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After quite a delay, Motion Twin has released Dead Cells update 1.39, and this is for the big Panchanku update that’s been available on PC since last month! Read on for the full Dead Cells September 7 patch notes.

Here’s the TLDR of the update:

After numerous requests following the animated Bad Seed trailer, we’re finally adding the panchaku to Dead Cells, with a new outfit inspired by Bobby Pills’ trailers. We already had a ‘Bobby’ skin, but now the iconic pink flame head is here to make it complete. You can stop pestering us now, or just move onto the next shiny thing you reprobates want.

It’s been a while since our last major rebalance of weapons, with the ‘What’s the Damage?’ update releasing over a year ago. Since then we’ve had new items and mutations from the ‘Everyone is Here’ and the ‘Break the Bank’ updates, plus ‘The Queen and the Sea’ DLC, so there’s a few imbalances here and there.

So, we’re making changes to 29 weapons and skills (and a mutation!) to rebalance the item pool.

Why do we do rebalancing? This isn’t a multiplayer game after all…

Well, we need to do this to keep the variety element strong – a good roguelite should offer you difficult choices. If you’re going to take the same 2 or 3 weapons every time because they’re OP, then you’re going to get bored very quickly. And we don’t want you to get bored of Dead Cells!

That’s why we need to bring items to the same power level (or as close as possible) to encourage players to explore and use more of the item pool.

Here’s the buffs & nerfs:

Moving on to the legendary item change, which we’ve wanted to do for a while. For those who don’t know, legendary items are the gold-coloured items.

In the old system, their damage would scale off your two highest stats (Brutality, Tactics and Survival), which wasn’t intuitive with the stats system. Your average player usually just spread points between the off-colour stats to gain maximum health.

As the legendaries power was affected by your two highest stats, it meant that you would need to put points on only one of the stats that you weren’t using to get maximum damage from legendaries.

Basically the whole thing wasn’t very clear.

It was also just not very interesting – the only thing that legendaries gave you was more damage, that was it. More damage is always good, but we wanted to make it better!

So to replace the old system, we’re introducing legendary affixes (affixes are the tasty extra powers you get on items, like 60% damage to a bleeding enemy).

All the legendary affixes have been specifically added to certain weapons so that they each have a synergy with their item’s gameplay. This way, they’ll be making legendaries stronger than your typical weapon version by adding an extra, complimentary gameplay element instead of just upping the damage.

We’ve created a few brand new affixes as well as using some existing ones. There are a lot of legendary affixes in this list, so if you don’t really care about specifics you should just scroll past!

Legendaries will always roll their legendary affix and they cannot be removed, rerolled or replaced.

Also just to be clear, we’ve removed the double stat scaling system, although legendaries will remain colorless in terms of scaling, which means that they scale off whichever of your stats has the highest value.

More legendary affixes will be coming in future updates, so keep your eyes peeled.

Oh and we’re also adding an option in Custom Mode to allow ‘legendary-only’ runs:

We’re also introducing content from Soul Knight, another roguelite that already has Dead Cells content in it, so we’re returning the favour!

The Magic Bow fires 5 slow-moving arrows, which make up for their lack of speed by homing in to their nearest enemy. Each arrow that successively hits the same enemy does more damage to that enemy. The Knight outfit adds the pint-sized adventurer and his oversized head as an option.

The last bit of content we’re adding is letting you pet the pets.

In transitions between biomes you just need to long press the interact button to show some love to your latest companion. You won’t get any benefit from this, it’s just something fun for us to add. I mean why wouldn’t we add this!

Unfortunately the owl was too awkward to code this for, so it will never know the loving touch of the Beheaded…

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