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.