Mortal Shell 2 just added Adaptive Difficulty, and it changes what a boss guide means

The update that landed today adds Adaptive Difficulty, and it is the most consequential thing the game has changed since launch. It is off by default, experimental, and buried at Game > Game Settings > Adaptive Difficulty.

Read this before you turn it on, because it does something no difficulty slider in this genre usually does.

It scales past the hardest setting the game shipped with

If you keep winning, enemies gain damage, health and break resist. They hit harder, take longer to bring down, and are harder to stagger.

The part worth stopping on: that does not stop at the standard difficulty. Keep clearing encounters without dying and enemies scale well past the toughest the game was originally built to be, and they keep climbing for as long as you keep winning.

So a good player who never dies is playing a game nobody balanced. That is a feature, and it is also a warning.

It gives ground the other way, with a floor

If you are struggling, enemies weaken across the same three values, and a cap is applied so no single attack can take more than a set fraction of your health bar. You cannot be killed outright from full health.

Night Mode is the exception. The reductions never apply there. Night Mode can still be pushed harder, and it will never be made easier. If Night Mode is where you are stuck, this update does nothing for you.

Nothing tells you it is happening

There is no on-screen indicator when the game adjusts in either direction. The developers say they will build one later. Until then you have no way to know whether a boss is harder because you are tired or because the game decided you were doing well.

Adjustments also relax on their own over time, so the game drifts back toward standard balance once your play changes.

What this does to our boss guides

Being straight about it: every no-hit boss run on this channel was recorded with Adaptive Difficulty off, because it did not exist.

If you have it on, a guide showing a clean fight is showing you a fight at a different scale to yours. The route is still right, the openings are still the openings, and the timings are still the timings. What changes is how many hits the boss survives and how much yours cost you.

If you are following a guide and the numbers feel wrong, turn Adaptive Difficulty off. That puts you back on the same footing as the recording.

The other changes worth knowing

Parrying got better. Consecutive parries with the Infinite Seal now have a wider window into the wind-up animation, so a string of incoming hits can be parried rather than only the first. Status effects can also now be applied to enemies while they are getting back up after a riposte.

Sariel got fixed. Thornfall now works in enclosed spaces rather than failing outright on a low ceiling, prioritises locked-on targets, and hits moving ones. Agonize no longer requires full pain. Affliction now shares damage to all cursed enemies and inflicts curse on enemies that are not cursed yet.

Genessa got nerfed. Augmentation no longer allows infinite resolve gain or infinitely summoning Faithful Doubles. If your build leaned on that, it is gone.

Two exploits closed. Leech stacks no longer save and reapply on top of themselves, which was a health exploit, and the Gloombound Stone no longer loses durability when recovering Gloom from your own corpse.

Quality of life that actually matters:

• Gloom is easier to retrieve after death
• Fragile Tarstones now properly grant Tarcores when they break
• Damage numbers no longer cap at 999 and go up to 9,999
• The Lost Child's collision is improved, so you should stop getting stuck inside him or launched into the air
• Bats have returned to the swamp Beacon in the opening region

Our advice

Leave it off for a first playthrough. The game's own balance is the one the bosses were designed against, and it is the one every guide was recorded on.

Turn it on for a second run, where a game that pushes back is the point.

Leave it off if you are chasing a specific fight, since you want the boss to be the boss rather than a moving target.