Slay the Spire 2 Deletes Its Most Hated Boss Entirely

Doormaker, the Act 3 boss that triggered multiple review bombings and weeks of heated debate across the Slay the Spire 2 community, no longer exists. Mega Crit didn't nerf it, didn't tweak it, didn't try a third rework. They deleted it. According to today's v0.105.0 patch notes, the studio decided that "starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss," calling Doormaker "over the complexity threshold" with "lingering issues" they couldn't resolve.

I respect the hell out of this decision. Doormaker had already been overhauled once, and despite Mega Crit's own data showing it was statistically the easiest Act 3 boss, its ability to shut down entire deck archetypes made it feel awful to lose to. Reworking a fight that frustrates players is one thing; recognising that the concept itself isn't salvageable and starting from scratch takes a different kind of confidence. Not every studio would torch weeks of design work rather than keep patching a problem.

In Doormaker's place stands Aeonglass, a floating hourglass boss with three stacks of Artifact and a mechanic called Withering Presence. For every four non-status cards you play, Aeonglass shoves a one-mana Wither status card into your hand. Wither retains between turns and deals two damage if you don't spend the mana to exhaust it. On alternating turns, the boss also drops your strength and dexterity by three. It's a simpler design by a wide margin, and early community reactions on the Slay the Spire subreddit range from relief to disappointment that Doormaker is gone. Some players are already flagging that Ironclad, with his built-in exhaust tools and mana generation, will likely breeze through the new fight.

The patch also shifts Slay the Spire 2's beta branch to a biweekly update cycle. Mega Crit says the weekly cadence from the first game "really sucked" from a workload perspective, and the slower pace should allow bigger, more polished changes. Alongside Aeonglass, Defect picked up several buffs (Hyperbeam jumps from 28 to 36 damage, Shatter now evokes all orbs twice), and the long-awaited Bestiary finally has a first-pass implementation, though it's still missing flavour text and full animations. Mega Crit says those will come in later updates.