Lately I see a lot of people in Wartune who have reached knighthood. It means still a lot of players have a trust in this game's future to spend money. It's good, I wish the devs would share that optimism :)
So let's see how the math works out:
Normal henna
You can get 300 normal henna per day if you check your henna lab in the morning and in the evening. if you do it a bit more intense (do a third run of 1-4 hours, and also raid) you can get a bit more but imho it doesn't worth the effort.
When you check the tatoo tab, it will say normal henna gives 1-9 stat, adv. gives 21-39. This is not completely true. After a stat on one slot exceeds 200, you will get only 1-8. This decreases further, at 300 it will be only 1-7 etc. For this reason, you should use adv. henna only when you already have enough to reach knighthood immediately. Until then, use only normal henna for optimal gain. Sadly, this also means there is no such as "free" knighthood yet. You can't attain the required stat just with normal henna in a reasonable time.
If you were doing henna lab twice a day, and didn't use adv. henna yet, your stat must be somewhere +200-250 per slot. In one month, you will earn 9000, which gives about +40 per slot. Next month you get a bit less, next month a bit less again. For knighthood, your goal is about 1500 per slot.
How much henna is needed for knighthood
Let's suppose you are willing to cough up some balens, and want to reach knighthood in the near future (ie. 2-3 months). In that time, you can attain like 2800-3000 total stats from normal henna, so you need 9000 more from advanced henna.
Since every 100 adv. henna used will give you approx. +30 stats, you need 30000 adv. henna in total.
Advanced henna
So far, the cheapest way to get advanced henna was wait for an event where you could exchange 120 chest for 1000 adv. henna. This way you could get 1000 adv. henna for free per event. You could also spend balens on the chests: with 2k coupons, you can buy 129 chest for 3000 balens. So if you spent 100 USD, you could get about 10k adv. henna (including prizes from the 3 spender events as well). So the price is approx. 1 balen per adv. henna. Do not buy adv. henna in shop, where it's much more expensive.
With the proper event, expert tatoo I-II, you could boost the amount of adv. henna you got. If you spend 2 x 100 USD in two henna events, and also get some more for free chests, you can get the minimum necessary 22700 adv. henna, then use it this way:
expert tatoo 1. day: use 10.000 adv henna, get as bonus 1900+1200.
expert tatoo 2. day: use 10.000 adv. henna, get as bonus 1900+1500
expert tatoo 3. day: use 5.000 adv henna to get 800, then spend the rest.
With this you will reach the 30k used, where you get 4000 more as reward - so prolly you don't even need to wait 2-3 months if you do it this way.
As an alternate, you might decide to spend only 100 USD, but then you need like 5-6 months to reach knighthood.
Of course they might alter anything, might remove expert tatoo event, might remove chest exchange, and might add unlimited adv. henna reward in events in 3 months, you never know :)
But all in all, this is a much cheaper BR boost than previous ones.
*** And what to do with chests ***
Personally, I will grab each day the 10 beast soul chest, and exchange 200 event chest for 100 hand of god. Too bad there is no more sophisticated exchange, like 1 hand for 2 chest...
Among all the late Wartune nerfs, we get another evil twist: the long-awaited sepulcrum and mahra event is back, and the amount of chest rewarded is still the same - however, you can't exchange these chests for anything useful - no adv. henna, no cloth set, no mount.
So what to do with them? First of all, check the contents: eudaemon junk (completely, utterly useless unless you are a new player), mount hoof, pure refine crystals (even more useless) and as rare drops, cloth pieces - useless, since you can't get the title without the wings. As additional rare drops, you can also get cloth shards. But the problem is, the cloth shard exchange list is not updated since a while, and instead, they offer the newer cloth sets for a lot of chests (ie. balens).
So let's check the available exchanges:
Maybe you can consider exchanging 600 for an orange seal, then sacrifice it for adv. sepulcrum. Also getting a purple seal for 100 chest can be okay if you still need it for some reason. Here is the second exchange:
If you need components for a bi-sylph, and either willing to spend 600 USD on it, or hope that getting the first version will be free somewhere in the future, you can grab these components as well.
Also, there is the third, basic exchange, where you can get beads of influence, and the 3 cloth (without wing).
And ofc there is the above mentioned sacrifice trick, so if you need adv sepulcrum still, and got 600 chest, you can exchange it for adv sepulcrum (but not a great ratio, 160-200 adv sepulcrum for 600 chests).
Whatever you choose, it's a kind of gamble, hoping for a future change in the game - either the first version of bi-sylph becoming free, or cloth shard exchange list expanded eventually. I think the later one has a higher probability of happening, but it is good to prepare for the first version as well, so this is what I will do:
Buy some emblem of wind and water, and open the rest (except for 90), for the cloth shards. Depending how many of the 3 different cloth pieces I got, I will exchange the remaining chests to complete the set, and open the rest. Update: I did this (exchanged 200 for wind&water emblem, opened 400 chests - got 100 cloth shards, and 5 cloth, excluding helmet).
I post this to make sure others dont fall into the same trap as me. Check out these graphics:
One is "chicken leg" (an item you get after tending to others campfires" the other is "ham chest", the current "chest" from hot events.
You see the similarilities? One is kind of mirror of the other. When a chest looks like the food you get somewhere else, accidents happen. Like, when I use all food after campfires, I open the event chests too. I post this so this accident doesn't happen to you. Chests should look like chests, imho...
Hi, I would like to share you a warning about a recent "silent nerf". I'm not sure when it went live, but probably the last patch. It's about spire.
Previously, you could start a spire run, turn off the computer, and then get the reward chests in your mail. Since spire is pretty long and boring, this was an ideal way to "blitz it". Lately, I check my mail only once every few days, so I didn't notice immediately - but I had no spire chests there from the previous day. So this thing is no longer working. I don't know if it is some conscious nerf from their part in their senseless nerfing frenzy, or simply a cron died out on their server and no one noticed.
But the point is, now if you want to get the full reward for spire, you have to leave your computer on, and you must be online when you finish. (You can still do it afk, just don't log out). I know that with a team of 4 medusa now you can even blast through spire nightmare non-afk and complete it, and it does not even take a horribly long time. But for me, it is better to get 16 spire nm chest by spending 1 minute on it, than getting 24 in 12-15 minutes :)
You can spend any amount of balen - ie. money - in Wartune. You can do it efficiently, and less efficiently. I remember a guy who stopped looong ago. At the end, he was just buying totally senseless things just to reach VIP9 and avoid losing honor in battlegrounds. He spent 5k USD in a record time, then he quit.
What can make people spend? Major reasons are to reach a goal (like getting a wing, being immune to honor loss, getting a bi-sylph etc) or just keep up the competition with others. The later one is a real motivation. I remember R2 servers once had a character named "Zebq". In like 3 months, he became the top BR, he maxed out everything. If you do it in such a short time, you skip all events, you just buy everything for the basic price, which is horribly high. So we could calculate, the guy was supposed to spend rougly 1 million dollars. Of course I'm pretty sure he didn't spend. He either was a good hacker (but this is quite unlikely, I'm sure if someone gets so much attention, the devs check him), or he was an insider, who just had access to unlimited balens. But nonetheless, his streak inspired the top players to race with him, and spend more. So either this was an intentional goal to milk the top cows, or just an unintentional result of an employee "trying the game", it generated extra income for them.
It usually starts little: you buy a wing or something else you cant get for free, and after you opened your wallet once, it gets easier and easier to open it again. After you spent 10 USD ten times, making a recharge of 100 USD doesn't seem so horrible - after all, you already spend this amount, and for lesser reward. After a longer (or shorter) time, if you did several 100 USD recharges, you will even consider the 500 or 1000 recharge, which is truly ridiculous for a game. And soon you won't even admit how much you spent and look for excuses like "I can afford it" "I spend 1000s of hour on it, it's still a cheap hobby".
As you know, I believe that spending on a game is okay, if it's not such an amount which you will regret after you stop playing / spending. However, now I believe the game has reached a point after which spending money on it is totally pointless. Lag, freeze, load times, complete and utter nerf of everything, hacks going uncontrolled, and this is going on since a very long time. We see no sign that anything will change. I admit that in the 3+ years since I play this game, I became quite and addict. The time and money I spent made me addict. And I'm sure I will continue to play for a while. Not because I have hope that something will change - just because the addiction, and because after a long day I can still find some fun in it. And secretly I hope that one day, they will explain all the fumbles, bad decisions they made. But I'm not recharging again, I'm pretty positive of that - unless these issues got solved by some miracle.
Ocassionally, when players get really pissed off, someone always says on the forum "boycott them, dont recharge." I don't think it works that way. Players will not sto precharging just because someon says so, or to "punish" the company. They stop recharging because they lose interest. I'm sure some of you still have goals, which, if you can buy it cheap enough, you will pay for it. Like "reaching knighthood" "getting a red sylph" etc.
But here is some advice: if you want to spend money to reach a goal - stuff will get free eventually, or at least much cheaper. Everything does. Just from the near past - first adv. henna sale, you could buy knighthood for 2000 USD. 1 month later, last hot events, you could get it for 400. So just to reach your goals, no hurry.
If you want to spend to compete with others, to keep up: I see a lot of players have quit in the past half year, which is no wonder. But note that the whales, who spent the most, stayed. So do not hope to gain rank by the top players quitting. They won't. They spent too much. Go to battleground, the only opponents you meet will have red sylphs. Go to titan wars, each team is a heavy casher team. So spending to catch up is also pointless, because you will never catch up.
So my answer to the opening question, "When to spend balens in Wartune?" is actually, never, anymore.
As I promised earlier, I made an analysis for the broken Wartune event, Sacred Gold tree. I prefer the data I collected myself, but I refused to spend balen on something so broken like this. So this data is based on info I got from friends, and also I checked videos on the net where people used Sacred Gold tree then showed what they have won.
A little explanation of what you see:
You can see the total amount of items people won with 1683 attempts. First number row is amount of the item, second is the total value. On the bottom, you can see the average value per attempt: total of all balen values, divided by number of attempts. Please note I made 2 averages: one with the Odin someone won, and one without. You see there is a huge difference. If you are lucky, and you win a bi-sylph, then you will be happy since you made a "good deal". But if you are unlucky, then each 65 balen attempt yielded a 15 balen value item on average. A very, very bad deal. The stats are insufficient to tell the chances, so you don't know if bi-sylph is 1%, 0,1% or what. But we know many people who used attempts worth 40-60k balens won nothing, and some won one from as low as 20-50 tries.
I noticed an interesting thing when I processed the data, one player had an extremely high amount of mahra, compared to the others, and much lower value in other items. So it is possible that it's true what R2 claims, they "rigged" the gold tree, to give "less rewards" for those who use free wands. But I quite doubt it works the way they claim. Rather, they might award less items for those who never spent balens, compared to those who did.
A few words on item values: with the 2k balen coupon, you can buy chests for 27 balen each, so thats the price I used when calculating item costs, which you can get in hot event exchanges - like compliment / gift / blessing of god, moon rock /dust and evolution emblems. The cost of divinity soul, hard to set here anything realistic. So I said, the average divinity soul an average player can make in areasonable time is level 7. You need 16x lvl 4 div soul (if you make it only during hot events), so I take the lvl 4 div souls BR value, multiplied by 2 and divided by 16 to set price for lvl 4.
I set epic sylph seals to zero balen value since they are worthless. Because when you use these, they have zero sepulcrum in them. So you have to use advanced sepulcrum instead of normal sepulcrum. A complete, total waste. You can make such epic sylphs totally free over the time, saving the evolve materials at the cost of 10.000 adv sepulcrum is a very bad deal.
About Odin seal value: its the chest exchange value you need to get the evolve materials (5000 dust/rock, 1500 emblems) plus the 60k balen.
Anyway, the conclusion: even if the game weren't dying, and the Sacred Gold weren't hacked over for months, I wouldn't recommend spending balen there. The event is the worst gamble in Wartune's history. The mount/chest gamble was already bad, but this? Some people can throw out 1000 USD on the window and get nothing? Some win a bi-sylph for near free, for which others need 2 fully evolved orange, and stuff worth 127k balens? This is the level of gamble which they should have never added, a true killing blow to Wartune. I can imagine people going to the doctor, crying, repeating "Why I did this? Why I spent so much money on nothing?"
And the hack itself, not corrected for weeks, maybe months... The tree should have been banned permanently from the game: but it won't happen. Because some ppl still spend money there, so they are happy running it, not thinking of the other consequences.
I promised a sacred gold tree analysis, but something more important came up meanwhile. They added a new exchange:
We didn't get too much free chest, so the question is, do this, or go for these:
At first sight, you would start calculating the BR gain from the cloth set title (the cloth BR is neglectable, as I calculated in a previous article) and then compare it with the henna BR gain. And I would be happy to do that calculation - but it's much simpler than that. If you check the cloth panel, there is a wing for this set too. You just can't get it in the current exchange. You could get it in the past 3 days (210 chest for the whole set), but not now. I'm pretty sure you need the wing for the title as well - but getting 210 free chests until yesterday was impossible.
So now we can witness another Wartune trickery, aka nerf, a well-concealed method to cheat the players (the forum is already full with complaints from people who were victims to this cheat). Unless you spent balens on the chests, you cant get this title. And I hope you didn't spend - if I would be an official credit rating company, I would assign Wartune "junk rating", "don't spend (not even a penny)". Especially since we got our new nerf. And this one is a BIG ONE. Mount training event nerfed as well. I'm sure you remember that each mount training event in the past 3 year gave back a percent (usually 50%) of the whips used. Not anymore. So yeah - they HALVED the amount of mount whips you can get from now on. Don't worry 7Road/R2Games etc, those players who can't be repelled from spending (and even playing) with this grand action, will keep spending even when the game crashes every minute and just to log in will cost 100 dollars (which might happen soon with the current tendencies).
So anyway, my advice is, if you didn't use your chests up yet, just go for the advanced henna. For 120 chests, you get 1000 henna, which is +300 stats. equivalent to henna you collect in 20 days. One small step towards knighthood :) But much, much worse than the +1000 stats title bonus from the cloth set.
I wish there would be some happy news around for Wartune, like unlimited events returning, or nerfs being undone, or caching enabled again... But sadly, the opposite is happening. They nerf something every day. Now the cloth events are nerfed further - where you didn't think there was anything remaining there to be nerfed.
1. Cloth synthesis no longer awarding fashion core shards. No one can explain this one. Getting 5-6 fashion cores for free? What was so bad about it so you had to take it away from us?
2. Clothing synthesis no longer awards "unlimited" cloth chests. Previously, if you made 2x lvl 5 armor on the same day, you could claim 2x the chest reward, containing random cloth. A little thing, but it did matter. I think they did not even want to nerf, they just try to make things simpler - but they do it the wrong way. I ignore cloth synth events since a while, I will continue doing so.
3. Cloth set exchange. We have a new cloth set exchange, where you can exchange 210 event chest for a cloth set you might have missed earlier. Wait a moment... I do have clothing shards for that purpose already! I sincerely hope that this panel is not what it looks like. Ie. making new cloth set sold only for balens, unavailable for clothing shards. They already did this to ancient beast shards - letting people collect them, then making it useless - I hope it's not going to happen to clothing shards.
With my next blog entry, I will try to make a sacred golden tree analysis (the most broken thing in Wartune's history), if you have any data, please send it to me or post it here.
