One of the most common complaints I've received from people after playing the game is the presence of a difficulty "cliff." The first 3 levels are pretty much a tutorial to let you gradually understand how it works and the different types of loot, then there's a few levels of trying to set up a good team, get some combos together, and experiment with your minion ordering. Then in the final few levels of the game a lot of players just hit a brick wall. Their team might be too small, they don't have enough varying minion speeds, or maybe they just got bad luck in the store. Either way, they go from having an easy time of it to suddenly having everyone shot dead right out the gate.

The most frequent cause of this, in my experience, has been over-prioritizing keys, and in particular missing treasure chests. If a minion drops a chest to pick up a key, they might complete the level and that chest is gone forever, but if you miss a key you can always go back for it. The game also tends to penalize smaller teams (particularly due to an early minion combine), since you have just enough minions to bring in a key or two but no treasure.

To handle this, I've made two big changes: 1) Minions now prioritize treasure chests over keys (they will drop a key to pick up a chest) and 2) Half the number of keys are now required to advance a floor (and only half as many keys spawn per wave). This is a pretty big change for how the gameplay flows, but the reduced total number of pickups required gives a lot more opportunity to pick up treasures, and increases your options in recruiting. With more gold available, you can afford now to reroll at stores more often and try to put together just the right team.

In addition, the number of levels has been increased form 10 to 12, so the difficulty curve could be smoothed out more in the middle. With the above change, the total time to play a session should actually be about the same due to most of the levels being more easily able to complete in 2 or 3 waves. The overall difficulty of the game should be just about the same as before, but please leave a comment on the page if you notice it has gotten too easy or too hard, as we're always adjusting!

Other new features this patch:

• Added a treasure counter to the stat bar, so you can tell if you have any unused chests or melt rewards.
• The minion management screen now has up and down scroll buttons (zombie builds know what I mean).
• Cut Agate now gives -2 delay
• Fixed a bug where combining minions with stat boots (like vamp or jack) would sometimes drop the boosts.