Recent events and changes

Dear Readers, today I write a quick summary of recent events and changes in Wartune.

1.) Big Spender. The same as previous big spenders, it's less and less appealing. It mostly gives stuff which is useless / can get a lot for free / almost maxed. For me, nothing interesting there besides sepulcrum and mahra. And they also fail to combine it with some good sale. So without detailed analysis, big spender is a NO BUY imho.

2.) Cloth synthesis. We accumulated a lot of free fashion cores and luck charms from wild shop in the past months, it's time to spend them! Don't forget, that you can claim the lvl 3 and lvl 4 reward too if you make a lvl 5 cloth. So best strat is not to use all ingredients and make a lvl 6 cloth now, just make a lvl 4 or 5, make one a month later etc. You earn more rewards this way. See more on cloth synthesis here.

3.) World boss final attack cannot be survived anymore. The worst part about this is that it came "unannounced". What did they think, that we wont notice? I remember when I played some Final Fantasy episode, which had some nice challenges even after I won the game. Some 1-million HP super boss which was a good opponent still. In Wartune, surviving the boss, then surviving it multiple times was a goal we could work to achieve. Building guardian rune, making high level HP gems etc. They take it away because they hope we shall now spend balen on WB revive now. Well, I won't, I never did. WB was fun, now it's damn boring again.

4.) Mars will working correctly now. Again not a word about this. As you all knew, Mars will was supposed to spread damage equally between members of the team. It shouldn't have done much with an AoE. Well, it was bugged, and reduced AoE damages (and heals) by 75% so it was really great help in Tower of Kings, and helped knights survive WB. Well, this bug is no more. We knew it will be gone eventually.

The game is changing constantly. Things get nerfed, and sometimes we get unexpected awesome rewards (like gem synthesis). The Wartune game designer's concept is that surprise is a good element. To some extent, I agree, but we had too much surprise lately....

Golden Road

Wartune has a new temporal event, Golden Road. Do not be mistaken by the look, thinking that this is some kind of a mini game. It's just another pay-and-win gamble machine like Magic Pot, Prosperity Wheel or Underground Palace and all the chest events. I have 2 main problem with these:

1.) You don't know what you get when you pay.

2.) It's horribly expensive - ie. the expected value is very low.

In Magic Pot, you get a random item for 65 balens, here, for 50 balens, but no other real difference, except for the pool of items. Actually, you can't even know for sure that the dice is not rigged. For example, when you would need a roll of 5 to get to the rare item, maybe that 5 happens less often than the other numbers :)

The squares have 4 categories:

Skull squares: didn't win anything.

Useless junk: bounty scrolls, legend stones, crystalloids, exploration artifact, insignia, mount whip, runestone, gem pack, fate stone. These are the items which you can get in large number for cheap, so you shouldn't pay for them.

Useful low-value items (worth less than 50 balens, like 20 in average): sepulcrum, mahra, xp scroll, horn, lvl 4 refinement crystal, 

Useful high-value items (worth more than 50 balens, let's say 200 on average): wings, good luck charm, lvl 10 transposer, lvl 6 potion, 999 roses, vulcan's hammer, 

To be able to make a precise calculation, I would need a lot of data, which I don't have at the moment. So my conclusion is: there are just too much junk on that board, and valuable items are part of a second gamble system (chests), as long as we don't know the chances, it is a scam by default. If you did one or more moves, please tell me what you win, I try to collect data, and maybe we know more.

Btw I think the developers made a mistake with this event. If it would cost only 10-20 balen per dice roll, a lot of players would try it. A gamble where you get a lot of junk besides useful items is always lower value, so it must be cheaper.

Free divinity shards

Wartune's new gamble, Wheel of Prosperity is a huge failure imho. In Big Spender, you get a fix bonus pack after the balen you spent. In Wheel of Prosperity (which replaced Big Spender now), you get only something random, which is mostly useless or of little value. Also players had a concern: what if they win a mount which they already have? Well, you shouldn't worry about that, since no one wins a mount. But in case someone does, there is an exchange event under hot events, where you can exchange this mount into event shards. 

And here comes a trick (which is prolly unintended by the designers) which can get you some free (or at least, cheap) divinity shards:

1. Buy phantom yeti card for glory crystals.
2. Exchange phantom yeti in kit exchange II for kit's supplement.
3. Exchange kit's supplement for divinity shard.

If you make it to the finals, you can buy 1 yeti for free, saving yourself 6240 balens (cost of 80 kit's supplement). But even with buying glory crystals via wager, it's much cheaper than buying chests.

*** UPDATE: It seems you can buy the yeti card only if you don't have it. So another feature limited to those who spent only very, very limited balen on the game or started recently. ***

Which is the worst feature of Wartune?

Today we were waiting for 1 hour on sylph atoll boss (since no one knew exactly when it died during the night), and spent another full hour killing it. Along with the additional features of this event (only the 1st team gets good reward, computer speed is more important here than BR, and some annoying bugs like if you have a farm ready, you have to constantly click off the warning, or sometmes you can't awaken for the entire fight) I was wondering if this is the worst event in Wartune, or if there is anything even worse.

But then cross-server guild battle came into my mind. It does not only have a record amount of bugs and lag (people having dark screen for entire xGB, people fighting their own team members, not being able to click on grab tower button etc). The complete design is bad, imho,lLasers killing people regardless of their BR, teams can't fight together etc, I think they should have saved a lot of work for themselves and a lot of frustration for us players if they should have just used the good old guild battle code.

Also here is the new arena. Before patch 3.1, the 3-player team arena was fast, furious and fun. The only reason why we didn't do it because the reward suck. Now there is great reward - but it's lagged, and insanely bugged. We hate it as hell but still do it :(

But I can mention tank too: it's one thing that tanks has nothing to do with a fantasy game. But, to make it worse, your stats, and the time you invested makes very little difference. It's just a damn stupid video game. Which, if you unlucky, have to play for a looong time for some minimal rewards.

There are many more mind-numbing, boring events which people do only for the rewards, not for the fun: maps, spire, mpd, fishing, circuit etc. With all the new things added to the game and time needed increasing and increasing, I would love to see the possibility to blitz more features. I know recovery is there, but it gives no items at the moment. If I were a Wartune developer, I would do this: if you did an event at least 100 times succcessfully - like be first in tank 100 times, or win nirvana nm 100 times, or complete 100 orange maps etc. then I would add an "Improved Recovery" button, where you could claim FULL reward.

So what is your opinion, which is the worst feature of Wartune now?

How much did you spend on Wartune?

There is something very important you should be always aware: how much money you spent on Wartune. You keep spending 10, 20, 50, 100 USD here and there on balens, who knows how much in total. Well, do know it, and you will think twice before recharging next time :)

A lot of people have no clue how much they spent on Wartune. Do you?
Okay, first, take a paper and write down how much you think you spent. Then:

1. Open the VIP panel. Note down your VIP xp.

2. Calculate for how many days you were VIP. If you are VIP since the first day, then just check when you started playing, and calculate how many days has passed since that. If you started VIP later, you have to know when you subscribed first.
3. From your VIP xp, subtract 10 x number of VIP days.
4. The result is the number of dollars you have spent. But also, don't forget to add to this sum 8 USD x VIP months played (cost of VIP).

Well, did you guess accurately?
How much you spent in total is one thing: it's more important how much you spend per month. One of my friends climbs wall, and spends like 100 USD on that per month. Another of my friend saves each month about 150 USD so he can go to ski once a year. Everyone needs a hobby, and if you enjoy it, don't worry about spending money on it, just be consistent. I set myself a limit of max 150 USD per month in Wartune, but I already spent the December budget as well, so I'm holding back now :)

To figure out your monthly spending, just divide the total spendings by the months you played.

Please also be aware if you spent more than you are willing to admit, or you can't hold to your limit, then you are a game addict. Yes, the same way as someone can be a game addict in a casino, for example. The realistic amount depends on your country and your monthly income, of course. 

Counter attack kit analysis

Here is my usual analysis of the current chest gamble on my Wartune blog. They did not make it very complicated, so I won't make it complicated either.

I recommend it to two types of players to get these chests:
1.) You want a purple amazon / pan / iris / eve. Since the chance to get one shard is approx. 50% from a chest, you need 400 chests (15600 balens) to get  If you have a green sylph, and use mahra to make it purple, you need approx. 1400 mahra to do so. You certainly can't get 1400 mahra for 15600 balens (espcially since here you got some extra goodies too), but you can collect it for free: problem is, it takes an awfully long time. So if you play on some S500+ and still dont have your purple sylph, prolly this is a good opportunity to buy one.

2.) You want divinity shards. Divinity shard were unavailable for almost 3 months, for a good reason: that the divshard-hungry masses now throw themselves at these packs. Prolly it will work :) But you have to know, 500 divinity shards might cost you 400 (four hundred!) USD (unless you are lucky and find a Hades/Apollo or two and exchange it back for shard).

If you want just a Hades/Apollo now (no divinity shards yet) it's a very expensive deal. If you are unlucky, you need 700 chests (273 USD!).and then you still need the mahra to upgrade them (they are only blue!) If you are a low spender, it's prolly better to wait for one for free, from sylph atoll boss last hit reward, or even better, go with a purple eve / amazon, they don't cost a fortune to evolve.

This time, I do not make a calculation of the chest's expected value. If you are waiting for those divinity shards for 3 months, you will buy regardless. For the purple sylph, I already calculated (above) that it's an okay deal. You should be aware that the Divinity Shard x 10 is not rare, it's an ultra-rare drop. So the only divinty shards you gonna get are those you exchange for the kit's supplements.

But here is a very important warning: DO NOT BUY YET!
Wait for a big spender event. And who knows, they might even add a gem synthetiser event with hundreds of free chests like last time. So wait until the last moment, but don't forget, you can only buy 200 chest per day. So if you wait until the last day, then you can't have 400 shards. If you need 600, you have to start buying 2 days before the final day, etc.

New balen sink: underground palace

This article will analyse the new addition to Wartune, "Underground Palace". I will first write a few no-so-obvious facts, write about what's good and bad in Underground Palace, and finally, will give you a simple mathematical calculation to help decide if we should spend balens here or not.

Things you should know about Undergroumd Palace

• Always try to move to a square which have 3 neighbours you have no info about. This way you maximize your chance to discover something new.
• The map is always build from roughly the same elements, only their positioning is random.
• After you have found enough objects, you can move to the next level, where each object gives double amount of items and points (supposedly there are further levels, with 3x (4x?) etc. rewards)
• When you move to a square where have already been, it costs no steps.
• Using the 30 free moves you start with, you can always get at least 100 points (and claim the first chest) but 500 points (second chest) is impossible.
• You can use the key (bottom of screen, center) for 3 moves when you step on a square where "you have a strange feeling". Possible rewards: vulcan's stove, underground chest shard, underground mount shard and a nice chest with some decent treasure.
• You can exit the Palace and reenter and continue later on the same day.

Pros and cons of the Underground Palace

Underground palace is an activity based on "Erebus", similar activity from another similar game, League of Angels. Unfortunately, they failed to copy a few key features:

• In LoA, there is an object named "Radiant light" which removes fog of war from the entire map. Would love something similar here too.
• In Erebus, the 50 or so moves are more than enough to explore the entire map usually. Here, the 30 moves are not enough to get access to the exit.
• In Erebus, you get item rewards for battles as well, here, you won't.

Despite those, this is a nice activity, you can get some cool items, like 1-day Spirit covenant or 1-hour VIP card. The sylph skill chest is fun too, although it sounds like a message "we keep the sylph skill replace-gamble in the game, collect random skills from Underground Palace to play it". 
Do not buy items in the "black market"! Despite what they say (40% discount) there is no discount at all, it's the same price as with usual sales (3-5x more than realistic value). Do not even move on those squares.

Should you spend balens on additional steps?

You can buy 5 extra steps for 99 balens, so +1 step cost 20 balens. Let's examine how much balen you can earn with 1 step. I collected info from a few runs. Also, I did one "balen-run", where I spent bound balens until I get enough points to claim the second chest. It wasn't cheap, cost 700 balens, so this is a much more expensive mini-game than jewel hunt.

As you can see, the average value of a step was 7,3 balens from 6 runs. There is a new item there, underground chest shard. When you have 5, you can synthesise it into a chest (on the left).
With the balen run (second one) I was able to reach the second floor. There, every object gives double loot and points. The problem is, the points needed for the next chest is increased as well. And the chest values play a heavy weight in determining step values. As you can see, I had the worst step/balen value with this run.
So, when you buy new moves, it cost you 20 balens / move, while it yields only 7 balens on the average. This is a very bad investment.
DO NOT SPEND BALENS in this event. It's so bad, even whales will not spend much here, so don't worry about them gaining an advantage :)
Still worth doing each day for free, you can earn goodies worth 200-300 balens in 10 minutes.

(I try to update this article when I have more information)

Wartune resist calculator

I promised a while ago that I will make you a Wartune resist calculator. It's complete now, you can try it on tis link, or just click "Resist calculator" in the top menu.
 You don't need to collect a large amount of data and do tests. Just do one simple attack, write down the numbers, and you will know exactly how much is your opponent's resistance. Great for sky trials, God's descent, and any other place where you want to see how the combat works.

Some fun facts about resistance:

• You need at least 167 more resist reduce than your opponent's resistance to have maximum damage.
• Players can now increase their reduce resist faster than their resists, so for veteran players in pvp resist only matters when you fight your own element.
• Looks like since patch 3.1, resist and resist reduce has changed seriously when you are not in awakened form. Play around with the resist calculator, and you will see.

October big spender analysis

Here is a short analysis of the October big spender event. It's almost identical to the previous one, so nothing really great here.

Item values:
mount whip = 2 balens, hoof = 10 balens, mahra = 5 balen, sepulcrum = 10 balens, SC = 0.5 balen, S quality cloth = 600 balens, lvl 6 gem = 122 balens, atoll pack = 30 balens.
Prices are based on recent blog posts and this article.
I consider insignia, dragon souls, gold, daru and legend stones zero value (you can get too many for free to assign any balen value to these).


52 balens (5% bonus)


185 + 52 (previous pack) = 237 balens (12%)

1070 + 237 (prev. pack) = 1307 balens (26%)


1750 + 1307 = 3057 balens (30%)



2944 + 3057 = 6001 balens (30%)

6076 + 6001 = 12077 balens (40%)


6564 + 12077 = 18641 balens (37%)


Please also note that last gem events, we got a truckload of lvl 8 gems, so I have doubts that gems worth anything anymore. Let's see if there is anything of value for sale:
mahra 25 balens each: 5x realistic price
sepulcrum 20 balens each: 2x realistic price
atoll pack 39 balens each: 1,3x realistic price

So the best thing you can do is buy atoll packs for at least 10k balens, and claim the 30% bonus, then you get the +1 BR per 10 balens spent value. Effectively, you get no bonus, you just get stuff for the expected price. We have seen much, much better promotions in the past 2 months. 
Please consider Wartune's current situation. They are unable to correct the lags, bugs, and exploits added to the game since patch 3.1, that's like 6 weeks. Their customer service is paralyzed, they are no longer able to resolve problems, they get too many tickets (I have an 1 month old unresolved ticket). The community's frustration grows, and they respond only with more sales as usual. So expect bigger sales, bigger discounts soon, and skip suboptimal promotions like this one. If you still think you need to spend a large amount of money on Wartune, wait, there will be much better opportunities.

Atoll Conqueror's Pack analysis

Here is my usual analysis of the current Wartune gamble, "Atoll Conqueror's Pack". Please note that although the name and content suggests that this pack has something to do with sylph, there is no track of divinity shards, as if the developers forgot about this item (or, rather, want to work up the price of it when they finally add it).

What's the best exchange?

1 balen / shard

6 balens / shard

1.6 balen / shard

25 balens / shard

20 balens / shard

20 balens / shard*

(* normally, I assign 300 balen value for A-B clothes they sell in packs, but these are S quality so I assigned double price) 

25 balens / shard

30 balens / shard

As you see, most exchanges are of similar value (just stay away from kyanite / resist shards) so you can't make a bad deal here. However, I would still advise against fashion cores. These you can get for free from the wild shop, and they are really cheap from "old leather" type events. So I would go for clothes first from the free boxes, and if they give so many that you still have shards to spend, get sepulcrum.

Now let's see if it's a good deal to buy extra boxes for balens so you can have the mount as well:

spirit shard: 25 x 0.5 = 12.5 balens

80k gold: 1.6 x 0.12 = 0.192 balen

2x sepulcrum : 20 x 0.12 = 2.4 balens

2x mahra: 10 x 0.12 = 1.2 balen

3x mount whip: 6 x 0.12 = 0.72 balen

1M gold: 20 x 0.007 = 0.14 balen

100x runestone: 200 x 0.007 = 1.4 balen

100x mahra: 500 x 0.007 = 3.5 balens

chimera: 8000 x 0.001 = 8 balens

expected value: 12.5+0.192+2.4+1.2+0.72+0.14+1.4+3.5+8 = 30.052 balens

A very bad deal for 39 balens. Do not buy. Not even if you are a cloth collector: remember, the cloth will be for sale later anyway.

If they would have included divinity shards in either the atoll pack or the exchange (instead of having it as a rare? drop in the limited 25 balen boxes), at least some people would buy this pack. But this way, Wartune will remain without significant income for another 12 days...

A good Wartune deal

I would like to call your attention to a good deal, which is pretty rare lately in Wartune. They run a mini "big spender" event, with a not-so-great bonus (worth about 20% of what you spend). But they also have in the shop two mounts for 5995 balens (packed with 150 mount whips). I hope no one bought these mounts yesterday, when the event was not running.

What I recommend, buy ONE of the mounts, and claim all 3 prizes from the event. This way, you get a +30 mount, 150 mount whips, 100 sepulcrum and some other goodies for 5995 balens. So you get approx. +1 BR per every 8 balens spent. Please also do not forget, that with the recent whip+gem combo events, you can get a LOT of whips. I spent about 30-30k free whips in August and September, and have over 50k now. So maxing out mount whip is a reality now, and that increases the value of new mounts which increase the number of whips you can spend. (Although these are crappy ones, only +5 mount stats, but still something).

And referring to the article I posted yesterday:
If Wartune should have run these two 2-day events at the same time (mount sale + big spender), then

• people who bought the mounts yesterday wouldn't be frustrated (+customer satisfaction)
• people would buy BOTH mounts, not only one (+extra income for them)

Wartune: Million USD profit

I read somewhere that Wartune generates 24 million USD income per month. This includes the Chinese and other versions as well, and might be out-of-date. So this game is really profitable, but there is even more potential - which can benefit us players as well. I want to give some advices to the Wartune owners here on this subject (even when I know none of them will ever read this blog).

1. Recharge. I bet you noticed that it doesn't matter how much you recharge in Wartune, a balen always cost the same. You don't get bigger discount with bigger recharge like in Doomlord. When someone pays 5 USD via paypal, the seller gets about 2.5 USD. When someone pays 100 USD, the seller gets about 92 USD. So if I pay 20 x 5 USD, or 1 x 100 USD, I get the same amount of balens - but R2Games gets 50 USD instead of 92. 

Well, they do give some bonus packs, which are supposed to be bigger and bigger  with each recharge. Maybe these packs were good when the game launched, but not now. Bounty scrolls, lvl 1-3 gem packs, some gold, daru - these worth nothing at all. So right now, I always recharge the absolute minimum needed to buy something, if necessary, in multiple small amounts, where they lose money. If I don't have unspent balens, I can't spend them accidentally on sylph upgrade, mount training or all the trillion other hidden balen-traps.

Solutions:

• give more balens for bigger recharges
• give better packs which include sepulcrum, mahra, mount whips and other useful items
• have recharge promotions where you get a huge bonus pack upon recharging a significant amount (like with merges - but some servers don't merge for a year)

2. Useless sales. 98% of the sales are hugely overpriced (like 5-20 times realistic value), or are a gamble (which are not only overpriced, but leave many unlucky players frustrated). 

Solution:

• The players are no fool. Make good value sales. It's even okay to reduce prices slowly.

3. Bad timing of events. Right now, they first have a spender event (with useless items in the shop). When it's over, they add some useful item to the shop. When it's over, comes the recharge event. They think this way they can milk more money, but it's quite the opposite.

Solution: 

• Synchronize recharge and spender events with good sales, have them at the same time.

4. Customer service. Let's face it, R2Games does not have a working customer service currently. You can send in tickets, you get an automated response in a few days, but after that, when you request further help, usually no answer for a long time. I know that they have no access to game data or logs, checking anything and compensating is very difficult because it have to go through several parties, so it's easier to reject everyone. But when they lose this way tons of customers who spent 1000+ USD and would spend even more in the future, it's a big loss.

Solution:

• Have a professional CS team who have access to game data and logs, knows the game and can actually help players like in Doomlord.
• I'm sure they get 1000s of tickets daily, they have to filter them. Let the pro team handle tickets from paying customers with high priority, free players will understand better that they have to wait.

5. Lack of trust. Having a great product is sure one way to make profit (that's what's happening now), but having faithful and trusted customers is the way to multiply it. Right now, players have very low trust towards R2Games. This is because the game problems are not corrected, player's don't get advanced info, and CS can't help people. People often don't make payments because they are afraid they can lose everything easily.

Solution:

• Have at least ONE member of your staff who is up-to-date with information, and have direct contact to the developers. Let this staff member post regularly on the forum, give precise, first-hand information, address the player's needs and feedback, and show us that our opinion matters.
• CS must make high priority that paying customer's who can't login due to bugs have their access restored asap, and paying customers who suffer massive losses due to a bug, hack or poor implementation are compensated accordingly and quick.

Crit heal and guardian angel

This is one of the Wartune's mysteries, does the guardian angel astral affect your chance to critical heal? And if yes, by how much? I mentioned a few months ago that I did some tests on crit heal with a critical of 3600, but had zero crit heal out of 100. Since that, the world has changed a lot, now I could test with a critical of 11383, and the result was:

So yes, the rumor is true, guardian angel is bugged. It reduces your crit heal rate too, not only your opponent's crit rate.

Please note that even without guardian angel, the chance for crit heal is much lower than chance for crit damage: with this crit, I had the maximum 80% crit rate even vs lvl 80 opponents.

Conclusion: Mages should use guardian angel only where the opponent criticals are a bigger problem than not having critical heals. This is mostly player-vs-player, where a guardian angel can mean a 15-20% damage reduction. Do not use it vs world boss, sky trial and other pve opponents where you need the critheal to survive, and critical hits don't happen often. Knights and archers can use this astral all the time of course. Although crit chance caps at 80%, higher critical is still good to counter an opponent's guardian angel in pvp, and for a mage, to have more crit heals in pve.

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Old leather exchange analysis

There was a great chest event at the end of August, „Old time event”, where the chests contained cloth packs, fashion shards, luck charms, and old leathers which you could exchange for additional cloth packs. That was a very good event, see my analysis here. Now we got the same event again: but things has changed since.

1.) Now you can get plenty of free fashion cores and luck charms for free in the wild shop. I'm always less willing to pay for something what I can get for free as well :)

2.) The cloth you can get for old leathers are exactly the same like last time. So if you participated in the event then and got the boxes, this event is useless for you: just for the fashion cores and luck charms, and maybe the 1-2 new rare cloth drops it's not a good deal.

So without going into the numbers, my advice is this:

If you didn't do the old leather event in August, and still need a lot of cloth you can get here, this event is good for you. See the exact calculation here first! I still recommend that you wait with buying until the very last moment. We are not in a hurry, you will get some free boxes, maybe there will be a big spender event, maybe they give out a lot of chests for free...

If you have the majority of the cloth, skip this entirely.