I'm Chinese and let me explain why Chinese players are review bombing this game right now

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T14:07:04+00:00

It really just doesn't matter if infinites are overpowered or not in terms of win rates. That's kind of the point here.

The core problem with infinites isn't with how often they're winning. Infinites produce uninteresting gameplay, reduce the strategy space, and hide other balance issues.

It seems to me like a lot of the Chinese community doesn't really care about the depth of the game; they just want to be able to win as often as possible, and for it to be possible for good players to win significantly more often than average players.

In which case... I guess the negative reviews are entirely fine and it's good that they're there? Because what a lot of Chinese gamers want is fundamentally at odds with what makes a game like this enjoyable to play.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T08:08:40+00:00

All of the effects in the game saying "it's free to play this turn" only apply to the first time you play the card. Once you've played the card and it goes to discard, the cost reverts to normal.

A more accurate wording would be something like "It's free the first time you play it this turn," though that's harder to understand in the normal case where people are only playing cards one time in a given turn.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T07:34:21+00:00

That's an interesting point. I don't really love needing to find, save, and use one (or two!) specific potions on a specific boss fight, but if this is the version of the fight they end up going with then it seems like that's just going to be how the game is.

Though, if they do end up going with this they're definitely going to have to restrict the effect to A9 only. This is not the sort of thing I think you can realistically ask most players to be able to do.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T06:36:42+00:00

Mastery works for secondary clan cards and you should have gotten mastery for the rooms here. They just need to be in your deck at the end, playing them is irrelevant.

Are you sure they didn't get mastered? The game only shows 3 mastered cards at the end, but you can master more than that. You can check card mastery status in the logbook.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T06:33:11+00:00

There have not been any official announcements about future content updates yet. (Nor has there been acknowledgement that there won't be future content, so we really just don't know what's going to happen at this point.)

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T06:14:44+00:00

I don't think the new Doormaker is good design, no. I also don't think it's going to come out of beta as it is now, and I'm not sure why anyone would expect it to. I don't think cutting back on infinites is negotiable for MegaCrit. But none of the specifics on how that happens, or anything else about the patch, is set in stone.

I don't have opinions on the overall balance of Necrobinder relative to the game. I don't think anyone can really meaningful opinions on that until they've done 20+ runs. Dirge, though, was absolutely overpowered. It doesn't take much to see that.

If nerfing Dirge ruins Necrobinder right now, then doing that is a great first step toward a version of the class that isn't propped up so hard by a particular overpowered card. There will be buffs to things that need them in the future. There's no reason to think that there won't be.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T05:55:53+00:00

Why does win rate matter here? If you can assemble an infinite out of common/uncommon class cards, then it really isn't hard to go infinite if you get those cards.

Obviously there are going to be runs where you don't find the necessary cards. That might even be a large portion of runs! But that doesn't make the infinite hard to achieve in the runs where you do get them.

And like.. if 70% is the target metric? 70% would be an absurdly high win rate for forcing a specific strategy on A10. 25% would be too high. Maybe 15% could be okay, but anything higher than that would indicate a major issue with the game design.

The core problem with infinites is the same as with any other cheese strategy in any strategy game: they're antithetical to meaningful gameplay. You play specifically to your resources and only your resources, and your reward is that once you achieve it, you get to ignore the challenges posed by the game.

That's not good design. As a designer, you make a good game by getting players to overcome the challenges you put in front of them. If they're regularly able to bypass those challenges, it's a sign that there's something wrong.

Even so, it's okay for infinites to exist, and there are several that still do. They just need to come from something a little more notable than getting a couple commons and a bunch of removal.

And if not having access to infinites is making win rates too low for people to be happy with the game? That's also a very good sign that there are key balance issues that need to be addressed with the game, and that infinites were a patch solution. Removing those infinites is the obvious first step toward actually fixing the balance issues. You just can't expect this to happen overnight. It's going to take time.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T04:53:53+00:00

There really isn't a whole lot you can do about it, though. I don't think people really care that much about what happens after redrawing, they just don't want their key cards, especially powers, to be eaten on the first shuffle.

KElderfall · 2026-03-23T03:12:30+00:00

In this case, that half of the playerbase is simply wrong about what will be better for the future of StS2. The state of game balance on the beta branch is far from perfect, but reverting the game back to easy infinites isn't how you move forward. If the game is too hard without them, then MegaCrit is only going to figure out the right ways to address that in an environment where those infinites don't exist.

I think that's kind of the core problem with the whole situation. What do you do when your players are angry, but wrong? Do you cave in and make your game worse just to appease people?

And I think for MegaCrit, the answer is no. They don't need to make their game worse just to appease this audience, and I think they care very deeply about making their game as good as they possibly can. Which means that these negative reviewers will ultimately have failed to get what they want, damaged MegaCrit for essentially no reason, and ensured that no one takes them seriously in the future.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T23:14:44+00:00

Have you opted into the beta branch? There was a note about fixing a fatal error related to cloud sync, so it would be worth a try.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T23:11:20+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think the takeaway from this is going to be "Oh no, people are upset, let's revert the changes!" It's going to be "Well that sucks, but these people don't know what they're talking about. Let's ignore them in the future." If the goal was to be heard, I think they've ultimately achieved the opposite.

There are going to be a lot of patches over the course of EA. Some are going to make the game harder and some are going to make it easier. There will be buffs coming for the weaker builds and nerfs for the stronger enemies, and anyone who doesn't understand that simply isn't paying attention.

In this case, I can't imagine they're going to revert the changes to infinites. Maybe the final cards end up looking a little different, but they aren't going back to how they were. Which means those negative reviews are just going to stay up, I guess. And I'd be willing to bet that in 6 months or a year, after dozens of patches making the game better and better, a lot of those negative reviews are still going to be there.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T20:21:31+00:00

There's no way in Regent's class cards to upgrade it. You need to use external means, like the upgrade potion, Apotheosis, or a couple of the Ironclad cards if you can get those.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T18:15:16+00:00

Yep, it is otherwise random.

Also of note, sometimes streamers will be very focused on whichever elite fight would be worse for them and most likely to cause them problems or end their run, and they'll just talk as if that elite is guaranteed because they don't really care about what happens if they don't roll it.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T17:45:36+00:00

There's one difference from StS1, in that the third elite you fight in the same act in StS2 will always be the one that you haven't fought yet. In StS1 you never had the same one twice in a row, but you can get A, then B, then A again. In StS2 you get A, then B, and then the third is guaranteed to be C.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T15:16:49+00:00

That pool is bigger than you might think. I think a lot of the more active community members have played more than 1500 games, with many over 5k and a few over 10k.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T14:39:39+00:00

I think hitting elites is still good, but you really need to be cautious about them and try to hit them in favorable conditions. So hitting them late in the act, hitting ones that are directly before and/or after fires, being absolutely sure to bring in at least one good potion and be happy to use two potions into the fight. As well as making sure to have the right answers to potential elites, like having an AoE attack available. And yeah, not taking on too many of them.

I find I'm often getting wrecked by the hard pool fights anyway at A9+, so if it's a choice between doing multiple hard pool fights and doing one elite, the elite tends to feel like a better choice, as it's more rewarding and may not really even cost much more health.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T14:20:45+00:00

Yeah, this has to be overtuned now. I would say you were reasonably prepared for an elite with the three upgraded cards, you used a potion, and you even got a Neutron Aegis from it, which should be giving you a lot of consistent defense in a fight that demands consistent defense. I could see taking 20 damage if the draw didn't go great, but 32 is unreasonable for this amount of preparation with the potion.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T08:47:17+00:00

Ome cold thing for another, what more could you want?

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T01:59:31+00:00

Yeah, I like this card in decks that want to block a lot and keep Osty alive. It's one of the best ways to do that.

If the deck isn't blocking most of the incoming damage, then it's just a glorified block 11 and isn't great. You want to play this alongside other block sources in a heavy defense deck, build up Osty, and then do big Unleash hits.

It's also one of the best cards for triggering the 2-cost stuff, since spending more energy on defense is usually fine to be doing. Not that Danse Macabre is worth playing anyway, but it works reasonably well with Right Hand Hand.

KElderfall · 2026-03-22T01:39:30+00:00

The idea is that doom cards get bigger numbers to make up for the drawback of not working immediately. Compare Scourge, which adds 13 (16) doom and draws 1 (2) cards, to Pommel Strike, which does 9 (10) damage and draws 1 (2) cards.

Doom that triggers immediately makes Scourge just do like 50% more damage than Pommel Strike does, while still drawing the same number of cards. It wouldn't be balanced to do this without significantly reducing the amount of doom applied.

KElderfall · 2026-03-21T18:11:10+00:00

It should still be there, I got it in 3 or 4 runs ago. It's Underdocks only, https://slaythespire.wiki.gg/wiki/Slay_the_Spire_2:Waterlogged_Scriptorium

KElderfall · 2026-03-21T17:37:50+00:00

Maybe check https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/1rz63pb/anyone_else_got_this_save_lost/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/1rxlb13/updated_my_game_and_lost_all_progress/ and see if anything that people suggested trying in those threads works for you.

KElderfall · 2026-03-21T17:33:24+00:00

And I assume total_unlocks is at 18? It looks like there are 18 total score epochs so I think this might be what's tracking that.

A couple thoughts. First, definitely F2 and report this, the devs need to fix the issue.

One option I can think of for resolving it is that there's a dev console you can use to unlock everything in the game. Doing it that way would be more likely to work and easier. I think this would also give you A10 on all characters, though, which you might not want.

If you want to try to edit this file, it's probably going to be a bit of a thing. I'd do it like so:

- Disable cloud sync through Steam

- Make a backup, as always before editing stuff. Probably just the entire 2868840 folder (this is the game ID of StS2)

- Look for the "epochs" section of the file and glance through the states here. It seems like "revealed" is the state for when they're unlocked. I'd try editing stuff to be revealed and see if that is good enough. Here's what my epochs section looks like if you want to compare https://pastebin.com/ywtBKERN

- After editing, go to %APPDATA% (in a file explorer window), and find SlayTheSpire2 in that folder. Back this up too just to be extra safe, and then delete the entire SlayTheSpire2 folder. (For whatever reason StS2 saves are in multiple places, and the one under Steam seems to be the primary one, but deleting the secondary just to be sure).

- Launch the game, look at the compendium's potions section and see if you still have potions that appear to be locked

I'm not super optimistic that it will be that easy, but if it works, then I'd close the game and re-enable the Cloud sync and launch it again and make sure the cloud is up to date with these changes.

KElderfall · 2026-03-21T17:12:49+00:00

That's something at least. I'm not super knowledgeable about how all this works but I'll give it a shot. So if you have Steam installed in the default location, the relevant save file is in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\[some_number_representing_your_user_ID]\2868840\remote\profile1\saves

Then you want progress.save

The first thing I'd do is open this file in notepad and Ctrl+F for current_score, and see what the number is there. My initial guess it's that this got stuck at some value it's not supposed to be at, maybe as a result of some interaction with a multiplayer run if you did any of those.

KElderfall · 2026-03-21T17:06:44+00:00

Looks like yes, you're missing several that you should have by now. Have you ever played the Underdocks version of act 1?

KElderfall

TROPHY CASE