Slay the Spire 2 developer Mega Crit has released a new major patch for the roguelike deckbuilder sequel that pulls an Act 3 boss out of the game.

In an update on Steam detailing patch v0.105.0, available now in the beta branch, Mega Crit confirmed it had removed Doormaker, replacing it with Aeonglass.

The significant change comes as Slay the Spire 2 wrestles with pretty much constant review bombing campaigns in reaction to balance changes, including to Doormaker. In late April, Mega Crit addressed Doormaker and the complaints about its various frustrating abilities, insisting it wanted to give players the chance to get to grips with it.

"We are currently monitoring the Doormaker and looking at a combination in-game feedback, social media posts, and metrics," Mega Crit said at the time. "We want to give players time to adjust a bit, otherwise we'll be balancing around kneejerk reactions. Currently, from looking at millions of runs, Doormaker's overall difficulty/winrate is in a good place (slightly weaker than the other Act 3 bosses both in kill rate and damage dealt). However, we do want to ensure that its mechanics aren't too abrasive against certain playstyles."

Clearly, Mega Crit decided the game would be better off without Doormaker all together. But it will be interesting to see how this change goes down with players. Recent reviews for the game on Steam are “mostly negative,” with all English reviews still on “very positive.” As IGN has reported, Steam users in China will often take to review-bombing because they’re unable to express their frustrations with a video game in other ways.

“Doormaker has been replaced with a brand new boss, Aeonglass!” Mega Crit said. “While Doormaker had interesting micro decisions in the fight, he was over the complexity threshold of what we want and had lingering issues. We decided that starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss.”

Meanwhile, Mega Crit confirmed it had switched to releasing a patch every two weeks rather than one to help the development team work on bigger changes.

“This may be a bit surprising as the first game patched weekly, but it was a lot of work so it really sucked,” the developer said. “Anyways, the two-week cadence should make it less hectic for us, allowing bigger changes and more time working and polishing stuff before it goes out. It also allows more time for beta players to absorb and give feedback on changes.”

Elsewhere, Slay the Spire 2 now has The Bestiary. “While it's still an outline of what it will end up being, we hope that seeing these monsters and their animations and data (not yet implemented) all listed in a separate screen will be fun,” the developer added.

Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access, and will no doubt change significantly between now and its full launch. This latest patch makes a number of balance changes — check out the patch notes below to find out more.

Slay the Spire 2 beta patch notes - v0.105.0:

CONTENT & BALANCE:

General:

• The Bestiary is now available in the Compendium

Silent:

• Nerfed Blade of Ink card: Inky enchantment damage decreased from +2 -> +1

Regent:

• Slightly reworked Sword Sage card:
  • Old: Sword Sage - Power - Cost 2(1) - Rare - "Sovereign Blade now hits an additional time."
  • New: Sword Sage - Power - Cost 2(1) - Rare - "Sovereign Blade gains Replay 1."
  • Among other things, this means that Sword Sage card now has synergy with Parry card
• Nerfed Bulwark card: Block decreased from 13(16) -> 12(15)
• Buffed Crescent Spear card: base damage increased from 6 -> 8
• Nerfed Patter card: Block gain decreased from 9(11) -> 8(10)
• Buffed Royalties card: Gold Gain from 30(35) -> 30(40)

Defect:

• Buffed Infused Core relic: now also gains "Lighting Orbs deal 1 additional damage."
• Buffed Hyperbeam: damage increased from 26(34) -> 28(36)
• Buffed Shatter card: now Evokes all of your Orbs twice
• Buffed Tesla Coil+ card: damage decreased from 6 -> 4, but Lightning Triggers increased from once -> twice
• Buffed Uproar card: damage increased from 5(7) -> 6(8)

Colorless Cards:

• Buffed Gold Axe card: in multiplayer, now deals damage equal to the number of cards played by ALL players, not just cards played by its owner

Enemies:

• Reworked Doormaker to a new boss, Aeonglass
• Changed Fossil Stalker: in multiplayer, now gains a set amount of Strength if it hits any player, instead of gaining Strength for each player hit
• Changed Haunted Ship: now applies 3 Weak on Turn 1 instead of applying Weak when it attacks
• Buffed Soul Fysh: Scream move damage increased from 11(12) -> 13(15)

Ancients:

• Reworked Tezcatara's Pumpkin Candle relic
  • Old: "Gain 1 Energy at the start of each turn. Extinguishes at the start of Act 3."
  • New: "Gain 1 Energy at the start of each turn. Extinguishes after 5 combats. Can be Kindled at rest sites."
• Added new Neow relics:
  • Kaleidoscope (temp name) - "Upon pickup, gain 2 card rewards with cards from other characters."
  • Fishing Rod - "Every 3 normal combats, Upgrade a random card in your Deck."
  • Silken Tress - "Enchant all cards in the first card reward with Glam."
• Moved Tezcatara's Seal of Gold relic to option 3 so that it is in the same pool as Pumpkin Candle

Events:

• Something special now happens if you have multiple Lantern Key cards (doesn't apply to multiplayer)

ART:

• Added art for Friendship Epoch
• Added new power art for Smoggy
• Added multi-hit animation for Corpse Slug
• Added unstun animation for Rock Bowlbug
• Tweaked Vantom explosion to look right on shrunken Vantom
• Added a phobia mode alternate portrait for the Zen Weaver event

USER INTERFACE & EXPERIENCE:

• Limited the total number of cards rendered when playing the Clone animation at a rest site to 15
• Added translation issue dropdown option to the in-game feedback form
• Outline darkness of continue button now matches the next dialogue arrow
• Adjusted Gremlin Mercenary combat enemy hitboxes, speech bubble, and intent positions
• Skulking Colony's health bar now changes color to indicate that it cannot take any more damage this turn
• When hovering over stale dialogues at Ancients, all of the dialogues will become opaque instead of just the one currently being hovered over
• Added a more informative error popup for Steam BadCert error in multiplayer
• If you move a current_run.save with a modded character in it back to unmodded, you get an error instead of a black screen

WRITING:

• Reworded Axebot death message to reflect that there is only 1 of them now
• Added more translated text for various languages
• Fixed translation errors in:
  • German
  • Latin American Spanish
  • Castilian Spanish
  • French
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Polish
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Thai
  • Turkish

AUDIO:

• Added Soul Fysh background music
• Added Kaiser Crab background music
• Added Kaiser Crab SFX
• Added hyper beam SFX

BUG FIXES:

General:

• Fixed save files being lost or corrupted after a PC crash, blue screen, or power outage
• Fixed black screen softlock when Steam would disconnect during room transitions
• Fixed the Sealed Deck modifier not being affected by the multi-character card modifiers
• Night Terrors modifier can no longer kill you
• The Perfect badge is no longer awarded if you abandon run at a boss
• Fixed being unable to navigate off of top bar in shop room
• Fixed being unable to controller navigate through rest site options when player has 2 rows of relics
• Fixed controller navigation in shop if you buy out all relics and colorless cards
• The game no longer rapidly switches between "Controller Detected" and "Mouse Detected" when playing with a controller
• Fixed being able to start a single player run via controller while the Ascension tutorial was open
• Fixed potion hovertip not appearing if you press "b" in the potion popup screen
• Fixed errors in input settings for new keybindings added after saving
• Fixed rare problem where feedback screen is stuck open on game launch
• Fixed rare softlock when playing Compact with status cards in hand
• Fixed softlock after the popup about shuffling in the tutorial
• Fixed Steam cloud sync errors when syncing many run history files
• Fixed duplicate files appearing in run history after Steam cloud sync
• Restored the default rendering backend to D3D12 for Intel 620 GPUs
• Fixed audio staying muted after pressing volume keys or alt-tabbing on Linux
• Fixed crash on Linux when ICU libraries are unavailable

Ironclad:

• To avoid softlocking after setting up an infinite loop (i.e. Hellraiser + 2 Pommel Strike cards), Hellraiser will only play 9 cards per turn if all enemies have infinite HP
  • Hellraiser card now properly plays cards containing "Strike" against enemies with infinite HP

Silent:

• Fixed Fan of Knives card VFX not playing

Regent:

• Fixed not being able to select cards with controller when you choose all the cards in your hand via GUARDS!!! card

Necrobinder:

• Fixed Fetch card not glowing gold if it is drawn by Gambling Chip relic
• Fixed Enfeebling Touch power causing Ceremonial Beast to gain Strength after you stun it

Colorless Cards:

• Fixed VFX sometimes failing to appear during Rolling Boulder power effect

Potions & Relics:

• Players are now disallowed from throwing the Foul Potion if the Merchant inventory is open
• Using Foul Potion on the Merchant no longer freezes the game on controller
• Bookmark relic is now able to properly apply its cost-reduction effect to a card that has been retained by a "Retain your Hand" effect like Equilibrium card
• Fixed Beetle Juice potion causing Vantom's tail to become visibly cut off
• If the player has The Boot relic and deals Skulking Colony 1-4 damage, they now properly take 5 damage

Ancients:

• Fixed issue where the top of the next dialogue bubble was slightly visible before it would animate in at Ancients
• Fixed being able to navigate back to Neow's blessing options while looking at the Card Library
• Fixed card inspection button blocking "accept" hotkey when looking at the Pandora's Box relic card view screen
• Fixed issue where playing Wish card via controller would immediately select a card in the grid on the same button press

Enemies:

• Fixed Kaiser Crab appearing if you load into an already completed boss room
• Recentered Axebot in fight so it looks like there is supposed to be only one of them
• Fixed a softlock that occurred if the player set up an infinite against Skulking Colony

Multiplayer:

• Fixed player names with brackets (e.g. clan tags like ) causing errors in multiplayer
• Fixed state divergence related to Mad Science, Juggling, and mixed combat speeds
• Fixed Strangle power proccing off of other player's card plays
• Fixed occasional black screen when loading into a saved multiplayer combat
• Fixed occasional state divergence caused by Stampede + Headbutt cards
• Other players' HP bars no longer go offscreen when resizing the window while in settings
• Disallow War Historian Repy duplicate Lantern Key card bonus if you are in multiplayer

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.