In the past TeamCity allowed us to spoof the branch we ran a build configuration on. We were going to utilise this with each differential revision having its own TeamCity branch. However in a recent change (post 2018.2.2) branches specified in builds must have a corresponding VCS branch otherwise the build is marked as failed. We therefore don't need a branch name within the teamcity plugin.
We are still passing through the REVISION_BUILD to allow us to display the snapshot within TeamCity.