A great list with variant choices based on solid reasoning! I would add the following:
- Cerebella: Brain Freeze. Her SA allows to reduce incoming damage without any reliance on buffs + Water type. That means that Curse, Armor Break, or buff removal often used against Water nodes would not work against her. An additional perk of high HP (which you always want to have on your defender) also boosting her damage. IMO, she is the only Bella useful on a defence team right now (AF buffs, please?).
- Valentine: I would switch Graveyard Shift for Kill Joy. GS's damage is too low to consider her a fighting force, bleeds are situational. She is a good support, but you can keep her at Silver tier for that, so you don't have to invest a lot. KJ on a light Defence node, on the other hand, can make the life very difficult for an unprepared player, so boosting her up to Diamond is a very viable option that I have never regretted.
- Painwheel: Rusty. For a cheap and easily obtainable Bronze, she has incredible utility value. Sharing the buff conversion ability with Mean One, she overcomes her in terms of combo potential (especially considering Charge Attack reset) and survivability (Grudge MA). Also, bleeds are never bad. I consider her the second best "efficiency/price" fighter in the game, slightly below Doublicious.
Appreciate the feedback! Here's where I'm going with them:
Brain Freeze: Added. Not gonna lie, I totally forgot about her since without dupes being penalized I just assume everyone is using BS, and as far as I'm concerned she has no SA on defense since frost promotes low hit high damage anyhow, which answers her cleanly. Frost Armor is just too good and she's okay at using it. Only thing is Star Spangled is overall better for Frost, but she kinda falls where Risky Ginger does where she's not better enough to justify twice the cost of a similar gold or investing in her over another diamond.
Killjoy: As an offense support, I wouldn't say bleed is situational at all. Most the situations where the bleed is countered, ICU Val, BBath, DBand, Evergreen and SI, are almost all overcome by Curse. The only ones that aren't are SI and Evergreen. The former they're about even against (KJ has 17% higher Atk, but Graveyard gets a 20% attack boost for ele advantage) although neither are a good counter. Evergreen admittedly should be a clean advantage for KJ, but hopefully you're just getting your real carry out in that case. For light defense, I feel like even when I forget to counter her, the revives are easy to take out since Last Words is once per match. She doesn't get the second HP bar of LH or the BB punishing of AG. I'll think about adding her as a mention in LH's spot as a budget option for light defense. I will say on defense she probably wants ICU, trauma center feels like a lose less MA on defense, since doing 10% in one hit is usually a good sign you can take them out quickly anyways.
Rusty: I preface this by saying I
love my Rusty. Outside of being cheap, she's not a better option than really any of the other buff control options. 5% is extremely low, even with all the hits she does when fighting someone with RNG buff gaining they can usually get them back easily. Grudge can kinda help against some multihit BB3s, namely Robo, which is about the only fighter I use Rusty against anymore (Overclocked in particular is fun to fight against her) and if you get unlucky converting MnF's buffs. Grudge usually keeps her safe, but if they have piercing even on a filler move she kinda flops. On a budget list, she'd make it, but I'm probably not making a budget list anytime soon.
