Wartune scam warning

You remember the Wartune beast shard exchange not so long ago? You could get mounts you missed for a decent price by collecting beast shards in Golden Road. Now they are running a cloth shard exchange, so I quickly checked the cloth packs they offered this time. I have seen that right the first set I was missing, so I started running around in Golden Road. The first thing I noticed was that there were only 1 and 2 shards, no 3 or 4. Also, there were more "junk" squares. So I had to spend 1500 balens to collect the 40 cloth shards necessary for the Nocturnal box. But I said its still a good price for a set of cloth (normally sold for 900 balens) plus a wing.

I buy the chest - and then I saw the text more closely:

Open to obtain ONE OF the following

So far, every cloth box contained a set:

"Open to obtain the following" and "Open to obtain one of the following" is a little difference. And to be honest, I did not even think it could be a gamble chest - containing a 300 balen cloth for 1500. So yes, I ate this. But I post it so Wartune can't scam others like it did me.

Another disappointment came from today's clothing event. When I do combines for wings, I do not use good luck charm from lvl 2 to 3 and from 3 to 4: since the success chance is still over 80% in these cases (based on 100+ cloth synth from past 6 months). I had about 16 level 1 wings, and one lvl 4, so I was pretty sure I can make a lvl 6 wing using these materials. First, I pumped up the 16 lvl wing to lvl 2 using fashion cores, then stared combining. After the first fails, I though I had bad luck. But when I saw I had 8 fails from 10 - while the success chance is supposed to be 80% - I know this can't be just luck. They changed the chances again, without notice. There is always a chance that I was super-unlucky, but I doubt that.

And I got the third disappointment too. During the past week, I got a lot of free double virtue chests. So I tried to exchange some for empire truncheons after getting a mount. There is a new stupid limit of max 10 exchange per day. Too bad, this counter did not reset during midnight. So I couldn't do any more exchange during the event. I submit a ticker, which was answered by R2 genius GM R2_Austin, 6 days after I sent in the ticket (and long after the event ended). His reply was: clear cache and cookies. In the past, when my tickets run into R2_Austin, I got similarly helpful, intelligent replies reflecting the GM's deep knowledge of the game. Prolly now you are asking the same as me: why the hell this guy was not fired yet? They do have some good GMs too.

I never saw a company which has worked so hard to get rid of his own customers. Just a half month ago, our server was totally crowded, and now its almost empty. I know that Chinese have a different ethic from us, Europeans. They considering cheating the customer honorable, since they "do it for the family". And short term profit is above all, get rich today, don't care about what happens tomorrow, if no one will ever play a Chinese game, if the enviroment gets ruined etc, they don't care. Just be rich today. 

But, like every human being, why they don't try to learn from their mistakes? Why they don't try to build trust? The other game I'm playing, Doomlord, is run by a small Hungarian company. They make games since 20 years. Players play their games for years, and when they make a new game, these players will try their new game too, because they trust the company. Because they don't cheat the customers, they communicate with players, they try to develop their games by listening to the players. Wartune could be a really good game. It's like nuclear power, a great invention of the human race. But in the wrong hands, it can do terrible damage. Such a good game, and it is used to scam players. Good profit on the short term, abandoned servers on the long...

Class Wars

I like Wartune's Class Wars, its really exciting, a test of all what you achieved. This is the equivalent of the Championship in Doomlord. Class Wars brough a pleasant, unannounced surprise: they made more categories. So far, there was a separate CW for east, west, europe and oceanic. Now it got split further. I'm not sure how it worked, but there were at least 2 sepearate Class Wars now on the European servers (if not more). 

This meant more people could get into the final. Previously, you needed 11 wins to make to the final, now 10 was enough. And yeah, BR requirement for making to Warlords Hall as less as well, so...

Yeah, I made it to Warlords Hall! The only non-vip there :) 

The past months brought many opportunities to increase BR for cash - huge advanced sepu and mahra sales, and the introduction of eudameons. I skipped these opportunity to spend balen, just grabbed the cheap mounts - but I did not even spend my mount hoofs on them, so I didn't really expect this. I'm very happy now, fighting with the big players in finals :) 

And if its already Class Wars, some words on strategy. CW strategy changes drastically almost every month. Lately, troops were replaced by sylphs, then eudaemon was added: those all changed CW strat. And now, the introduction of dual gems made ATK values soar, surviving is not really an option anymore unless you are a whale with astronomical DEF values.

So far, I always went with guard and heal rune, but now I tried chaos and guard. Chaos can really mess up the first 3 rounds due to eudaemon, and if somehow the fight is still going on after the first awaken phase, it can counter the opponents heal spell as well. Amnesia can be powerful too, since on CW, there is no HS, so amnesia can be more effective than in general pvp.

In CW (and in pvp general) its always important to time your awaken well. The best bet is to awaken at the same time as your opponent do. If you awaken too early, then you will revert much earlier than him and he can destroy you while in sylph from. Same if you don't awaken, and try to outheal. I think this outheal strategy no longer works since the dual gem ATK boosts.

Also do not forget, that during CW, if you happen to have a draw, most damage dealt is the tiebreaker. Keep this always in mind when choosing skills.

Don't forget resist. For a mage, dark resist is obviously the most important. Hercules is also still popular, and thirdly, I choose fire resist. I need fire and electro resist for elemental forest anyway, so I even have dimensions for these 3 resists.

Also here is stun. You prolly remember how much crying was about stun. People hated that they stood there helplessly for rounds. But eventually, this problem solved itself: they nerfed holy seal, and everybody reached HS 99 anyway. And now, stun is back, nastier as ever. You just need to cough up a few thousand of USD, buy a large amount of beads of influence, and you can stun people for 3 rounds right before sylph. This is a show of how poor is the game designer lately. Not only he piss off everyone by rendering fate stones useless (which are still given out as rewards EVERYWHERE in the game), but he demands beads instead, which is a very expensive cash-only item now. So influence is a guarantee for whales that they can win: regardless of resists, mistakes, timing delphic and guard runes (unless his opponent cashed into influence as well).

Luck is still important (with chaos and amnesia runes, deflections, criticals), but timing is important as well. If you know your opponent is going to delphic, you can usually have time to use guard rune - unless you are casting a delphic too.

If you made it into the finals, good luck to you!

*** UPDATE ***
Finished 14th, which is not so great, because I could beat only 2 people. The fun part is, I realized after the CW finals that my medal was expired :) So guys, always check everything before going into battle! Medal, buff, astrals, resistance crystals...

Sylph expedition

In general, I like Wartune's new addition, Sylph expedition. It's a new challenge, gives new goals, requires thinking and strategy. Also I like the feature of borrowing a friend's sylph: it strenghtens the community, and creates some kind of socialization. But, sylph expedition could be even better.

Blitz: Thanks god this event can be blitzed! However, you can blitz only to (max level you reached minus 10). And as such, this makes sylph expedition a 30+ minutes activity each day. If I were 7roads, I would have done blitz differently: if you complete a level without using ANY skill, or you win it at least 20 times - then you can blitz to there.

Rewards: The rewards are not very motivating. On screenshots, I have seen that the Chinese version gives advanced sepulcrum, mahra and other useful goodies. Here, you got blessing of god only on first completition. At least a few blessing of god and gift of god should drop each day. Sylph equipment shard and sylph xp scroll, who needs that? (The divinity soul shards I got only for being first, its not general loot). A Cloud adventure gives 10 times better reward.

Skills: The skills system looks good at first glance. A lot of skills to use, they can make the difference between victory and loss. However, the way you develop these skills is not good. First of all, as you see, I got a grand total of 8 shards while I got to stage 29. At this rate, maxing skills will take about 100 years (ok, no doubt, some cashing event will award more). But the bigger problem is the way skills advance. When you upgrade a skill, you upgrade its power (by a tiny amount), not it's cooldown. The upgrade should go for the cooldown (or duration), for all skills, not only the last 4 wich has such a long CD anyway you can't use them twice.

Strategy advices
Here follows some strategy advices. If you know more, please, post them as comments.

• When you choose a friend's sylph, you can choose from currently equipped sylph. If you need a triton, for example, which your friend does not have equipped, ask him to equip first. After that, you will be able to select it as well.
• I prefer to play 2 tritons, because most late bosses deal a large amount of damage, including AoEs, so need a lot of healing. I have a 150k Hades, which can be one-hitted by boss 26 without ice shield. Also Triton's ability to stun the boss is invaluable. 
• Boss 20 is immunte to PATK, so plan accordingly.
• When you use a skill, actually, one of your sylphs will use it instead of its normal skill. So be careful, if your triton who is using the skills is about to heal, wait for it to be finished before activating the skill.
• The spare sylphs are kinda useless, unless you are a whale with 4-6 fully developed orange sylphs. By the time a sylph from your main team dies, your spare sylphs will die in the first round too.
• The famous Wartune lag can be actually your friend. If a fight lasts longer due to lag, you might win some seconds on the cooldown timer :) Btw, I was thinking a lot how can I reduce cooldowns by sacrificing my spare sylphs, but couldn't come up with anything.
• You can win 12 rounds vs a boss which is dealing too much damage. Use stun, divine guardian, then reset the skills with the last skill and use those again. For me the first boss where I need skills is stage 26, it's really hard.

Dual synth gems advice

As usual, I did not want to make an article which just copies and repeats information from other sources about the new Wartune feature, duel synth gems. Rather, I wanted to make an article which gives practical information about how to use this feature to your best advantage.

The word "advice" is maybe too strong here: rather, let's say, I just explain how I do this. If you like, you can do the same, or come to a different conclusion following the same logic. Or just disagree with me and do something completely different :)

I already wrote multiple articles about how combat works in Wartune, and what is the effect of different stats. To know what duel gems to make, you have to know which are the priority stats for you.

ATK. Atk is the most important stat in Wartune. In PVP (player-vs-player), attack increases by 50%, 100% etc. as time passes, while defense not. Also in the most glorious PVP event, Class Wars, total damage dealt is the tiebreaker. In PVE (player-vs-environment), most bosses go berserk after a while, so it is usually a damage-race: ATK is the most important in PVE as well.

DEFENSE. Defense is the second most important stat in PVP. This is due to the nature of Wartune's combat mechanism. Damage is calculated: (ATK-DEF)/2 * multipliers. So even if your opponent has many multipliers (crit, determination, pvp medal etc), if you reduce the basic damage a lot with your defense, the result will be still low. However, in PVE, defense is not so great. Because most PVE bosses have a very huge ATK value, and no multipliers. 

There is one exception where DEF is as important as ATK, in team PVP situations. When 4 players (and maybe some eudaemons too) throw aoes at you, then 1 DEF point will counter 3-6 points of ATK per round. But in the current team PVP situations (arena, GB, XGB) the rewards are not very good, so you should still focus on ATK. Maybe this will change with future events.

HP. HP is the second most important stat in PVE. While defense wont help you that much there, big HP can help you survive a big attack, and suntoria and heal rune will heal you for more if you have high HP. 

CRIT. I made many tests on this, and I strongly believe that crit is a capped effect. It reaches its maximum somewhere at 12-18k crit (depending on the opponent's crit reducer effects like guardian angel). Many people disagree with this, it's up to you if you prefer having a 40k crit because it looks nice.

BLOCK. Block is a capped stat as well, you can get maximum proc rate with about 8k block in pve, approx. 13k in pvp (because you have to counter penetration).

So, you have 38 gem slots (8 legendary items, plus artifact and halidom), the question is, what gems to use?

I recommend still using 10 pure ATK gems. A duel synth gem gives 20% more bonus than a non-duel gem, but 100 ATK worth more than 60 PDEF and 60 MDEF.

You should also use a bunch of ATK+CRIT gems. I'm sure a lot of players will use 10 of those as well. Problem is, that way I will have way too much crit. And if I suppose I don't need half of the bonus, well, 60 ATK is not better than 60 PDEF + 60 MDEF. Personally, I will make 7 ATK+CRIT gems only, that will give me more than enough crit.

I curently have 3 block gems, I will make 4 HP+block to get the same block value as before.

The remaining gems should be HP+PDEF, HP+MDEF and PDEF+MDEF gems. The question is, what is your priority, DEF or HP? I would say, if you are a top player, then PVP is a priority for you, beating the best of the best is your ultimate goal, so you will focus more and more on DEF. If you still not in the top tiers, you should focus more on getting as far as possible in PVE content to get maximum rewards daily, so you should weight a bit more on HP.

Right now, I will keep my balance between HP and DEF, I will make 9 HP+PDEF, 2 HP+MDEF and 6 PDEF+MDEF. This way, I will have the same HP, block, pdef, mdef and a bit higher crit than before, and about 20K more MATK. Please note I prefer to have roughly the same PDEF and MDEF, I can balance this out with having less MDEF gems than PDEF. If a knight/archer wants to do the same, obviously they have to make it the other way (2 HP+PDEF and 9 HP+MDEF).

There is one last question, should you make level 12 gems (if you didn't do it yet) before the synth, or wait for a possible future lvl 12 gem event?

Currently, I have lvl 12 ATK gems, because ATK is a top priority, but the rest of my gems are lvl 11 only. Before the dual synth, I will make a few lvl 12 defense gems too, but I keep the majority lvl 11. I think there is a good chance that there will be lvl 12 gem synth events in the future, and I'm patient. But if you have so many gems that you can make all dual 12 and still have a good stock of lvl 11 for any future events, then you are safe to make them.

Pink Bunny Chest analysis and Mount Exchange

Actually, I would like to touch multiple Wartune topics in this article, not only this weird-named gamble-chest.

Ultimate Dragon Chest

First of all, I would like to apologize for not giving an analysis on the previous chest, Ultimate Dragon hest. The reason was simple, there was little to analyse there. The contents were total crap - blood of zeus (both a limited use item, and available for free); ice cores and soul cores (also completely worthless, since you will max those out long before you have enough divine energy to upgrade your item); green flames  (very limited use item). Also it was supposed to have divine energy (but it was rare), and a cool dragon mount, Artrhos. And the hot event exchange also had nothing useful besides the mount. So I collected approx 150 free chests from events, then bought 150 more and exchanged for the dragon.

Pink Bunny Chest
The current Pink Bunny Chests seems to be the exact copy of the previous month's resistance vessel. You can find analysis of that in my previous article. Obviously, you shouldn't spend balen on buying these chests - especially because you have only 50% chance of getting it, and 50% to get the absolute crap Dragon Chest. Probably the cloth won't be bugged this time, still, most of us are cloth fans, so buy armor and either weapon or hat depending on class. Fortunately, plenty of free chests are given out, so we can get the 2 cloth and some warpath crystals. The wing is too expensive, as usual. I wonder when will the developers realize that wings should cost the same as the other cloth.

Late Development Blunders

Lately I feel that the Wartune event designers and testers are not as good at their job as before. We encounter more and more mistakes during events. You remember the problem with the level 7 divnity soul synthesise, the zero cost cloth refines, temporal incubus dragon card showing up for 400 beast shards in mount exchange, no gift/blessing of god in big spender packs during sylph equipment enchant events... And now the eudaemon gem chests sold at 1/10 of intended price... Although imho a price was right the first time in Wartune's history, and every other price is wrong (ie. 10-20 times more than realistic value). 

But this is probably due to the stress they got, more and more problems, stricter deadlines, maybe less personnel. I don't mind if they make mistakes - if they can correct it. And I must admit, my other favorite game, Doomlord is much better at that. But, in their defense, they keep adding good things too. The matrjoska chests, or the mount hoof events rewarding only mount hoof is not among those, but the Mount Exchange is a good one.

Mount Exchange

For a long time, I kept saying mounts are the best thing to spend balens on in the game. Many other resources (sepulcrum, mahra, fate stones, soul crystals, whips etc etc) are now maxed out for top or not-so-top players, rotting in their inventory by tens of thousands - and they can bang their head into the wall for spending balen on these in the early days. But mounts, it is very rare that you can get an earlier cash mount for free. They are nice to collect and give good boost. Unfortunately, if you missed a mount, it was very difficult to get it later. But not anymore. Via mount exchange, you can get many mounts you missed early.

And the good part is that there is a nice discount on them. You can get beast shards in Golden Road. Previously, it was a "dont-even-touch" hoax, but now its much better. On almost every square, you get a random amount of beast shards (between 1-5, but there is one square with 50). On the ? marks, you get mount whips from mystery chests, and the skulls squares, well, those are really "you won nothing" squares because they give sack of gold only.

The catch is, you can get an average 2-3 beast shard per move (50 balens). Mounts cost 40 shard per +10, which is 800 balen per +10: much better than the usual 2000 balen price. I spent 1600 balens, and got 100 beast shards and 320 mount whips. I had 20 shards from earlier, so I could get an incubus.
Of course still do it only if you can also claim several big spender bonus packs as well. The coupons are really good, if you spend 5k balens you get coupons worth 4.5k back (but you have to be smart with those).

Eudaemon war emblem and resistance vessel

Today I try to give an overview of one specific eudaemon feature, the War Emblem.

Looks like every new Wartune aspect is more and more complicated. As if the developers want to make sure players are unable to tell the value of the required materials - and as such, will blindly pay any price. And they are succeeding partially - its more and more difficult - if not impossible - to assign a BR/balen value to all the various components. Eudaemon itself gave like 40 new items, its hard to tell how much they worth.

At first, the War Emblem panel seems puzzling. But you can understand it better if you compare it to your character's "Battle Protection panel". Its effectively the same: Each of the colored circles are "resist slots" where you can insert 3 different resist crystals. But instead of making gems and upgrading them, you use Eudaemon resist essences directly to increase your resists. Also, you can level up the War Emblem itself using warpath crystals. This does 2 things: first, it allows upening up resistance slots (as you see, you need level 5 to open up all), and it increases the BR of your Eudaemon the same way his equipment does.


Resist essences

You can get eudaemon resist essences and RES reduction essences from Tower of King chests and from Sacrifice. If you can do ToK nm, you get about 5 of each every day. I have no info of drop rates from lesser levels of ToK. Offerings are quite rare, so you wont get much from there.

The resist levels cost 10, 12, 16... resist essences each, atm I know only the resist bonus for the first 2 levels, 15 and 25. Since most players have a resist reduce of 500-800, I would say you need at least 600 resist with your eudaemon to have any use (in pvp). To reach that in 5 slots, for 3 resist, well, I can only make a very rough guess based on the current numbers... you need like 4000 resist crystals. At that time your Eudaemon might get a 10% damage reduction, that can be like 6-10K BR. The Eudaemon's BR worth somewhat less than the players BR, I would say 2 balen at most per BR. That puts eudaemon resist essences value at 4 balens.

Resist reduce essences
Resist reduce essences are more useful, since 1 point there can counter all different resists, but it seems also more costly to increase. So I put the resist reduce essence value at 16 balens (4 times more than resist essences), but both numbers are just very, very rough estimates (please note in hot events exchange that they value res reduce essence 4 times more valuable too). But I need some anchor so I can compare the value of these items and calculate chest values. Of course when we have more data, we can fine-tune these.

Warpath crystals

The third item is the eudaemon warpath crystal. As you see, each upgrade gives a nice boost to stats. Question is, what is the max. level, and how steeply the cost increase. In the above example, 150 warpatch crystals give +6800 BR to the eudaemon, which is pretty decent. But further levels will cost exponentially more and more, so I would say on average warpatch crystals will not worth more than 30 balens - prolly even less on the long term. I think it is quite possible that this stat maxes out at level 10 after a few months, and remaining warpath crystals will be useless like fate stones.

Resistance vessel

And now come the current chest, resistance vessel. Now that we have assigned some balen value to these new items, it is possible to calculate a rough estimate of expected value. I assigned zero value to pure refinement crystals: these items are used to refine Artifact and Halidom, and are dropping in great numbers in Elemental Forest. You will have more than enough for completely free to refine your equipment before you upgrade them to orange. So they worth nothing.

Even if you could buy these chests directly for 39 balens, it would be a bad deal. But you can't, you have to buy them via a gamble, which makes it an even worse deal. I sincerely hope that the developers realize soon that their matrjoska experiment failed, and stop giving us these gamble-in-gamble chests.

Fortunately, we got some of these chests for free from the love thy mount and resistance crystal events. So the question is, open them, or exchange them?

Looking at the above table, and also at the exchange under hot events, the answer is obvious: exchange all chests for warpath crystals. But actually, there is a twist. I recommend that you exchange first an armor for 30 chests, then a weapon if you are archer or knight, or a hat if you are a mage for another 30. After that, try to identify it. Although they are only class B, you will be able to make them 5-star which worth the exchange. You can exchange the remaining chests for warpath crystals.