Wartune equipment refinement

Although patch 5.0 removed all possibilities to collect refinement crystals (items no longer drop in blitz) and pure refinement crystals (items no longer drop in Eternal Forest), they also made refinement much, much, much more efficient. Now the new stats level is always same or greater than before. For example, if you have a crit 6 stat on your item, it can be refined into a lvl 6 defense, lvl 6 attack, or lvl 7 or lvl 8 something, but it will not be lower.

There are 3 things you can refine:

1.) Equipment

2.) Sylph equipment

3.) Eudaemon Equipment

Equipment

You use normal refinement crystals to refine orange or lower quality equipments. When you upgrade it to mythic, the refinement levels wont reset, but afterwards, you can use only elite refinement crystals. With the new system, it is a good idea to refine your orange item to 5 level 10 stats before you upgrade it to mythic:

Because after you make it mythic, you just use need to use a few sets of elite refinement crystals for best effect. Sadly, for this you needed to save up refinement crystals, AND not upgrade your item to mythic yet. Don't forget, elite crystals are still worth to use, because red refinement gives better stats for the same level.

Sylph equipment

This is especially actual, since the golden holy water sipper hot event is running now. You get bonus to golden holy water used! Some weeks later I discovered I lost many items from my mail. If it was my mistake or a bug, I can't be sure, but I wasn't compensated. Among other stuff, I lost 9999 golden holy water. (Morale of the story: don't keep ANYTHING important in mail-inventory). Fortunately, I still had some 3000 left, so I could refine all my sylph equipment still, like this:

The sad thing is, now everyone can do this, don't need strategy in refining, you just keep clicking, and you get it maxed in no time. For max. effect you might want to use some bound balens for locking, but even that is not really necessary.

Eudaemon equipment

Eudaemon equipment is special in 2 ways: first, refinement materials cost balens (and a lot!) you can't get them for free. And you need a different one for every color quality. For pre-purple, I suggest only use the few free refinement itemy you got from chests eariler. For refining purple, you might want to spend some balens. It is still very expensive, and eudaemon is not that important; but now it's defintely more efficient to do this than before.

Wind & water chest analysis

We haven't seen a good chest in Wartune since a long time, one which was good to open. Here is finally one, the wind & water chest. Most of the content is highly useful. This is not going to be a long analysis. I just recommend that you keep opening your chests at least until you find a mount. Here are the stats I got so far:

As you see, no luck with mount. But mount has 0,1% chance usually (I think all the free players on the server who got 30 chest found one :)) so it pumps up expected value to 20 balens. It's almost even worth buying for balens (with discount coupons and using the spender bonus packs too).

Wartune Patch 5.0 analysis

I wanted to wait with comments of the new Wartune patch until I see it with my own eyes. Yes, there is some good stuff - but for some unknown reason, the developers main hobby is still nerfing. So, let's see what are the good changes, are what are the bad ones.

The good changes

Tara temple
An easy new weekly dungeon, with very nice reward. Everyone loves this addition.

Hell mode

A new challenge is always cool, and the way reward is given is really great, you can choose which item you need, and do that hell dungeon. We tried hell eternal forest, and could do it on 1st try, but the first boss was really hard, we could barely beat it. (Two people with 2.7M BR, two with 2.2M).
Update: The 2nd day was not so cool, we got ALL 3 boss at final stage... Laughed, cursed a bit then left. New patch = new bugs.

Atoll boss time displayed
A great help, now we can see when the AB will spawn. A needed addition.

Eudaemon arena
A new event with decent loot, I like it, although it has 2 drawbacks: increasing game time again, and it's a fixed time during the day, easy to miss.

Patch notes
Now you can read the patch notes ingame, a very useful addition to see the summary of changes.

Fast sylph change

Changing sylph assigned to player/eudaemon is now more easier, a very convenient thing.


Sylph skills

Now you can forget a sylph skill - finally! Too bad it costs 300 balens, but at least it is possible. Also, now there is a Learn skill button which can learn you a skill for free. Too good to be true? Yeah. Because you learn a RANDOM skill this way. Ie. this feature is totally useless; unless you try to learn the 15000 balen skill for your Odin, in which case forgetting the wrong skill multiple times is still cheaper. The developers managed to mess up even a good feature. Shameful creatures.




New fate ability
New things to improve are always cool. So we have a new fate skill to improve, via weekly pvp chests. But why we can't use fate stones there? Or at least allow us to exchange it for something useful? I got 25000 of them...

Equipment refinement

Now, after refinement, you can't get worse stats. It can change - like you can get a charisma10 from a block10 - but level will not decrease. An awesome change, but it might bring grief to those who already upgraded multiple equipment to mythic with level 6-9 refinement stats; or used all their purify crystals / refinement crystals / elite refinement crystals earlier. Wartune is like the stock exchange, you never know what comes, raising you to the heaven, or throwing you down to hell...


The bad changes

Sylph arena

This event has been nerfed horribly. You can no longer choose your opponent - it's totally random. Ok, not totally: it seems there is a higher chance that you get a particularly strong opponent. My sylph team has a total BR of some 420K, still, 1/3 of the time I get an opponent with similar or higher BR, what a coincidence :) They also joined the groups. There is only one group now for Kabam, R2Games etc... So 99,99% of the people have no chance to rank anywhere. Also they removed the daily reward (why???), and it looks like no more advanced sepulcrum in weekly reward... Just this change alone is trashing all the good changes. Their patch message is particularly funny:
"Greatly improved matching and rewards."

Recovery nerf
In Wartune's history, this nerf is the one which I have the most difficulty to understand. Recovery was a good invention: each day, you could choose an event you skipped, and you could claim at least some of the rewards. Dragon Invasion was a super-boring event after a while, with useless rewards. The only thing we did it for was the 10M gold: about 25% of our daily gold income. With recovery, I could claim this 10M gold. Now I can choose, spend 20 more minutes each day, or lose this 10M. A completely senseless nerf, it's only goal is to get rid of players.

Sky trail

There are so much to do in Wartune, it's just beyond me why they need to "fix" something that doesn't need to be fixed. Sky trial was just a good progression event. The only problem with it was the obsolete reward - and this is the only thing they didn't change. You still get sepulcrum, star tear, star sand etc. the same crap as before. With previous sky trial, once you went far enough, it took you just one click to get a handful of rewards each day. Not any more. This change is a FAIL.

No more crypt keys
Crypt key was a rare drop in dungeon blitzes for your skeleton key. In fact, since we maxed out XP since an eternity, this was the only point of using up the stamina, getting crypt key. An earlier patch has nerfed this, but luckily, there was one dungeon remaining which still had the crypt keys: Buradoth's Grave. It is no more. So effectively, besides losing the 10M gold each day from recovery, we lose 75 bound balen each as well. On a side note, you can't get any more refinement crystals either from these blitzes. So if you didn't refine your equipment to max, bad luck. You can't do it anymore.

Purgatory maze reward changes

Now in purgatory maze we get only vulcan hammers and vulcan stoves instead of the previous loot (moon dust, divine stones, resist crystals etc). Actually, on the short term, these are positive changes, since everyone needs a lot of these hammers/stoves. But. Narrenda/Tara already gives enough of these. Even if only those dungeons would give them, people would still max out holy forge in a few months. But with Purgatory reward change, everyone will have max holy forge in no time. Being better in Narrenda and killing 3 boss instead of 1 will have no meaning. And when everyone maxed out holy forge, and trying to build Odin, Freya etc. which requires thousands of moon dusts, then you will understand why this is a bad change.
Please also note that Purgatory got more difficult: so if you couldn't do it to level 30 pre-patch, now you won't do it for a while.

Resist changes
The resist numbers has changed totally. I'm pretty sure this hides a nerf too, but the time was too short, I couldn't figure out how. We shall know soon enough, though :) I suspect caps has changed (max damage bonus reduced from 20% to 10%, maybe reduction is capped too, no clue yet). if you have info, let me know!

Kitten club

Advertised as a new feature which can make players rich, this feature is a huge disappointment. After buying the 5 furniture, and getting cats 2 times for them, I had a netto 80k gold profit per day for a lot of clicks. Nowhere near to compensate for the 10M lost from recovery. And this is not the only problem. Tanks, surfboards and now this kitten crap is very alien to a fantasy game. It's not even funny. It's just disgusting :(


Lag
Don't be fooled by the patch message. Both the game's CPU and memory usage has INCREASED. 2 days after the patch, I still see swirling mists, more graphics, less cached. A good test was doing some arena runs. Previously, when I had 4 vs 4 in arena, the game became slow-motion, but when I was 1 vs 4, it was okay. Now, with 1 vs 4, it became more laggy than before, even so, I saw a new bug: the cursor started blinking around, I had to use hotkeys because the mouse is no longer working when many players cast spells. Today was Titan Wars. 4 vs 4, completely unplayable, while it was just slow before. So the lag got WORSE.
And the big "black screen after refresh" error they added with last patch? Yes we still got it! And wont go away, ever.
The biggest fail here, showing the complete incompetence of developers is what they did with the damage numbers. The game really died with the introduction of eudaemons. In 4 vs 4 battles, everyone AoEing, they displayed 200 numbers at once, freezing the browser. And their answer? Changing the font, instead of removing them entirely or adding an option to turn them off.

Conclusion. This patch is just another nail into the game's coffin. Again, they increased the lag, again, they increased the time needed to play the game, again, they nerfed rewards. Yes, they did a few good things too. But remember: washing the dishes for your mom will not undo a crime of murdering someone.

Sylphs and resists

The unlimited resist crystal events in Wartune has changed the game drastically, as I wrote earlier. Now I will write specifically about how this affects sylph choice.

For a long time, the dark sylph as dominated the game. It was the best sylph undoubtedly due to its insane heal&damage power. But right now, even a free player can build so high dark resist, so he can beat players far above his BR if they insist on using dark sylph.

After the patch I tried using Hecate in arena only once:

After that, I realized, every player and their grandmothers are now running around with 1500+ dark resists, so it's totally pointless. So I started using my Medusa. I did not even evolve it, but it's orange. I simply removed items from my Hecate, and gave them to my Medusa. It's skills are not as good, but I can do 15 arenas quickly without the danger of another 15-minutes fight happening. My choice for Medusa was simple: I had build a pretty good equipment set for my Hecate with refinement, gems and all: focusing on PATK. My normal sylph team has an Athena and Triton, but both of them are MATK. So my Medusa with Hecate's stuff was better than my other sylphs.

In Class Wars, I was lucky enough to make top 16. I finally figured out what NO ONE was able to tell me so far: exactly when your BR is taken to count if you are in top 16 or not. It is taken right after the 15th round ends in preliminaries. So, I made top16, as 15th, and managed to rank 8th with a 8:7 score. I used Medusa as my main sylph for the above reason. My team did not even include the Hecate, it was only following my eudaemon.

I made a high dark resist, 1500+, like everyone else. I also had 1100 light resist, because I think it's the second most popular sylph, due to its AoEs, and higher BR than it's free counterparts. Also, if someone is using Loki/Odin, the combination of these resists is useful. My third resist was wind, for a simple reason. Medusa gave +200 bonus to wind resist, so it was the element I could make the highest resist aganst. I had no illusion about whales resist reduce in top16. I was thinking they have 1100+, which meant my light and wind resist is just enough so they don't get +20% damage vs me.

The final result was quite a stone-paper-scissors game. I meet every sylph, except for electro: Although high damage, Zeus only have single-target damage skills, making it useless in team fight.  Out of 16 opponents, I met 6 with dark resist. Quite big names, like +1M BR above me. I could still beat them, excelpt for JustRaven. I guess they stick to Hecate either because of laziness, or because they trusted their extra power to win still. Of the other elements, each represented itself equally, so it really didn't matter what were my other 2 resists. So here is a list of sylph's strength and weaknesses:

Hecate. Although everyone have high resist vs dark, some people still trust they are strong enough to win. This was a mistake. It can be the strongest, resist made it useless in the top fights.

Venus (evolved Athena). This is usually the 2nd or even 1st strongest sylph of many whales, because they build it for a future Odin. I think it's not that great sylph as others, and most people's second resist choice will be light. Also it's MATK, so as a mage, I would avoid this in CW.

Arise (evolved Cerberus). The favorite of many mages, because it's PATK, almost as good a damage-dealer as Zeus with an AoE, and they suppose people don't have fire resist. If you have a Hecate, you can borrow it's equipment to Arise. It's a good choice in CW. The only reason why i didn't use it, because I don't have it.

Medusa (I didn't bother evolving it). The skills are good, although not as good as of Hecate. Not many people have wind resist, and it is PATK. Still, Arise is better if you have it.

Poseidon. The Class Wars is about damage (damage dealt is the tiebreaker), not about healing. Also, this is the only sylph which can be messed up with chaos. So I don't recommend it. But some people still used it, hoping for the surprise factor and because they still don't believe that in tiebrakers, damage dealt counts :)

Zeus. The best damage sylph, not so great in CW. if you wasted your delphic on a troop, you are toast. I don't recommend it.

Also the funny thing was in CW that your escort sylphs inherited not only your HP, but your resists as well. So if you had a high dark resist, the opponent's Hecate could not even damage those.

I tried going without eudaemon (it has a lot of HP, so it can take a lot of damage, giving advantage to my opponent in tiebreaker, and also it can make me vulnerable to chaos rune), but it didn't really matter, since all 15 fights finished with someone killing the other.

One final note: this whole situation is due to resist reduce gems being behind resist gems. But this can change soon. You can buy resist reduce gems in mystery shop relatively cheap, and the resist gems are not going past level 10 soon. So expect people to build level 9 resist reduce gems eventually, and then the resist advantage will decrease. Also do not forget about dimensions: if someone is really intent on performing well on CW, he can always spend a billion gold to get a couple of extended dimensions, and have some really mad resist reduce.

Consecutive recharge bonus

Some Wartune event designer has really fallen in love with this hard-to-pronounce event, because he runs it nonstop. Still, the rewards are cool, unless you have grown so bitter to say "never spend on Wartune again".

Sadly, the golden age of Consecutive events are over, when you could just claim all the bonuses by clicking on the "Get free balens" menu and watching videos. Now you have to pay 5 x 5 USD to get the bonus. So far, we have seen this event giving out like 500 beast souls (equivalent of a +40 mount) plus some chests. Combined with the other recharge bonus running parallel (awarding items and bound balens) it was the best recharge bonus in Wartune's history, you got like 150% bonus to your payment.

The current one is pretty decent too. Instead of beast souls, it gives divinity souls, up to level 7. Divinity soul is still an exclusive casher-only item. Although you can win some in sylph expedition, it won't be much, unless you are top (due to being casher). Also you can buy them in mystery shop, but that's also an option mostly for cashers. So lvl 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 soul, plus 40 cloth shards is as good as the +40 mount, if not better.

Please note that this event follows a predictable pattern: during the 6 days when it's active, there is usually a recharge pack for 2 days, and for 3 days, they award bound balens for your payment, plus additional recharge gift packs which are better than the small ones. So it' best to time your recharges so you get maximum benefit. I recommend wait for the bound balens, recharge once between midnight and 5am, again after 5am, and then the next 2 days: this way you get bound balens for 4 of your 5 recharges.

Although the rewards are cool, this recharge event is prolly the most annoying one in Wartune's history for several reasons:

1.) if you forgot to make payment on 5 different days, or you mess up something, and accidentally do twice on the same day, or just their system get's messed up, which is quite frequent - you lose the majority of the bonus which comes on the 5th day.

2.) doing 5 small separate recharges is just pain, many clicks, and 5 chances to select the wrong server, the wrong game.

3.) With many payment methods, 5 USD recharge can be very expensive. Someone mentioned with Xsolla, 5 USD recharge cost actually 54 USD! So unless you use paypal or bank card, this will cost you a lot more than 25 USD.

4.) Since R2Games introduced the - otherwise illegal - double-taxing (charging Europeans BOTH USA tax and European tax), many players try to dodge this by using proxies while recharging. But it's a lot of extra trouble, and if you do it too often, paypal might ban you.

5.) And the last point, when a player recharge 5 x 5 USD, R2Games will receive only 12.5 USD. When a player recharge 25 USD in one sum, they get like 22 USD. So with this degenerated method, they lose half of their income. But yeah, this is one point we don't care about :)

Skeleton chest analysis

As usual, I post an entry about the current chest exchange, sorry for that. For this chest, again we have some nice options. Instead of going into complex analysis this time, I will just tell you how was I thinking, and what conclusion did I get.

Let's see what are the possible prizes:

Bony dragon, +150 mount. This is really cool. But how much does it actually worth? You can refine a +150 mount only 5 times like a +50 mount, so it's real value is only double of that of a +50 mount. Since the ancient beast shard / beast soul era, I put mount prices at 1/3 of their original sale price, so this one worth approx. 7000 balens. (But the extra title further increases the prize by at least 1k.)

Beads of influence. Another cool item, and not so easy to get. In the past events, where people were opening chests, hoping for luck, I exchanged them for beads instead. As a result, I can stun 99% of the people for 3 rounds and win fast and easily. So do not underestimate the power of influence - but be aware, eventualy all will max it, so it will become useless. I would say, if your bead level is only like 5-8, you really need more. If its 15+, you are okay, you don't need more.

Divine energy. Upgrading a purple halidom / artifact to orange can be an awesome BR boost. Not only because of the stat increase, but also because of the extra gem slot, refine stat, and option to holy forge. And you never ever will collect enough of these from eternal forest nightmare. So this is also a top exchange. However, be aware of 2 things: this item - although you need a lot - has a limited use. After you upgraded both item to orange, it will be total junk. Also, we expect eternal forest "hell" with next patch: where divine energy might be more common.

Let's see the possible action:

1.) Open your chests, and hope for the mount. Bad idea! Based on previous chest statistics, chance for mount is only 0,1%: which - in case of a 7+1k mount - adds only 8 balen to the expected value of this 39 balen chest. All the other contents are crap. Even if you are a free player who gathered only 60 chest, I recommend go for an exchange, get the beads, and don't risk. 

2.) Exchange all chests for beads of influence. This is a really good deal, if your influence is still low, and you get stunned frequently.

3.) You have a good influence, and a nice amount of free chests, like me - I collected about 450 free chests from last week's event. If you are a free player or light casher, I recommend you simply exchange your chests for divine energy. But if you are willing to spend some balens, this might be the moment - to get a kickass mount, or upgrade artifact to orange. This is what I did after a long thinking:

I used a 2k coupon from mail, to buy 129 chests for 3k balens. Then I claimed another coupon from hot events, bought 129 more, then 129 more. Finally, I used a 200 coupon to buy 31 more chests. I claimed the rewards in all 3 spender events, so I had 1030 chests, and 300 extra divine energy.

My dilemma was, orange artifact, or mount. About divine energy, I could have ended up with 1500 of those. A bit too much, I feel that more and more of these will come in free events. About the mount, if I don't spend any balens, I could have had 450 divine energy. Now, with 10k balens spent, I could have a 7k balen mount, 530 divine energy, 120 beast souls, and a title with decent extra BR. So I choose the mount.

Wartune Bounty Targets

Bounty Targets is one of the better additions to Wartune. A good, challenging event, which does not become boring, and has good rewards.

When I first saw the 8 absolutely trivial opponents, I wondered where this will go. Then, each day, when I completed the entire table, I got a slightly more difficult, higher level one. Eventually, I had to start using skills. As it grew harded, I was afraid I reach a table where I can't beat anything, and the event becomes impossible for me. Fortunately, this was not the case. When I reached the lvl 80 boss, from that on, the table did not get stronger. Every time, I got 8 opponents, between lvl 76-85. The 83+ opponents seem totally impossible for me. The magic immune guy simple heals more in a round than the damage I deal. But the ones before him, I can beat, with a little strategy. I want to share this with you.

First of all, you have to make your eudaemons as strong as possible. Yes, this is pretty obvious, I guess. Eudaemons inherit the percentage of your BR: so the stronger you are, the stronger are your eudaemons. You also have to be aware that if you use tea, scroll, potion, making your character stronger, that will make stronger your eudaemons too. So it is a good idea to buff up before bounty targets. 

Also sylph assignment is important. Normally, you assign your strongest sylph to your character, and the second strongest PATK/MATK sylph to your eudaemon (depending if the eudaemon is PATK or MATK). Here, you should use a different strategy. Assign your strongest sylph to your main eudaemon, and assign your second strongest to yourself (preferably one which grants HP bonus). This way, your main eudaemon will be much stronger.

About the skill use. Fortunately, these are on fast CD, and reset before each fight, unlike in sylph expedition. Please note that always your weakest eudaemon will use the skill, and he will do it very fast.

Please also note it is impotant what skills do you set for your eduaemons. Your eudaemons will not use delphics, so if you put in 2 slot the delphics, he will use the other 3 skills. For archer, i recommend incendiary shot, lunatic fire, and bloodthirsty strike. For mage, suntoria, restoration and rain of fire. For knight, whirlwind, apollo shield and ultimate slasher. Scourge mage skills seem to me pretty weak, I keep my scourge mage weakest, so he is using the bounty skills.

For the bosses 78 and below, I just start for with potent hero's blessing (+100% attack), to get rid of the trash mobs before they damage my characters. Please note you can alternately activate the first 3 skills, they have very low CD, and stack up 5 times. This way, why your other 3 eudaemons are killing the trash, you can build up a nice buff for your team. For the boss himself, I start with physical or magical force to give immunity for my team for 2 rounds. Then just buff (hero's blessing, potent hero's blessings) and heal (healing praying, potent healing praying). If one of your members die, its best to use revive first, then potent healing praying for entire party immediately after.

Boss 79 (or 78?) is a problem, because the trash mobs have a nasty damage shield. Here I use potent hero's blessing, then physical shield to reduce damage, and spam heals when necessary. You have to time heals for maximum efficiency.

Boss 80, the trash is ugly too, because each have a special attack which can kill your entire party. I do the same buffs as with boss 78, and when the immunity expires, and the aoe hits my party, I use aoe heal immediately. To survive this aoe, you really need to max out HP and buff before the fight.

Boss 81, Lurker Loen, this one has a total annihilation AoE eventually, so you have to kill it quick. For this reason, do not use potent hero's blessings on the trash. But feel free to use physical force, and heals to make sure your entire party survives and makes it to the boss. It is also vital here to build up buffs, using at least the first skill repeatedly. When you arrive to the boss, use potent hero's blessing, then 2 turns later hero's blessing, and hope your team finish off the boss in time. This boss don't have big damage, so fortunately I don't even need heals, it was ok to use them up during the trash.

That's all, I hope my advices helped. The loot is very nice, truckload of lvl 3 diamonds each day, now I have lvl 7 diamonds in every slot for 3 eudaemons, thanks to unlimited events. Good luck with this!

Consequences of the unlimited resist event

In my recent article, I already mentioned that the unlimited resist event changed the balance in Wartune. People are full of level 9 resist gems, some even lvl 10 ones - and the resist reduce level is nowhere close to that.

As you know, resist gives a modifier to damage: The multiplier is
(1 + (your resist reduce - opponent's resist)/833)
As long as resist and reducers were in par, this meant a +-20% damage. But let's check what happens when I have an 1500 dark resist, and your resist reduce is 900:
(1+(900-1500)/833)= 0,28.
So you will deal only 28% of your normal damage. That's pretty tough.

We just had a Class Wars. I'm not a big casher, but it seems with determination and time I start swimming with the big fish (but only as their food). Now again I made it into top16. I did 5 dark dimensions to pump up my dark resist to 1500. Also had 1100 wind and light resist (and yes, this means I went against reason, and did even some lvl 10 resist gems, and now I can bang my head into wall, with lvl 9 resist coming tomorrow).

Out of 15 rounds, I got only 5 players who dared to use dark sylph. All big names, very far above my BR, much stronger than me: still, I could beat 4 of them. 72% damage reducting is a real killer. The other 10 players, they used all sylph except for electro: there was fire, water, wind and light too. I used wind sylph, that was my other orange PATK sylph who could use the equipment of my temporarily retired Aegis. My final result was 8:7 which I think is pretty unrealistic for my BR (and the amount of money I spent), the usual 14:2 would have been more reasonable.

But the current resist mess made the pvp game a pretty stone-scissors-paper game. Which is fun, everyone have a chance to win, and you need a heavy mind-game trying to figure out who is going to use what, and which 3 resist should you use. But I'm sure the majority of players - especially heavy spenders - wont like this. It is rumored dimension resist bonuses were reduced due to whale's pleas, and I'm sure we are getting another resist nerf soon.

Until then, enjoy it: complete sky trial, purgatory, narrenda, farm people in battleground: and dread the day when the nerf finally comes; when all the tendonitis you collected from doing dimension 3 hours each day becames meaningless.