Endless TD — Modes of Mayhem

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 debuffs from hex & shred towers, 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 Steam post image

⭐ 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.

• Optimized Anathema Spire and Ice Tower Tier 5 projectile animations to reduce lag on some machines

⚔️ 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. Steam post image

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

• 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. Steam post image

• 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. Steam post image

• 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!