Free knighthood

Wartune promises that the knighthood requirements will be lowered with Wednesday patch. This means some free players will reach knighthood this week, and more / everyone will follow in the next 1-2 months. This is really good news! Knighthood was one of the few features where the price has dropped fast. First, it cost about 2000 USD for the whales in hurry, then they lowered it to like 200 USD, and due to an accident, you could buy it for even 50 a few weeks later. But those who were patient enough, and exchanged for adv. henna their chests each time when there was an opportunity, will now have KH.

Also do not forget that since many days, you can collect tatoo gift packs in Cloud city. You can find 10 henna in this pack with a high probability (like 25%?) So if you are devoted enough, and do all the 200 collections each day, you can get like 500 henna per day which is a decent amount, helping to reach knighthood even faster. I wonder why they never think of giving free adv. mahra :)

So, knighthood is within reach, here are some advices for you:

1.) Only half of the power comes from the skills. The other half comes from the talents. And those cost bound balens. A lot. Some months ago, I would have said, there is nothing better to spend on your precious bb. But now, bb is your only chance to get a bi-sylph. So my advice is, buy a few cheap talents for bb, and put it on res reduction, but as soon as it gets more expensive, save the rest of your bb. As you see, talent stones are given out occassionally, who knows we might even get enough eventually to buy talent points for them.

2.) The strength of knighthood is the 2 powerful delphic skills. With those, you can deal almost as much damage as with your sylph delphic. However, don't forget that skills are merely multiplying your current ATK. If your ATK is not high enough, KH will not make you a god either. I often meet in the arena complete teams with KH, who die easily. They did pay for knighthood, but they didnt have the other stats.

3.) KH not only gives you: it also takes away. Mages lose restoration, suntoria, blessing of light, purification. In the old times, with some well timed heals, combined with heal and guard runes, you could beat a stronger opponent. Hell, I even beat KH ppl when I wasn't KH. But after you reach KH, tactics is gone. Battles are just brute force. Higher ATK wins.

4.) Be wary of the "titan system". It's a very bugged, badly designed, useless system. Instead of your second skill, an automatic skill is used. If you try to click a rune BEFORE that, you lose 2 actions, not one. This is the same as the amnesia bug. Also, after your 2nd action, the 2nd automatic rune triggers - taking away another action from you. A 90% damage reduction shield then a heal right after it in the first 2 rounds is not very useful - but losing 2 action is. Especially since on World boss you lose not only these 2 actions, but the double hit as well. So I recommend not taking the titan rune at all until you can get the 3rd, the death rune. But I also know it gives some resist and resist reduce, so some of you wont be able to resist it... and then curse like me :)

5.) You won't get the KH skills to max automatically. You need to collect XP for that. Best XP is campfires (do all 3 each day), and MPD / ToK / Spire runs. If you saved up a crapload of xp scrolls and stamina potions, now is the time to use them. Especially during XP buff from you servers CW champion.

If you want to know more about how much henna you need and how to spend it, see my previous articles here and here.

Advanced henna and knighthood

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...

Henna, Tatoo, Knighthood

Originally I wanted to write a full analyis of the new Wartune patch, but the Henna-Tatoo-Knighthood topic itself will fill a full entry, so I will continue with the rest only in my next post.

When they added the Tatoo system with the last patch, at first glance it seemed a small stat bonus, nothing special. But these stats are adding up, and as we learned from a Russian test server, can go up to +5000 stat per slot! That's pretty powerful, making Tatoo the next Holy Forge, being able to increase your attack and defense by as much as 20-30 percent. But hold on for a minute, and let's make the math.

On average, 100 henna gives you +5 stat increase. You earn 300 henna per day, so you can get +450 stat per month. To reach the maximum 40.000, you need almost 8 years. "Fortunately" we have advanced henna as well, which can give you something like +30 stat increase per 100 adv. henna used. Too bad that advanced henna is a purely cash item currently. And it's sold super expensive as usual - based on the stats given and BR for balen value, 100 adv. henna worth aprox. 100 balens. But the shop sold it for 500 balens, at 5x price. So far, I just said, who cares, ignore this new way to waste money in the game - it's so expensive, only the heavy whales will buy it, and they are already too strong compared to the rest of the players, it won't make any difference.

Tatoo of Quorax

However, the current patch added a new feature, "Knighthood", the next step after Class Advancement. And it's prerequisite is +12000 total tatoo stats! Something you can reach in 2 years - or immediately, if you are willing to cough up 2000 USD for the advanced henna. Which only one player, Quorax did so far on the European servers. I say, do not worry much about this. You don't have to wait 2 years. Henna will be inflated like everything else in the past 3 years. First, they sell it at gold price to cashers. Then they will start to give more and more in gift packs. Then they reduce prize, and finally, we shall start getting tons of it as a free reward for some new event. Until then, just keep collecting the free henna, and don't even think about advanced as long as it's prize is not reduced to 1 balen apiece.

It is a pretty unfortunate thing to add a complex system to a game, which is available either after 2 years, or if you play 2000 USD. The devs obviously didn't do their math. But let's put aside this prerequisite, and check what Knighthood does actually.

The main feature is that both your skills and talents are replaced completely. Hold on... I lose all my skills? All my talents? No more Thunderblast? No more Restoration? I hope they give something really good instead.... Well, they do. For a mage, you can choose between 2 path, Arcane and Restoration. You can even have free switch between the two, but for that, you need 16000 total tatoo, not 12000. There are 2 basic skills which apply to both paths: one is an improved version of lightning bolt (more damage, more rage) the other is an improved version of Rain of Fire (more damage). But the bigger deal is that these skills give you a permanent passive bonus of +20% MATK, +20% HP and +30% MDEF. Thats a real kickass bonus, more than you get from all your tatoos (even when those are impressive too). So when you reach Knighthood, you will play in a different league, you will become a god.

About the rest of the skills: the additional arcane skills are great too, nice delphic, nice big aoe, cool passives like one which reduces the opponent's resists, the other reduces their awakening points. However, the restoration skills suck at first glance. Instead of restoration - which usually heals the caster to max hp - you get a skill which heals only 10% of your max HP at level 1. Same for the "big" group heal, restores only a percentage. Complete useless as long as Tritons and Blessing of Light exists. Even the new suntoria is a pale version of its previous version. Sure there are some passive mini-heals, but the fact is, mage loses it's ability to heal when reaching Knighthood. So this is also a nerf, disguised as a boost. 

And what about the talents? I remember we were grinding XP for months to max out holy seal level 99 and the rest of the talents. Some (ok, most) talents are pretty useless, but there are some which are real good. Direct 14% damage decrease, 30% reduction in rage cost, extra heal for Restoration (wait, heal is no more), and Thunderblast slowing 100% chance (wait, Thunderblast is no more). These talents will be all GONE. And what you get instead? Some cool new talents: increased resist, resist reduce, tenacity, intensity, influence (although I wonder how can I use influence when I don't have frost bolt anymore, or any other skill which could stun, lol). But each level cost (bound) balens, the more talent points you have the more it cost. The total can be several hundred thousands :)

You can see a full video on youtube about the new mage skills and talens, thanks to chillin and wartunenewsfeed for making it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTrgb4Yb_ic

There is one more thing, you can upgrade your equipment further in the new mpds after you do Knighthood. It's a cool thing, too bad not available to 99,99% of the players either.

So what I think, this knighthood thing is messed up. It's something like, "Hey guys, business is not going as we used to. So please, please, give us 2000 USD, in exchange, we will give you 50% increase in your BR. You will be stroooong. (ok, we will nerf a few things, like healing and stun, but you didn't need those anyway)."

So I think Knighthood requirements are too steep. They should be lower, and they should add extra talent for pumping up your henna total (and not selling it for ridiculous balen prices). Also I don't see the point of replacing the skill system, they should have just boosted the old skills to additional levels. Fight is decided in sylph phase anyway, I don't see much point in totally revamping the skills, people will be angry losing the old skills they used to. Don't fix something that is not broken!

The Odin Project

Dear Players, I would like to thank all who was kind enough and donated for the Wartune Odin Kickstart Project. I got many encouraging messages, it felt very good that the blog I make since years helped people. Although there wasn't enough to cover the cost of a sylph merge, I still consider the project a successful one, because it helped me to find the spirit to continue playing.

I had 10k balens from recharges. Got a total donation of 350 USD, so I had to recharge 150 more so I can buy the Odin, which I did. I had all the materials to merge 2 orange sylphs into a Loki, then advance it further to an Odin. The adv. sepulcrum event came just at the right time, so I could immediately pump up the new sylph. I had enough adv. mahra so I could make it 3 moon, but I decided not to do it, just spent 9000 adv. sepu to make it a 2-star Odin. I wait for the next adv. sepu event so I can collect the chests there as well, and complete pumping it then.

Also, about the skills, I got 7 useless ones out of 8. So I started this cycle: forget a skill for 300 bound balens, and learn one for free, and hope for luck. Repeat every 8 hours. I was a bit afraid that the better skills are more rare, but fortunately, this is not the case. After 3 days of trying, I'm here now:

Active skills:
Delphic Endless Engulf is a must have, everyting else is optional :)
Devour Soul: this life-drain skill was one of the reasons why Hecate was the best sylph, so I was happy to have it with Odin.
Awe: The fight is decided in sylph form, so staying longer in sylph form than your opponent is cruical.
Divine Prayer: Unfortunately, Odin has only one aoe which affects all opponent, the rest is only 2-4 targets. Still good enough in most cases and decent damage.
Delphic: Apocalypse Judgment. A devastating single-target spell. This is the one I got last, but I hoped more for Delphic: Light of Inspiration, the aoe version of Devour Soul. In pvp, you don't need 3 Delphic, since you won't have enough time/awaken point to cast all. But 3 delphic is useful in Sylph expedition and in arena. So later on, I will try to get Light of Inspiration, I have yet to decide which skill I want to drop. The wise choice would be probably Apocalypse Judgment, or maybe Awe.

Passive skills: 
right now, I got lotteried the 3 damage-increasing skills:
Mass Assault: +20% damage vs all but Dark targets. (this one I got via replaces)
Master of Light: +5% damage.
Redeeming Light: +10% damage after each attack.
Logic says i should replace the later 2. Either with Power of Darkness (all damage received reduced by 10%, light by 20%) and agoran shield (damage received reduced by 20%), OR go for awaken point management: Divine Howl (chance to get 300 awaken points), Divine Wrath (Chance for opponent to lose 150). Problem with these too is that the chances are unkown. I might give these skills to my old Hecate and experiement with, my guess is the chance is either 5 or 10%. Still have to do the math which is better - being in sylph mode longer than your opponent, or taking less damage. But right now, I will stick with these skills, I want to get as far in sylph exp as possible. Too bad lag kills that event like everything, sometimes I start it and by the time I can do something some of my sylph is already dead...

Also I want to do some more experiment. I'm curious how exactly the light&dark resist works, also how is ATK calculated from MATK and PATK. I will get back to you when I have this information.

Henna event
Finally, I would like to call your attention to yet another hoax from Wartune devs, the seemingly worst resource-user event in Wartune's history (although no doubt even worse will follow), the "Adv. Tatoo" event:

This event works only with advanced tatoo, not with normal. Really the only way to get these is do a big recharge right now. But, you make better use of your money if you put it to fire, then it will at least give something useful, a bit warmth. Adv. henna is nothing just a couple of normal henna used in a row. Whenever you use henna, the actual stats increase a little. If you use, advanced, it increases more. So it's the same thing,  you just pay something for what is free. If you ever grab some adv. henna, save it. Save it until you can't improve your stats anymore with normal henna. And use adv. only then, not now!

Wartune patch 5.2 analysis

First of all, I would like to thank again those who donated to my Odin kickstarter project. Although we are still far from the goal, the kind words of support felt really good, I see the work I did in these past 2 years were not completely vain.

I wrote a long article about the patch changes, which I think positive, and which I think negative. Please comment if you think I missed something or you have a different opinion!

Positive changes

Treasure inventory

This is the best thing in the new patch. 5 extra pages for gems, inventory problems solved forever, hopefully. Yes, it costs 2500 bound balens, but it's a one-time price, and you can earn at least 4-5000 bound balen per month without recharge (method described in the hint sheet of this article for donators), so this is affordable to anyone. They also added a dimension essence inventory too, but unfortunately, it is bugged, the dimension essences are in your inventory still, so this addition is just a useless visual show right now, hopefully they will correct it.

Devotion rewards

A fix fashion core is a nice reward, and you don't have to fumble with the wheel rolling, thats a small positive change.

Tatoo and henna

A new feature which requires little time and gives extra BR is always welcome. However, in this case, the BR gain seems so neglectable, and maxed so fast, it will be probably a feature which wont keep us excited for long. When you have gathered 100 henna (you can earn 150 per every 10 hour from the henna lab, and if you like, you can plunder 20-25 more daily from other players), you can create a random henna. Like everything in this game, this is completely random lottery, both the stats you get, and their amount. So it mostly resembles to refine, with the difference that with every stat increase, you get a decrease as well. Actually, you can lose more than you gain, so the only useful tatoo is the one where the negative stat is charisma. So all you have to do, click a slot, make a henna, if the negative stat is charisma, and better than the previous stat, insert it. If you max out everything, your BR might increase even by 500, whoa! Of course there will be an expert tatoo but that's for the future (and for balens for sure).

New spirit convenant functions

Spirit covenant was useless since a long time. The only feature I used lately was power of healing, but I purchased it separately. With the fishing nerf, even lord of time lost most of its charm. The current additions, detecting wild boss, and one-click farm can save you a lot of time, however. The world boss function I consider useless, since our WB dies in 1-2 rounds, and if I do it manually, I earn twice as much gold as in afk. Anyway, I think spirit convenant is useful now, just make sure you buy it from hot sales, with the 200 balen discount coupon for 1099.

New VIP functions

Besides increasing the weekly VIP reward, the only new VIP function I found is that they decrease gem conversion cost for VIPs. This means when you use your 1-hour VIP card (precious now, since you can't fish more!) you not only do guild blessing, VIP reward claim, sylph arena and adding dimensions, but you have to time your gem conversions. Still, this small addition is not something which could make anyone subscribe for VIP.

Eudaemon skill system simplified

In itself, this is a good change, you can choose which skills to improve, and neglect the useless ones. You need 640 skill books to improve one skill from lvl 4 to 5. With 72 different skills, it meant you needed 46,080 skill books to get a level 5 skill after level 4. Thats 921 days, and 23 billion gold. I bet not even the devs made that math :D So, this would be all good - if they didn't remove the skill books from the guild shop.

Check info of players from different server

This one was always possible in the past (battlegrounds and other places), so making this available again is not a new addition, just a bugfix which took them a loooong time :)

Negative changes

Sylph arena and normal arena hot icons removed

Game time increased, now you have to run in the city to these NPCs, an unnecessary, bad change.

Eudaemon skill books removed from guild shop

This is a massive nerf, you can no longer buy eudaemon skills for gold. I will never understand their love for nerfing, taking away from players.

Bounty targets reward nerf

Rewards have been decreased in the eudaemon arena. Since they removed rewards for making lvl 3 and lvl 4 gems, the amount you earned in eudaemon arena was no longer enough to claim all rewards during gem synthesis event. The situation will even get worse. A completely unnecessary and senseless nerf to those who can't beat the top opponents.

Resist crystal replacement

Previously, you could replace resist crystals with one click, now you have to remove first then add a new one. Extends game time, this is probably just a bug, not intentional nerf.

Sylph expedition reward adjustment

I see no extra reward here, if there was a change here, something got removed or amount decreased.

Guild blessing

Apart from the new graphics, I see new change whatsoever, the items are the same crap, xp books, seeds, the only useful item is still the bound balen.

New eudaemon: Panther lord

I'm not sure if the game developers noticed, but a player needs, and can use only ONE eudaemon. The only places where you have a minor use for 3 more is eudaemon arena and bounty targets. So adding a SEVENTH eudaemon to the game is no use to any, unless it has some unbalanced powers (to be nerfed later) like wind ranger. More eudaemon would mean just more skill books needed to max out skills, fortunately they changed the system and this is no more problem.

Texas Hold'em

Although we haven't seen this mini-game added, the forum patch message gives a good description, so we have a clear vision what this is going to be. First of all, I put this into the negative category, because:

1.) poker has NOTHING to do with this game. Period.

2.) if it gives any reasonable reward, then this is yet another thing which can increase game time.

3.) this is just another „buy stuff for balens” mini-shop, camouflaged so no one can really see how much they are paying for specific good (which, as such, will be certainly overpriced).

4.) making a complete poker game takes a lot of time. This amount of time could have been enough to resolve ALL problems we have right now.

5.) this is truly an online poker, where you pay money, win money, lose money. The only real difference to real poker is that you are not allowed to withdraw your winnings, you must spend it on virtual goods. I don't have to be a lawyer to know that this kind of activity would require a strict government licence, special taxes, and strict control to ensure no cheating happens from the side of the owner. And as such, by adding such an event without a licence, they risk shutting down the entire game, which would hurt all of us the worst way.

About the game system itself, you play poker, and from each pot, they take 20% rake (insanely high, compared to any poker site!) For all rakes you paid, you get points, which you can exchange for items in a point shop. We yet have to see the prices of items, but all I can say in advance, unless you have good experience in online poker, don't even try this.

Summary: my overall feeling of this patch is positive. I'm very happy about the treasure inventory. Of course, like with every patch, it would be even better if they don't do any unnecessary nerf, but we are used to those, sadly.