Community Choice Buff: Guillotine Clarification + Live AMA with a *very special* Kabam dev!
Kabam Boo
Member Posts: 840 ★★★★★
DESIGN
OriginalKeeping topped up on health, dealing with opponents healing, and gaining strength the more HP you take away from the opponent.
Now (Changes)
New Design: Keeping topped up on health, dealing with opponents healing, and gaining strength through debuffs, or hitting HP thresholds on the opponent or Guillotine.
Biggest Changes:
- New “Unshackled” Mechanic. This will increase her special attack effects, and make them unblockable if she has 10 or more souls!
- Bleed Curse on Heavy, giving you guaranteed Bleeds, and thus guaranteed Souls if you strike an opponent with any hit of a special while active.
- Guillotine can now apply Ruptures instead of Bleeds to Bleed immune opponents!
- Moved Regen from random chance, to be all the time but lower potency.
FUTURE PLANS
Upon review of Guillotine’s initial performance, the team determined that she could benefit from some more regeneration in the future.While the team is satisfied with the current state of most of Guillotine’s kit, they will be keeping a close eye on her healing during an average fight. The team is approaching the continuous form of healing with caution and some reserve when it comes to tuning.
Currently, the team will continue to examine all available data and will endeavour to release a buff for her regeneration some time in the foreseeable future. Rest assured that the team will prioritize this as much as they can.
Below are the main statistics that the team uses to track Guillotine’s regeneration (regeneration per second). This graph tracks how much a Champion regenerates on average, at a consistent scale.
Regen per second for Guillotine vs others across MCoC Pre-Rework
Regen per second for Guillotine vs others across MCoC Post-Rework
EXCLUSIVE
Questions or thoughts about the above? Join @Kabam Boo , featuring the one and only @Kabam John , in a live AMA session tomorrow, Friday, November 5, 2021 from 11AM (PT) to 12PM (PT).***NOTE that this thread will open tomorrow, Friday, November 5, 2021 at 10:30AM (PT). Please hold all your questions and thoughts until then! We look forward to chatting with you all very soon!
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Comments
I have 3 questions.
Firstly, I think one thing that needs to be remembered is that new Guilly has a much different playstyle than old Guilly, namely the need to parry heavy and heavy spam to build up bleed curse debuffs in order to achieve max potential. This means that with her fairly low block proficiency, and focusing on parrying, you lose a lot more health than you would have before, when you simply played Guilly MLLLM 5 hit combos.
As a result of this, even if new Guilly had exactly the same regeneration capability as old Guilly, the new playstyle leads to a net worse health gain, as the chip damage suffered to achieve her max potential wasn’t there with the old Guilly.
Q1) Has this been, or will this be considered when balancing her?
Secondly, when Hercules was selected for the community vote, in all of the Dev Diaries episodes there was an air of great care. An air of “this is the community selected champion, we *need* to do right by them”. And Kabam really felt like they poured the community’s heart and soul into Herc. He can be used suicides or not, by lower skilled players but has a high skill cap for higher skilled players. He is THE community’s champion.
I think as a result of that, there has been this same expectation by the community that when we’ve put effort into voting for a champion, whether by campaigning for them, debating about them or actually doing a whole arena for them. But then for her to come out as a champion that quite evidently doesn’t have the utility to be effectively used past act 5, which is clear from her spotlight alone, is just a real shame.
Q2) So my question is this, are you aware of the hype that a community vote creates? And if so, is that something that can be held at the forefront of the designers minds for the next one?
Lastly, regarding her utility and the rest of her kit. You say you’re happy with the rest of it, but a lot of people I’ve talked to feel like this is just rearranging the deck chairs of the titanic. Even if Guilly has some pretty good regen after this, she has a lot of issues as a member of the mystic class with no way to deal with tricky buffs, and no other meaningful utility at all.
Q3) Are there any plans at all to address the other issues of her buff? Or to make any improvements on any other front?
The last several months have seen multiple champions that are very, very powerful in terms of healing (King Groot, Diablo) get reworks.
While their "regen per second" is higher than hers by quite a bit per this chart - it's a night and day difference in game and even more exaggerated than shown here. Guillotine is not viable as a healer in end-game content (Act 6/7, Cavalier EQ, Map 7), whereas the other two are. She doesn't see near the levels of healing of either King Groot or Diablo, but all three were reworks that had regeneration as core parts of their kit. Why was there more concern with how powerful her healing might be, with those two already out and in the game?
Thanks!
This is obviously a rare case, and with synergies, but just to show that there was POTENTIAL for huge SP3 damage and huge healing, which isn't really the case anymore
Pre-buff Guillotine and Buffed Guillotine have the exact same utility set, a utility set that by even 2017 standards is weak. If it was to balance her damage and sustainability out, then the sustainability we know didn’t work, and I think most developed players would tell you damage is meaningless if the champ is not useful.
But some supplementary questions.
Who was this buff aimed to benefit?
What was the point of Pain Link?
Why was the unblockable and regen stuff not caught before release?
What timeline can we expect for any changes to Guillotine? And will this take up a buff spot like the Hood rebuff did?
Was the initial buff impacted by the 3 champ per month cadence that was cut back on?
And some more general questions on the buff programme going forward:
Is there any possibility that the community could get to see what categories champs lined up for buffs are falling into? Because there have been some buffs recently that the devs and the community have significantly disagreed on what kind of buffs they should have gotten (including Guillotine)
What is the focus of most buffs? As in, are they focused on damage, utility or practicality?
What buffs have been released that the devs believe need to be looked at again? (Looking at you Nova and Gamora)
And one final question:
Is my beloved Killmonger up for a value buff at some point (or at least just letting his bleeds stack)?
I understand I’ve kind of bombarded you with questions here but I’m very invested in the buff programme, and champion kits in general. I find it fascinating. I’m also a journalism student, so what can I say? Asking questions is kind of my nature
I'm a bit of a forum noob, so my apologies if this isn't formatted correctly.
> While the team is satisfied with the current state of most of Guillotine’s kit
I'd love to hear some clarification regarding this point. Her regen has been nerfed based on what your graphs are showing, but from an overhauled champ, I personally expected a lot more in terms of utility as well. The only new part of her kit is the Sp1 reflect (mostly defensive). I understand that the heal reversal is more accessible now, especially compared to how she was before the changes without a synergy team.
She has no impactful ability that makes her feel like a mystic at all. No nullify, no real big benefit from buffs, no way to deal with buffs, or power.
Hearing that the regen is the only point being looked at as a possible further improvement is very disappointing.
Are there plans to rebuff some champs that didn't improve as much, i.e. nova, ronan, maw?
When can we expect the Community Choice Champs to be buffed? Is it possible early next year?
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/283063/is-there-a-problem-with-the-buff-program/p1
And the consensus seemed to be that I think Kabam have too many champions slated for overhauls, when they just don’t need to be.
The reason I'm asking is because like a lot of people I felt that the things that Guillotine was missing could have been added in through a moderate update as opposed to an overhaul but I wanted to also understand the approach from the dev team.
Joining me is @Kabam John, Balance Designer, who has been with us for 4 years now. John is a Thronebreaker player, and his favourite all-time Champion is Doc Ock; although he has been swayed lately to Knull. John's day to day involves Character, content and game mode balancing, running the revamp process, and helping design champions. As you can see, John has quite a full plate!
I would like to remind everybody to please remain respectful during this AMA as John has taken time out of his busy schedule to speak to us today. Please direct any questions, thoughts or suggestions at the present topic only. Any further and off-topic discussions may be answered at a separate time.
Finally, we will also be moderating this thread, so please remain respectful at all times to John, and your fellow Summoners! We hope to have an amazing AMA today!
Without further ado, I give you............... the one.......... the only..........
@Kabam John !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Instead we got a nerf to her top qualities, no utility and overall just a bad champ honestly. From what I can tell, she will definitely not get played by me personally and all the old gully fans are mad cause she’s worse, so who was this “buffs aimed at?
This has personally made me want to not participate in any future polls/voting with you guys.
I’ve come to think of value, moderated and overhauls not in terms of what they explicitly mean, but more the level of effort required to buff them. I think that’s why we see values that are more like moderates and overhauls that are more like moderates.
"While Guillotine is Unshackled and the opponent is suffering from Bleed Curse, any buffs the opponent triggers are converted to a Bleed debuff" would do a lot on those fronts.
If you plan to only buff her regen back to what she was, then why bother? No one gonna use her, she lack damage, you literally changed her sp3 damage from 80-90k to 3k!! I mean, WTH?
Her damage output seems lower, as well. While the increased attack per soul is nice, it comes at the cost of her utility. She used to trade in 0 souls on her sp1, 2 souls on her sp2, and all souls on her monster sp3. You could use sp1 on a loop and continue to build up souls. She lost the additional crit damage rating per soul, which allowed her to get some awesome crit damage/critical bleeds in with synergies. She now has long periods of time with lackluster damage if she uses a special attack, since she now trades in all of her souls with unshackled specials.
Her chance to place bleeds decreased in general, and tying them into buff-heavy opponents only makes sense if she got an increase in crit rating and damage per buff. In order to get a guaranteed bleed on a crit, the opponent would need 13 buffs. I guess the question is “why would I use guillotine on such a buff-heavy opponent, especially if she can’t benefit all that well from MD?”
The Pain link mechanic only makes sense if you could pass the damage along 100% to the opponent, a la Namor, or somehow benefit from it like pseudo-immune champs like OR. Otherwise, why use Guillotine instead of an immune champ?
Her sp3 degen is disappointing, as well. Guilly had a really fun sp3 in her old kit. Now it’s underwhelming.
The specter debuff is still nice, and I like the rupture ability in her new kit. But there are too many hard trade-offs in her new kit, and they aren’t balanced within her kit.
Her old kit may have been dated, but it was at least balanced. Her style was fun, and she had a niche in the game. There wasn’t a constant trade-off of damage for the utility she offered, she was relatively reliable, and she had some synergies that made her a pretty good champ. The only real issue was her reliance on RNG.
I hope you folks roll her back to pre-buff and start this one over from scratch. Disappointing buffs happen, but they rarely make the champ subjectively worse. This one basically made Guilly worse in every way: lower regen, less damage mitigation, lower damage, lower bleed damage, removed her massive sp3, etc.
Her new mechanics, outside of Ruptures, are bad. Pain link isn’t worth using. Her degen is meh. Having to trade off all of her souls at 10 to use a special attack locks her useable utility (specter) into losing the bulk of her ramp-up damage