The April 24 Slay the Spire 2 patch brings a new set of changes to the beta branch, with adjustments to the baseline difficulty, staying in "wait and see" mode with regards to Doormaker and its community feedback, with some small balance changes (including a Neow's Fury buff) and a handful of card adjustments. Here's what just got loaded into the pipeline.
Check out our previous beta patch note rundowns below to trace the development changes in full:
Slay the Spire 2 v0.104.0 Main Branch Patch Notes – Key Insights
General Balance
- Terminal run modifier can no longer bring a player below 1 HP
Event Changes
- Slippery Bridge will no longer offer to remove the same card multiple times (unless it has already offered to remove all other cards in your deck at least once)
Card Changes
The Silent
If you play Nightmare and select a card with an Affliction on it, that Affliction is now removed from the copies added to your hand the following turn.
The Regent
This means Parry's Block is displayed on the Sovereign Blade card and is now also affected by powers like Dexterity and Frail.
Tyranny now triggers before Bombardment.
Reflect's Block is decreased by 1.
Ancients Changes
- Buffed Neow's
Booming Conch: in addition to drawing extra cards, it now also gains 1 Energy at the start of Elite combats. - Buffed Neow's Fury: instead of selecting randomly now allows you to choose which 2 cards will be put into your Hand from your Discard Pile (you may also now choose fewer than 2 cards if you want).
- Buffed Tezcatara's
Nutritious Soup: in addition to making your Strikes cost 0 and giving them Eternal, now makes all your Strikes deal 3 additional damage.
Enemy and Boss Changes
- Axebots combat now only has a single, more challenging Axebot
- Ruby Raider Assassin's damage decreased from 11(12) -> 10(11)
- Scrolls of Biting have slightly less HP at low Ascension but slightly higher HP at high Ascension
- Changed from 31(32)-38(39) -> 30(33)-37(39)
- Owl Magistrate has slightly less HP at low Ascension, but slightly higher HP at high Ascension
- Changed from 234(243) -> 231(247)
- Slimed Berserker has slightly less HP at low Ascension, but slightly higher HP at high Ascension
- Changed from 266(276) -> 261(281)
- Vantom nerfed at lower Ascensions:
- Dismember move damage decreased from 27(30) -> 26(30)
- Slippery goes from 9 -> 8(9)
- Waterfall Giant nerfed: now heals less at lower Ascension
- HP healed changed from 15 -> 10(15)
- Notably, no changes to Doormaker in patch v.0.104.0
- The devs explained, "We are currently monitoring the Doormaker and looking at a combination in-game feedback, social media posts, and metrics. 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."
Art, UI, and Quality-of-Life Improvements
The following cards received portrait art in the v0.104.0 patch:
Additional animation and art updates:
- Neow's Fury artwork is now centered
- Added Vakuu background art and VFX
- Added Skulking Colony animations
- Updated art Tunneler, Entomancer, and Mawler
- Updated animation for the following enemies:
- Vantom
- Ceremonial Beast
- Entomancer
New badges added:
- Damage Leader - Dealt the most damage to enemies in multiplayer.
- Debuffer - Applied the most Debuffs in multiplayer.
- C-c-c-Combo - Played 20 cards in a single turn.
You can read the full list of changes on Steam.
Slay the Spire 2 v0.104.0 - First impressions
I was really curious whether Mega Crit would immediately take a hammer to the new Doormaker, but it seems they want to let us keep knocking. It's a good choice: while having an incredible amount of data and feedback available can deifnitely help the development process, we've seen in many live-service games that it also makes knee-jerk reactions more likely, preemptively nerfing something rather than letting an organic solution emerge.
I did a double-take reading the Slippery Bridge event change - who has enough HP to cycle through their whole deck during it?
I'll always appreciate a change that improves The Silent's survivability.
Absey32's thoughts on the patch
Some smart PR here, making it clear that the highest difficulty isn't meant to be realistic for the average completionist. And I appreciate the reassurance that they're taking their time with the Doormaker, even mentioning their consciousness of 'knee-jerk reactions', funnily enough. The Drum of Battle rework seems like an appropriately modest balance. I have a soft spot for these multifaceted designs that make synergy cards more palatable.
It was already very common to keep rolling the Slippery Bridge event until it hits a bad card, so it's unfortunate that the decision will be even more clear-cut. All three Ancient buffs are a win. Booming Conch actually looks solid on the right map. I'm still not thrilled to take Neow's Fury, but it looks somewhat pickable now. Nutritious Soup looks very strong, and I'm excited to try it out.
Absey32 is a writer and streamer passionate about roguelites, arena shooters, consumer tech, and discovering music.