🧪 Early information on the March 2023 HOTM -- Gilligan [Part of The Beta Beat V55]

because he is slow

because the rest of his special is nothing interesting either

he CAN POTENTIALLY charge faster, it´s not a guarantee. You have very little control over enemy buffs other than the ability to dispel them, which is usually the goal (which in turn negates the passive)

Compare this hero to an actually strong hit 3 hotm: Grace

300% damage vs 285% this is the one and only adtvantage this guy has lol, 15% damage. Now what is Grace better at:

  1. She is actually fast not slow (with a possiblitly to maybe be a bit faster than slow), btw Grace has a passive that boosts her mana as well :slight_smile: (although a more narrow condition). But just to mention: if her passive triggers and she has mana node and maxed 20% troop she charges in 6 tiles.
  2. She gives skill defdown, while this one only does def up.
  3. Taunt immunity against bypass def buffs (both are niche)
  4. elemental link preventing fiends vs. does nothing at all?

Does he come with an island?

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It´s called Monster Island, but yes :smiley:

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We have professor lidenbrok, captain of diamonds… Elena is obviously ginger, just need to establish the old rich peeps and the other hot girl…

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Gillian is a conditional heroes same as Finley, with conditional passive, he can be very fast and his skill although defensively, but his damage is meta. I predict Gillian will be popular in someway but his speed has limited him in attack team, where you need carefully team him with Some tactics.

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Slow hero gets charged in 12 tiles. He gets 0.4 mana tile for each buff.

  • Give him a lvl 11 mana troops (9% mana boost) and add the 2% mana talent, then he will get charged in 12/111% = 10.81 tiles. So he needs 5 buffs to get charged in 9 tiles.

  • Give him a lvl 29 mana troops (15% mana boost) and add the 2% mana talent, then he will get charged in 12/117% = 10.26 tiles. So he needs 4 buffs to get charged in 9 tiles (which is very awkward as I cannot think of a lot of heroes who gives 4 buffs)

  • Give him a lvl 23 magic troops (17% mana boost) and add the 2% mana talent, he will get charged in 12/119% = 10.08 tiles. So he needs 3 buffs to get charged in 9 titles.

Actually I think he is reasonably good for offense especially if you have a high level magic/styx troop. Plenty of buff teams out there.

PS: not for me though. Holy is my strongest color tgt with Ice. If he is Nature or Dark, I may actually level him up if I get him.

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Nice math… I presume it to be right… I don’t really feel like putting pencil to paper until I have the guy in hand. Having said that… I have a lvl 29 mana green… and I Think I have a styx… and a ton of feeders… but the process of leveling a hero to 27 (for the 20% styx mana bonus) is just emotionally exhausting… especially since I am in the middle of doing my ice styx troop…

Your maths is nice (I guess, didn´t check), but largely irrelevant. I think you misread the passive!

It doesn´t matter how many buffs he has at all, the only thing that matters is how many buffs THE ENEMY has!

You cannot influence the number of buffs on the enemy besides giving them a spirit link and dispelling them.

The buff I was referring to is indeed buff on enemy, not buff on this hero.

No misread but I prob did not write clearly so there is some misunderstanding.

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If building def team - yes, you’re right.
But this hero is very situational, and mainly for attack. And you can easily predict if the enemy team will have a lot of buffs or not and in some way control which enemy heroes are charged.
In buff booster war he will be probably used quite often.

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I have just noticed that his passive description says " at the start of each turn".
So does it mean that Gilligan doesn’t get small amount of mana just once when buffs are applied on enemies, but every single turn as long as those buffs last?
It sounds even better. Maybe he’s not as bad as people say or he is so bad, but just on paper he looks good.

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I think it could be how the mana generates like for ludwig

Even IF (and that´s a big if!) the best case scenario hits EVERY time, he´s still not a good hero! He goes from useless to mediocre in the BEST case. If if his speed was printed as average speed he wasn´t a good hero, he would be merely acceptable.
Nobody has ever accused Grace as being OP, she´s simply a very good hotm from last year. Just compare the 2!
Even if he was printed as average speed and still having his buff passive on top of that he´d still be worse than Grace!!!
This guy is so far below where he should be, not even jumping through all the hoops available will make him anywhere interesting!

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I agree. As are Iris or R&N.
This hero is not so universally useful, but - after the buff - also not completely useless. He is a very niche hero, to be used as counter to heroes with undispellable buffs (CoK family, cMT, there are still new ones coming). We don’t have many other easily accessible heroes for this situation (Lepiota is harder to get and Griffin is only a 4*, we had Zagrog as HOTM last year, who is comparable to this one).

Not quite sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying he is good, because he has “bypass defensive buffs”?

I find that a tiny bonus yes, but nothing that influences the quality of a hero greatly. It would be the same as saying Alucard is a great hero because he has “bypass defensive buffs”.

The comparison with Zagrog is fair. Let´s look at it:
Zagrog is a 1 year old hotm, that is somewhere in the middleclass of hotm in his year. So not useless, not good, but servicable.
Let´s compare the 2:
Damage: Similar, Zagrog has higher damage, with minor nearby, while this one has lower, but even distribution.
Chance to bypass: Z 100%, G: 60% (lol!)
Defense buff: Z (through element link) 10%, G 35% to 3

So if we put this all together we have a fair matchup with similar skills although the bypass chance seems to make Zagrog the better hero.

Now come the kicker! Z is average speed with the chance to become faster (20% mana on bypass), while G is slow with the chance to become faster.

So a hero that was mediocre 1 year ago is an entire speed class better than this hero here! With absolutely NOTHING speaking for the newer hero in return!
or to put it in other words improving this hero by an entire speed class would make him equal to a mediocre hero from last year! That is ridiculously bad!!! And yes completely useless! There are yellow 4star heroes out there that are FAR more impactful than this piece of junk!

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well done Zynga ! Another mediocre hero ! My other holy forever lvl 1 Eset will have company now !

Situationally, he maybe able to hold out against the new hero Luna. Luna’s waterpipe cutting abilities are from buffs. So even if she manages to cut mana from Gilligan, it is useless because next turn he gains it all back. And then when he fires the next turn, the DU is going to make her 120% damage even more useless.
This is the only hero I can think of that Gilligan can hard counter. Very good passive, it’s really a shame the skill is mediocre at best.
He is what I think is SG’s new gen gravemaker. I joined after gravemaker but I have heard everyone’s saying how much gravemaker sucked back in beta and look at what he became when he was released. He went very strong until he got power crept eventually

I agree that his passive is interesting! Sure is the best (or only interesting) thing about him.
I don´t see him as a solution to Luna though. I understand why on paper one could think so, but Luna is one of those unicorns we hear about running around top level play. In that world the rest of the defense is going to be Annes and Panthers and Joves. Noone living in that part of the world is touching an average speed hitter these days, because they are too slow. A slow hero would have to consider himself lucky if he got half charged before he died lol. I bet half of those people don´t even look at hotm anymore at all, they throw them in for feeding Luna, well since it´s SE month they may keep 20 of them for a free 20 pick… Not sure they waste the time reading the text on a hotm before they do that…well maybe for a good laugh, if they have a sense of humor…
Anyway a slow hero is so far out there even in his wildest dreams he won´t get picked.
The easy solution to the Luna problem for people like that is Toxi, she´ll mana buff all your heroes, not just 1 and she does it at fast speed, while doing other super strong things. top level players already have multiple Toxi´s. If Luna becomes the meta they´ll max another Toxi or 2.
I in my world never saw a waterpipe in war (on either side) and I doubt I´ll see a Luna much more often, so I´m good :smiley:

Of course there is a lot of range in between my world and the top end, but I don´t see anyone who has to face top level defs regularly benefiting from a hero like this.

The only people I see “benefiting” from such a hero would play in a world far below me, where this is the only 5 star hero they have or maybe they have the choice between this one and Justice which they got from TC20. And also they don´t spend any money at all, so they don´t have 4star heroes better than Hu Tao either. So in such a world it would make sense to max him.

This is only half truth. Zagrog can be faster - but only by 20% and only after the first shot.
Gilligan speed increase is passive (so works also before the first shot) and not limited - he can possibly charge himsef without a single match of tiles. So I would say that effectively Gilligan is faster of the two.
What I am trying to say is, that while not being an overall good hero, he still is a situational usable hero, not a complete trash, as some people want to see him.

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is it possible? Yes!
How often is it going to actually happen? Well that´s the big question. Because Zagrog is an entire speed class faster! So under any normal circumstances he will charge much faster. Gilligan needs everything to go right just to get up to where Zagrog is from the start. And then he needs even better luck to get faster than that! Maybe 1 in 20 hits he goes off faster. 19 times Zagrog will be at least same speed or better.

And even when that 1 in 20 chance hits you still only have beaten a mediocre 1 year old hero by a little bit! That is the ridiculous part! if he at least was strong 1 in 20 times, we could talk about a use case for the entertainment value.

I am certainly one of those some people! He is utter trash! Situationally he becomes mediocre, not good! And no I don´t want to see him that way, I want to see him buffed another 3 times to finally make him a mediocre hero!!!

The only way I see us agreeing on this topic would be if situationally usable for you means utter trash most of the time and mediocre in very few cases after you jumped through 17 hoops for no good reason, when you could have used a hero that is mediocre all the time instead.