Hey all,
Hot on the tails of our accessibility release, we're releasing a new alpha into the wild!
In this update we'll be adding the long awaited panchaku and a new Bobby outfit to go with it, a ton of rebalancing on weapons & items, reworking the legendaries system to make it more intuitive & interesting, Soul Knight content and (game changer!) letting you pet your pets.
Patchnotes are here if you just want to read the list, if you want a bit of extra info and some gifs then keep reading!
Panchaku & Bobby outfit
Your eyes aren't deceiving you, the long-awaited panchaku is finally coming to Dead Cells, with a new outfit inspired by the animated trailers by Bobby Digital. Yes, we already had a 'Bobby' skin, but now the iconic pink flame head is here to go with it.
It crits on enemies facing you and has a pretty tasty combo if you can reach the end, now go out and relive the Bad Seed trailer!
Item reworks
It's been a while since our last major rebalance of weapons, with the 'What's the Damage?' update releasing over a year ago. Since then we've had new items and mutations from the 'Everyone is Here' and the 'Break the Bank' updates, plus 'The Queen and the Sea' DLC, so there's a few imbalances here and there.
So, we're making changes to 26 weapons and skills to rebalance the item pool.
Why do we do rebalancing? Well, we need to do this to keep the variety element strong - a good roguelite should offer you difficult choices. If you're going to take the same 2-3 weapons every time then you're going to get bored pretty quickly - we don't want people to be recycling 90% of weapons without even considering using them.
That's why we need to bring items to the same power level (or as close as possible) to encourage players to explore and use more of the item pool.
Here's what we're proposing:
Buffs:
- Hard Light Sword and Pistol: slight damage buff to the sword and attack speed buff to the pistol
- Queen's Rapier: the delayed slice hits sooner
- Maw of the Deep: attack speed buff
- Wrecking Ball: first and last attack are faster
- Leghugger: now jumps on a nearby target before launching its reactivation attack + keeps its growth state across instances of the object in a run
- Gilded Yumi: charge time slightly decreased + now crits reliably on Mama Tick (to be consistent with Impaler)
- Killing Deck: damage buff on the first 2 attacks
- Hand Hook: now also crits when the thrown enemy hits another entity
- Greed Shield: can now trigger once per enemy every 10 seconds + damage buff
- Frantic Sword: crit multiplier is now inversely proportional to your life (when at or under 50% max life)
- Abyssal Trident: slight damage buff
- Shrapnel Axes: slight damage buff
- Pollo Power: now fires 1 more egg + damage buff
- Crowbar: now also crits on beast enemies (hand-picked, think "non-humanoid, non-mechanic")
- Lightning Bolt: now crits one tick earlier and damages you 1 tick later
- Spiked Shield: crit damage buff
Nerfs:
- Smoke Bomb: scaling heavily nerfed (it was following the same formula as the stats)
- Grappling Hook: same as Smoke Bomb
- Boy's Axe: damage nerf + can't roll the Extra Ammo affix + can't be affected by Ammo mutation
- Bladed Tonfas: slight crit multiplier nerf
- Lacerating Aura: cooldown now starts at the end of the effect instead of starting at cast
- Maw of the Deep: its root is now less effective on bosses
- Crusher: its slow is now less effective on bosses
- Hunter's Grenade: no longer provides stats
- Rapier: damage nerf
- Sonic Carbine: damage nerf
- Hokuto's Bow: procs less often + damage bonus nerfed
I'm sure there's going to be some pain here, especially with the Rapier and Sonic Carbine, sorry about that but hopefully the explanation above made sense!
Besides, none of this is finalised, we want to test the changes with a broader set of players and make some changes based on feedback anyway. However, we have our own thoughts, this doesn't mean you can convince us not to make changes to your favourite weapon by saying it feels too weak now...
Legendary item change
We've wanted to adjust the legendary items for a while. The current system where they scale off your two highest stats is pretty OP and out of whack with the rest of the scaling system, plus it's just not very interesting - all it does is give you more damage.
It's also counter-intuitive for players who aren't clued in and will split the off-colour stats to gain max health, instead of focusing on one off-colour stat to get max power from legendaries.
So, we've removed the double stat scaling system, although legendaries will remain colorless in terms of scaling.
In it's place, we're introducing legendary affixes. We've created a few brand new affixes, including specific affixes for certain items. They have all been hand-picked and should have a synergy with the item's gameplay (or at the very least, somewhat thematically linked). This way, they'll be making legendaries stronger than your typical weapon by adding an extra, complimentary gameplay element instead of just upping the damage. There are a LOT of legendary affixes so I won't list them here, if you want to read the whole list go check out the patchnotes on our site.
Legendaries will always roll their legendary affix AND it becomes a bonus affix, i.e. the item is rolled normally and then gains the legendary affix on top. Legendary affixes cannot be removed, rerolled or replaced.
We'd like to have your feedback on all these, we're running a public alpha after all! Of course, we are not asking that you each test every legendary item in the game, although if you want to do that then be our guest. In this spirit, we added a new custom mode option (that will also be added in the release version of the update, it's not just for testing) which makes every item legendary.
Soul Knight content
We're also introducing content from Soul Knight that was already in the mobile version. Soul Knight is another roguelite that already has Dead Cells content in it, so we're returning the favour!
The Magic Bow fires 5 slow-moving arrows, which make up for their lack of speed by homing in to their nearest enemy, and the Knight outfit adds the pint-sized adventurer and his oversized head to Dead Cells.
Pet the pet
Finally, we're letting you, well, pet the pets.
In transitions between biomes you just need to long press the interact button to show some love to your latest companion.
Unfortunately the owl was too awkward to code this for, so it will never know the loving touch of the Beheaded...
You won't get any benefit from this, it's just something fun to add.
Other additions
- Popup window to tell you to try 1BC at the start of every 0BC run after killing HotK, if you've never tried 1BC (stops appearing after you try 1BC one time)
- Sonic Carbine DPS display fixed
- Damage cap (50%) added to the Servants (you can't one shot them anymore, sorry)
- Conjunctivius' tentacles' damage cap increased to make them 2-shottable
How to access the alpha:
Back up your save first. The alpha shouldn't affect your saves but better to be safe than sorry (and if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here - https://steamcommunity.com/games/588650/announcements/detail/1696100248017690442)
Then follow these instructions to access the alpha:
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.
As always, everything is still being tweaked according to feedback. So some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.
If you want to leave feedback you can do so in the comments here, or on our official Discord - there are two channels called update30-alpha-discussion and update30-alpha-feedback specifically for alpha conversations, so please use them!
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT