Patch Notes — March 16-21

Modes of Mayhem adds four new ways to play, alongside major performance improvements, new 4-star merged towers, gameplay balance updates, UI improvements, and a large batch of fixes.

🌪️ New Game Modes

Chaos Rift

Semi-randomized resistances roll each wave through tiered mutation templates that scale with progression.

  • Mutation templates become more dangerous as the run goes on.
  • Chaos Resistance can strip enemy resistances, creating unpredictable wave-to-wave shifts.

  • Early wave behavior has been adjusted so opening starts feel fairer and less punishing.

Elemental Surge

Elements rotate between immune and super-effective states every 10 waves, forcing you to adapt your builds as the cycle changes.

  • Waves 1–10 act as a grace period.
  • Surge cycle rotations pause on boss waves every 25 waves, but environmental bosses are still affected by the current Surge elements.
  • Enemy tooltips now show immunities and weaknesses more clearly.
  • The HUD now shows how many waves remain in the current surge cycle and previews the next cycle.

Juggernaut

A mode built around fewer, tougher enemies and constant elite pressure.

  • Enemy count reduced to 50%
  • Enemy HP increased to 2.5x
  • Bosses appear every 2 waves
  • Wraiths appear every 20 waves
  • Juggernaut Aura gives nearby enemies ±15% resistance
  • From wave 18 onward, bosses have a 40% chance to gain regeneration
  • Bosses now cycle through all 10 boss variants instead of repeating the same one

Vortex

A brand new spiral-map survival mode where enemies converge toward a central portal.

  • Enemies move at 1.5x base speed
  • They gain +2% speed per loop
  • Enemy count is increased to 10x
  • After wave 30, gold per kill drops to 10% to prevent snowballing
  • Solo Vortex starting gold increased to 200
  • Vortex enemies now also have +5% HP

⭐ New Content

4-Star Merged Towers

Merged towers can now reach 4 stars.

4-star towers gain:

  • +275% damage
  • +70% attack speed
  • +40% range
  • +150% HP

Their special effects are also enhanced, including improvements to splash radius, slow, stun, and poison.

⚙️ Performance & Stability

This update includes a major round of optimization work aimed at smoother long runs and better multiplayer stability.

  • Improved multiplayer performance during heavy combat.
  • Reduced network overhead during busy matches and large waves.
  • Optimized combat event handling for smoother effect-heavy gameplay.
  • Improved long-session stability by reducing memory churn and repeated processing.
  • Improved performance in high enemy-count situations.
  • Optimized Whirlpool behavior to prevent late-game slowdowns.
  • New object pooling for attack visuals reduces garbage collection during combat.
  • Spawn queue processing has been optimized.
  • Spatial queries now reuse memory instead of allocating every tick.
  • Pool sizes have been increased for Vortex mode to better handle higher enemy density.
  • Ping display now gives a more stable reading during brief spikes.

⚔️ Gameplay Changes

  • Merged tower fusion damage bonuses now stack correctly with other damage multipliers, including elemental bonuses, tower-specific bonuses, and Annihilator.
  • Merged shield towers are now immune to burn damage on shield HP from environmental hazards.
  • Fire Boulder and Lightning Fire burn scaling after wave 50 has been reduced from +8% per wave to +4.5% per wave.
  • Multi-select tower upgrades now process much more smoothly when upgrading many towers at once.
  • Upgrade purchases now have added rate limiting for better stability.

🖥️ UI Improvements

  • Clicking an upgrade card in Power-Ups now highlights which towers in the hotbar it applies to.

  • Clicking a talent node in the Talent Constellation now highlights affected tower types in the filter bar.

  • Warfare mastery nodes now correctly map to all attack tower types in the filter.
  • Merge Glossary filters have been redesigned into a more compact icon-based layout with collapsible Base and Merged sections.

  • Merge glossary tooltips now appear below icons for cleaner readability.
  • Added a new Hide Enemy Names setting that removes enemy name tags while keeping health bars and status effects visible.

  • Mode HUD panel has been scaled up for better readability.
  • Tower info panel now displays the new 4-star merged tower state.
  • Hotbar and tower pool UI now refresh immediately after talent allocation, refund, or reset.

🎨 Visual & Rendering Polish

  • Large map props now consistently render behind towers and enemies instead of occasionally overlapping in front.
  • Minor animation and effect tuning for:
  • Water Tower L6
  • Laser L3
  • Arcane Storm
  • Death Knight L4
  • Eternal Winter

🏆 Leaderboards

  • Leaderboard tiebreakers now use timestamp, so whoever reached a wave first ranks higher.


Modes of Mayhem is live! Jump in, test your builds, and see which mode you like best!