2015/09/17

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.








11 comments:

  1. i also see a change in wild shop items and prices (or at least that's my impression after this patch ...)

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  2. Some things are worth to do (tara temple), others no (cat club), some requires less time and gold (sylpharena), some are so boring to push people to use a bot (kid arena).
    Lag is decreased for me, cause the game seems continuously clearing chace, so i don't load parts of game that would make me lag, like clothings. But loading time is much worse now.
    Rewards are never a problem, because it's the same for everyone: the game must give enough rewards to push players to play an event/duneon, and it's not like we have few events that worth to do :)

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  3. They also nerfed Cloud Adventure rewards.. you can get a lot of 1 BB's now. .

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    Replies
    1. It's a visual bug, those are golen wands

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  4. Lol, patch notes finally shown in-game.
    This should've been done a long time ago.
    Such a shame this game was once awesome to play, now has been
    optimized and improved to trash. And their events always distasteful:
    sky adventure and now kitty club? (for some little kids fantasy) :/
    I've got a gd feeling the actual devs behind wartune has moved on to develop mobile app games,
    and given up this game project to some amateur game designers to plan the game's future.
    They don't even communicate or know who are their players!!

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  5. Here is something that seems to be working for me. Turn off Hardware Acceleration in the Flash Player. I was getting stuck on the Wartune Splash Screens taking forever to load. No it is still bad, but not as bad as after the patch.

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    Replies
    1. Well, I got so fed up with the lag, that I found a different solution. Bought a new computer :) With an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, I finally get rid of the lag. Probably the devs use similar computers too, thats why they are not aware that for most people, many aspects of the game are unplayable :(

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  6. Few notes to add:

    The patch notes being displayed was there before the patch already.

    Fate Stones can be used to feed marriage tree, 2 points/ea (it was like that for a while). Not an ideal solution, but they aren't technically totally useless.

    While you no longer get eq from blitzes etc, you can now synthetize eq for crystalloids only, so technically you still get some (but very little) refinement stones for lower level eq. I'm not sure if wilds chest still drop items? (I'm not doing wilds for a longer while)

    Also, personally I really like the random skill for free for Sylphs, as I have 12 sylphs there and at least they can have some extra skills now. Most of them are useful to some degree and if you are lucky, you will save a bunch of balens if you get the skill you want. Also, technically with enough time you can learn all the skills for free if you do enough rerolls (but that's a pure gamble, unless you accept compromises)

    I also like the new Sky Trail. It's faster to do if you plan on doing it and gives MASSIVE amount of sepulcrum, which I always lacked.

    When it comes to lag, I actually see the changes as a benefit. For me the game don't require so many refreshes now, as they got rid of memory leak by not keeping everything that loaded into memory. A drawback is much more loading time. But the whole fact that they started to address the problem is actually a good sign. Also they seem to change the font to reduce some lag, the game rarely slows down for me now.

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    Replies
    1. I still have some 600k soul crystals saved up, used those for tree :)

      Learning all skills for free -- aah so you mean you when skills are full, you replace a random skill with a random skill? What is the chance that you end up with all 5 skills you wanted, Im not sure it can be done in a lifetime :)

      About sky trial, thx to that, now I have about 15000 sepulcrum. My only escape will be when they allow it to convert it to something useful :)

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  7. Things I like:
    - Mpd hell mode
    - Tara temple
    - Narrandera is a lot easier now.
    - Sky trail, it doesn't take that much time, and reward is much better
    - Eudemon arena is nice, but I agree with you that because it's timed, I missed it most days.
    - They seems to be replacing outdated items with new ones

    Bad changes
    - I can't pass purg maze anymore; it's much harder.
    - Sylph area does not give out adv crums. :( I already have 3 sylphed with maxed crums. Need more adv crums.
    - Recovery nerf. DI is so boring
    - Res crystal synth is only to lvl 8 now. Why do they always give us something better then change it to something worse?
    - New fate that replaced the old fate. This is so stupid, why can't they just add another one, without removing the old one? What am I going to do with all these fate stones?
    - No more crypt keys from blitz, no more refinement crystals source
    - On lag, I can't tell that they did anything to make it better. Seems like they're caching more stuff now, but speed is still the same. Loading time is a lot longer if you clear cache. Missing cursor, etc.
    - Kitty club

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    Replies
    1. Yes, I dont understand the lvl 8 res crystal either. Maybe they scared off giving out too much?
      About narrenda and tara, I think it's TOO easy. I like challenge. Narrenda was a challenge, I enjoyed beating it. But true, now it requires only 5 minutes instead of 35, that's good, I save playing time.

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