Balen value of items

This article will show you a simple way to determine if a deal in wartune is worth it or not.

Wartune is a game where you can spend any amount of balens. If you are not smart, or if you don't have the time, you can buy things others achieve by spending time and playing smart. However, if you spend mindlessly, you will soon find that you spent too much, and achieved too little. When one day - maybe 1 week later, maybe 6 months later - you get bored of the game, would you regret if you spent 200 USD on it? And if 20000 USD?

There is one thing you must buy - it's the VIP membership. 8 USD per month, it gives so much advantage, if you buy nothing else, you should buy this. About the rest. There are many things you can buy for balens. Right now at the beginning, I show you a simple way to know whether you should buy something for balens or not.

Wartune is a powergame. When you spend balens, you usually buy Battle Rating (attack and defense stats) for your character. Obviously, you want to get the most BR for your balens. Do not buy anything where you get less than +1 BR per 10 balen or this game will cost you thousands of dollars in a few months. You should also set the maximum you are willing to spend per month. 10, 20, 50 or 100 USD and hold onto that.

So max. 10 balen per BR

Let me show a few examples (I write rounded, approx numbers to make it easier).

Daru

Daru has much more limited use than gold. You can spend it on enlightenment to increase your attack, and as such, your BR. Enligtenment costs hundreds of millions of daru, though. When you need 300 million daru for +600 BR, then 50K daru worth about 1 balen, the same ratio like with gold, just more limited use. So they can't sell daru so cheap to make it worth. 

Event shards

Each event, you collect some kind of event shards: chocolates, dreadful scraps, cloud city chest pieces etc. What do these shards worth?

First, look at the list: what you can get for them. It can be something like a +20 mount for 160 shards, a cloth for 80 shards and similar exchanges. Calculate each exchange, and figure which is best.

A +20 mount worth 4000 balens, so there, each shard worth 25 balens. A cloth worth 400 balens, so there, each shard worth only 5 balens! Always try to exchange your shards so you get the best deal: usually it's buying the mount, mahra, and other rare items. Asking gold, soul crystal, clothes is not a good deal.

Fate stones

Each fate level gives +400 BR. Soon enough, you need a fixed number of 400 fate stones to increase fate level by one. So a fate stone's value is about 10 balens.

When your fate level is very low, a fate stone worth even more since you need much less stones to level it up. Your first paying roll each day gives an average of 2 fate stones for 30 balens. Until level 4, it worth buying (but only first roll each day).
Please note that on the long term, you get more fate stones (even for free!) than you need. So if you are willing to wait for many months, don't spend balen on them.

Gems

First, check what is the level of your gems. I have all level 6 gems, some level 7. So I need to upgrade my level 6 gems to level 7. My level 6 gems give me 499 BR (including soul engraving), level 7 ones give 635. So I gain +136 BR while upgrading a gem. To upgrade a level 6 to 7, I need 3 level 6 gems. One level 6 gem is made from 1024 lvl 1 gems. So 3072 gems give me +136 BR (worth 1360 balens). So one level 1 gem worth for me approx. 0.5 balens. A level 2 worth 2 balens, a level 3 8 balens etc. You should calculate this for yourself.
* Please note that with the recent gem events, everyone got lvl 8 or higher gems. So in overall, this decreased the gem value a lot. One lvl 1 gem worth only 0.1 balen if you make lvl 8 gems. So don't spend balen on gems. They can't sell it so cheap so its a good deal.

Gold

The easiest way to transfer gold into BR is by using it to make an astral. For example, to advance level 8 red astrals you need 360k astral xp. For every 1 million gold used, you get approx. 2000 astral xp. So you need a total of 180 million gold for +300 BR. That's 600K gold for +1 BR: which means for me, 60K gold worth 1 balen.

Does it worth for me to buy 90K gold in alchemy for 50 balens? Definitely no. Does it worth me to spend about 500 balen on 15 revives and +20% bonus to get +2 million gold in World Boss? More than 10 times worse deal than buying mounts! It's like paying 20K balens for a +10 mount.

Calculate this for yourself. Maybe your char is young, and for you, 1 balen is 30K gold or even less. Still, spending balen on gold DOES NOT WORTH it. Especially, since you get millions of gold for completely free each day.

Hades

Sometimes they add new features to the game, like sylph. If you are experienced enough, you can calculate the BR/balen value of anything. Let's takes Hades as an example. Hades is mostly useful for mages in class wars. Let's suppose, you are a mage, and without Hades, you won't make into the final, and with it, you do. So Hades will earn you 200 glory crystals each CW. If you play for 1 year at least, it's 2400 glory crystals. Best exchange for those is whips or runestones. So in best case, Hades worth like 7-8000 balens. But if you can make finals without it often, or can't even make with it, or you are not a mage, it's less valuable for you.

Kyanite

Kyanite's value can be vastly different for players, so I just show you how to calculate this. For me, to gain +8 defense or other stat in the advanced academy cost approx. 120k kyanite. 120.000 / 8 = 15.000, so I get 1 BR for 15k kyanite: which means, 1 balen worth 1500 kyanite. Might be different for you, just make the calculation for yourself.

Mahra

Calculating this is hard as hell. You have to consider how much BR the sylph gains from each upgrade, and how much that sylph BR transfers into your BR. When you use mahra, it mostly gives you just the opportunity to spend sepulcrum to make your sylph stronger, it gives only a little BR boost itself. Still, until purple, it's relatively cheap, and necessary (for evolve).  Short in short, a mahra is worth about 5-10 balens at most (not 30-35 for what Wartune sells it to you). 10 balens before your sylph becomes purple, 5 after. So don't buy mahra for balens. But when they give mahra as bonus to recharge event, it is usually a good deal.

Please note: using mahra to upgrade a sylph from white to green gives much better BR rate. But you shouldn't do that. Go farm sylph instead, getting a green is not so difficult (you have about 5% chance).

Mounts (direct buy)

A mount gives about +200 BR for every +10 stat. Shops/promotions sell +10 mounts for 2000 balens, +20 mounts for 4000, +30 mounts for 6000, so they are worth to buy.

Mount hoof

You need 50 mount hoofs to upgrade a mount to 1 star. It's the equivalent of a +10 mount, so it worth 2000 balens, which makes a hoof look to worth 40 balens. However, when all your mounts ar star 1 (which happens pretty quick) you need 100 hoof for an upgrade,reducing its value to 20, even later to 10 etc. So I would say the average realistic value of a mount hoof was 20 balens in th first 2 months, 10 balens later.

Mount whips

This can be very different for people. For example, I need 230 mount whips to increase armor stat by +5 (this gives the most BR for my whip spent). So I get 45 BR for 230 whips - making 1 whip worth 2 balens. If your mount stats are lower, a whip might worth you more, like 3-4 balens.

You can inrease the value of whips, however. Usually there is a whip event each month, which gives bonus for using them. This increases the value of whips by 0.5-2 balens.

Still, the price set by Wartune – 10-16 balens with discount - is too high.

Sometimes you can get whips bundled together. For example, a +30 mount with 50 mount whips for 6300 is an acceptable deal - you get a mount which worth 6000 balens, and the mount training whips cost you 6 balens apiece.

Refinement locks

Locking a slot cost normally 45 balens. So this could have been a really valuable items in the old times - but not anymore. You find a lot more refinement locks in jewel hunt than you will ever need. In fact, refinement crystals will be your problem, not the locks. So for me, this item has no value at all.

Runestones

If calculating mahra into BR is hard, runestones are near impossible. Rage granted from a rage rune can let you use a few more delphic during a fight, a chaos rune can reduce damage to you and increase damage to opponent etc. A better approach is to say, you can get an average of 30 free runestones from a 5 minute tank session each day. How much money would you spend on those runestones then? Me, 2-4 balens at most (so rune refine definitely don't worth it). The same is true here like everywhere, early on, a runestone is most useful, since you need less to improve a rune. But when you need like 4500 to level your chaos rune to 10, then it won't worth more than 2 balens.

Soul crystals

3000 soul crystals give all my gems +2% bonus. Since I have a total of 32 gems, each giving +220 BR, the 3000 soul crystals would give me +128 BR in wartune. So need 23 SC per +1 stat - that makes a soul crystal worth about 0.5 balens. If your SC level is much lower, this might be better for you, but not much - since your gems are probably weaker too, so 1-2 balens per SC at most. R2games gives soul crystals for like 4-5 balens. So you should never buy them.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get free soul crystals. I never bought any and I'm already at level 54 soul engraving after 13 months of play.
* Update: Now that everyone has maxed out soul engraving, SC's value is determined what you can exchange it into. You can buy for 5 SC either one whip, or one rune stone. Both items worth approx. 2 balens, so and SC's value is 0.4 balen.

Sylph sepulcrum

Sepulcrum makes your sylph stronger, which makes you stronger. Unlike other resources, the BR you get from 1 sepulcrum does not decrease, it even increase a bit. So we can assign a fix price to sepulcrum. I do not go into specifics, but one sepulcrum worth approx. 10 balens (12 if you have an evolved lvl 80 Hades or Apollo).

Crystal shards

If you do 5 map attempts with a full party, using green maps, you will get approx. a total of 190 crystal shards. If you all use orange maps, you get about 570. So if you pay an average of 150 balens (cost of 1.25 orange maps) you get +380 crystals shards. So you pay an average of 0.4 balens per crystal shards. With 3 different resist crystals, the damage you take is reduced 50% of the time. I do not go into detail here, but using the above methods (calculate damage reduction into BR, and calc the balen cost of that) it is worth using orange maps until your resist crystals reach level 4. But do not buy crystal shards in the shop: using orange map is much cheaper!

Will crystal

Will crystals are very powerful. Level 1 gives +30 resist reduction, level 2 +50, level 3 +80. Every 10 reduction increases your damage by 1% (see calculations here), so it' pretty powerful. The only drawback is that bonus from will crystals is capped. You can have a maximum of 20% bonus damage from (resist reduce - opponent's resist). So after you have lvl 3 will crystals, it worth much less, because they will be useful only versus an opponent with high resist.
When flipping horns for balens, it costs an average of 750 balens to get 60 will crystals, so it cost about 12 balen per will crystal. At level 1 will crystal, to get +3% atk you have to spend 1250 balens, it's a good deal. When going for level 2 crystals, you will need to spend 2500 more balens for 2% more attack. It's still a good deal for 12 balen apiece. To improve them to level 3, you need 7500 balens for every +3%. Even if it doesn't work every time, still seems to worth it (but see later). Level 4 needs 1800 will crystals, this is where it gets expensive. At this point, reduction works only in half of fights or even less, so at this point a will crystal worth only about 3 balens.
Please note that a bit slower, but you can get will crystal for free from horns too. I do not recommend spending 12 balen apiece by flipping horns after your crystals are level 2, because when you reach level 3, the crystal's value drops significantly, so at this point you should slow down unless you have a lot of balens.

Packages

Each month, there is a package for sale for the usual price of 39 balens. How do you know the actual worth of this package? After all, the item you get from it is random!

There is a simple way to calculate this. If you know the probability of each item, you just have to multiply their values with their probabilities, add them together. About probabilities, it's usually the same, but many pages, like Cosmos publish good statistics of these.

Let's take an example:

Chances
Kingly soul (ie. event shard) chance is 50%.

Hades is the super-rare drop, it's like 0.2%. 

Sepulcrum and Mahrax80 rare drop, 1%. 

The rest is common: whips, fate stone, gold, runestone 12% each.

Values
KS's best exchange is for mahra. Since you can get 1.3 mahra for every chocolate, 1 KS worth 13 balens.

 Hades 7000 balens, 2 whips 6 balens, 2 fate stones 20 balens, 50k gold 1 balen, 2 runestones 8 balens, 80 sepulcrum and 80 mahra 800-800 balens.


So let's multiply values by probabilities:

 Laurel's pack value = 0.5 x 13 + 6 x 0.12 + 20 x 0.12 + 1 x 0.12 + 8 x 0.12 + 800 x 0.01 + 800 x 0.01 + 7000 x 0.002 = 6.5 + 0.72 + 2.4 + 0.12 + 0.96 + 8 + 8 + 14 = 40.7 balens

Looks like an okay deal for 39 balens, much better than usual. Of course, you must buy a lot so you get the rare items as well, and you can still be unlucky.

If you don't understand the calculation, just trust the result. Poker players calculate the same way.

Please note that most of the above contain some approximation. It's no way precise, and in many cases, you should make a calculation with you current stats. This is just a method, which helps you decide whether to buy or not.