Halloween exchange

Wartune has some decent exchanges lately, and also they give out a lot of free chests. So it seems we are again in some kind of a golden age :) It's hard to decide how to use the chests. Lately, they always have a normal exchange, and some premium exchange, with extra items, like now:

Previously, they gave 120 beads for 30 chests, which was already a great deal (4 bead for 1 chest), now this is even better, 7 bead for 1 chest. If you low on influence, grab this deal, it's far the best. However, if your influence is already decent (lvl 15+) then don't do this. Wild shop and guild battle prize giving a lot of free beads, so it's just a matter of months before you maximize your influence anyway, and then beads will be a dead weight.
If you are a relatively new player with low runes, the 2000 runestones is a good deal too. For some veterans, 2000 whip is useful too, because whip is never enough - but please note that this deal is far from exceptional, they often sell the whips for 2 balen apiece.
If none of the above is an option for you, and you have a few hundred chests, I say just open them. The contents are fair (cloth shards, lvl 3 gems) and there is a good chance you can grab a full set of the new cloth. I was wondering for a while to either get whips or open chests, but I will rather open.

*** UPDATE ***
A third exchange is coming tomorrow for cemetery chests:

Very good one, if you didn't use your chests yet, I recommend saving them for this :)


There was one more thing I wanted to tell you, refering to my previous post about combat strategy. If you do everything right, you can win even vs a superior opponent. In class wars, my 1-star Medusa beat a 5-star Frigga:

R2Games SWAG surprise

If you play Wartune on the R2Games platform, I would like to call your attention to a nice promotion, called "R2Games SWAG surprise":

http://www.r2games.com/activity/task/

There are simple tasks which you can do for 5 days, and you can win different rewards for doing so. Of course it looks a bit rigged, my first 3 rolls were win ("50 USD pack, 80 USD pack, t-shirt") then the remaining 9 rolls were you "Thank you". But, this is a completely free gift, so I'm happy with whatever I get :) The T-shirt I didn't claim, first, because it was ugly, and 2nd, it needed all my personal data (address, phone number etc) I do have enough T-shirt so I don't have to share that for one more with R2Games. (And I wanted to be nice to save them the mailing cost :))

The packs are:

"50 USD pack"
800k gold, 80 mahra, 10 tenacity mark, 1-day vip card, 5x lvl 4-10 gem pack, 80 sepulcrum, 2x200 balen discount ticket.

"80 USD pack"
1M gold, 60 adv.mahra, 20 tenacity mark, 1-day vip, 10x lvl 4-10 gem pack, 60 adv. sepu, 1 x 2000 balen discount ticket.

Of course the discount tickets you have to save in mail or they become useless in 24 hours.

Update: It seems this event sucks as much as every one... I just hoped they could do something rightm but they couldn't. You get Wartune codes only on first day. On other days, you get codes for different games. So if  you don't play those (and who have the time to play 5 games at once?) then the rest of the promotion is worthless for you.

Wartune combat strategy

You know, my favorite articles are analysis of what to get for chest, or if a recharge / spender event worth doing or not. Lately, I'm not recommending recharge / spender events, for 2 simple reasons. Every such gift pack is bigger and bigger, so the more you wait, the more you will get. Also, the sad fact is, there are many negative processes in the game lately. More and more uncorrected bugs, more and more nerfs and bad changes. Like the developers don't care about the players anymore. The same events repeat over and over since many months. So right now, I'm a bit unhappy about how the developers and the publisher disregards us players. There is really one way to make them listen, by not paying. 

But of course you didn't come here to hear about my complaining. You came here to read something useful. Today I try to focus on the main aspect of the game, combat.

Many player says that in combat, whoever has higher BR wins, so it is actually irrelevant what skills you use in what order. Of course, BR is important. You can't beat someone with twice as much BR as you have. But if there is a lesser margin, you can turn the tides.

Combat has some main components: what runes and skills you use, when you use them, when you sylph, and what resists you have.

1.) Resists. Previously, you could reduce damage through resist by up to 90%, this way it was possible to kill even 100K USD whales by mere mortals. It was a fun age, but it is over. Also, you could get as much as +20% damage with resist reduction. These caps have been shifted, the max., damage resist converges to 60% (although with extremely high resist you can push this to 61%, 62%...) and the max extra damage can go much higher as well, converging to 60% (but can go to 61%, 62%... if you have lot of resist reduce via adv. and extended dimensions). This gives back the edge to the whales, but still. If you have +60% dmg vs your opponent, and he have -60%, you have a big advantage. Please note that resist works differently in sylph and non-sylph form. If the attack is non-sylph, the resist used does not check against the opponent's sylph, it check based on your resists (average? highest?  I never tested). In general, I would recommend dark, light and electro resist for pvp, since these 3 are the most popular sylphs. But in Battleground, after a few tests battles, you might switch light and/or electro for fire and /or wind if you see several strong opponents with these.

2.) Runes. Since eudaemons, chaos rune became even more powerful. It is as good as a 3-round stun which you can use repeatedly, and you can even use to counter the opponent's heal spell. There is one simple way to protect yourself fully against chaos rune: do not use eudaemon. People overvalue eudaemons because their huge false BR. The truth is, in combat, most damage is dealt in sylph form. Before that, not much is happening if both players are strong. But, your eudaemon can never sylph, so he wont help you as much as his BR would suggest. All he will do is make you kill yourself with chaos runes. I do not even use the chaos rune anymore. If my opponent use the same strategy as me, or if the combat lasts longer and the eudaemon dies, its not so great. And if I have go 1 vs 8 in arena, one chaosed opponent wont make as much difference as a heal or guard rune.
Yes I use these two, they always serve well. In arena, if I have 2 or more opponent, I start with guard rune, and begin aoeing the opponents, killing their eudaemons while I take almost no damage. If all goes well, I can use it again after sylph.
Amnesia worth mentioning here. Amnesia is bugged, if you use it after your opponent used a skill, and that skill is banned, then your opponent will be helpless for 2 turns. This makes it very strong. Also, knights has no guard rune, so for them, I would recommend amnesia to replace guard rune. If you lucky, you can disable your opponent early on as much as with chaos, and if you disable delphic skill after awaken, you are in good position. But it's very hard to time it well, and not useful vs multiple opponents.

3.) Skills. Each class has it's preferences, and I'm good only with mage skills. Lately, I do not use suntoria, it's too slow, and it's too much subject to chaos. I rather focus on damage and use runes for protection, because they can't be chaosed. After guard, I used to open with delphic hell thunder. Besides dealing insane damage, it can stun opponents. Rain of fire next to finish off eudaemons, then frost bolt to try stun one opponent. Maybe restoration to keep myself at max life vs a strong opponent. Having high influence is very important, stunning your opponent can win you the match in many case. Especially, if you time it well. Best to stun the opponent after he sylph, or, if you know he have chaos rune, and you need to heal yourself, stun him first so you can safely heal yourself.

4.) Sylph choice. Although Hecate is the strongest sylph, you should avoid using it - because everyone have dark resist - unless it is twice stronger than your other sylphs. Any other sylph can be good, in my experience people stack random resists besides dark. Maybe water resist is the only one which no one uses. But I advise against Poseidon, unless you are in a party. The game is about dealing damage, not healing. Playing with and vs Poseidon is boooring and disgusting. (Btw, Nightbloom of ToK nightmare, please, stop logging out with Poseidon! You make tok much longer...) Also, when you are alone, chaos rune can hurt you only when you heal. My favorite is Medusa, because its PATK as well, so I can remove equipment from Hecate and borrow it to him while I do pvp.

5.) Sylph use. Some people like to stall sylph awaken, thinking if they can survive the opponent's sylph phase, they will easily destroy him during the 50% dmg increase when they reverted. This can be a good strategy, but it's very hard to survive the opponent's sylph phase with awaken, if he is as strong as you. So I suggest to sylph relatively soon. Before the 50% dmg increase, even sylphs don't do enough damage to kill the opponent. So you should time your awaken sou can can cast delphic the exact moment when the timer switches to 60 seconds. Delphics have a cooldown, so best sequence is waken, use a sylph skill, then guard rune, then delphic. Fight outcome often depends on who can counter the delphic with guard rune, and who can't. So you have to be ready to adapt, if your opponent cast guard rune when you are about to delphic, you better wait until it wears off. If you see you can't kill your opponent while in sylph form (neither he can kill you), you should revert back to normal form sooner, so you sylph first during the next round.

6.) Teamplay. Most of what I wrote refers to 1 vs X combat. When you are teamed up with friends, you need to consider additional things. In this case, there is no point leaving eudaemons home, so you have to prepare for chaos. Best to have a mage with a purify, and a knight/archer with a purify rune, if the mage gets chaosed. Put the mage in the bottom line so if he gets chaosed you can see it, and wait with the purify rune a bit. Using chaos rune yourself is great too, if you chaos multiple opponents, you usually win. So I use chaos+guard rune. You will need one player with a poseidon, so you can heal even in sylph form. In team, things are usually very laggy, you can use less skills than usual. I can just use a chaos, a purify and a group heal before sylph. Group heal is important so your team goes into sylph phase at full health. The archers death star, to stun the opponents and keep up the pressure. Buffs and debuffs also make big difference in team play (incendiary shot, apollo) if your eudaemons can do it for you, that's the best. When your team faces a big whale, you can give yourself a chance if you can amnesia him, so have 1-2 player pack that. Marriage resurrection is an insane advantage in team play, try to "marry" someone with whom you regularly play with. Eternal hearts are now easy to get.

Combat is often a "dance", watching your opponent's actions, and reacting to them. You see he is going to rage steal, don't do delphic hell thunder then, because it will fizzle and you just lose a round. Try to guess when he wants to delphic and use guard rune before that. Time both awaken and cancel awaken well. Etc etc. PVP is the most enjoyable part of the game, despite low rewards, I still enjoy doing BG and arena. When in arena, if I meet 4 people, with 4 eudaemons, with all 4 player having 2-4 star orange sylphs, it feels a real achievement when I beat them using only a 1-star orange Medusa (and this happens quite often). Of course, I never have chance vs real whales, but the other day I killed a guy who had a 5-moon sylph, that felt cool.

** will add pics soon so this does not look just a boring wall of text ***

Sylphs: long-term strategy

One of the things I like in Wartune is that you often need long-term planning. And you can make mistakes there. By doing less mistake than others, you can get ahead. Yeah, they can always correct their suboptimal play by fetching their credit card, but still... :)

Recently I read a topic on R2Games forum, where a player complained that he evolved to 3rd stage several of his sylph, and now he can't make Loki etc. and how bad is this, R2 should do something do cure this situation.

Actually, most of the time I agree that Wartune gets messed up by the developers, but I wouldn't say this happened in this case. You just need to plan wisely. When they added the 3rd evolution phase, I wrote in my blog that these new sylphs are nothing just a visual tuning: they are not a BR stronger than their previous versions. To make them stronger, you must spend advanced mahra and sepulcrum. But how much adv. mahra is needed to max. one sylph to red? Like 20.000? And adv. sepulcrum? 10.000 maybe? Thats a pretty long-term goal (or a lot of money). So okay, I evolve and start pumping my primary sylph. But why would I do the same to a second sylph as well? Each adv. sepu/mahra I spend on my 2nd sylph, I could have spent on my primary. And the primary sylph I use everywhere, in pvp, pve. The second one is useful only in sylph expedition (no rewards at all) and sylph arena (no rewards now either). Surely, it can mean some visual BR tuning to your eudaemon, but thats all. So when someone spends moon rock and dust to evolve a 2nd, 3rd etc sylph, then he is wasting resources.

So what's the future of Wartune, sylph-wise? Always look at the Chinese version, and you will see the future. There, all sylph arena teams are merged teams. Odin-Odin-Frigga, Odin-Frigga-Thor etc. So if you evolved 2 or more sylph to last stage, then you have the following options:
1.) You just trash / retire these sylphs eventually and make new orange ones for merge.
2.) You spend a truckload of money to make them red, and then merge them for double price.
3.) You just wait until adv. mahra is as inflated as normal mahra, and make red sylphs then.
All are viable options, but not evolving them is an even better choice. You will suffer a short-term disadvantage for a few months, you will miss a few chests from adv. sepulcrum events (because you save them up for your future Odin instead of pumping it into your 2nd sylph) but that's it.

Of course, there is a "little" problem with sylph merges. Right now, it costs 600 USD besides the other materials. So there is a theoretical possibility that it will stay this way, only a half dozen whales will have merged sylphs, and the rest can either retire, or bite the bullet and play the boxbag with their miserable non-merged sylphs. But I do not believe in this possibility, because Wartune devs were never the enemy of their wallets. When the milking of whales is over, eventually, merge cost will be reduced somehow - so the sheer masses can finally start spending on merge components, adv. mahra and merged sylph skills, generating extra income for Wartune.

Btw, if I were them, I would do it this way:
1.) Recharge event (rewards: merge components)
2.) "Sylph tame" event: claim 50.000 balens if you have a merged sylph.
So people would rush to recharge, make the merge they desire since long, and claim the "free" balens (which they would spend in a month anyway).

What to do with the werewolf chest?

Instead of giving a mathematical analysis this time, I try to explain my seemingly irrational decision about this Wartune chest exchange.

At first sight, you see this chest's contents are full of crap, so unless you are a gambler type who opens 400 of them and says "no mount? cool. no problem." then you should choose one of the exchanges instead. In one of my late analysises, I explained why I don't choose cloth set either. Simply, because it seems they always add cloth sets for cloth shards - and that way it's much cheaper than for chests.

Still, there are plenty of good options. First, with all these holy forge frenzy and other events, prolly you are at 400-600 chests, so mount is pretty close. With coupons, you can buy some more chests 20 balen apiece and then get the mount. This could be the best option - if this mount would come with a title as the previous ones. But it wont. Still, there are some other good choices, like beads, but I did something different.

Already the previous events, when emblem of dark & light, and moon rock/dust was in the exchange, I choose those instead. Why?

It's more an emotional thing. I always want to have long-term goals in the game. Odin seems a good long term goal. I would never pay the 600 USD for it, but I believe that Wartune devs come to their sense eventually, and give it us with a nice discount - hopefully on Christmas. And I want to be ready by then:

Yeah. I know I play a gamble. What if they never reduce the price. But the whole game is a gamble. And I better have an Odin than another set of clothes or even a +150 mount.

You know, the real big problem with Odin and Frigga is that once you evolved your sylphs, you need 2 red sylph to make them. If you make them from orange, via Loki/Freya, you need only one red. Half amount of adv. mahra and sepu. Right now, I'm getting behind because I am saving up adv. mahra for my Odin, and not evolving my Medusa and Poseidon (hoping they can become Frigga eventually). But I hope this gamble and patience pays off on the long term.

If you want to play safe, better get the beads, the mount, or the cloth set.

How to get rid of the lag

I used to say, Wartune has 5 big problems:

1.) Lag (flash is just not meant to be used for a game with so much graphics)
2.) Greed (European version has prices like 20 times more than the Chinese version)
3.) Too much time required each day to do everything
4.) There are too many useless resources given out which we cant trade for something useful
5.) Lack of support

(Yes, there are bugs too, but those pale in comparison to the above 5 problems.)

I was happy to see lately that R2Games support service has improved greatly. Their response time is still week, but now they often understand the problem, and actually help. I hope it stays this way, I wanna play this game for long :)

About the other major problem, lag. My friend, Nono (who have quit the game, sadly) always kept saying he have less lag. He had a faster computer than mine, with more RAM. Still, he often had to refresh because he started to lag eventually. So I was always thinking, would a really good computer solve the lag problem? I never needed a faster computer for the other games I play, like Doomlord.

Some days ago, Wartune has posted a really good recharge event. 4400 adv. mahra, 4400 adv. sepulcrum, 300 beast soul, 3 rare mounts, hundreds of event chests and other goodies, and as usual, you get as much bound balens as much balens you purchased. There were only one problems: this pack "cost" 500 (five hundred) USD, plus VAT (which would be another 135 USD for me).

That's a lot of money in my country, and I still have a large proportion of the balen I purchased in February, so I don't really need balens. Also I knew when something is given in large amount as a recharge gift (ie. adv sepu and mahra) it usually means it will be totally free soon.

So I decided to do what I planned since a year, I bought a new computer for the same amount of money. A computer with a Intel i7 CPU and 16 GB RAM. And see the wonder. I have no lag whatsoever. Not even with 4 character active at once in different browsers. Not even with 8 participants in arena. Not even after the game has run for 3 hours. 

So here is the answer to the lag dilemma. The Chinese guys who develop Watune has very fast computers. They don't know what is your lag problem. So they will never fix it. So if you have lag problems, you better stop spending balens for a few months, and buy a new computer instead. It will improve your playing experience a LOT more than adding 2 stars to your sylph.