Slay the Spire 2 removes Act 3 boss, addresses RNG and balance changes in Major Update

Mega Crit has dropped the second major update for Slay the Spire 2’s Early Access, and it’s a big one, covering four patches’ worth of changes in a single release.

The headliners are a boss deletion, a confirmed RNG bug that the community had been complaining about for months, and the arrival of Steam Workshop support.

It seems to have been received much better than its first Major update, which got nuked because of the infinite combo builds.

The Doormaker is gone in Slay the Spire 2’s latest update

For those of you who frequent Act 3, you may be happy to know Doormaker is no more.

Mega Crit confirmed in the patch notes that while the fight had interesting micro-decisions, it was over the complexity threshold the team wanted, and had lingering issues that proved too difficult to resolve cleanly. Rather than patch around it, the decision was made to scrap it entirely and start fresh.

Taking its place is a brand new boss called Aeonglass, with Mega Crit keeping details deliberately vague for players coming in fresh. So, you have that to look forward to.

The Infested Prism enemy has also been fully reworked, and the Axebots fight has been redesigned from a multi-enemy encounter into a single, more challenging Axebot.

A wider discussion on RNG issues

In what amounts to a public admission that players had a point, Mega Crit confirmed that the Debt curse from Neow’s Bones was appearing more often than it should have been, and the root cause was a genuine flaw in how the game’s random number generators were set up.

The issue was tracked down by a community member called tckmn, who went on an eight-hour investigation. They revealed that the game’s multiple pseudo-random number generators were incorrectly correlated with each other. Outcomes in seemingly unrelated parts of a run were actually influencing each other in predictable ways. In practical terms, players could theoretically use knowledge of one part of the game to predict outcomes in another, which is the opposite of what a randomised roguelike should be doing.

The fix involved replacing the game’s entire RNG implementation with a more modern system. As Mega Crit put it in the patch notes: “Rest assured that your suffering is now truly random.”

Notable balance changes

The patch also came with a tonne of bug fixes, balance changes, and other smaller bits and pieces. There are a few that stand out a lot, though, that could affect your builds.

On the balance side, the Defect’s Shatter card has been reworked to evoke all orbs twice, while Fusion drops from 2 energy to 1 but now Exhausts, losing that Exhaust on upgrade.

The Ironclad’s Drum of Battle has been completely reworked into a 1-cost Skill that draws 2 cards and grants energy when Exhausted. The Regent’s Monarch’s Gaze has dropped from 3 energy to 2, and Conflagration on the Ironclad has also been reworked entirely.

On the bug fix side, save file corruption following a PC crash, blue screen or power outage has been addressed, which should be welcome news for anyone who has lost a run to an unexpected shutdown.

For the full patch note, you can see them on the Steam Community post.

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