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Community Choice Buff: Guillotine Clarification + Live AMA with a *very special* Kabam dev!
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I have several questions based off of that premise.
First, if the champion has the exact same utility and purpose both before and after changes, what piece of content can she be brought to that she could not before?
Second, I can’t help but notice that Pain Link is not mentioned in this summation of her purposes. What is the purpose of Pain Link? Does it have any offensive use cases outside of maybe Life Transfer and Flare?
Third, why these specific changes to her sp3? The damage is substantially lessened and is now in a format that can be mitigated, shrugged off, or ignored by a wide variety of champions. It is hard to see this change as anything shy of a nerf.
Additionally, on the note of the regeneration data you provided: does the data from old Guillotine reflect regeneration from all Guillotine uses, only awakened Guillotines, or only max sig Guillotines? With the way her healing was tied to her signature ability, her maximum healing capacity varies greatly from individual champion to champion and could skew the data dramatically downwards if not appropriately accounted for.
She has a decent (though worse than previously) heal, but that's sustainability. She has a lot of bleeds and can apply ruptures instead in some cases, which primarily assists in damage, but can serve as minor utility. She has a fairly potent Spectre to deal with healing, but she already applies enough debuffs so that Despair will negate most if not all of the opponent's healing.
Overall, Guillotine has a very minuscule amount of utility, and, respectfully, what she does have feels like it wasn't given much thought. My question is, to a lesser extent, what is the point of buffs like Guilly's, and to a greater extent, what was the point of buffs like Nova's and Ronin's, which changed virtually nothing. I understand not wanting another Magneto, believe me, I don't want this game to be further thrown off balance, but when I hear that a champion is being 'buffed', let alone a champion the community voted to be buffed, please forgive me for expecting something more.
Guillotine's new kit is paying a large homage to her old kit. We wanted to make sure we didn’t remove the key pieces she brought to the table. One of the biggest goals was an easy-to-understand, new player-friendly kit. Contest in general at the higher levels have gotten Uber complicated, which is a lot of fun once you know what you’re doing but can be pretty scary for learning. We wanted Guillotine to be easy to pick up and understand while making her more valuable than her old version for most players choosing to use her.
The graphs do include both awakened and unawakened. I’ve dived into both separately, having the two together didn’t make much of a difference visually. So both are included most as a Catch-all. Also, some of the graphs posted here are super nice looking! I’m going to be taking that feedback to our data science team and see what we can do about getting some easier-to-read/present graphs in the future!
We're looking into the Sp1 not giving her unblockable for the full special. It's on our Radar for sure and being investigated, when you'll hear more or see a fix I can't confidently say but sooner rather than later I'd wager.
Which Characters has this dev worked on:
All of the reworks except Bishop and Warmachine. At least with the new process. I personally also work on/helps with pretty much every character we release and have since around 2018.
Most of the time when you see a character have something removed from their kit with releasing updates/reworks it’s because we wanted to put that power elsewhere. In this instance, we wanted to give him much more power and remove a bit of that niche utility for it. I think it worked out in his favor for the most part
You guys change characters shortly after release from time to time, the most recent being Ikaris:
Most of the time we try and leave things as is if we can. Sometimes we can get some super egregious interactions that we didn't properly account for. That's when you'll see some changes like the Psycho-man and Shang-Chi hotfixes. For Ikaris, I think we didn’t explain what ACTUALLY had happened with this well. This wasn’t actually us last minute noticing his damage was too high, it was actually an error. We had turned him down internally before his release, and there was a data error that ended up removing those number changes. We actually even released him at a higher potency than we had planned because we didn’t want to remove too much of that accidental power
I'm curious if you could share a bit of use data from Guilly, not exact numbers if you can't but I'm curious to know how many people were using her before her buff, and now after. Did it not change at all, go up/down by alot? How does this compare to other overhaul / moderate buffs such as Diablo, Angela, or Colossus? (especially in the month right after their release if the data is available since that is where we are at with Guilly)
I'm curious if the data would show more people using her, which I assume is the ultimate goal of any buff to get more people to play a champion. Also, any differentiation between tier of players using her? Are Proven playing her more often than Thronebreakers?
Thanks!
Secondly, I just wanted to ask about what I've quoted above. I can appreciate a simple kit, and what that would mean for newer players learning. But I can't help but feel that an overhaul designed and aimed at for a learning player may not have been best suited for a community choice champion, and secondly simple does not necessarily have to mean not much utility. I mean look at Howard the Duck's buff, he has a relatively simple kit, but is definitely still useful.
As an end game player, I know that not every buff (or even many) are aimed at me, but I feel that when everyone has campaigned, voted, done arena for and debated about a champion vote, it feels a little out of place to have that buff designed as one aimed at for only a newer section of the playerbase. How did the fact that this was a summoner choice vote play into the buff design? And was there ever a conversation about making her really useful for everyone due to the nature of how she was decided to get the buff?
(and when I say really useful, I don't mean Magneto level buff. Even Diablo, Kingpin or ultron level would be great. Enough utility and damage to be useful for most of the players who would have gone out and voted for her)
We see some MASSIVE changes in terms of players picking up newly reworked champions. With Guillotine we saw around 5-10x the number of users picking her up and playing her. When we sort a lot of our data we also break users into different skill groups and use those to verify our metrics for things like DPS, Regen etc.
What do you feel are the strengths/weaknesses of her new kit?
What would you like to see her have?
With Guillotines release we've learned that we need to make sure that our top tier players still have something extra to chew on and we have more skill expression for you guys to show off the cool new toy you banded together to earn! We're going to be considering this heavily if we do any more community choices in the future. We won't be making any massive changes to Guillotine regarding this, but your voice is heard on the matter
Because a 5-10x increase sustained from the buff going live to now means much more than 5-10x more people using her in the first week, when almost every player will simply be trying out the buff, like most players do every month. That does not necessarily indicate she’s being used more
A lot of the feedback in the Guillotine thread has been about her being a community choice champ and I also see a lot of people saying x champ feels more like a moderate update vs overhaul etc.
There are a few places we look, we have an internal list of champions we feel could use an update/rework. From there we'll go through the list, and start spitballing ideas for designs. When we find one that we really like, we'll take the next step. We've found this ends up being the best for us, just due to how many we release. Updates are largely run by a team of two people, Myself and Dorosh, where the new characters team is made up of around 5-7 people at any given time. That means there's just the two of us(mostly Dorosh) working on updates every month instead of 1 person working on a character every few months
One thing that I think is important is to analyze the champion at hand. Guillotine was a MCOC original that many loved and had an essence/personality that needed to be preserved. Her main traits were a) an aggressive playstyle of placing bleeds, b) moderate to great healing potential, c) control of enemy healing, d) a buildup to a massive special 3.
I think going forward it would be best to embrace the traits that make champions who they are and add in what they are missing. Guillotine really needed just a bit of mystic utility added.
It seems many think we are too far into overhaul territory when a small addition and refinement may have been best. Personally, I find myself missing Guillotine even though she's still on my roster. What are your thoughts on this?
1. Will her revamped regen mitigate the abysmal armor & block proficiency values she now has?
2. Why would anyone use pain link? You take all of the debuff damage (minus 2% or 4%, yay), and place a debuff that can be decreased by physical resistance on an opponent that typically has higher HP values. Any champ with a high physical resistance value lowers the impact of the pain link debuff, making it an even worse option to use.
3. Why doesn’t she have a special attack that doesn’t force you to exchange her souls once unshackled? You have to constantly restart your ramp-up, or lose access to her utility. Her unshackled state doesn’t really offer much of a trade-off, either. Double the pain link debuffs, or pause the specter, all to re-start the ramp-up? Not a fun mechanic at all.
4. Why would anyone take guillotine into a buff-heavy matchup, unless she was your only option? There are so many other champs that actively punish, remove, or otherwise interact with buffs better than Guillotine, even outside of the mystic class.
5. Why is bleed curse only applicable to hits from her special attacks? Her bleeds aren’t super powerful, and her specials only have 2-3 hits each. Does it make sense to parry/heavy for 2 or 3 bleeds, if it comes at the expense of whatever chip damage she may take?
6. Would a simple change to her regen make her whole kit balanced, or at least not feel like a step down across the board from her original kit? I doubt it, myself.
7. How does this re-worked guillotine fit into the game for players? How does she fit in a new player’s roster, or handle any late-game content, or have a role within the current meta? She’s far too squishy for end-game attack values. She takes too much chip damage for new players who haven’t learned to intercept. She doesn’t do anything better than other champs in the game, and her niche utility come at the cost of her damage output or your potion stash.
Getting new art for characters takes a long time! Much longer than our regular design/update process. This does limit us a bit on who we can update. We're looking into getting more and more of those OG's updated with fresh faces, it just takes a bit more time
I can't confirm anything on this, but it is 100% something we're actively looking into and we hope to one day have!
Was there a reason to just “move the cups around” creating a champ with no more use than she had before? She was a 6 to me before but real fun to play she’s now still a 6 but not nearly as fun.
Note that any questions that come in after 12pm (PT) may be answered at a later time today if John has another moment to pop into this thread. We will be closing this thread at 3pm (PT).
Thank you to all who have taken the time to join us in this AMA. Thank you to those who have been respectful and fair in your participation today. We enjoy interacting with you all and we hope you enjoy this mode of interaction as well. Your kindness and support makes it easy for us to do the things we do, and allows us to offer up more of these experiences to you all!
TTFN, folks!