Guillotine buff is immeasurably disappointing ( in depth review and comparison)
Sungj
Member Posts: 2,113 ★★★★★
Now I was one of the few people that took guilloine to rank 2 pre buff and probably one of the even fewer who did the rank up just because I love the character and not in anticipation for the buff. I was optimistic for the buff but after trying out as many playstyles as I could and really trying to push her kit she feels not only mediocre but straight up worse than she felt pre-buff.
I'll try to make a youtube video as I have a lot of pre-buff guillotine videos to really show the comparison but I'll do my best to convey it in writing.
First off, damage. Yes in her base kit now Guillotine's damage is improved. But it's not like insane top tier damage output champion levels of DPS. She still needs synergies primarily with purgatory and night thrasher. This basically means her damage has been quite significantly nerfed for anyone that enjoys playing guillotine to her full potential. Pre-buff she cut down ROL bosses consistently under 50 hits and under 50-55 seconds. Post buff this number ranges anywhere from 60-95 hits and anywhere from 1:00 to 1:58 seconds. With just 2 synergy partners taken into account her damage has almost been halved on average.
Her biggest problem now, which contributes to the lacking damage is she is much much more RNG reliant for her damage than before. She starts with only 1 soul now instead of what I believe was 4 pre-buff so what was previously a 400 crit rating increase off the start with the night thrasher synergy it's now only 100. This makes it a lot harder to proc the initial crit bleeds to really start building up her soul charges. Paired with her now lowered bleed chance I've gone multiple fights hitting 25+ hit combos without proccing a single bleed and only getting 2 soul charges in that time. A problem pre-buff was also the fact her soul charges can deplete so if you get unlucky you can really get stuck in a rut of low damage. This problem has been exacerbated post buff. Even though charges below 11 are permanent you consume them so often with specials which you need to do to maximize her damage post buff and it's harder to build them up. I found myself having real lulls of damage output stuck between 1-6 soul charges and just not proccing bleeds on my basic combos. Added onto all that removing her big sp3 means you're subject to the rng gods for even longer portions of the fight than before since she could nuke down 120k+ health pre buff against big health pools.
Now going onto utility, I think she is only equal to how she was pre-buff if not just straight up nerfed. Pain link is so situational it might as well no be part of the sp1 text. Her heal is also just straight up nerfed, passive healing can situationally be good but you could heal so much more in most situations pre-buff. And biggest of all her big sp3 removal is a huge hit to her kit. It not only nerfed her damage it was one of her best pieces of utility. She could bypass a lot of nodes and champions with trickier phases below 30% health. Think IMIW, unblocked able under 25% health nodes, etc. The only utility added is that now she can have good damage against bleed immune champions but personally I would rather have her pre-buff sp3 over that any day of the week.
Her playstyle as a whole is just frustrating at times. Its more work now having to weave in a lot of heavies, managing your opponent's power so you can time heavy spam into sp2 or 1, having to reset her charges every special. That would be fine if the pay off was worth it but currently you're doing more work for less damage than she was doing pre-buff. Even hit counters are deceptive because you're using a lot of heavy attacks so even in fights where pre and post buff hit counts to end a rol fight are the same the time post buff time is significantly higher
I guess what is so frustrating is that she didn't need much for this buff to be successful. All she needed was to simply just move her most needed synergies (night thrasher, purgatory, optionally guillotine 2099) into her base kit, move her regen sig to her base kit, add a relevant piece of utility to the sp1 maybe a stagger on hit and add the rupture damage to bleed immune opponents as her new sig ability. She already had everything to be a good champion pre-buff it just happened that most of those things were locked behind multiple synergy partners and a high sig ability so 95% of the player base never realized she was as good as she was,
I'm not exaggerated she was for medium to long fights (200k-600k ish) the best pure mystic damage dealer in the entire game. I see people excited about her dps post buff, saying triple heavy to sp 2 is insane damage but it's just because they didn't know her capabilities before. She was always doing this much damage plus extra with the purgatory and night thrasher synergies and she still needs those synergies post buff.
She was one of my favorite champs to farm pots with but I really don't enjoy playing her anymore knowing how good she was pre - buff. Kabam really needs to address this because IMO this is worse than the hood situation. At least with hood you could argue his damage was significantly increased so it balanced losing a piece of utility but guillotine has straight up lost damage and utility. There's nothing about her kit post - buff that will make her used anymore than she was pre-buff. She's still mediocre with slightly better damage at base and a worse version of herself with a full synergy team
I'll try to make a youtube video as I have a lot of pre-buff guillotine videos to really show the comparison but I'll do my best to convey it in writing.
First off, damage. Yes in her base kit now Guillotine's damage is improved. But it's not like insane top tier damage output champion levels of DPS. She still needs synergies primarily with purgatory and night thrasher. This basically means her damage has been quite significantly nerfed for anyone that enjoys playing guillotine to her full potential. Pre-buff she cut down ROL bosses consistently under 50 hits and under 50-55 seconds. Post buff this number ranges anywhere from 60-95 hits and anywhere from 1:00 to 1:58 seconds. With just 2 synergy partners taken into account her damage has almost been halved on average.
Her biggest problem now, which contributes to the lacking damage is she is much much more RNG reliant for her damage than before. She starts with only 1 soul now instead of what I believe was 4 pre-buff so what was previously a 400 crit rating increase off the start with the night thrasher synergy it's now only 100. This makes it a lot harder to proc the initial crit bleeds to really start building up her soul charges. Paired with her now lowered bleed chance I've gone multiple fights hitting 25+ hit combos without proccing a single bleed and only getting 2 soul charges in that time. A problem pre-buff was also the fact her soul charges can deplete so if you get unlucky you can really get stuck in a rut of low damage. This problem has been exacerbated post buff. Even though charges below 11 are permanent you consume them so often with specials which you need to do to maximize her damage post buff and it's harder to build them up. I found myself having real lulls of damage output stuck between 1-6 soul charges and just not proccing bleeds on my basic combos. Added onto all that removing her big sp3 means you're subject to the rng gods for even longer portions of the fight than before since she could nuke down 120k+ health pre buff against big health pools.
Now going onto utility, I think she is only equal to how she was pre-buff if not just straight up nerfed. Pain link is so situational it might as well no be part of the sp1 text. Her heal is also just straight up nerfed, passive healing can situationally be good but you could heal so much more in most situations pre-buff. And biggest of all her big sp3 removal is a huge hit to her kit. It not only nerfed her damage it was one of her best pieces of utility. She could bypass a lot of nodes and champions with trickier phases below 30% health. Think IMIW, unblocked able under 25% health nodes, etc. The only utility added is that now she can have good damage against bleed immune champions but personally I would rather have her pre-buff sp3 over that any day of the week.
Her playstyle as a whole is just frustrating at times. Its more work now having to weave in a lot of heavies, managing your opponent's power so you can time heavy spam into sp2 or 1, having to reset her charges every special. That would be fine if the pay off was worth it but currently you're doing more work for less damage than she was doing pre-buff. Even hit counters are deceptive because you're using a lot of heavy attacks so even in fights where pre and post buff hit counts to end a rol fight are the same the time post buff time is significantly higher
I guess what is so frustrating is that she didn't need much for this buff to be successful. All she needed was to simply just move her most needed synergies (night thrasher, purgatory, optionally guillotine 2099) into her base kit, move her regen sig to her base kit, add a relevant piece of utility to the sp1 maybe a stagger on hit and add the rupture damage to bleed immune opponents as her new sig ability. She already had everything to be a good champion pre-buff it just happened that most of those things were locked behind multiple synergy partners and a high sig ability so 95% of the player base never realized she was as good as she was,
I'm not exaggerated she was for medium to long fights (200k-600k ish) the best pure mystic damage dealer in the entire game. I see people excited about her dps post buff, saying triple heavy to sp 2 is insane damage but it's just because they didn't know her capabilities before. She was always doing this much damage plus extra with the purgatory and night thrasher synergies and she still needs those synergies post buff.
She was one of my favorite champs to farm pots with but I really don't enjoy playing her anymore knowing how good she was pre - buff. Kabam really needs to address this because IMO this is worse than the hood situation. At least with hood you could argue his damage was significantly increased so it balanced losing a piece of utility but guillotine has straight up lost damage and utility. There's nothing about her kit post - buff that will make her used anymore than she was pre-buff. She's still mediocre with slightly better damage at base and a worse version of herself with a full synergy team
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Comments
Similar to Gamora who also needs a lot of heavy spamming, I think Gully had really benefited from a passive stun on her heavy at the end of her combo. Right now, it feels like you're either going for big bleeds on specials or consistent bleeds on basic attacks.
Obviously this is based on very little testing but there just wasn't anything that stood out to me as particularly impressive. The fact that I died again and again and again does also, perhaps, speak a bit to how underwhelming her regen is. Granted, my Gully is not particularly high sig so I wouldn't have gotten that much health back pre-buff anyway, but I barely even noticed any health ticking in during either fight.
Diablo
The amount of players that honestly have no clue that Guilly has the most damaging SP3 in game was amazing to me. You'd see those threads of "Which champion can do the most special attack damage" and so many answers who weren't Guilly just went to show so many players had no clue what she could do even if it was with synergies.
Those same players cried the most for a re-work rather than keeping her kit as is but rather just making her numbers better and give her some good utility. That's ALL she needed.
ALL kabam needed to do was as you said. Just add some synergies to her and give her some utility. That's all.
I want players to understand something. All these damage caps that was put in place even 5 years ago in MCOC was due to TWO champs. OG Thor pre 12.0 and Guilly.
Do you players understand how much Kabam wanted to remove Guilly's SP3 how it worked? The damage it could do was insane no matter the health of the enemy with no damage cap. You could have a champ who heals back to 100% every 2 seconds or a champ with 100% regen per second and you couldn't heal block or reverse it with anything. Well Guilly is one of the few champs could by-pass it with alittle time.
Kabam no longer have to worry about yet another champ would just end fights in a single blow.
Of ALL the champion buffs so far, the worse thing that ever happened was the murder of Guilly's SP3
If you're wondering what I mean. An example of this is if the enemy had 1 billion health, 50 souls would do 1 billion health in game. If the enemy had 1 trillion health then 50 souls would have done 1 trillion health in damage. If they had litirally Infinity health then again, 50 souls was enongh to do well... infinity damage to them in a single blow.
Now
Another pointless Ebony maw like buff.. but now with this "buff", kabam was able to complete the achievement of ridicule the winner of the community buff choice..
Why give us the choice on voting for a champion Overhaul buff, when we got less healing and the same damage?!
Why wasting time and resources on this?
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
70 hits no boost no synergies ...15 bleeds from sp2 is amazing
Ranked her up because I liked her old abilities with synergy..now this just looks like a meme
Guilly just needed some damage. Maybe the purgatory crit bleed put into her kit. And a couple pieces of utility… maybe a stagger and slow. Would’ve been good to go 👍🏽… pain link? No. Regen nerfed to the ground? No. C’mon man…
Please can I get a rank down gem so I can get back resources put into champ I never thought was getting a buff
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