In the past 24 hours, Slay the Spire 2 has dropped to a Very Positive 83-percent rating on Steam (as of this writing), all the way from its Overwhelmingly Positive 97-percent rating on March 19. Not the end of the world, but a hefty drop when you take the total number of reviews, roughly 60,000, into account. So what’s the cause of the 11,000 negative reviews that just appeared overnight? A balance patch that technically hasn’t even been released yet.
Last night, Mega Crit announced Beta Patch v0.100.0. “Welcome to the first BIG post-launch patch, Slayers!! This one has a huge balance pass, the main aim of which is to make infinites harder to achieve,” reads the post on Steam. “We’re also introducing a Phobia Mode with bespoke assets that should mitigate various creepy phobia concerns.”
Now, just to clarify before we get into the specifics of the balance changes, this patch is currently opt-in only. To access it, you have to go into the Game Versions & Betas tab on Steam and click on the “public-beta” branch to download it. As Mega Crit has clarified several times before, these beta patches are optional and subject to change. With that in mind, what could this beta patch possibly contain that’s managed to piss off roughly 11,000 players? Card nerfs.
The main one that’s seemingly upsetting everyone is the change to Silent’s Prepared skill. In the beta branch, it’s been replaced with an entirely new skill called Prepare. Instead of drawing two cards and discarding two cards with a 0-cost like Prepared, the new Prepare skill costs 1, discards two cards, and then gives you 2 energy next turn. Personally, if you’re asking me, Silent was ridiculously OP beforehand, and now she’s just slightly less OP.
The other main change that’s bugging people is to the Doormaker boss fight at the end of Act 3. In the beta branch, Doormaker has been buffed, and will now permanently remove the tenth card you draw for the remainder of the fight and gain 1 strength when it does. This has upset players because, according to a popular post on r/slaythespire, there’s “almost no reliable counterplay” if Doormaker eats an important card in your deck. I’m 50/50 on this one, because I get where players are coming from, but Doormaker was kind of a joke beforehand. The boss needs a buff, but maybe this is overkill.
Ultimately, however, whether you think the changes in the beta patch are good or bad, review bombing the game is ridiculously childish behaviour. Several of the negative reviews state that they’re hoping Mega Crit “notices” their complaints and reverses the changes in Beta Patch v0.100.0. How about, instead, you just use the “Feedback” option that’s literally in the game?