It’s been another two weeks, which means we all get another Slay the Spire 2 beta patch. This week’s v0.110.0 patch isn’t anywhere near as silly as the previous patch—in fact, the latest patch is actually trying to undo some of the silliness that was introduced in patch v0.109.0–but it does feature a wealth of balance changes and relic reworks that are very much worth discussing.
First things first, let’s go over the fun little visual update that Mega Crit has added. You’ll notice that the banner for the v0.110.0 patch notes features some glowing versions of three of the characters. This is because the “Form” cards—such as Ironclad’s Demon Form and Silent’s Serpent Form—now trigger permanent visual effects when you play them. They don’t look quite as cool as the ones that the community cooked up a while back, but hey, it’s something.
Now, onto the relic reworks. These are almost exclusively buffs, and most of them are pretty minor. For instance, Nonupeipe’s Fur Coat now decreases 8 enemy combats to 1HP (up from 7 enemy combats), and Tezcatara’s Seal of Gold only decreases your gold by 3 per turn instead of 5.
However, there is one pretty big one: Tezcatara’s Toasty Mittens. This relic used to exhaust the top card of your draw pile at the start of your turn and grant you 1 extra Strength in return. It has long been memed as one of the worst Ancient relics in the game, because while getting 1 Strength per turn is nice, the randomness of exhausting a card every turn simply wasn’t worth it.
Instead, Tezcatara’s Toasty Mittens now lets you choose a card in your hand to exhaust every turn. On one hand, this has the downside that you’ll have one less card per turn, but the fact that this essentially hard-counters Aeonglass, as you can just exhaust the Withers it adds to your deck, and it also enables Ironclad’s cards that trigger when they exhaust, suddenly makes it feel very, very strong.
Also, there is one huge bug fix in the patch notes that I haven’t seen many people mention: “Uncommon cards show up slightly more often (as intended).” I thought I was just getting super unlucky by never seeing uncommon cards, but it’s nice to know that it was a bug and that I’m not simply cursed.
As far as card nerfs and buffs are concerned, there are some goofy ones in here. For instance, after the last patch I noted that the community had figured out ways to abuse the newly reworked Eidolon card by having two in your deck at once. This is no longer as easy to pull off, as Mega Crit has altered it so that it “can no longer be generated mid-combat.”
That being said, the main character that had the most focus in this patch is Silent. It seems as if Mega Crit is trying to find ways to nerf her without upsetting the players that review-bombed the game last time, and…well, I don’t think there’s any chance that’ll happen this time around, as these nerfs feel a lot more like buffs in practice.
For instance, Haze has been completely reworked. It’s no longer a Sly card that applies 4 poison to all enemies. Instead, it’s now a non-Sly card that costs 2 and applies 4 poison and 1 weak to all enemies. Close enough; welcome back Crippling Cloud.
There’s also the pretty drastic change to Outbreak. It’s no longer a Power that costs 1 and damages the enemy by 4 every time you apply poison; it’s now a Skill card that costs 3 and applies 9 poison to all enemies. Oh, and it makes poison damage “trigger immediately.” I messed around with this card a little earlier, and lemme tell you, it’s a lot more broken than it sounds. The poison damage triggers “immediately,” and then triggers again when your turn ends.
Ultimately, I don’t think this has really nerfed Silent’s Sly capabilities by much, and it’s just made her poison damage way, way better. Instead of having one archetype that’s super busted, she now has two archetypes that are stupidly overpowered. Someone at Mega Crit clearly loves Silent, but please, I beg of you: show my GOAT Defect some more love next patch.