Even though it’s still pulling in roughly 250,000 concurrent players every day, Slay the Spire 2’s Steam rating has officially dropped to “Mixed” in the last week. The culprit? A second round of review bombing, which started on April 17, followed the release of its first “Major Update” patch. One of the primary grievances was the changes made to Act 3’s Doormaker boss fight, as many on Steam have complained that its newly implemented debuffs make the fight too difficult.
However, Mega Crit decided to throw some fuel on the fire earlier last night, as it released the new v0.104.0 beta patch. There are some cool changes in there, like buffs to the Neow’s Fury ancient relic, a reworked version of Ironclad’s Drum of Battle card, and an updated version of the Axebot fight in Act 3, but the content of the patch itself isn’t the star of the show here.
Instead, the juiciest part of the patch notes relates to the controversial Doormaker boss fight, as Mega Crit has revealed that players actually have a higher win rate against the newly buffed boss than any other boss in Act 3. “We are currently monitoring the Doormaker and looking at a combination of in-game feedback, social media posts, and metrics,” states the patch notes. “We want to give players time to adjust a bit, we’ll be balancing around knee-jerk 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).”
While Mega Crit conceded that the devs do still want to make sure that the Doormaker’s “mechanics aren’t too abrasive against certain playstyles,” it’s hard not to find this funny. Since April 17, there have been roughly 27,000 negative reviews for Slay the Spire 2 on Steam, yet the boss fight they’re complaining about is easier than the other two Act 3 boss fights that haven’t been buffed since the game first released.
I just couldn’t help myself, so I decided to read through some of the latest reviews in the last 24 hours and… yup, as I suspected, the tidbit about the Doormaker’s win rate has seriously tilted some folks. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game dropped from Mixed to Negative before the end of the month.