Long-term goals are always important in any game, and that was a strong aspect of Wartune. I always had long-term goals. Building up two red sylph and then merging them into a kickass Odin sylph seemed a truly grand, epic long-term goal, and I liked it when I read about the first time.
Sadly, when we got the details, the whole thing became pretty disappointing.
First of all, the price. 60.000 balens, which is 600 USD. An insane price for a few digital pixels, and as someone pointed out, 20 times more as in the Chinese version. But we are used to getting things at ridiculous prices, paid mindlessly by the whales. And, after a while, it became cheaper, then it is given as a recharge gift, and even later you could get it completely free. But in this case, this will be pretty difficult. Because it's not an item you buy, its a fixed balen cost. Hard to change without loss of face, and without angering those (very few) who paid it. Still, I hope that one day this price reduction will happen. Either they change the price, or allow bound balens (although it's still too much), or give back 50.000 balen as bonus upon purchase, or simply give out free or cheaper Loki seals. So I did not give up on this long-term goal yet. But the 60.000 balen I willl never pay.
Sadly, Loki / Odin has other flaws too. When you make the merge, the new sylph will inherit random skills from the previous ones. You might lose all important skills and retain only useless ones! And after that, you have only one choice: start buying skills, and hope they overwrite the right skill. In other words, gamble - with 150 USD skills! This is as unacceptable as the 600 USD price. So reducing the price is not enough to make this sylph appealing: they must reduce skill costs too, and, for god's sake, finally allow players to delete sylph skills.
And sadly, the drawbacks do not end here. The main question is, if the new sylph will be stronger, and how. Sylph statistics are calculated by multiplying together their base stats (strength, armor etc) with the "aptitudes" (the green bars you improve by spending sepulcrum) x 0.0018. After transformation, the maximum of the aptitudes do not change. Since you already needed a maxed out Loki / Odin, you will not be able to spend any more advanced sepu after the transformation (unless you tranform Loki to Odin). However, the base stats for Odin increase. So your Odin will be still stronger (but Loki not). But there is a catch. Loki / Odin is a MATK / PATK sylph. So you have to increase BOTH stats. And this is true not only for the base stats: you have to divide between MATK and PATK on equipment, both in refine and divinity souls. So what you win on higher base stats, you will lose on using both MATK and PATK. Still, the new sylph will be stronger: but not as much as you hoped for.
There are 2 ways to make Odin. One is to make 2 red sylph with max aptitude. The cost to make a second sylph red is like 20.000 advanced mahra (this is just a guess, can be more), and at least 10.000 advanced sepulcrum.
Or, you can make 2 orange sylphs into a Loki, then advance it into an Odin, at the cost of 5000 moon rock, 5000 moon dust and 1000 emblem of dark & light, and then raise it to red. (So effectively, you have to build only one red sylph).
With all discounts and gift packs, you can get adv. sepu / mahra as low as 10 balen / piece. So this would be an additional 300.000 balen cost if you make Odin from 2 red. This compares to the 5000 moon rock and dust (cost a total of 1000 event chest in last promotion, 30.000 balens) and 1000 emblems (cost another 1000 event chests, 30.000 balens), which is "only" 60.000.
So obviously, upgrading to Loki and then to Odin is a much better way than building 2 red sylph first then making them Odin. Still just making Loki and not upgrading to Odin will get you only a useless sylph.
Of course, these prices are still ridiculous. But you can start gathering moon rock, moon dust, emblem of light & dark from free events, so when they reduce the price finally, then you have the components.... If that ever happens. But, as I said, I like long term goals.
We had a really busy week behind us, there were a lot of intense events in Wartune, and more are in the progress. I already wrote about the clothing event, let's see the others.
Unlimited resist crystal event
This one was really surprising. My first comment was, the developers did not think about the maths. Yes, I had a lot of crystals from dimensions, but if I combine them without any event, they would have given one level 8 crystal. With the conventional limited event, I could have gotten eight lvl 8 crystals. But with this unlimited event, I made 112 lvl 8 water crystals! And I'm sure most of you have similar numbers. There are some interesting consequences.
First, now I can make lvl 9 crystals, even lvl 10 ones. I make a few sets of lvl 9, but lvl 10, I suggest precaution. You never know if this unlimited event will happen again, or the days of glory are over. If I combine these 112 into 12 lvl 10, and then a few month later, an event is added which awards lvl 9 and 10 gems, and people who were patient make lvl 12 gems, I would be pretty disappointed.
Second, there is news of the upcoming patch changing the resist system. Yes, the gems will display a bigger number - but you can bet it will mean much less resist. People now parade with a set of lvl 10 resist gems, and if it's against your sylph's element, they will be invulnerable. So there is a big lure to make those lvl 10 gems. But I recommend against that. Now everyone have multiple orange sylphs, it is easy to switch to another, and the lvl 10 gems become useless. Also, you should wait for this patch and see what happens to the resists.
But anyway, CW is tomorrow, Hades is okay for preliminaries, but for the finals, I don't recommend it :)
Advanced sepulcrum (exploit) event
Lately, more and more events are bugged. They are made hastily, without testing. First, we got a sylph enchant event, which was not counting advanced sepulcrum as before. I was angry, beause I saved up advanced sepu for this event. When I saw it was excluded, I used all. A few days later, another sylph enchant event show up - for advanced sepulcrum! In the first hours, it was bugged, and it was awarding advanced sepulcrum - for using normal sepulcrum! If I were aware of this, I would have collected 1800 advanced sepulcrum for free, but it was corrected before I could have used it. And instead, I spent my montly limit on an adv. sepulcrum sale a few weeks before, which I used without getting reward. So this was a good lesson, not spending balen on adv. sepulcrum ever again. And of course, now saving them up for the next similar event. But, you know, this is why I still like Wartune: because you can make mistakes. And if others make more, then you are still better :)
Holy forge event
This is a real badass, with Narrenda giving a truckload of holy forge components, this event is a golden mine. I used 2500 vulcan hammers and gained significant BR, and a lot of lion chests. The only problem here is gold. Earlier, I wrote an article about saving gold, it helped me really to use all these tricks. And I will have gold even for the next holy forge event too, luckily.
Anniversary lion chest exchange
Again this week, like on the previous one, they added an "anniversary exchange" for the lion chests. So now we had some really good options for this chest to exchange for. I admit I should have written an analysis on this. Problem was, I didn't even know what to choose for myself. I had about 576 chests, all from free events, so they were really generous this time. Finally, I choose to open the "remainder" chests - a total of 66. Mostly I get only gold, nothing useful as usual. I also claimed the full set of cloth and wing for 210 (because of the title), and bought some evolve material.
Cloth shard exchange event
Looks like I made another mistake here. I often said, go, exchange some chests for cloth, but don't buy the wing, it's too expensive. Now you can buy the whole sets together. I have all the sets, but none of the wings. Just for the wing, the price is too high. So if in the past, I wouldn't have bought cloth at all, now I could get the set much cheaper. Anyway, this is a good lesson for the future, either buy the whole set together with the wing, or don't buy any of the cloth. There is a big change now, though, now you get a title which gives a good BR boost. Of course, if the event designers weren't lazy, you could buy each cloth and wing separately. But don't expect them to be reasonable.
And it looks like the ancient beast shard golden road is no more. Replaced by mount shop. I wonder what's gonna happen to my ancient beast shards then?
Looks like the Wartune developers has finally understood that no one is doing cloth events, because they cost a lot more than you win. So they changed it. But they did it their usual brain-lacking way. They add bit, but they nerf meanwhile.
Changes to cloth event:
1.) Now you get event chests again (like it was always some months before). This is a positive thing.
2.) Now you get clothes again (like it was always earlier). This is a positive thing too.
3.) If you make multiple clothes of the same level (only lvl 5+) you get the cloth chests multiple times. This is positive as well.
4.) Earlier, if you made a lvl 8 cloth, you could claim the reward for lvl 5-7 as well. Not anymore. This is a very serious and nasty nerf.
The problem is, even when you could claim all rewards, you get much less good luck charms as it was needed to make the given item. We no longer get good luck charms from wild shop, and the balen shop price is still ridiculous. So the only thing you can do is, gamble. And gamble is one of the most disgusting factor of this game, especially with such high stakes.
Here is an example. Let's suppose you already have a level 8 wing from previous events, and want to upgrade it to level 9. Fortunately, you saved up a bunch of wings and fashion cores. So how to do this? First, upgrade lvl 1 wings to lvl 2, using 5 fashion cores each. If you don't have a LOT of wings, you have to upgrade to lvl 3 too this way, but fail rate is 75%, so you need 20 fashion core for each upgrade. For a lvl 8 wing, thats a total of 32 wings, and 800 fashion cores - or 64 wings, and 320 fashion cores. But that assumes all your combines are successful - which requires an insane, impossible amount of good luck charms. You can risk doing it without luck charm (success is still 80-90%) but thats over 30 combines, you will fail 3-6 times at least, and if its at level 7, thats a big problem.
Previously, you could do this: Make a lvl 4 wing, and reclaim some of the components. Collect cores and luck charms from mytery shop. Next time, make another lvl 4 (or right away a lvl 5) and reclaim components too. And so on, slowly, over a year or more, with a series of clothing events, you could get your lvl 9 wing. Not anymore. Yes, you get back chests and cloth now - but you get back so much less fashion core and good luck charm as before, it became quite impossible now.
So sadly, point 4 makes it worse than points 1-3 has helped. If the developers had brain, they should have reverted the cloth event to the version they had 6 or more months ago. That worked fine, nerfing it multiple times was completely unnecessary.
There is one more thing you can try, of course. Grab your level 8 wing, and try to upgrade it with 5 fashion cores. Previous tests show the chance is 1%. So this is much "cheaper" than the above method. I know a guy who upgraded all 4 pieces to level 10 from level 9, using only 30-50 attempt per piece. I gave up after failing 400 times. Same for my friend. So this is just a ridiculous gamble. And you don't know if this is still possible, you never know when they change it. I did 110 tries now, all fail. You can try this, but don't gamble all your fashion cores. If anyone have success with this, please let me know (with how many tries).
Finally, here are some fresh statistics:
using 1 cloth and fashion core:
lvl 2 to 3: 28 success, 101 fail
lvl 8 to 9: 110 fail
using 2 cloth and no luck charm:
lvl 3 to 4: 22 success, 4 fail
lvl 4 to 5: 11 success, 5 fail
lvl 5 to 6: 5 success
lvl 6 to 7: 3 success, 2 fail
lvl 7 to 8: 3 success, 1 fail
lvl 8 to 9: 1 fail (ouch)
So my suggestion about this event: Do the clothes you can, grab the rewards you can. But don't put too much effort into it. Wings give a little bonus, but the other clothes are pretty irrelevant. So do it only as long as you get more than you spend. And don't even think about buying cores and luck charms for balens. Eventually there will be an event where you can get those very cheap or for free. Until then, no reason to hurry. The best strategy is have one lvl 5, one lvl 6, one lvl 7 etc (as far as you can) cloth of each, so you can claim all rewards each event with the minimum effort (which is still a lot more than before).
Lately I post less often, the reason is that my father is in hospital, I have less time to play. Still, I will try to give some up-to-date and useful information for you.
Chaos War
The recent hot topic is Chaos War. As expected, the Wartune developers managed to mess up even this seemingly simple event. When I heard about this event, I imagined it will work like a combination of Cross-server guildbattle party setup, and Class Wars pairing. The leader forms teams, and the event simply pairs a random team versus another from the opposing server. When a team wins, the system pairs him with a winner from the other team. No battlefield etc. and other sources of lag, flash crash and other various bugs.
But the developers have choosen a different way, sadly. When you join Chaos War, you have to invite players to party. This part is already bugged. Some players are just impossible to invite. My regular team member, I couldn't invite him once in preliminaries, and not in finals, I always got error message "he is in a dungeon". Also, players can pay 100 balen to attack immediately, so people can attack the other team's random members even before teaming up. To top it off, our party got disbanded every time after 2 battles. Such a bug won't happen accidentally, it needs some code made on purpose :)
Sometimes, when I killed all my opponents and finished the battle at full HP, I appeared dead after the battle, couldn't continue to fight. The lag is huge, flash crashed - and when I reloaded, I did not get back into the battlefield, I was in Cloud city - on a 2 minute lockout.
All in all, this is another super-crappy lagfest event, where you torture yourself through it for the reward itself. So the next dilemma is, how to spend your points:
Here is my suggestion
If you have 10k+ points, get the mount. Mount is always the first thing to grab.
If you missed to grab the free moon rocks last event, and still need them (an unlikely case) then this is the only shop which gives moon rocks for free, grab them here.
Don't take blue crystalloids - it's the only useful reward from XGB shop now. But red copper and well refined stone, this is the only shop where you can get these now. So if you have the mount; don't need moon rocks; and have a bunch of eudaemon equipment which you already upgraded to purple, prolly you should take these.
Elite refinement crystal, this is useful too (gives much better refine stats than the conventional!) after you maxed the eudaemon stuff and refined it roughly, this should be the next priority.
Advanced sepu and mahra are also great items, but there are many other sources to get these from.
All in all, this is a good shop, with many useful items. They should leave out the event, and just keep the shop permanent, and let us earn chaos points by selling useless stuff :)
Anniversary clothing chest exchange
Like previous week, now we have a very nice exchange event again. Too bad, that the current events awarded less chests, and even those have to be halved.
At first glance, getting the super-rare gift of god seems a great grab. But don't forget - the theoretical value of these chests is 78 balens (you need to buy 2 chests to get one which you can use here), so technically, they charge 156 balens per gift. The most expensive price for this 10 balen item in Wartune's history. Buying 50 for 4000 bounds in mystery shop is even a good deal compared to this.
Blessing of god is a much better price. If you don't have purple items, this might be a good chance to get your first. But if all 6 items of your primary sylph are purple quality at least, this would be a waste of good chests.
Glint and moon - the time is over when we got too much of these from dimensions. Still, if you have good stock from the good times, then you don't need these.
10 lvl 2 divinty stones for 10 chests - this is a very good deal. Divinity stones are still very hard to get, and they give a good BR boost to your sylph. The only question is, get only div sould for your chests, or exchange for the anniversary blood thirsty armor as well.
The problem is, the armor is only A quality, and as I mentioned earlier, the cost is actually not 30 chest, but 60 per piece. It's just too expensive, you better wait and get this set later, and get the cheap divinity souls now.
Today I would like to write about one of the late features of Wartune, eudaemon, with a new perspective.
Eudaemon is cool, right? Insane amount of extra damage, making pve events easier, and a crapload of new stats to develop, which means a lot of new goals. Well, this could have been the developers intention. To me, eudaemon is different.
Eudaemon is the main reason of the game having so huge lag, so many events are unplayable for me now. Especially events where 4 or even 8 eudaemons are present in additions to the players, well, thats beyond the capacity of Flash player.
Eudaemons make one of Wartune's most disgusting feature, chaos rune an even annoying feature. Now even in 1 vs 1 the game is about who has faster connenction and can launch chaos rune first..
A very basic bug is not corrected since the eudaemon's release: in any event where damage counts, the eudaemon damage is not counted. So in world boss, in atoll boss they just do one thing: they steal gold from players.
Eudaemon is making the gap between players with different budget even bigger. Because now if I have 2x BR than you, then my eudaemon has 2x BR as well, so now we will deal 4x more damage.
Anyway, you know my blog is not about ranting (ok, its partially about that), but its about giving advices. So here is my suggestion:
There are many situations, where it is better to leave your Eudaemon home.
1. World boss. You don't get any gold for the eudaemon damage. So all it does, make the WB die faster, and everyone get less gold. It also makes your fight slower, so you also get less gold. All you miss when you leave him is the +20-30 max rage. The gains will easily compensate you.
2. Atoll boss. 4 player and 4 eudaemon will lag your computer to hell. And will halve your gains like on WB. Unless AB is incredibly high HP and we just want to get rid of it, we leave eudaemons out.
3. Arena. 8 players and 8 eudaemons, each AOEing the other 8 targets, this is the true lagfest. On my computer, it's a slow motion. After my friend, Nono has quit, i kept trying arena for a week with full team. And it was almost as disgusting experience as playing Steel Wars. So now I kinda gave up, and do arena solo like many others. But hell I don't want anyone play the chaos game on me. I don't take eudaemon even there. Chaos me, and I will merrily chaos you back, then delphic hell thunder etc your team. Often I kill teams with 8 participants.
I'm sure there are other events too where you better leave eudaemons. In GB, XGB when I solo vs teams of 4 people, if they could chaos me for 3 rounds, it would give them too much advantage. So I often even rest eudaemon there too.
Of course, eudaemon is useful in other situations, like in pve. Sky trial, Purgatory are all easier with eudaemons, and Narrenda would be impossible without them. Dragon invasion, I'm not so sure - we tried once without them, and had the same result. The extra lag they create counter the extra damage :) But don't consider eudaemon as your default attachment. Rather, its a kind of boost, which you use in some situations...
Wartune has nerfed dimension now the third time. Usually one major nerf is enough to get rid of a lot of players in any game, but 3 nerfs to the same feature is a clear show of incompetence. So you can do only 2 things: quit like many others, or try to adapt to the changes. Right now, I'm in the second category, so I try to summarize my current strategy for dimensions, which is entirely different from previous ones.
The first question is, what dimensions to do. First, let's examine the difference between dimensions.
1.) Trials. The new dimensions has a very simplified system, 90% of the events are trials. This is a battle which costs approx. 40 energy, and you get mahra, sepulcrum, crystal shard or will crystal. Do not do basic or beginner trials, it's just a waste of energy. I do only master / expert trials, but if you are short on time, and have to spend energy asap, you can do advanced ones as well. Advanced / expert dimension have more advanced and expert trials.
2.) Chest loot. These are very rare, and contain only a limited number of items. Some are useless (bounty scrolls, dragon souls, rose hazels), some are okay (like 50 mahra), some are very good (like eternal heart or random offering). Even basic dimensions seem to have offerings, so there is not much difference here.
3.) Hidden balen mines. Mines don't seem to be more common in advanced or extra dimensions. On the contrary, basic and int. dimensions have more event / square, and this seems to be true for mines as well.
4.) Decay rate. A fully explored basic or int. dimension decays in 3 days, an advanced in 6 days, so you get better payoff with advanced / ext dimensions.
5.) Reward. The reward is only crystals shards and will crystals, but you get a lot. Adv / Ext dimensions cost a lot more energy to explore than basic / int, but they don't give that much more crystals.
Considering the above, it would be better strategy to do only basic and intermediate dimensions - if we would have an unlimited number of dimensions open. But we get so much energy (4800 per day, plus bonus) it can be easily achieved that you have 5 fully explored advanced dimensions all the time. And it's just a matter of gold now to get enough advanced dimensions. If you got an exended, you can toy around with that and use some basic / int meanwhile.
So based on these, my strategy is this:
1. Open an advanced dimension every day.
2. Explore it fully as fast as possible, do only master / expert trials.
3. If I can't spend all energy, I don't worry to much: my free time is more valuable than a few extra crystals.
About balen mines: some people like to explore all squares in hope to find balen mines. This is a bad strategy. Mathematically, it doesn't matter if you explore 500 squares by fully exploring 2 level, or fast-exploring 10 levels. You will see the same number of unexplored squares, you have equal chance to find a mine. But the final reward will be drastically different.
PS: I updated the mytery shop table for you.
