Latest Wartune event changes - and how to adapt to them

The surprise element is one of Wartune's most annoying part - but it's also a prime element of the addiction. You never know whats gonna happen the next week or next month. To be successful in the game, you either need to spend a truckload of cash, or be able to prepare and adapt for the coming changes. Today's article is about adapting, preparing, and some analysis of the current events.

The Wartune events sometimes give you „gold” - and sometimes they give only „rocks” (and I mean by „gold” here something valuable, not the game's basic commodity). You have to be patient to wait for the „gold”, and don't trade your resources for „rocks”. Wartune has different periods of event and reward systems. Probably because the developers experiment with us too see how they can achieve the highest income. I remember that for a long time, there were events which rewarded event chests, full of goodies and some rare items. There were „use your resources events”, like love thy mount, engrave your soul etc. which also rewarded these event chests. So you could get the rare loots for free if you had enough resources saved up. Later on, the pattern has changed. They no longer awarded event chest in resource spending events. So the only way to get the rare item was either be lucky, or buy extra chests. So rock era followed the golden era.

Then another golden era came. Although in different events, but you could get a lot of event chests again. Cloth synthesis, gem events, mount hoof event gave more than enough event chests. Coins of ancestry boosted the chests value, giving an additional gaming element where you either spent your coins or waited for a better event.

Right now, we are in a „rock era” again. And this is far the darkest in Wartune's history. Not only the coin of ancestry disappeared from chests, the rare mounts are no longer in the chests, and are replaced with items which are junk. The common loot from chest is mostly useless as well. Events no longer award free chests, you get „signets” instead which can be traded only for mount whips.

And although you can still get previous chests, you can't exchange them - eudaemon vessel and holy vessel still available, but the exchange itself is not. So by the time you realize the holy vessel's contents are junk only, you have no other choice but to open them anyway.

I do not want to go into detail how bad is this for Wartune itself - people don't spend, and many players quit. Rather, I want to focus on those who continue playing with me, and hope for a gold era which is sure to come eventually.

You have to understand the difference between short term and long term goals. On short term, if you spend balens / resources to increase your BR with suboptimal conditions, you will be higher ranked on the top list, and you will have a slightly higher chance to win in Battlegrounds. But this means little on the long term. On the other hand, if you optimize your resource use, you will gain much more BR on the long run, and eventually will be able to beat those who went for the short term goals.

So what does this mean in practice?

1.) Do not buy the current matrjoska chests. The expected value is horribly low, due to the eudaemon system most contents are either junk, or will become obsolete soon.

2.) Do not jump into suboptimal resource-events even when it means +BR for you. A mount hoof event which rewards only mount hoof? A clothing synthesis events where you spend 100 good luck charm and the reward is 60 good luck charm and a few mount whip?

3.) Do not rush to buy new items at astronomical prices. Advanced sepulcrum or mahra for 25 balens? These items worth exactly the same as normal sepulcrum or mahra. (10 for sepulcrum, 5 for mahra). Buy them only when you get with spender events enough additional value.

4.) Do not rush to spend balens to claim goodies from big spender, unless the bonus packs are of REAL VALUE. I did not make a detailed spender analyis event lately, because there are so many spender events - and each last only a few days. Some of these offer components for the 2 new items. But you need only a limited amount of these, so you will get them for free in some weeks or months - and as such, they have no balen value. There are more and more resources in the game which are either maxed out for many players, or will be maxed out very soon. Or you simply don't need more: why would I need more glint of magic when I can't get blessing/gift of god? Same for golden holy water. And since the new chests contain mostly junks, they are of no value in spender packs either. So be very careful when drooling at a triple big spender: chances are good you get only junk.

The items which represent value to veteran players are advanced sepulcrum and mahra, vulcan hammer, empire truncheon, blessing / gift of god, high level divinty souls, and components needed to enchant / refine / upgrade purple or orange eudaemon equipment.

Now check chest contents and big spender packs. You don't see much of these. You see gold, daru, mount hoof, eudaemon signets and other countless junk. And the above stuff is all balen only, sold at 5-25x of realistic value.

So there is only thing you can do: wait patiently for the next gold age. And hope that until then, your sever does not become abandoned...

Eudameon analysis part 2.0

I continue my previous article about the new Wartune feature, eudaemons. My blog focuses on optimizing game play and balen spendings, so I examine eudaemons from this aspect.

Eudaemon inherits a percentage of your abilities, and as such, your BR. So a weak player will have a weak eudaemon, a strong player a strong one (using the same resources). This is good and bad at once.

The good...

Now that some players are over 1 million BR, spending another 100 USD to get a +50 mount granting +1000 BR would make the player only 0,1% stronger. Not very inspiring, getting nothing for a lot of money. The game designers have realized this too, and lately they are adding bonuses which give percentage bonus, so they are similarly useful to a weaker and a stronger player. This is good!

...and the bad

But this also increases the gap between players, which is bad. When a strong player fights a weaker one, and the weaker can't even get rid of the others eudaemon which is killing him alone, that increases the despair in the weaker players. Not that the weaker player had a chance, but now it is a complete massacre. In BG, now it often happens that when I fight a player with a non-orange sylph, I cast a rain of fire, my sylph does a passive attack, my eudaemon attacks - and the player is dead. That must be really disappointing, since I'm not even a whale, and he prolly spent a lot of time building his character.

So, the eudameons are good for strong characters, giving them new goals, but they just make the weaker ones even weaker.

Now, the question is, do eudaemons worth spending money on?

During the triple spender event, I spent 10k balens to buy 231 eudaemon vessels. Along with the bonus ones, I got like 300 vessels in total. See this post, what have I found in the vessels. All in all, these goodies were enough to make one sylph equipment blue, and socket all with low level gems - and that's it. The blue weapon's BR is 1.3% of the eudaemon's BR. So if you spend 100k balens (1000 USD!!!), you can make your eudaemon about 10% stronger. The gain is more for weaker players, and less for stronger ones: but it's the stronger ones who are supposed to spend money here.
Btw, it is much easier to resist the new chests, the holy vessels. They contain almost nothing useful, and you can't exchange them for anything useful :)

So imho, spending balens now on random chests containing random eudaemon items (usually common ones) does not worth it. The eudaemon's damage is not counted in World Boss, Atoll Boss and Guild Boss. I might assume that it will not count even in Class Wars. Yes, this is a bug - but you know how fast bugs are corrected: maybe never. The only difference you will see is in PVP: Arena and Battlegrounds, but these events has no stake, so improving your eudaemon for balens just for these does not worth it.

The only players who could benefit from buying equipment for eudaemon are the very low BR players, where the equipment can make the eudaemon 50-100% stronger. But even these players are prolly better spending their balen on the now highly discounted items to pump their own BR: and the eudaemon will inherit it's percentage anyway. Of course whales will buy them too: they want to be top at all cost. Even when being the top means no or little reward....

Fortunately, you can build your eudaemon for free and miss very little. You can get free blood of zeus from farm, free stuff for war emblem from Tower of Kings, and free skills chests from guild shop. So the only cash component is equipment.

Eudaemons in detail

The Wartune eudaemon system is pretty complicated. Lot of new items and mechanisms. But all in all, its just one number: BR, which increases your damage.

Most of the BR of your eudaemon is a precentage of your stats/BR. This percentage increases as you level up your eudameon using blood of zeus. You can also give some BR boost to your eudaemon by upgrading, enchanting and socketing his equipment.

So the main item to pump up your eudaemon is blood of zeus. Fortunately, you can get this item for completely free, in large amounts. In your farm, just put 9 deers in your second pasture, and collect 9 antlers from them 3 times a day. You also have to grow some blue magic grass so you can make black boxes. Each black box will give you 10-30 blood of zeus, so you can get a purple (lvl 6) eudaemon pretty fast.

Upgrading the equipment is very similar to that of the sylph. You can enchant the items to increase their level (and as such, their bonus), you can upgrade them to higher rarities (white, green, blue, purple, orange), you can socket them gems, and you can refine them to give extra stats. All these require different items.

Enchant. This is a simple procedure. White items require 5 white iron. You can buy this item completely free in your guild shop, for 5 fangs. When your white item reaches lvl 10, you need to use 20 green flames to upgrade it, and after that, you use turquoise to enchant it further.

Since your eudaemon have 8 items, you need a total of 400 white iron, costing 2k fangs. You can collect this in like 3 weeks. After that, you never need white iron again. You also need a limited amount of turquoise items as well, so be careful when spending balen on these. Eventually you will get a lot for free (see sylph equipment shard) and then you can do nothing with them. The purple and especially the orange items will be harder to get, but I wouldnt rush buying these either. Every resource of which you need a very limited amount will be maxed for cashers and free players too, like fate stones.

The same is true for the upgrade items. Now the green flames seem a rare and expensive to get item. But soon, it will inflate. So better wait before buying these.

Socketing. You can put 3 gems in each of your equipment initially (the 4th slot prolly opens up at epic quality). I recommend ATK gem, and HP/DEF gems. These gems upgrade like other gems, to make a lvl 2 you need 4x lvl 1, to make a lvl 3 you need 4 x lvl 2, etc. If you got a bunch of gems now from chests or events, I do not recomment combining them into higher level gems. Pretty sure there will be a hot event which rewards you for making these, just be patient.

Refining. Unlike with sylph and your own equipment, here you use different items for different quality items. For white items, you need rough stones, for green, smooth stones, for blue, darksteel rock, for purple, well refined stone, for orange, dragon blood stone. A white item gets only 1 refined stat, a green 2, and so on. The refined stats are random, like their levels, so you need to refine an item multiple items until you get something good. I recommend going for ATK, if you got a high level DEF/HP thats ok too. Anything else, I would reroll.

There is a big difference between sylph item and eudaemon item refine. If you used a golden holy water to refine a blue sylph item, you got 3 refined stat, like level 3 PDEF: +130. When you upgraded it to purple, all the refined stats got upgraded. Here, the stats DONT upgrade. So if you refined a white item, and upgrade it to green, you will replace the refinement anyway. Same later on. Don't spent a ton of refinement stones to get a rare high level or use balens to lock stats, because you will erase these later.

And this leads to another conclusion: lower level refinement stones are pretty useless, since they give only a very small, temporal bonus. Refinement pack now is 10 balens, but it worth max. 5-6 balens (and only because you have a small chance to find a purple or orange refinement stone).

Now lets glance at Eudaemon vessel statistics. 

This is a total lottery, you can get all kind of chest, which can contain items of different rarities. As you can see, the higher quality items are always much more rare. For example, an enchant pack will give you mostly white iron – which is completely useless. Same for refinement pack, you have over 90% chance to open something which you don't really need. The gem packs are better, since they combine together and dont become obsolete. The upgrade pack would be also okay if they werent so overpriced.

I did buy some chests, because I wanted to see what's inside, and the 3 parallel spender event running made it near-worthwhile already with the bonus items. But the rate of higher quality drops is as disappointing as ever.

Anyway, I have the following advices regarding eudaemons:

• Use the fangs from guild boss to buy the white iron to enchant all your eudaemon items.
• If you are willing to balen, open the majority of your chests, and exchange the remaining ones for green flames so you have enough to upgrade one item at least, so you can use the free turquoises you find in dimension. You can exchange vessels for green flames (in fact, this is the only worthwhile exchange in hot events).
• Do not combine eudaemon gems, wait for an event.
• Don't rush to make purple+ equipment. And don't waste balens on refining white, green or blue ones. There is time, be patient.

First impression of Wartune patch 4.0

When a patch bring a lot of new things, I am always excited and afraid at the same time. Excited since I like to explore, afraid since patch is most of the time more lag, bugs, and lately, massive nerfs. So here is my first impression after 1 day:

Good features

• Elemental forest mpd. This is a real challenge, with good rewards, I like it. Nirvana was a disappointment when it came out, we beat nm easily on the first day. We beat this as well, but it was hard (Please note that the buff from electro boss CAN be dispelled!)
• Farm. Farm looks like fun! More things to do, but does not require significantly more time. I only regret that energizing other players tree is more clumbersome.
• World boss. You can hide other players, a little help with the lag. Another, probably unintended feature... the 2^nd WB couldn't kill anyone. Was fun to survive again :) Same with guild boss.
• Improved login and guild wheel rewards, free mount in arena shop. It's cool :)
• Reduced tank time. Winner team needs only +5k points, so it ends easier (but it's easier to miss a kill and lose the chest).
• Item stacking. I have seen mount hoof can be stacked now to 9999, maybe there are other items too. Still don't understand why they couldn't do this to ALL items. An 5^th page is also handy, but it gets harder to oversee all my items.
• Necro and Purgatory maze now free. Great! Just be careful to unclick the crypt key box each time, because otherwise you lose 3 keys. Too bad these are not in the devotion list, that list is a good checklist to see what did I do and what not.
• Increased gold capacity. Another great change, now I can save up more gold for events like holy forge (if they ever add vulcan's hammer), and can still gain gold via town/gold mines.
• ToK chests give Eudaemon items as well. Loot upgrade for old events is always good, too bad they didn't do this for other events like sylph arena, gods descent, duel arena etc.

Bad features

• Dimension nerf. Dimensions now give much less resist bonus. I understand this was necessary so people spend balen on upgrading resist crystals further. Still, after the first nerf the bonus getting nerfed again is a proof of the designer's inability to do his job. I wouldn't be surprised that after people spend a truckload of balens getting lvl 10-12 resist crystals, resist itself will be nerfed. And a set of lvl 12 resist crystals giving the SAME bonus as a set of lvl 7 now.
• Dimension plunder. Now you can attack and steal other players dimensions. I did not try this feature yet, but it can generate a lot of hatred.
• Sacrifice. Something went very wrong here. I opened 50 dimension chests I saved up, and I did not get a single offering. I also wandered around in 3 entire dimensions, and did not find a single „Dragon Den” which is supposed to drop these offerings. So these are either super-rare (then why the daily offering limit?) or it's not in the game, and they will sell them for balens later.
• Sylph arena nerf. Now you get 20-50 points per win, instead of 200-250. But the point limits to reach the next category did not change. So reaching diamond is impossible now. Either points will not reset at the end of the week, or something went very wrong here.
• God's descent reward nerf. They should have upgraded the reward for God's descent since a long. Instead, they reduce it! What a twisted thinking...
• Eudaemons. Eudaemons brought even more lag to the game, and this is something we do not desire. A million new way to spend balens, while not making the game more enjoyable or fun, I dislike this addition.
• Goodies link. While I could enjoy this mini-game, the lack of reward makes it completely worthless. If you pay attention, you don't need the bombs (they just find a pair for you), and you don't really need the shuffle either (the table shuffles automatically if there are no matches left), still, time is a limiting factor. If you want to go anywhere, you have to keep buying stamina for balens. I got the 3^rd chest by spending 200 bound balens (the first chest which contain something what looks remotely useful), but it was really just a waste of time, I won't play this minigame again unless I have a lot of free time.
• Minigames (jewel hunt, fishing, goodies link, underground palace) alternating every week. One of the most fun things I still enjoy in Wartune is jewel hunt. I do not find fishing such a fun, but still, it can provide fashion cores, so I would hate to lose that. I see they are trying to reduce playtime for us, but this wasn't a good idea.
• Blood Inferno. I heard it became harder, boss stunning people for rounds etc... I couldn't check it, we are not doing BI because the reward sucks. So if it got harder, with the same loot, it's just a reason to continue avoiding it.

Also I am missing some things which I expected from a large patch like this. Namely, a way to finally get vulcan hammers, empire truncheons, advanced mahra and sepulcrum. Also, some way to exchange the useless items for something useful. Looks like we have to wait longer...

All in all, I do not have positive impression about this patch. The good things are shadowed by the nerfs, unnecessary changes, and poorly designed new features. I wish the developers would sometimes communicate with their players via votes and questionnaires. This way they could make a much better game.

Wartune Patch 4.0 information

There are already some forums with information about the coming patch, now R2Games posted an official summary as well:

http://forum.r2games.com/showthread.php?169766-Guide-Patch-4.0-Part-One

I try not to make a similar listing of features here. Rather, just a simple to-do and how-to-do list for the optimizer players like me so we don't miss anything. Unfortunately, I do not have a high level character on S1, so I have only what I collected from forums and heard from others. Please feel free to correct if I'm wrong about something.

New multi-player dungeon, Elemental Forest

It seems the nightmare version is a real challenge. The first boss is a pair, one is immune to magic, the other is immune to physical damage. You have to kill them within 1 turn otherwise they revive. The strategy here is that you keep dealing about the same damage to them, and when they are low on health, you finish them off together.

You can achieve this best by using 2 magic and 2 physical damage based sylph, with AoEs. The best setup is 2 Hades and 2 Apollo. Hercules is not so great, since it have only single target damages, and you can't control which boss you hit. Continue AoEing the bosses - if one is dieing faster, those 2 players must hold back - and when they are on like half bar, release the Delphic AoEs.

The second boss is one of 3 random bosses. It seems there is no special trick here, they are just though, you need a decent BR, deal a lot of damage spiced with heals, and pay attention to chaos/amnesia/bleed.

The main reward here is getting the 2 new equipments, crest and halidom.

Farm

Looks like to be fun, will need to toy around with it a bit too see what's the optimal play there. You can make items from what you grow on the farm, like Vulcan Packs, mahra, whip, eudaemon stuff and tea which gives temporal boost. I will definitely try to make the vulcan packs here.

Dimensions

One of the few features in Wartune which I like as it is and wouldn't change is Dimensions. Exploration, loot, main rewards, some tactic and strategy all included. It was nerfed once, which was a really bad move, now it seems the whole thing will be messed up even more. There is really little information about the new features, one thing which catched my eye is now that you can attack other players dimensions and as a result, they can lose it. I know Wartune was always a partially PVP game, but the best PVP is where the loser does not lose anything he worked hard for. I remember the early days when just a simple plunder created so much hate. Then came amethyst mine, and in a few weeks the whole server set into a silent non-attack agreement. Prolly the same is gonna happen with dimension war pvp, but this depends on the reward as well. People will either farm their alts, or leave this altogether. And maybe farm some old enemies :)

Eudaemons

The kid system, kind of 2^nd sylph, brings us more lag and more BR. There is an excellent guide about the Chinese version on Cosmos blog, I think what we get is about the same, just without the period of growing the baby. You can develop, equip, refine etc. this new „sylph” like your previous ones. Initially, you have to make a decision if you want a make, knight or archer eudaemon. It seems they have the same skills as the main Wartune classes. So for me, an archer is an obvious choice - I always envied their incendiary shot, and deep freeze can be helpful in Purgatory Maze still. Besides that, this game is always about damage, and archers are supposed to be top damage dealers :) Knight kids can rage steal which is not so good since the combat is decided in the awaken phase. They have apollo's shield which can be good if your regular daily party does not have a knight. Achers and knights will prolly take the mage eudaemon for its healing skills.

Other features and changes

Goodies link: I like jewel hunt, so I guess I will like this mini-game as well.

New mount in arena shop: Save up 3000 league insignia to buy a green leopard.

Free purgatory and necropolis: Now I have to pay attention to do these each day as well for the free loot. Especially since the Purgatory is now dropping 2^nd sylph evolve materials.

New items in mystery shop. Just check all shops imho, crypt shop, arena shop, guild shop etc. to see what's new.

Last resist slot: I read that now the last resist slot is available, for 1000 balens. Will be a nice boost.

Resist and will crystals can go up to lvl 12: This poses many questions. Prolly this will mean an inflation of resist crystals on the long term (I was a fool to buy 2 x lvl5 for 6-6 coins of ancestry). I doubt that will crystals can keep up with resist crystals, so with dimensions, people will be able to build a high resist vs a specific element. You remember when I defeated R4GE in BG (and many others complained too that people with 200k less BR beating them). Now this is gonna happen again.

Clothes can go up to lvl 12: Good luck charms need a serious inflation to keep up with this, but I guess that will happen :)

Divinity souls go up to lvl12: I still not recommend doing these unless there is a hot event reward for it.

5^th inventory page for balens. (If you opened the previous ones.) Let's hope it's not more expensive than the 4th page.

Tank mount. Tank now awards mount shards which you can exchange for a 30-day temporal mount. A lot of people don't do tank lately, but now maybe it worth it again.

Astral. Now there is button do to a lot of astral once for 

VIP6+. (But still possible that it is bugged like the previous version, will need testing).

Daily devotion. Some items are changed, like mahra instead of luck stone. Also you get more dimension chests for daily log ins (4 basic per month + 1 intermediate), so stop doing battles for basic dimension shards in basic dimensions (if you didn't do so yet).

Guild wheel. Can give now mahra, sepulcrum and runestone. So if you don't bother doing this, now it's time to do again.

ToK chest. Should have saved up these, but I didn't. Now they will give eudaemon stuff.

2nd sylph evolution

The second sylph evolution is a cash-only event curently. And it's not a cheap deal either. So does it worth it?

The first sylph evolution increased the maximum of your stats by a lot (you could spend like and extra 5k sepulcrum), and it also increased the base stats by 10%. So it made your sylph immediately 10% stronger.

Unfortunately, the situation is different with the 2nd evolution. You get no base stat increase. So a 2nd evolved Hecate is not 1 BR stronger than your Aegis. Of course, the possible maximum of your stats still increase: but for that, you need advanced sepulcrum. And these are also cash-only items currently. And very expensive ones: during the previous months chest event, you had to buy 4 chests to get 1 clown cake, which could yield you 3 advanced sepulcrum. The advanced sepulcrum gives the exact same boost / BR increase as a normal sepulcrum (worth about 5 balens). But this one cost 4 x 39 / 3 = 52 balens. Even if you could utilize the 3 other chests (yielding items of 15-20 balens value each), you still paid like 40 balen per sepulcrum. So the price was 8-10 times more for the same bonus.

Of course everyone have to (and will) do this evolution eventually. But right now, it looks like the gain is not so big, and is very expensive. So it's better wait until they finally add cheaper / free methods to get the materials for the evolution.

Unfortunately, you can never be sure when that happens. Now there are too many examples for items which give a decent boost, and still, are only available for heavy cashers.

1.) Marriage is in the game since a half year, and still, eternal hearts are ridiculously expensive, you can find only 1-2 as a super-rare item in dimensions. But free revive is a badass ability in the arena.

2.) Vulcan's hammers are still super-expensive rarities since many months. The cross-server guild battle can yield a few for free, but this event is very rare. Also it is very sad that you can buy hammer only together with stove (which comes free from AB). And holy forge can boost your BR by 30-50%!!

3.) Empire truncheons. The new medal upgrades are exclusively for cashers. I did buy the 400 truncheon for 2800 balens for the 2nd level, but 800 for the 3rd level (and maybe 1600, 3200 later?) seemed just too much. Still, based on the above, these items can stay extint as well.

So let's hope advanced mahra and sepulcrum will be available for free eventually. By the way, I do pay for the game, but all the above materials are ridiculously expensive.

PS: I just checked Golden Road, now it's full of gems. Made 5 moves, for 250 balens. Got a lvl 8 gem, a lvl 6 gem, and 2x lvl 5 divinity soul, looks like they improved this feature. Too bad it's not working with bound balens.

Spoiled candy analysis

Hi all, I'm back from Paris, spent a wonderful holiday there. I hope you missed my blog entries :) 

I made a quick analysis for you to see what to do with your spoiled candy:

To the left, you can see the expected value of opening it. The contents are pretty poor, no coin of ancestry, and items which many of us don't need (mount hoof, gold, maybe sepulcrum too). Please also note that from 311 candy, there was one mount, and no resist crystal, no vulcan pack. 

To the right, you can see the exchange rates. Of course not every item is similarly useful to everyone. Runestone can be still useful to relatively new players, and for them, it's the second best buy after the mount. The fashion core / luck charm trade this time is pretty poor. The mount is pretty strong, +60, but since you can upgrade it with mount hoof only to 5 levels anyway, I put it's value at 11k. The empire truncheon exchange is very poor. Last time they were selling those for 8 balens apiece, so I do not recommend this change. Same for Moon dust / rock / divinity stones. I put the price of these to 10 balens, and even that's too much, since you need 1500 in total, and unlike the first syph evolution, the 2nd one does not make your sylph any stronger. So these items give no +BR - they should be free effectively. So sadly, the only reasonable thing you can do with Joke hats is exchange them for gold.




Based on the above, here is what I recommend:
If you are a heavy spender and have the balens, just get the maniacal rocket via exchange (do not gamble!). 
Otherwise, if you are willing to gamble, and are not afraid of getting nothing, open your free spoiled candy - but do not spend balen on buying more!!
If you don't like to gamble, and still need a lot of runestones, get those.

PS: Some "kind" people gave me bad repu on R2Games forum. If you like my blog, have like 50+ posts on r2Games forum, and a green repu, please do me the favor, click on the black star under my name and approve my post. Thanks :)