Guillotine's Update is a Miss (here's why)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,883 Guardian
I've been contemplating Guillotine's update since the info was released, and my initial reaction was not favorable. But I thought I would think about it further, particularly because I heard so much positive buzz about it after the CCP videos of it came out. However, the longer I think about it, the more I believe my first instincts were correct, and the update does not do the right things to Guillotine in my opinion to make her a more valuable champion within the current framework of how MCOC works in the present day. To put it bluntly, as someone who voted for and campaigned for Guillotine, I consider the update to be a design failure.
First things first: does the update preserve Guillotine's core value while improving the champ? In my opinion, no it does not. The way I would summarize Guillotine 1.0 is: she's a moderately sustainable champion with heal reversal and some bleed. In other words, she can heal damage at a mediocre but not worthless level, she can reverse opponent healing, and she can land bleed debuffs. Has this core value been maintained or enhanced? In terms of heal reversal, yes. In terms of bleed, that's even better now. But in terms of sustainability, no it hasn't. G1.0 at max sig had a life steal that was essentially 5.5% of damage dealt (it was a 10% chance per strike to steal 55% of damage). G2.0 now has an automatic life steal that heals 2% of all damage the opponent takes, regardless of source.
The mechanics can make direct comparisons confusing. I outlined the calculations here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1930113/#Comment_1930113. Bottom line: if G2.0 gets back 2% of the damage dealt, then G1.0 gets 5.5% of damage dealt from attacks, which means for G2.0 to outperform G1.0, OG Guillotine would have to deliver about one third of all damage through attacks, and two thirds of all damage through bleeds. In actual fact, the ratio is reversed: G1.0 delivers about two thirds of her damage through direct strikes, and one third through bleeds. This makes G1.0's healing about twice as strong per fight as G2.0. When it comes to sustainability, healing rate (which some players are looking at) is not the critical number, it is healing per fight that matters for sustainability.
Of all of Guillotine's original utility, heal reversal and sustainability were the two most valuable. And one of them, in my opinion, was *strongly* nerfed. As a result, in my opinion Guillotine's core original value was not preserved by the update.
Second: does G2.0 gain significant utility, which I'm defining to be gaining new capabilities that increase the number of situations in which she would be useful. And within the context of the above, does she gain enough to compensate for the fact that she lost one of them? In my opinion, once again, no.
Guillotine does gain a lot of damage, particular a lot of bleed damage. It is possible her damage was more than doubled. Pure damage can be a kind of utility to a certain extent, but I don't think Guillotine's damage rises to the point where it becomes so exceptional it becomes a subjective utility on its own. It does become useful enough that if Guillotine is an early pull for a new player, she becomes more useful when no other options are available. Her damage is no longer lacking to the point of being a handicap. But beyond that, what did the update give her?
The first place to look is to consider what the core competency of Mystic champions is: countering buff heavy champions. Most *modern* Mystic champions have some means to counter buffs. Nullify, Stagger, Neutralize, Buff AAR, Fate Seal, something. Guillotine gains none of these tools. She does gain a higher chance to crit when facing an opponent with buffs. But that's not a buff countering ability, that's just more damage. When a champion has buffs that make them dangerous, Guillotine has no way to remove, prevent, or otherwise mitigate those buffs. The fact that Guillotine 1.0 did not have such abilities is a historical accident. The fact that Guillotine 2.0 wasn't given any such abilities is a Class Crime.
G2.0 does gain some new mechanics, in particular Pain Link. But once again, that's just more damage, and it is basically a weaker kind of damage reflection. Instead of reflecting damage, it just *shares* damage. If you take damage, so does your opponent. Which would be great if you could heal all that damage back, but Guillotine simply doesn't have that kind of healing (to be fair, neither G1.0 nor G2.0 have that level of healing).
G2.0 was given more bleed, so any situation in which you need a lot of bleed debuffs G2.0 will be better than G1.0. And G2.0 has (when awakened) the ability to convert bleed debuffs to degen for bleed immune opponents, which means her damage won't be totally nerfed against bleed immune champions. But while she retains her Spectre healing reversal on SP2, she doesn't gain any other such utility or situational strengths.
In my opinion, G2.0 does not gain materially significant additional utility, which is essential for any champion update to be considered a positive change. And the fact that she doesn't gain any of the most obvious ones for Mystics is completely inexplicable. The devs were basically handed the answers to the test and decided to guess wildly anyway.
Finally, judged in terms of the current developer content design meta, does Guillotine have significantly better usability or situational value? In my opinion, not enough. G2.0 does have a better situational Spectre, because she can gain and keep souls better. You won't have the "I'm out of souls so nothing works anymore" problem that G1.0 had. And if you ever find yourself on a Mystic path that requires stacking a lot of Bleed debuffs and you don't have Claire, okay. But in terms of the kinds of things we face now, or will ever likely face, G2.0 is only marginally better than G1.0, and mostly by fixing the soul problem with Spectre. It makes a G1.0 use case better, but G2.0 doesn't really add any new ones. G2.0 doesn't have the basic core competency players should expect from any Mystic champion designed after 2018. It doesn't have a lot of counter-class utility besides that. G2.0 fixes one G1.0 ability, breaks another G1.0 ability, and doesn't add any more dimensions to the champion.
More damage is always welcome. But more damage only matters if I'm actually *bringing* the champion in the first place, and in 2021 I bring champions into content that specifically address or counter the challenges in the content. Over time, most updated champions have been given specific tools to make them better counters to content. Colossus is not just tankier with more damage. His immunities, his armor buffs, his power mechanics all make him useful in many challenging situations. The better updates make champions not just better on paper, but more attractive to use in content. In my opinion, not only is G2.0 not more attractive to use in content, but unless you're a new player with a very tiny roster G2.0 is actually less attractive to use in general.
And for me, that makes the update a failure.
How would I fix it? I'd do three things:
1. Make G2.0's passive healing scale with sig level, so that at max sig G2.0 heals at least as much, if not more, than G1.0.
Guillotine's sustainability was always mediocre in the first place. There's lots of room to improve this utility, and no reason to nerf it.
2. Add a chance to stagger opponent whenever gaining a Soul
Conceptually, gaining a soul steals life force from the opponent. Practically, this makes Guillotine look less like a Skill champ who snuck into the Mystic club when the bouncer wasn't looking.
3. Add something new
Even if you restore or buff Guillotine's heal, and even if you add a stagger or nullify mechanic, that just makes Guiilotine not lag too far behind other Mystics. She does have a lot of bleed damage now, no question, and being able to obliterate your opponents with a ton of high damage debuffs is no joke (cf: BWDO). But I think Guilly needs one more thing. I haven't really mentioned SP3, because I don't really want to get too deep in the weeds there, but I think taking inspiration from G2099 we could add some extra oomph to G2.0 by adding some extra carry forward "if you kill with SP3" ability. Maybe when you use SP3 each soul is consumed one at a time to continue extending the duration of the degen, but if the opponent dies during the degen then G2.0 starts the next fight with all remaining souls she had when the opponent was knocked out. That would give her some extra momentum players could try to shoot for, and it would be evocative of G2099's mechanics.
If I had the time, I would try for something even more novel. But I suspect that with the update already announced, that kind of time doesn't exist, unfortunately.
If I had to guess, I would guess that Kabam got tunnel visioned on giving Guillotine interesting mechanics and lost the forest for the trees. Pain Link is an interesting mechanic. Bleed Curse is an interesting mechanic. But neither is an interesting ability. Pain Link is interesting, but I don't want it. Bleed Curse is interesting, but I don't need it. Life Siphon is interesting, but I don't want to give up half my healing for a more interesting heal. I'll take the boring version, thanks.
Interesting mechanics only matter if they translate into more useful champions. These don't. If you want to make Pain Link interesting, then for every Soul Guillotine has the damage she takes while Pain Link is up decreases by 5% and the damage the opponent shares increases by 5%, up to a maximum of 50%. Now that's an interesting mechanic that powers an interesting ability. If you want to make Life Siphon interesting, increase the strength of Life Siphon every time Guilly gains a Soul for a short window of time, so if the player times their damage to those windows they can get more healing. Give the player some agency to make the abilities work better with more skillful play.
First things first: does the update preserve Guillotine's core value while improving the champ? In my opinion, no it does not. The way I would summarize Guillotine 1.0 is: she's a moderately sustainable champion with heal reversal and some bleed. In other words, she can heal damage at a mediocre but not worthless level, she can reverse opponent healing, and she can land bleed debuffs. Has this core value been maintained or enhanced? In terms of heal reversal, yes. In terms of bleed, that's even better now. But in terms of sustainability, no it hasn't. G1.0 at max sig had a life steal that was essentially 5.5% of damage dealt (it was a 10% chance per strike to steal 55% of damage). G2.0 now has an automatic life steal that heals 2% of all damage the opponent takes, regardless of source.
The mechanics can make direct comparisons confusing. I outlined the calculations here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1930113/#Comment_1930113. Bottom line: if G2.0 gets back 2% of the damage dealt, then G1.0 gets 5.5% of damage dealt from attacks, which means for G2.0 to outperform G1.0, OG Guillotine would have to deliver about one third of all damage through attacks, and two thirds of all damage through bleeds. In actual fact, the ratio is reversed: G1.0 delivers about two thirds of her damage through direct strikes, and one third through bleeds. This makes G1.0's healing about twice as strong per fight as G2.0. When it comes to sustainability, healing rate (which some players are looking at) is not the critical number, it is healing per fight that matters for sustainability.
Of all of Guillotine's original utility, heal reversal and sustainability were the two most valuable. And one of them, in my opinion, was *strongly* nerfed. As a result, in my opinion Guillotine's core original value was not preserved by the update.
Second: does G2.0 gain significant utility, which I'm defining to be gaining new capabilities that increase the number of situations in which she would be useful. And within the context of the above, does she gain enough to compensate for the fact that she lost one of them? In my opinion, once again, no.
Guillotine does gain a lot of damage, particular a lot of bleed damage. It is possible her damage was more than doubled. Pure damage can be a kind of utility to a certain extent, but I don't think Guillotine's damage rises to the point where it becomes so exceptional it becomes a subjective utility on its own. It does become useful enough that if Guillotine is an early pull for a new player, she becomes more useful when no other options are available. Her damage is no longer lacking to the point of being a handicap. But beyond that, what did the update give her?
The first place to look is to consider what the core competency of Mystic champions is: countering buff heavy champions. Most *modern* Mystic champions have some means to counter buffs. Nullify, Stagger, Neutralize, Buff AAR, Fate Seal, something. Guillotine gains none of these tools. She does gain a higher chance to crit when facing an opponent with buffs. But that's not a buff countering ability, that's just more damage. When a champion has buffs that make them dangerous, Guillotine has no way to remove, prevent, or otherwise mitigate those buffs. The fact that Guillotine 1.0 did not have such abilities is a historical accident. The fact that Guillotine 2.0 wasn't given any such abilities is a Class Crime.
G2.0 does gain some new mechanics, in particular Pain Link. But once again, that's just more damage, and it is basically a weaker kind of damage reflection. Instead of reflecting damage, it just *shares* damage. If you take damage, so does your opponent. Which would be great if you could heal all that damage back, but Guillotine simply doesn't have that kind of healing (to be fair, neither G1.0 nor G2.0 have that level of healing).
G2.0 was given more bleed, so any situation in which you need a lot of bleed debuffs G2.0 will be better than G1.0. And G2.0 has (when awakened) the ability to convert bleed debuffs to degen for bleed immune opponents, which means her damage won't be totally nerfed against bleed immune champions. But while she retains her Spectre healing reversal on SP2, she doesn't gain any other such utility or situational strengths.
In my opinion, G2.0 does not gain materially significant additional utility, which is essential for any champion update to be considered a positive change. And the fact that she doesn't gain any of the most obvious ones for Mystics is completely inexplicable. The devs were basically handed the answers to the test and decided to guess wildly anyway.
Finally, judged in terms of the current developer content design meta, does Guillotine have significantly better usability or situational value? In my opinion, not enough. G2.0 does have a better situational Spectre, because she can gain and keep souls better. You won't have the "I'm out of souls so nothing works anymore" problem that G1.0 had. And if you ever find yourself on a Mystic path that requires stacking a lot of Bleed debuffs and you don't have Claire, okay. But in terms of the kinds of things we face now, or will ever likely face, G2.0 is only marginally better than G1.0, and mostly by fixing the soul problem with Spectre. It makes a G1.0 use case better, but G2.0 doesn't really add any new ones. G2.0 doesn't have the basic core competency players should expect from any Mystic champion designed after 2018. It doesn't have a lot of counter-class utility besides that. G2.0 fixes one G1.0 ability, breaks another G1.0 ability, and doesn't add any more dimensions to the champion.
More damage is always welcome. But more damage only matters if I'm actually *bringing* the champion in the first place, and in 2021 I bring champions into content that specifically address or counter the challenges in the content. Over time, most updated champions have been given specific tools to make them better counters to content. Colossus is not just tankier with more damage. His immunities, his armor buffs, his power mechanics all make him useful in many challenging situations. The better updates make champions not just better on paper, but more attractive to use in content. In my opinion, not only is G2.0 not more attractive to use in content, but unless you're a new player with a very tiny roster G2.0 is actually less attractive to use in general.
And for me, that makes the update a failure.
How would I fix it? I'd do three things:
1. Make G2.0's passive healing scale with sig level, so that at max sig G2.0 heals at least as much, if not more, than G1.0.
Guillotine's sustainability was always mediocre in the first place. There's lots of room to improve this utility, and no reason to nerf it.
2. Add a chance to stagger opponent whenever gaining a Soul
Conceptually, gaining a soul steals life force from the opponent. Practically, this makes Guillotine look less like a Skill champ who snuck into the Mystic club when the bouncer wasn't looking.
3. Add something new
Even if you restore or buff Guillotine's heal, and even if you add a stagger or nullify mechanic, that just makes Guiilotine not lag too far behind other Mystics. She does have a lot of bleed damage now, no question, and being able to obliterate your opponents with a ton of high damage debuffs is no joke (cf: BWDO). But I think Guilly needs one more thing. I haven't really mentioned SP3, because I don't really want to get too deep in the weeds there, but I think taking inspiration from G2099 we could add some extra oomph to G2.0 by adding some extra carry forward "if you kill with SP3" ability. Maybe when you use SP3 each soul is consumed one at a time to continue extending the duration of the degen, but if the opponent dies during the degen then G2.0 starts the next fight with all remaining souls she had when the opponent was knocked out. That would give her some extra momentum players could try to shoot for, and it would be evocative of G2099's mechanics.
If I had the time, I would try for something even more novel. But I suspect that with the update already announced, that kind of time doesn't exist, unfortunately.
If I had to guess, I would guess that Kabam got tunnel visioned on giving Guillotine interesting mechanics and lost the forest for the trees. Pain Link is an interesting mechanic. Bleed Curse is an interesting mechanic. But neither is an interesting ability. Pain Link is interesting, but I don't want it. Bleed Curse is interesting, but I don't need it. Life Siphon is interesting, but I don't want to give up half my healing for a more interesting heal. I'll take the boring version, thanks.
Interesting mechanics only matter if they translate into more useful champions. These don't. If you want to make Pain Link interesting, then for every Soul Guillotine has the damage she takes while Pain Link is up decreases by 5% and the damage the opponent shares increases by 5%, up to a maximum of 50%. Now that's an interesting mechanic that powers an interesting ability. If you want to make Life Siphon interesting, increase the strength of Life Siphon every time Guilly gains a Soul for a short window of time, so if the player times their damage to those windows they can get more healing. Give the player some agency to make the abilities work better with more skillful play.
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Comments
"Avec Plaisir"
Once per Fight, Guillotine converts all Bleeds stacked into X."
Haven't decided what X is yet.
Anyway, if DNA is saying it’s bad, then it’s bad. Hopefully kabam will take another look at her.
She needs some identity, not just a boost in damage.
Pre buff - healer, heal reversal
Post buff - healer in a different way, longer heal reversal
Who is this buff really going to cater to? As DNA said, people pulling her as their first 4*, 5* or 6*. Well as a community choice champion, you'd kind of hope the champion would cater to, y'know, the community. How many people in the community who participated and cared about which champion would get buffed doesn't have 5 6* champions, let alone not even their first?
I was honestly hoping for way more, because I knew they would have to overhaul the Souls mechanic and I thought that allowed for a lot of creative latitude. I still believe that, but Kabam just didn't take the opportunity.
Well... Looks like I won't be ranking her up..
Next month's both buffs Thor and guilly, they both looks bad!
Feeling like they forgot they had two champions to change this month. And than one of them remembered and told everyone, ‘guys we have a few days left to come up with changes and also to program them into the game’..
Looks exactly like school projects I had and which I only started to work on the day before the deadline. Made a bigger effort to show I did something than the real work itself.
As basic as Juggernaut's kit is, he at least has Stagger.
Jane Foster has Stagger.
Sasquatch has Stagger and a weird situational Power Drain.
Iron Fist has a Nullify.
About the only "less" Mystic is Unstoppable Colossus, but I'm not sure I can count him.
If Bleed Curse increased duration/potency/likelihood of normal bleeds, that'd be good. Adding bleeds to 1 or 2 Specials isn't really particularly useful.
If Pain Link actually had some defensive value, and reduced your damage, that'd be good.
But ultimately: Guilly has no useful Mystic abilities. Nullify, Power Control, Power Gain... Core utilities that she has no access to.
How game-breaking would this be? -
Unshackled: Guilly has a 100% chance to Nullify a buff on each hit, at a cost of 1 soul charge.
Just took something out of the freezer and warmed it up in the microwave.. Gordon Ramsey would lose his sh*t over this. Very disappointing
I agree on all points. My alt has an r5 sig200 and while i found her enjoyable, i used her only because she paired well with MS and g99. I was hoping for a real reason to prefer her over my other mystics. More damage? That isnt it. Currently, after the "buff" she does nothing different that would make me prefer her over any other mystic.
This buff was a total failure. I could care less about damage, she has just become a generic hit hit hit champion now.
Wholeheartedly agree with the three principles you have listed. I would say that there can be an exception to the class ability one in the rare circumstance that they have some other, unique, practical piece of utility (for example, Hercules doesn’t have the armor break that is so prevalent in Cosmic champions, but has plenty of other unique utility to compensate for that).
I would also add that the rotation needs to be practical. Gamora actually has a fair bit of utility in her kit, but it’s locked behind her sp3. Original Recipe Diablo could do some genuinely cool stuff, but like only once per quest. Odin's Odinsleep mechanic on release that just made him worthless for doing two fights in a row. A lack of practicality dooms a champion, no matter how great their potential.
And finally, just how fun they are to play. I mentioned in conversation about the Thor buff that if his playstyle is satisfying to execute, that can be enough to justify a rank up. It’s why I think BWDO is a popular character, she’s just extremely fun to play and firing off that sp2 to watch the opponent’s health bar fall off by chunks is great.
Those are the two ideals I would add to your list when considering a buff.