that’s the risk I took by taking her to R3 just because I already liked her before the buff and the life steal + killer sp3 wouldnt be taken away! Well I was wrong.. haha
However, because of the life steal sig ability I gave her around 70/80 sig stones. Do you guys think there is any possibility of getting at least the sig stones back? I gave it to her because of the life steal, as this will be standard in her kit right now I feel like it has been a waste of sig stones i gave her over the past year..
anyone experience with a situation like this?
Thanks!
@BitterSteel
If that makes no difference between community vote and Kabam selected, then why are we wasting our time to vote? Really make no sense.
Cause I don't think Kabam can actually make AntMan even worse when it's his time.