Bad deals

I'm going for holiday, so this is my last entry for 2 weeks probably. But no worries, I will be back after and continue :)

Wartune can always enlighten me with some really bad deals and offers. Probably this is how they test if there are still some fools playing (surely, some do, but I sincerely hope their number diminishes due to my blog :) )

First, there is the "Wheel of Fate" event.

Spin the fate wheel 5 times a day! It costs 30+50+70+90=240  balens for the 4 extra rolls. If you lucky, you can get the average 2 stones per roll. So you get a total of 16-18 fate stones, plus a glory chest. Below-average deal, and you can get unlucky.




Resistance synthetise

Here is another poor promotion. On the aeria games forum, they advertised as giving will crystal (not the first time they mix up will crystal with crystal shards, btw). With resistance crystals as reward, this event is certainly not worth buying crystals for 1 balen apiece in current "hot sale" promotion (opposed to the 0.4 balen real value). I know a lot of people did orange maps in the past days to prep for this event. However, if they were smart, they did not spend balens, but asked some kind free characters to spend their bound balens on buying orange maps for them and join their party.
Well, at least balens can be traded, if nothing else...






Cya in 2 weeks!

June big spender analysis

The previous big spender promotion was okay, let's see how good is the current one.

First, let's see the value of items:

gold: 1 balen per 50.000
daru. worthless
crypt token: worthless
mahra: 10 balens
whip: 2 balens
fate stone: 10 balens (if it's not maxed)
star sand and tear: since you need only a limited amount of these, and you can get them for free eventually, also you don't gain BR here, just your awakened sylph will be stronger, it's very difficult to assign a value. I will have 1000 star sand in a week or so for free, so I don't think there is much point in paying for it. Same for star tears, although it takes more time. The only importance of these would be when you want to evolve your second sylph. But you should do it only to win more in sylph arena, which gets you only sepulcrum, which is not such a big deal. Anyway, you should worth for yourself how much these goodies worth to you. To me, star sand 1, star tear, max. 2 balens.

Spend 2,000 Balens to receive: 200,000 Gold, 100,000 Daru, Crypt Tokens x80, Mahra x5, Star Sand x50, Gods' Gift x1
   value: 4 + 0 + 0 + 50 + 50 + 39 = 143 balens (7.1% bonus)

Spend 5,000 Balens to receive: 400,000 Gold, 200,000 Daru, Mount Training Whip x100, Sylph Sepulcrum x10, Star Sand x100, Gods' Gift x2
  value: 8 + 0 + 200 + 50 + 100 + 78 + 143 (prev. pack) = 579 balens (11.6% bonus)

Spend 10,000 Balens to receive: 800,000 Gold, 400,000 Daru, Soul Crystal x300, Mahra x40, Star Sand x150, Gods' Gift x4
  value: 16 + 0 + 150 + 400 + 150 + 156 + 579 (prev. packs) = 1451 balens (14.5% bonus)

Spend 20,000 Balens to receive: 1,600,000 Gold, 800,000 Daru, Fate Stone x300, Sylph Sepulcrum x60, Star Tear Shard x50, Gods' Gift x6
  value: 32 + 0 + 3000 + 300 + 100 + 234 + 1451 (prev. packs) = 5117 balens (25.5% bonus)

Spend 30,000 Balens to receive: 3,200,000 Gold, 1,600,000 Daru, Mount Training Whip x300, Star Tear Shard x100, Gods' Gift x10
  value: 64 + 0 + 600 + 200 + 380 + 5117 (prev. packs) = 6361 balens (21.2% bonus)

Spend 50,000 Balens to receive: 4,000,000 Gold, 2,000,000 Daru, Crystal Shard x800, Star Tear Shard x150, Sylph Sepulcrum x150, Gods' Gift x20
  value: 80 + 0 + 320 + 300 + 750 + 760 + 6361 (prev. packs) = 8571 balens (17.1% bonus)

As you can see, the only case when you get the minimum bonus they give during such promotions (25+ %) is the 20k pack. The question is, if there is anything in the shop worth buying.

• You can spend a few thousand balens on the skills of your future evolved sylph.
• You can buy god's gifts to get the scorpion mount and spend about 10k more.
• "hot sales", sepulcrum is 4 times more than the realistic price, mahra is 2.5 times more expensive, don't buy those.

Conclusion: this promotion is no worse or better than the ones we see every month. If you have 20k balens you purchased earlier with some recharge bonus, need the scorpion, and your fate is not maxed out, it's okay to spend. But it's not so good so it worth to recharge 20k without getting a recharge bonus. you better wait, there will be better and better promotions as time passes.

The truth about sepulcrum

About a month ago, I did some testings about sepulcrum, and I found that feeding sepulcrum to my sylph did not improve my combat damage in awakened form. Since that, we did a lot more accurate testings, and were able to reverse-engineer the precise combat formulae, many thanks to Tihh! And it seems I was wrong: a sylph's atk IS added to your attack in awakened form, so relax, sepulcrum is good stuff, get as much as you can :)



So sepulcrum does 4 things:

1. as the sylph's hp increases, so does yours.
2. it increases the damage of the sylph when in passive form.
3. it's atk is added to yours in awakened form.
4. it helps you collect more sepulcrum in the sylph arena (if you can make it to the top 3).

Sepulcrum is one of the rare resources where the more you spend, the more you gain. For example, the formulae for your sylph's attack is STR/INT apt * Strength/Intelligence * 0.0018. So the higher it's basic stats, the more you gain from a sepulcrum.

Mahra does really nothing besides increasing the maximum amount of sepulcrum you can feed to your sylph. So unless you are a really heavy casher, you shouldn't advance you sylph past purple 1-star. After you evolved your sylph, you can spend sepulcrum for years until you hit the limit :)


And the conclusion?
1.) Sylph refinement. When you evolve your sylph, it's base stats improve a bit. Don't expect too much from it, unless you already pumped the maximum amount of sepulcrum into it and ready to feed it a lot more.The more sepulcrum you spent earlier, the more that +200 atk apt will increase your attack.
2.) Mahra vs sepulcrum. When you have the option between sepulcrum or mahra, get the mahra if you don't have a single purple sylph yet, otherwise get the sepulcrum. Unless if your sylph is maxed already, then choose these mahra of course.

See more details about sylphs in my sylph spoiler article.

Glory of Gods event

Here follows a quick analysis of the current Glory of Gods event.

Let's see first what can we buy for the Hero Medallion. Here are the reasonable choices:

30 SC for 10 medals, so 1 hero medal worth here 1.5 balens.

10 mahra for 20 medals, so 1 hero medal worth here 5 balens.



frost bear for 300 medals, so 1 hero medal worth 13.3 balens.



scorpion for 700 medals, so 1 hero medal worth 8.5 balens.



loyal steed for 1000 medals, so 1 hero medal worth 8 balens.

You can also exchange 1500 medals for a purple sylph. Let's put aside the fact that If you can buy 1500 medals, you probably already have several purple sylph (hades, apollo etc). You need about 1500 mahra to build a purple sylph from green (you can farm a green for sure). So with this exchange, 1 hero medal worth 10 balens.
Obviously, the best deal is frost bear (if you don't have it), especially since prolly you can collect enough hero medals to get it for free or very cheap. Now let's see if it worth spending money on getting more hero medals.

God's gift.

Hero's medal is super-common (50%), whip, fate, gold and sc is common (12% each), 500 sc and sepulcrum rares (1% each), steed is ultra-rare (0.2%).

5 hero's medal: 0.5 x 5 x 8.5 = 21.25
2 mount whips: 0.12 x 4 = 0.48
2 fate stones: 0.12 x 20 = 2.4
80k gold: 0.12 x 1.6 = 0.19
20 soul crystals: 0.12 x 10 = 1.2
500 soulc crystals: 0.01 x 250 = 2.5
100 sepulcrum: 0.01 x 500* = 5
loyal steed: 0.002 x 8000 = 16
* previously, I valued sepulcrum to 10 balens, but recent experiments show that sepulcrum does very little besides granting some extra hp and helping in arena, so I reduced value to 5.


total value: 21.25+0.48+2.4+0.19+1.2+2.5+5+16 = 49.02 balens

The pack looks good value, better than the previous ones. But do not forget, the above number is based on you having average luck with the ultra-rare. If you open 200 packs, and don't win a loyal steed, your average value was only 33. So this pack is, as usual, for gamblers, and for rich people. You need to buy 280 to have the Scorpion for sure.

Another conclusion, IF you don't have a good purple sylph, but have the money (for example, you are from a new server) you should consider collecting 1500 medals and buying a purple sylph, it's much better deal than buying the mahra itself.
AND if you go for a puple sylph right away, and ready to evolve it eventually, I would recommend Pan! Check out the evolved sylph skills. All of them suck, except for Pan's, which are excellent. Obviously, the developers want to make Pan attractive.

Please do not forget: as you can spend an unlimited amount of money in this game, you can even spend an unlimited when they begin reducing prices slowly (as we have seen in the past months). So be wary. Prices will be even cheaper eventually. And keep yourself to your monthly spending limit! In other games, like Doomlord, you can be a top player just by being smart and spending 20-30 USD per month. Here, spending twice more will not make you much stronger.

Class Wars strategy

Tomorrow is Class Wars, so I would like to share some thoughts on Class Wars - from a mage's view, of course, but maybe some advices work for other classes as well.

Testing. It is very important that you decide in advance what skills, astrals, sylph you will use, and make some testings. Find someone of your class with similar BR who is willing to do some practice with you. Go to altar of enoblement, you can duel there unlimited time without losing HP potions. Try out different strategies, see what works best for you. But make sure you do not go in the direction of just trying to beat the specific setup your friend is using! This practice is good for something else too. CW is some stress (at least for me), and any mistake can be fatal. So you must have a good routine at knowing what to do, what skill to use. You hands should not shake :)

Preparation. This is a good time to use all the sepulcrum you saved up (waiting for a sepu spender event), upgrading your astral, refining/identifying your last cloth. Make sure you have all the lvl 5 potions (do not buy it for balens! Just roll guild wheel each day 30 times, you will have enough), and scrolls (you can get them from guild wheel too, or buy them for crypt tokens). 5 minutes before CW, double-check skills, astrals, sylph, your PVP medallion, then drink the potions, and use the scrolls (2 of each since scroll last only for 30 minutes).

The swiss system. People complain about pairing all the time, even though it works fine. Each round, you get paired with someone with the same number of wins. BR has nothing to do here. Earlier, this system was exploitable, since the first rounds were less points than the later ones, so it was a good strat to lose the first 4 match. Not anymore. Just try your best. If you lose, no worries, your next opponent will be weaker probably.

Astrals. Some astrals work better than others. If I were you, I wouldn't use Illusion, for example. Guardian angel is great, on the other hand. It's a reason why I don't recommend a mage use crit setup: even if you like it for emotional reasons, guardian angel will ruin it during cw.
Deflection is a funny gamble astral. It's main strength is, if it triggers when your opponent would kill you and you kill him as well, you will win. If it wins you one match you would otherwise lose, it served its purpose.
If you think between HP and block, I would go for HP.

Slyph. A slyph does 3 things during cw: it determines the elemental form of your attacks, it deals some damage based on its stats in passive state, and it deals massive damage in awakened form, based on your atk and the mahra and sepulcrum you spent on the sylph.
If you have a sylph where the quality/sepu is much, much more than your other sylphs, use that - it will deal more damage, regardless of other considerations. If you have several similarly powerful sylphs, consider what others use in your category, and what works best against that (I mean here the resist / elemental type).
My personal opinion is that for mages, Hades is the best choice, for others, Gaia. Unfortunately, not everyone had 400 bucks (me included) to have a Hades.



The duel itself. Chaos rune is widely used now, so you have to be prepared for that. For a mage, it does not make much difference - troops die in 2 rounds anyway, and then you start sylph phase at max hp, but for other classes where it is a damage race, it can be lethal. It's best to wait a little at the beginning to see what your opponent is going to do, before eating/using a chaos. Besides chaos, my other favorite is still bleed rune.

The duel is decided by awakened sylphs. Before that, we just toy around: kill troops, heal up, purify each other's bleed - but the sylph delphic is usually a finisher, whoever can cast it first AFTER the 50% damage increase wins. Therefore, you must time your awaken well. If you awaken too early, eat a bleed and use sylph skills before 50%, your opp heals up and then finish you off. If you fumble too long with purify and healing, the Hades big nuke kills you. BR, ATK is not as important as timing. Practice it with someone a lot in advance.

Good luck all!

Soul engrave & big spender

We got two "events" today, soul engrave and big spender. Wartune gives the same events us each month, but there is always some twist, so it's wise to examine if participating is worth it or not.

Soul engrave. use 100 soul crystals, and receive 100k gold, 100k daru, lvl 1-5 gem pack and 30 soul crystals.

Please note that the 30 soul crystal you receive you can use again to claim more rewards, which you can use again to claim even more etc.So this event is actually:


Spend 100 soul crystals, and receive 142k gold, 142k daru, 1.4 x lvl 1-5 gem pack and 43 soul crystals. 

100 SC worth 50 balens.142k gold worth 3 balens, 1.4 lvl 1-5 gem pack worth about 7 balens, 43 SC worth 21 balens (daru worth nothing). So by using a goodie worth 50 balens, you get a bonus pack of 31 balens. More than 50% bonus! A really great offer, you should spend all your SC. And don't worry about not getting mahra, mahra is overpriced anyway.

Big spender: the bonus packs looks pretty weak at first sight.


pack1: 33*+25+2=60 balens (6% discount)**


pack2: 33+100+4+60(prev. pack)=197 balens (9.8% discount)


pack3: 66+1000+8+197(previous)=1271 balens (25% discount)

*see Father's love value explained here
**prices calculated using this guide

Looks like if you want to get some reasonable discount, you need to spend 5000 balens. And that's with me valuing sepulcrum to 10 balens (will make an entire article just about sepulcrum soon).

Now let's see if there is something worthwhile to buy.
First, if you saved up your horns from sky trial, and think you should spend balens to get more will crystals, this can be the good time.
Buying fashion core for 270 balens apiece is a decent deal too since cloth synthesis.
If your fate is not maxed out, you can spend balens to reach chest2 and maybe chest3.
There is also on sale Poseideon's wing, a class A wing for 1726 balens. Unless this wing is essential to upgrade your wing by 1 level in the near future, this deal doesn't worth it: the stamina itself you get after identify worth only 400 balens (8x5 endurance: 40 BR)
And don't even think about buying soul crystal packs!

The one-time goodie bag

Under Hot Events, the one-time goodie bag is up (although it is a mystery why they call it that way, since you can claim it an unlimited times). Let's put into practice my method to decide if this deal is good or not.

First, let's see the value of the packs:

20+20+12+25+10+2=89 balens
(8.9% discount)


50+40+24+50+20+4=188 balens
(9.4% discount)


150+100+60+100+50+10=470 balens
9.4% discount)



When calculating values, I used the usual method, found here.

As you see, this promotion is pretty poor: on spender event, they usually give 20-25% discount for spending. And to top it off, if you buy more, the discount does not even increase. And sadly, there is nothing in the shop worth buying. Sepulcrum for 20 balens apiece is a serious no-no.

So this is a bad offer. Do not spend.

Wishing wall

With Sky Trail, Wartune just added another gamble to the game. I don't want to go into detail about sky trail strategy. I want to discuss the rewards you can get by using the horns.

The trick about horns is that you can use all of them for free, or you can use balens to flip additional cards and have higher chance to get the rare loots. First of all, here is a table of 500 horns used for free. As you can see, mahra and sepulcrum are the super-common loots, star tear shard4, celestial stone, star sand4 are the uncommon ones, star sand 10, 20 and will crystal are rare.
First, let's check the usefulness of these items.
Mahra, sepulcrum: nics goodies, worth about 10 balens each.
Celestial stone. Totally useless trash.
Star tear, star sand. You will need 1000 star sand, and 10 star tears (either found as S reward in sky trials, or made from 50 star tear shards) to upgrade your purple+ sylph. Can't really assign balen value to these yet, we don't even know when the sylph upgrade is added to the game.
will crystal. Now this is the real loot. Will crystals make your toon really stronger (see in detail here), so this is a goodie you should consider spending balens on.


As you can see, the only reason why you should consider spending balens is to get more will crystals. You have 2 options: never spend balens, or keep flipping cards until you hit a will crystal. If you get 6 free horn per day like me, you get 180 horns per month, which will yield you 10x60 will crystals shards per month. On the other hand, if you spend balens, you will get 35x60, but it will cost you 26,250 balens:

So, in a month, you can have either +11% damage for free, or +21% for 26250 balens.

I do not say you should spend so much money. What I say: with also spending an average of 150 balens on jewel hunt each day, and buying orange maps when there is a hot event for it, you can easily spend 300+ USD per month, while getting +1 BR or more per every 10 balen spent.
You can spend a LOT of money on this game and still gain a good BR ratio.
Then why spend money on something which gives much worse BR? Like the current "Limited gem pack". A lvl 5 gem and 5 level 1-5 gems (mostly lvl 1) for 999 balens. Worth 133 balens using the calculations here. Don't fall into the sale traps. Don't forget, Wartune is not like the European customer-centered games like Doomlord. You have to be smart or you lose your car and your house :)

Father's day events

There is a quick summary of the current Father's day event in wartune. As always, I focus on helping you to make the best decision about spending balens and increasing your BR.

First, let's see what we can buy for roses:

1 rose for 15,000 gold (50k gold is 1 balen*, so this is 0.3 balen per rose)
        * you can find in detail here how to calculate balen value of items

5 rose for 10,000 kyanite (1500 kyanite worth 1 balen, so this is 1.3 balen per rose)


10 rose for 8 mount whips (1 whip worth 2 balens, so this is 1.6 balen per rose)


10 rose for 10 runestone (1 runestone worth 3 balens, so this is 3 balens per rose)

20 rose for 10 sepulcrum (1 sepulcrum worth 10 balens, so this is 5 balens per rose)


200 rose for a cloth (Since these are only B clothing, they can give 48 BR at most, so they worth 480 balens: 2.4 balens per rose)

500 rose for a wing (just a B wing, worth no more than a general discount wing for 1400 balens: 2.8 balens per rose)




So unless you are a real fan of looks, you should go for the sepulcrum.


Now let's see the Father's love packs' worth:

Red Rose x5  (50% chance, 25 balens value: 0.5 x 25 = 12.5)

80,000 Gold  (12% chance, 1.6 balen value: 0.12 x 1.6 =  0.19)

Sylph Sepulcrum x2  (12% chance, 20 balen value: 0.12 x 20 = 2.4)

Mahra x2   (12% chance, 20 balen value: 0.12 x 20 = 2.4)

Mount Training Whip x2  (12% chance, 4 balen value: 0.12 x 4 = 0.48)

Runestone x100   (1% chance, 300 balen value: 0.01 x 300 = 3)

Mahra x100    (1% chance, 1000 balen value: 0.01 x 1000 = 10)

Scarlet Plume x1  (0.2% chance, 1400 balen value: 0.002 x 1400 = 2.8)

So the total value of the pack:**
12.5+0.19+2.4+2.4+0.48+3+10+2.8 = 33.77 balens
   **if you don't understand how the pack value is calculated, see here
For 39 balens. Doesn't worth it, especially since now you can spend thousands of balens daily and earn +1 BR for 10 balens or less.

Summary:
You can collect about a total of 300 roses for free (number depend largely on how many gems you had accumulated). You should not buy any father's pack, it's just a waste of money. The roses you should spend only on sepulcrum. You might consider buying one cloth (helm for mage, weapon for others) but it will be a waste when one day in the shop the entire set will be sold for 900 balens.

Maximize Battle Rating

Battle rating is used to compare strength of players. It is derived from the total of your statistics. Whenever you upgrade your character - enchant equipment, improve gems, level, academy skills etc. your BR improves. It is similar to the Ability total in Doomlord.

How is BR calculated?
1 ATK, 1 DEF etc. worth 1 BR, and 5 HP worth 1 BR, so it's pretty simple. If you are a mage and gain +1 PATK, your BR will increase. But it will not make you any stronger. So if you have slightly higher BR than another player, it does not mean that you will be able to beat him. The BR itself is rather for "showoff", for being 1st in rankings, and winning rewards in BR events.

Which stat should I increase?
Sometimes you can make decision which stats to improve, like when spending mount training whips. When you spend whips on intelligence, you gain +20 ATK and +5 DEF (=25 BR) if you spend them on armor, you gain +20 PDEF and +20 MDEF (=40 BR). So it would seem improving armor is better, since you gain more BR. However, Wartune is based on offense. Attack is more valuable, since you get more multipliers on attack. Also, +1 ATK increases your dmg more than +1 DEF decreases it. (See my article on combat to learn why)
And don't forget that the main resource generator, World Boss takes into consideration only your attack power, your defense is irrelevant there (after reaching a minimal level).
So in general, you should go for ATK first, and when it's maxed or too costly, begin improving the other stats in stables, in academy, in guild skills etc.

Spending balens
When you spend balens, you actually buy BR. You have to make sure you get the maximum amount of +BR when spending balens, otherwise you are just burning money. See this article how to maximize the BR/balen gain.

Maxing out BR
Of course you still want a BR as high as possible, for being 1st in BR ranking, and to grab the occassional nice rewards for BR events. There are some things you can achieve this:

• In Academy, improve PATK for mage (and MATK for knight/archer). Although it is a useless stat for you, you can get a good BR increase for a minimum amount of kyanite. 
• You can improve the other attack as well in stables. When you need to use 200 whips to gain +5 intellect, it's okay to spend 30 to gain +5 strength. It not only gives some pdef, it helps you in BR events.
• In guild skills, max out every skill.  Even charisma.  Those all give some BR, and in the long term, the gold cost will be insignificant.
• An archer should use crit gems - but before BR reward events, convert them to mdef of pdef, since they give more BR.
• A sylph's only stat which is added to yours in HP. So when a BR event is coming, reset your main sylph's attribute points and spend all on HP to gain extra BR.
• Some astrals are nice, but don't give BR at all. Such are will destroyer, determination, goddess blessings etc. Before you log off, equip the brilliance, charisma astral you otherwise not using to improve your BR. With a good reward event, you might even consider converting one non-BR astral into a PATK/MATK astral as well, then convert back later.
• Potions/scrolls no longer work in BR event and rankings so don't waste them. But if you log off in a dungeon, your card bonus will count.