Behind the 7.0 Balance Changes

The 7.0 balance changes sparked plenty of discussion, and most of it came back to one question: why? Why did so many relics get hit, why was Pepper touched so lightly, why did Ronan get nerfed? This post answers the questions that came up most, with the reasoning behind each change. For the full list of changes, see the 7.0.0 balance notes.

Several of these changes are hard to judge from the patch notes alone. They interact with each other, and with the relic changes in particular, so a nerf on paper isn’t always a nerf in a run.

Relics

Why relics got weaker

Players have told us for a long time that being offered a relic that doesn’t fit your hero or build feels bad. The root cause was the other side of that coin: a relic that does fit was so strong that every other offer felt wasted. That made unlocking new relics feel bad, because each unlock diluted your odds of getting the one you wanted. It even stopped some players from unlocking new heroes, since not getting them would optimize their potential relic pool.

That left two options. The first was to make every relic so powerful and so broadly useful that unlocking more never feels bad. If I did that, they’d all drift toward a handful of generic effects and lose their niches. So I went the other way and brought relic power down across the board.

The goal is for a relic to be a power boost, but not something that defines your build. I’d like them to be interesting and powerful enough to push you in unexpected directions sometimes, but never so powerful that missing the right one sabotages your run. One example is Infernal Ashes, which has definitely become more unique but hopefully much less niche by not enabling a major archetype ( builds) on its own.

Many relics have also been very finicky and demanding during a run: they locked up large sections of the board and had you constantly checking and readjusting to get the most out of them. A larger pass on this was done in Season 5, but some of the relic changes also help here, such as the change to Exhaustion Stone’s pattern.

I also moved two relics in the other direction, to be more picky. Instead of using completely generic “per item” wording, I tied them to specific item types, as with Arcane Astrolabe and Plaguebringer’s Pendant. These have multiple types on them, unlike older relic designs which often use only one type like or . Only two relics were moved to this new system to get feedback: the extra types are meant to give them more flexibility and help highlight some different categories, but simply having that many types may also cause confusion. Having these more restrictive requirements is one way that relics can keep power up through a run without accessing its full power immediately. They may be daunting on first look, but I look forward to seeing how everyone plays with them. If the multi-type filters are too annoying, I will get rid of them.

Lock before reroll

When you’re first shown your batch of relics, you can now lock any number of them, just like locking items in the shop. Locked relics stay when you reroll, and the reroll shows that many fewer new relics.

This is a small quality-of-life improvement, not a new system for controlling your relic pool. The reroll still costs gold, you still only get one reroll, and you have no control over which relics replace the ones you didn’t lock. Locking itself is free; the only cost is a smaller reroll.

Rat King’s Crown

Rat King’s Crown (RKC) lost its on-crit and heal in 7.0. It still gives to rats, its level bonus still inflicts up to 8 every 3 seconds, and it’s still a bona fide rat fountain, catching you a rat every time you enter the shop to help build out your lineup. And if you’re not going rats this run, you can sell the Brown Rat for .

This isn’t quite where I want it to end up. Ideally, it would eventually grant some extra Mild Cheese when you buy it, and have that summon your rats. Unfortunately we ran into some technical limitations that we haven’t worked through yet, so for now it keeps catching rats on its own.

It’s fair to point out that it grants when not many rats care about crits, especially now that its own on-crit effects are gone. Whether that gets solved on the rats’ side or by moving RKC away from crit could go either way.

The bigger issue with RKC was what it did to the rest of the rat archetype:

• It blocked general rat improvements. If a rat build worked without RKC, it would be insane with it.
• It collided with other items. Any rat pattern that didn’t match up with RKC was a problem, including Pepper’s unique Cheese.

Bringing RKC down gives me room to improve rats in other ways.

Karmic Essence

Karmic Essence at its best now does noticeably less damage than it could before. That top end wasn’t used much, and usually required dramatically warping your build, but it was very easy to picture. Losing that ceiling feels dramatic, and makes the relic seem much weaker than it really is.

In practice it almost never did much, and it was already one of the least-picked relics in the game. The rework gives it a stronger early and midgame and a more reliable endgame floor, where it still feeds a respectable amount of and . It also now triggers when you receive critical hits to fit with its flavor.

Pepper

This is the most-asked question, so here’s the full history of Croissant Crossbow over the last few months:

Version	Croissant Crossbow
Before 6.0	+2 per 30 gained
6.0	+3 per 100 current
6.1	+8 per 100
6.2	+6 per 100
7.0	+5 per 100

Before 6.0, Pepper was reasonably popular but generally considered one of the weaker heroes. When I moved the Crossbow to use her current at +3 per 100, it was widely seen as very weak — weaker than the old version, even. She only really took off when it went to +8. Nothing else in her kit changed enough over the last few months to explain that swing, so it is very likely the Crossbow.

I like the new design. It’s more front-loaded than the rest of her kit, which adds variety. It also has more mechanical counterplay than before: you can still stop her gaining , and you can now reduce her current with Skara, Enoch, or even Pepper’s own Tenderizer.

So why the light touch? We already know +3 was very weak, and a downside of a front-loaded weapon is that small nudges can make its popularity fall abruptly. Other changes hit her too: the relic changes reach her through the Grandpaw’s Pepper Mill nerf, and the season mechanics changed (Special Shops going away, Boons rotating).

This may still have been too light. I’d rather have one release where she’s still slightly too strong than overshoot and leave her dead in the water, like she was at +3.

On Perpetual Stew: it’s possible it’s a bit strong since Crafting Hammer started working on Absorbing items. That change went in on April 17th (4.1.0), though, and Pepper wasn’t recognized as this strong until around August 11th (6.1.1), right after the Crossbow went to +8. A weaker front-loaded Crossbow also gives her less slack to build up a big Stew for the late game, so this nerf indirectly limits the Stew too.

Ronan

I understand why this one stings. Ronan players already felt their hero was struggling, and then saw what looked like a nerf. Here’s what I was going for.

Excalibur’s big payoff had a long-standing problem: stacking Excaliburs multiplied it instead of adding up. Three Excaliburs weren’t three times better than one, they were nine times better: three times the payoff, arriving three times earlier. That kind of scaling is hard to balance around. I chose to remove it and redistributed some of that power around other parts of the item, with some other adjustments I will come back to.

I want Ronan to be comfortable playing a longer game with “sword and board”: one or a few powerful weapons, hiding behind shields and armor. I don’t want him boxed into either a full-turtle build, or an exaggerated berserker build dominated entirely by weapons.

Excalibur and Champion’s Ripper are now much better on tempo:

• Excalibur: when you first crafted the old one, you got nothing good from it for several rounds, even if you crafted it on time and the shop goblin didn’t delay you. The new one gains 3 on every hit instead of waiting on 50 stolen , costs less , and gets a bigger reduction at the start of and .
• Champion’s Ripper struggled because it was so big compared to the Razor. It now costs less (1.5 → 1.25), so it pulls more weight for its size.

Steal → Remove is partly a thematic realignment. It never made much sense for Ronan to steal s. The new numbers were checked against other weapons with similar designs, with size and speed normalized. But losing the stolen will absolutely be felt in some matchups.

I don’t think I’ve nailed the new Excalibur yet. Still, these two weapon changes, plus other heroes losing their relic power, add up to more than the patch notes suggest. If it does need more help, I’ll most likely look at the ability: extending it to Dusk, adding some to those triggers, or scaling back the reduction and moving that power into the base weapon.

Harkon

Skullsmasher

Skullsmasher now has the same chance as Mallet, but it still stuns for twice as long (the duration didn’t change, only the chance did) and it deals twice the base damage per second. I think there is still a clear case to upgrade to Skullsmasher, but maybe not as much incentive to pour your entire coin purse into forcing multiples.

The problem was that Harkon leaned too heavily on Skullsmasher for stunlocks. That meant either a large amount of uptime or, more commonly, dagger spam, because daggers get free attacks whenever the opponent is stunned. I’d like to see more variety in Harkon’s bags than Skullsmashers in every spare square.

Lost Symbol & Lost Runeword

Lost Symbol was adjusted to fit better in the early tier. It used to generate , and as a common it shouldn’t crowd out higher-rarity items built around that same identity. It now heals directly instead.

The biggest of those is his unique Lost Runeword, which has struggled for a long time with a weak mechanic and a weak identity. The redesign gives it something that befits a unique, with a strong identity that steps a little away from the rest of his kit. It’s different enough that it will almost certainly need some iteration. I’m very curious to see how this will play out in the community.

Bloodrage Axe

The heal on Bloodrage Axe was removed only from its level bonus, which now inflicts and instead. The main ability is unchanged. I also made it a better weapon in its own right (faster , lower , higher ), so it doesn’t have to fight the rest of his arsenal as hard for bag space. It should feel cleaner to use, and more focused.

Kragg

Scroll of Potential was doing a lot for a common. It now gives and per instead of , and no longer grants after 15 seconds. If the new version can’t carry his early game, he’ll most likely get buffs elsewhere rather than on the Scroll.

The community has made a good case that Scroll of Potential and Prayer Bell could use a price decrease, and Scroll of Earth looks like it could use a small buff. All three are on my list to look at for the next balance update. Thank you for calling these out.

Some players have asked why Kragg has several items that apply when he isn’t a debuffer. Debuffers don’t have a monopoly on debuffs. Sometimes Kragg will go that way, and the debuffs will be part of how he wins. Other times he’ll just bonk people to death with raw . At the very top level, some players feel it’s hard for hybrid heroes (ones that mix debuffs into another plan) to make debuffs work, and they’re not wrong. But I think the flexibility is still worth it as the meta ebbs and flows between releases, and these debuffs can add sneaky value when you aren’t expecting it.

Buzz

Bouquets

First, the speed buff on the bouquets didn’t change. The “During ” line (faster attacks for your Bees, Flies and Butterflies while it’s Day) works exactly as it did before 7.0. Here’s what did change:

Beautiful Bouquet and Wildflower Symphony are no longer Brambles:

• Thematically, carrying Wild Rose’s Bramble identity was a lot of work for such a combined item, and didn’t match how I think of these flower bouquets.
• Mechanically, they were mostly big stat sticks placed around Whip. Nothing flowed back the other way, mechanically or thematically, and I didn’t like the bouquets being tied so strongly to Whip. Removing the type leaves the rest of their mechanics alone and breaks up that one-way coupling.

Their level bonus now copies their base ability: Where I can, I’ve been making level bonuses repeat the item’s main ability. That makes more sense to players, is easier to balance, and avoids an item’s identity shifting as its level bonus grows. The bouquets’ main abilities are too long to write out again, so their level bonuses used to be a condensed version (flat and ). Now the level bonus simply activates the bouquet again. Depending on how you used them, that changes their power: they’re a bit better for sustain now and a bit worse for offense.

Maybe the bouquets have a broader issue: they do too much of “all the flowers together at once”, Voltron style. Some of that might be better boiled down into a plain count on the main item. We’ll see how it plays.

And for Buzz players waiting on bees: assuming nothing else comes up for Buzz, they’re high on my list to look at for buffs.

Fern

The woodwinds were tweaked because I want Fern’s play to complement her healing instead of replacing it. It’s not fully solved yet, but I think it’s getting closer.

Her staves (Dendromancy Rod and Living Staff) are separate from that. is great against opponents and does little against everyone else, which makes for polarizing matchups. The staves now spend your for a significant hit of that works against any opponent, at the cost of the you’d otherwise keep as defense against opponents. The staves will likely need further tuning within that design, but I think it’s an interesting direction.

Celeste

To many of you, Celeste looks like she was substantially nerfed. That’s not the intent, but I get why it’s hard to see from the patch notes alone. A few levers did come down, mostly around potion spam and taking the edge off some of her unique interactions. But many of the apparent nerfs come with a much stronger level bonus: the power was redistributed between the main ability and the level bonus, not removed.

She also gets much better access to Elemental Whetstone. Its shortcut recipe moves from a Rare to a Common ingredient, and its shop price goes from 5 to 3 . It gives a bit less per copy (+2 max instead of +4), but getting it this early will likely change how her early game plays significantly, and removes one of the major roadblocks to embracing her Sword line.

Other Heroes

Sage and Skara got no direct changes this release, and Chana only got a tooltip clarification on Wizard Hat. Not every hero needs changes every release, especially when something as big as the relic changes is reshaping the game around them. They were all middle of the pack, and the numbers weren’t raising concerns. But I’m keeping an eye on them, and they’ll get adjustments when they need them.

---

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write up detailed feedback in the patch discussion, even the angry posts. Balance never stands still, especially in a young game that keeps adding heroes and items. I’ll be watching how these changes play out over the season. This post doesn’t cover every question, but if yours isn’t here, it was still read.

(Note: the Relics and Ronan sections have been revised after publication for accuracy and clarity)