Hey everyone,
Our “What’s the Damage? Update” is available to download! Patchnotes are in the normal place for anyone who wants to skip my ramblings.
TLDR:
- Balanced items so that historically weaker ones are now viable
- Added rooms to Derelict Distillery and Fatal Falls biomes
- Weapons that can reflect grenades now reflect all the grenades in range
- Integrated Tiled for modders to make custom room design easier
Item balancing
The whole point of this update is to try and avoid a meta with only a small fraction of weapons being viable. We want you to be able to pick up whatever you find and be able to go nuts with it, not just instantly hit the recycle button - this is a roguelite after all goddammit!
So, in short we are mostly buffing all the weaker items (70 items are being buffed with 21 slightly nerfed). You can read the full list below but it might actually be shorter to just play the game.
Melee Weapons:
Buffs:
- Balanced Blade (weapon damage and damage bonus increased)
- Assassin’s Dagger (weapon damage increased)
- Twin Daggers (first two attacks weapon damage and breach bonus increased)
- Broadsword (weapon damage increased + damage slightly redistributed among the 3 attacks)
- Cursed Sword (weapon damage increased + all attacks now crit)
- Shrapnel Axes (weapon damage increased)
- Seismic Strike (wave damage increased)
- War Spear (shorter charge + weapon damage and breach bonus increased)
- Impaler (weapon damage increased)
- Rapier (weapon damage and crit enabler duration increased)
- Hayabusa Boots (weapon damage increased + last hit now reflects all grenades in its hitbox)
- Wrenching Whip (breach bonus increased)
- Torch (weapon damage increased (impact only))
- Flawless (weapon damage and crit multiplier increased)
- Flashing Fans (crit multiplier increased + correctly enables crit upon bouncing a grenade back)
- Tombstone (weapon damage increased + doom now stuns enemies it hits + slow mo reduced + slow mo can now correctly be disabled through the options menu + crit affixes not allowed anymore)
- Oven Axe (weapon damage and breach increased, charge slightly reduced)
- Toothpick (broken duration reduced)
- Sadist’s Stiletto (crit multiplier increased)
- Spiked Boots (crit multiplier increased)
- Oiled Sword (crit multiplier increased)
- Snake Fangs (weapon damage and crit multiplier increased)
- Shovel (damage increased).
- Tentacle (damage increased).
Nerfs:
- Sadist’s Stiletto (poison cloud affix removed)
- War Spear (crit multiplier decreased)
- Katana (invincibility frames removed and forward movement reduced on basic attacks). Please note that the charged attack is unchanged.
Ranged Weapons:
Buffs:
- Bow and Endless Quiver (weapon damage increased + arrows work like other bows)
- Sonic Carbine (weapon damage increased)
- Ice Bow (freeze duration increased)
- Boomerang (weapon damage increased + slightly faster travel speed)
- The Boy’s Axe (weapon damage and breach increased)
- Nerves of Steel (weapon damage increased)
- Firebrands (impact damage increased)
- Pyrotechnics (can now have both Pierce affixes)
- Fire Blast (weapon damage increased)
- Magic Missiles (weapon damage increased)
- Blowgun (added a poison DoT)
Nerfs:
- Quick Bow (crit condition now at 3 arrows instead of 2)
- Alchemic Carbine (DoT duration, cloud duration and dps decreased)
- Hokuto’s Bow (DPS bonus, duration and aoe range decreased)
- Electric Whip (DoT dps decreased)
- Ice Shards (weapon damage, slow duration and crit multiplier decreased)
Shields:
Buffs:
- Front Line Shield (bonus buffed to 50%, was 30)
- Cudgel (stun duration increased)
- Knockback Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Assault Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Greed Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Spiked Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Parry Shield (increased reflected projectiles damage)
Nerfs:
- Punishment (weapon damage decreased)
- Thunder Shield (DoT dps and stun duration decreased)
Skills:
Buffs:
- Infantry Grenade (damage increased)
- Stun Grenade (damage duration and range increased)
- Ice Grenade (freeze duration increased)
- Root Grenade (damage increased)
- Swarm (worm stats increased)
- Tornado (damage increased + cd reduced)
- Corrupted Power (damage buff increased)
- Lightspeed (damage increased on both)
- Lightning Rods (instant damage increased)
- Scarecrow Sickles (damage increased)
- Barnacle (damage increased)
Nerfs:
- Flamethrower Turret (DPS and duration decreased)
- Tesla Coil (DPS, DoT and range decreased)
- Lacerating Aura (DPS and duration decreased)
- Great Owl of War (reactivated version dps decreased)
- Crusher (damage decreased)
- Tonic (duration and bonus health decreased)
Mutations:
Buffs:
- Vengeance (bonus increased)
- Adrenaline (duration increased)
- Scheme (bonus increased)
- Porcupack (starting value increased)
- Ripper (now drops 6 ammos and damage per ammo increased)
- Networking (starting value increased)
- Point Blank (starting value and growth increased)
- Soldier Resistance (starting value and cap increased)
- Blind Faith (starting value and cap increased)
- Counterattack (bonus increased)
- What Doesn’t Kill Me (starting value and cap increased + internal cooldown reduced)
- Extended Healing (duration reduced, for the same heal)
- Spite (damage increased)
- Frostbite (damage increased)
- Instinct of the Master of Arms (internal cooldown reduced)
- Recovery (duration multiplier increased)
- Necromancy (starting value and cap increased)
Nerfs:
- Barbed Tips (DPS and tickrate decreased + no longer causes ammo to drop when combined with Ripper)
- Gastronomy (healing bonus decreased)
- Heart of Ice (starting value and cap decreased)
- Emergency Triage (healing and speed bonus decreased)
- Disengagement (activation threshold decreased and internal cooldown increased)
That's quite a big chunk of changes so please let us know how you find everything!
Item Binding
Item binding. My new most hated phrase…
The original plan was to move this option to custom mode, but then that wasn’t working properly so we were going to remove it from the game completely for this update. There was all kinds of hoo-ha and it was frankly a bit of a mess.
However, as the plans have changed a few times in such a short amount of time, we’re concerned that removing it completely might accidentally mess other things up. Leaving it be for another few months won’t hurt anyone and we wanted to get this update out in the wild, so we’re going to keep it in the game FOR NOW. Expect it to be moved to custom mode in the future though…
Extra rooms
The Derelict Distillery and the Fatal Falls biomes were feeling a bit empty, so we've added some extra rooms to give them more spice. The Distillery in particular has some new sequences in it so be sure to give it a run through...
Room creation for modders
Modders rejoice! We have new room creation support for you lot, in the form of Tiled. You probably know that it’s a free, open-source level editor and I have no idea what I'm talking about here so I’m gonna shut up and just let you read the file written by someone more qualified than me.
Just go to the Dead Cells Library page, then to 'Workshop' then 'About' and there is a Google Drive link on the right hand side under 'Related Links' -> 'View Official Documentation':
That's it for this update, feel free to leave your thoughts about it in the comments, Discord, Reddit, Twitter etc and I'll be back soon with a new alpha :)
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT
Community Highlights:
