2014/11/30

SC and gem event

We were all waiting for the next Wartune Soul Crystal event (both use and exchange). But there is nothing since 2 months. People are tossing around 2-3 complete vault size soul crystals in their mailbox. So everybody is asking the same questions, why there is no SC event? Will there be any ever? Well, it is here finally, but you wont thank it. You can exchange 100 SC for 50k gold, and that's it. 

Why such a sucky event?
There are many possible explanations, but I think the most likely is:
They finally realized that they gave out too much SC. Not only everyone maxed it out, but people can max out even whatever they can exchange for them (whips, runestones). So they just want the players to lose all these SC while gaining nothing in exchange.

Exchange or not?
I wouldn't do it if I were you. Gold is a free resource, we get a virtually unlimited amount. WB, DI and sylph boss gives many millions each day. If you are a relatively new player, with far from max stables, SC is your only chance to catch up with the older servers with whips. So you can do nothing just wait and hope. Older players, prolly you don't need gold anyway. So wait is a good strat too. When your mail is about to expire, just loot it, get kicked and that's it. 

Is it wise what Wartune does?
No, not at all. It's never wise to piss off your customers because you can lose them. In my other favorite game, Doomlord, they don't nerf, don't reduce rewards, and you have an event calendar for the entire year. Players feel safe and are happy.
And this is why because there WILL be a better SC event eventually. Because the player community CAN create a pressure on them, it will just take some time. But until then, don't worry to much about it. A better SC event will come eventually.

The gem event
There is also a gem event coming tomorrow. It's the same as before - it's limited (can be done only once per day), gives runestones. The change is they removed lvl 5 gem reward, and added lvl 9 and lvl 10.
This event is good! Actually - since most of us made lvl 9-10 gems for HoF and other advantages, an unlimited gem event with lvl 9-10 gems would be really shocking when we realize how much we lost by not being patient enough :)
Finally some math: 
1. If you have a few lvl 9 and lvl 8 gems, you need a total of 112 lvl 4 gems each day to claim all rewards and end up with 2 lvl 10 gems.
2. In the old unlimited event (where you get double reward for every gem, incl. lvl 5, but no rew for lvl 8 and 9), if you started with 112 lvl 4 gems (and also had 1 lvl 8 and lvl 9 gem), you ended up with 1.3 lvl 10 gems. 
So actually, the current event is better than the previous one :) You should claim each reward each day if you have the gems.


2014/11/28

Black friday "sale"



Really amazing! We cant event get a real discount on "black friday" sales in Wartune.

mahra normally sells for 25, sepu for 15. so 1 mahra+1 sepu is 40: exactly the same they sell it here. Btw mahra's realistic value is 5, sepu is 10-12, so this "sale" is double of realistic price.
mount whip worth 2 balens, SC is 0.4 balen (well, it actually worth nothing, since no SC event since 2 months) but anyway, the value here is 600 balen, they again sell for double price.
mount hoof and soul seals value is approx 10 balens each. So the third pack is 2k balen. Why buy it for 5k balens?
Vulcan's hammer worth approx 20 balens at the stage where I am, but price drops quickly as chance decreases. Stoves hold no value to me, have a lot from sylph boss. So 6k balens for a 2k pack, pretty ridiculous.
Will crystals approx 3 balens, crystal shard 0.4 balens (these are normal ingame prices!!) so this is 700 balens. Again no discount at all.

I see there is an extra 1M gold in each pack, but it worth nothing, really. So my question is, with all the SC and HoF fumble, wouldn't it be wise to do a REAL SALE at once? Because there will be only a very low number of fools who fall to these scams (even with the big spender combined) and Wartune lose a LOT of money.

2014/11/25

Turkey exchange

Here is Wartune's new gamble-chest exchange. The only new about it is that it's combined with a "group buy" - if enough people buy this chest, you get a discount. First, let's see what we can get for the turkey drumsticks:

Gold, kyanite and mount whips are obviously not why we should collect these.
Divinity shards can be useful to some people, 1 shard is still as expensive as 20 balens, so there you get 20 balens for each drumstick.
Will crystal is another option, unless you have lvl 5+ will crystals, each will crystal shard worth at least 3 balens, so in this case you get 45 balen per drumstick. But now, I strongly advise against this. There are just too many ways to get free will crystals. 
Mount hoofs worth only 10 balens, so exchanging Drumstick for those is a no-go.
A Skeletal Dragon can be cool, but for Drumsticks, it's just too expensive. Either hope to be lucky and get it from a chest, or wait until they sell it for balens.

So it's either divinity shards (if you want to evolve Hades/Apollo) or will crystals.

Now let's see how much balen a plump turkey worth:
  • Turkey Drumstick x1 - converts to either 1 div.shard or 15 will crystal shard
  • 100,000 Gold - we don't need more gold (at least not for balens)
  • Fate Stone x3 - most of us don't need fate stones either
  • Mount Training Whip x3 - a lot of people don't need whips either
  • Runestone x2 - we wait on the SC exchange event to get tens of thousands
  • Soul Crystal x800 - no SC event since 2 months, so not excited about this either
  • Divinity Shard x10 - this is a super-rare drop, so expected value is neglectable
  • Skeletal Dragon Card x1 - 0.1% chance to get a 8K balens mount
So 50% chance for a drumstick, and 0.1% chance for a Dragon:
0.5 x 20 + 0.001 x 8000 = 18 balen value (if you need a divinity shard)
0.5 x 45 + 0.001 x 8000 = 30 balen value (if you stil need will shards)

The gamble factor is here again, maybe you buy 100, 200 etc boxes and win a dragon, maybe you won't. If you buy plump turkeys for 12000 balens, you get divinity shards worth 3000 balens, and will have 30% chance to get a dragon. It is definitely a bad deal, better buy the dragon for 8000 later.

If 6000 plump turkeys are sold on your server (not gonna happen on ours), then you get the chest for 29 balens instead of 39. Even then, you can spend 12000 balens to get divinty shards worth 4000 balens, and you will have 40% chance to get a dragon. Still much worse than just buying the dragon for 8000 later.

Fortunately, a nice amount of free chests are given out. So if you need divinity shards, grab the free ones, and wait for the future events, there will be much better ones.

2014/11/24

sylph pack + big spender combo

Here is some triple combo running currently which worth an analysis:
big spender + wheel of prosperity + mahra/sepulcrum packs.
Of course a lot of gamble is included! 

First, lets check the value of the packs. Value is hard to determine, since we don't know the exact chances - the packs are very expensive so we don't have too much statistics. So I used the statistics for Violet boxes which were very similar.

30 x 0.68 = 20.4
40 x 0.25 = 10
100 x 0.06 = 6
300 x 0.01 = 3
600 x 0.001 = 0.6
1000 x 0.001 = 1

So thats an average amount of 41 sepulcrum / mahra per pack. So you pay 24,3 balens apiece: pretty expensive, considering that I value sepulcrum to 12 balens and mahra to 5 balens.

Now let's see if big spender and the wheel can improve this value. The Wheel gives an average value of 90 balens for every 1000 balens spent (this is based on a small statistics). Additionally, each pack has some balen value. I do not go into details here, just: flame chest 30, soul seal 10, sepu 12, mahra 5 balens. Gold, daru and gem pack represent no value.



pack value: 80 balens, wheel: 90. Total: 17% bonus

previous (170) + 180+90 = 440. Total: 22% bonus

previous (440) + 1260+270 = 1970. Total: 39% bonus

previous (1970) + 2500+450 = 4920. Total: 49% bonus

previous (4920) + 5000+900 = 10820. Total: 54% bonus


Looks like an almost okay deal. There are only 2 problems:
1.) You need to spend at least 100 USD to make it worth.
2.) There is a LOT of gamble and luck factor included.




2014/11/18

Sky trial 3-10 beaten

Hey guys, I'm happy to boast that yesterday I have finally beaten sky trial 3-10 (and as a side effect, has beaten Necro 30 too). I have used generally the same strategy as before:
1.) Do one attack round on sky trial while I filled up my rage and awaken points.
2.) Do a 2nd round, where I awaken at the beginning, and try to do a 2nd awaken as well with using only minimum heals and maximum damage.
I kept trying this since a while, hoping for a lucky streak, but the boss always had half-one bar HP left when he went berserk and finished me off.



What changed today:
1.) I spent the 700 sepu I saved up lately, and maxed out the PATK of my 3-star purple Aegis to 25K.
2.) Raised my Soul Seal level to 6.
3.) Used a lvl 6 intelligence potion (found in Golden Palace earlier).
4.) Used Ruthlessness astral.

It seems these small things were enough extra to push me through, especially Ruthlessness. See my stats to the above and left. Although Ruthlessness does not increase my average damage, with enough tries, there was a lucky streak where it performed better than average.

Being a mage didn't make much difference, Aegis, and his heal ability was the key here as well. I'm happy to see Aegis is at least useful somewhere, Hercules is so superior everywhere else.

My skill order was something like this:


2014/11/14

Flame chest & big spender

Here is my analysis of the events of this week.

Flame Emblem Exchange
Whats the best deal to exchange your flame emblems for?
1.) If you could get enough emblems for free to get a Smoldering pincer mount, that would be the best deal. However, I do not recommending buying chests for balens (see later), so you should just hope for a free pincer from free chests.
2.) The second best deal is either clothes (not the wing!) or sepulcrum. In BR-for-emblem calculation, sepulcrum is a little better, but for many players the visual counts too, so they will go for the cloth, I guess.

Flame chest value
The average value of items you can get from the Flame chest (purchased for 39 balens) is approx. 27.64 balens. This is a very bad value chest, you shouldn't buy it.


Gem synthesis event
We have a gem synthesis event where you can claim each reward only once. Wartune designers should learn that since they did multiple unlimited events in the past, making a limited one can reach only one goal: piss off customers and get rid off them. I don't care about the rewards - be it mount whips, runestones, or chicken heads - but I want a reward for each gem made. Especially since the number of times a player can do SC -> WHIP -> GEM -> SC cycle is very limited. Once your SC and WHIP is maxed, it is over, you can't get more gems. So if anyone makes gems during a limited event, he can't replace them later, so literally loses 20-30k BR permanently by missing the rewards. And Wartune wants to lure people into that???

New item: Soul Seal
Finally, here is the item which let's people continue engraving soul. You can get soul seal 3 way now: 


  • winning sylph atoll boss event
  • participating in flame temple (higher level battlegrounds)
  • spending balens

There are 2 questions about soul seal:
1.) how much it worth? Determining it's value is not easy, since we know little of the development costs yet. So here is my speculation: early on, cost goes up fast, until it reach like 400 seals per level, then it will slow down. So we can say on the long term, expect like 400 seal to give one level. I gain +400 BR per level (most of my gems are lvl 10), so I set seal value to 10 balens apiece now.
2.) Should I hoard it? There is a chance that there will be a spender event for soul seals, of course. Still, I recommend that as long a level costs only a few seals, you should use them. The BR gain is really huge for very little invested. When you need a lot of seals for one level, you can start hoarding.

Big spender
Seriously: You don't want to thank Wartune this Gem synthesis event by spending balens, right? Not even a cent. Unless its such a great promotion that is compensates for it - but it doesn't.

Still, I make the analysis: but I recommend that you do not spend. Especially since there is nothing really good to buy at the moment. The seals look appealing, but you need to throw out too much money on the window to get a significant amount. And don't forget: gem event...!!!


value: 57 balens (5.7% bonus)

value: 200+57 balens (12.8% bonus)


value: 739+257 balens (20% bonus)

value: 1300+996 balens (23% bonus)



value: 2760+2296 balens (25% bonus)

value: 5056+4500 (32% bonus)


value: 9556+7600 (34% bonus)

1K USD pack? seriously? c'mon...

2014/11/10

Hoard or use?

Chinese browser games including Wartune has a unique feature, they reward people who do not use resources, but hoard them. I have seen the same in an older game, Business Tycoon online too. Probably the original concept was to combine an event where you get reward for using a resource with a sale, where people can buy the resource – and sales will skyrocket.

However, the idea does not seem to work in practice. Players (or at least, some of them) are smart. They hoard the resources they get for free, and use them only when they get rewarded. Sales could be still a great idea, but not when you collect 1000 resources for free, and can buy 10 more for 50 USD.

Personally, I don't think that the hoard concept is so great, since:
  • It forces players NOT to use ANY resources to develop characters, but save up these for weeks, maybe months. We love to use stuff the moment we get them. Holding back, is like holding back your... you know.
  • It increases the gap between players – especially since in Wartune, you hoard and reward the same 3-4 resources around, so the benefits increase exponentially. Players who started later, or with less, or are on holiday during such an event, or just used some without reward are falling behind more.
  • When it ends – and it will, when you are maxed and can't use more – it will feel quite desperate. When you spend thousands of SC, gems, whips each week and get a huge BR boost every time, you get used to the euphoria. When it's over, it's bad.


Still, I agree that these „treasure showers” are great for the community morale, we are even willing to overlook lags, bugs, lack of CS as long as we get tons of treasure.

Anyway, we know that we have to hoard soul crystals, mount training whips, gems, sepulcrum, mahra, resist crystals, bounty scrolls, since we know there is a regular „hoard-and-use” event for these. But what about the other resources? Should I save mount hoofs? Dragon souls? Runestones? Etc. I would say, think what you win if you use these resources. If it nets good weekly reward, use some or maybe all. If it doesn't help you that much, save it. But let's see each.

Fate stones. Maxing out fate stone abilies was pretty easy, even for non-cashers. For this reason, we didn't expect any significant hoard event: and recently, they added one with great rewards. So now I say, if you didn't maxed fate yet, don't. Leave it at 20/18 and 20/19, just in case.

Lvl 8 gems. Question is, should I make lvl 9 or 10 gems? Or wait for an event which gives reward for these? Personally I decided to make the lvl 10 atk gems, and my team members did the same. This way now we can easily do 7 boss in DI every day, so win +20 hoof +20 dragon soul and some gold with it. It also made possible for me to do sky trial 3-5. I also made lvl 10 HP gems so I can survive World Boss 1 too. Which I could, but then WB got nerfed – so maybe this wasn't such a great idea. But with Hall of Fame coming up, almost everyone will make as much lvl 9 and 10 they can anyway.

Mount hoofs. It is possible that they will add a hoard-and-use event for mount hoofs. But also, hoofs are a real badass BR-boost. So I did the following: pumped up all my mounts to 2 star. It's a lot of BR, really. 3 star costs 200 hoofs, things slow down here, so I save up them now. But hoof are only available to lvl 80 class advanced players, so it is less likely that there will be a spender event on this.

Runestones. I don't expect a spender event for these, but of course I have the basic caution of always saving up like 1-2000 of these and use only when I can gain immediately a new level for a runestone.

Dragon souls. Some people might have maxed this out already, or maxing it out soon, and it is open only to lvl 80 class advancement players anyway, so I think dragon souls are safe to spend.

Daru. Although you can spend any amount of wild shop, I recommend that you save up 600-800M for the next troops.

Gold. You can always save up gold for gem synthetiser and cloth identify events: leave the world boss prize2 in your mail, do not use gold chests, store luckstones and vip tokens.


There are many other stuffs too: refinement crystals, vulcan hammers/stoves, heaven horns, amethyst etc. which they can use for a „hoard-and-use” event anytime in Wartune. I always save up some of these – just in case – but use the majority of them.

2014/11/06

Socialization and loyalty

Today I would like to write about a topic which is not related to optimize your character or gain more BR. But it is equal importance if you want to have fun in the game (in fact, in any game). It is socialization, your connection to other players.

In Wartune, there are many events which require teamplay. And this is a good thing, since it creates a community, and keeps players playing (since you don't want to quit and abandon your friends, right?) Still, I see it causes a problem for the majority of players to find partners for their daily multi-player dungeon, spire, arena etc.

You can do 2 things to find partners:

1.) Yell each day on guild or world chat, that you need additional players for spire, lych lair etc. The game even has built-in „LFG” tools to help this. Actually, when you start playing, this is your only way to find partners. But, after a while, this gets tiresome. You spend a lot of time yelling; sometimes no one wants to help; sometimes the people who join up are lame, and you fail early, or even worse, they quit / dc in the middle. This can really take away the fun in the long term, and can be the main reason of quitting.

2.) You must find 3 other players of similar playtime and skills like you, and always do team activities together with them. Every day. Sounds like impossible? Be assured, all good players do it this way. This is the only way on the long term. Let's face it: most people who play Wartune, play it like 4-6 hours a day. Then you can surely find an hour when all of you are online. Of course it can still happen that one player quits or you think too differently. In that case it's usually hard to find a replacement. In desperate situations, you can even play 2 character at once, and you friend can do the same, and then you need only one friend. But 3-4 is better of course.

When I see in guildchat: „No one is helping me! This is a bad guild, I go to somewhere else.” I always try to explain this concept, but not all players are smart enough to do it. Also, in some cases a players starts on a server with 6-10 months delay (or returns from many months of afk), have no balens and is not willing to buy any, for them it is indeed hard to find a permanent team. For players like this, I recommend that they restart on a new server. It's more fun, in an old server you can never catch up with the rest and you have to beg for help for the remainder of your life.

Besides making a team, loyalty / friendship is very important. After you are together for a while, and the team seems to work, think of your best real-life friend, or the family members which you feel closest to yourself. And give the exact same respect, loyalty and trust to those who you team with. This is the only way. Never blame them, never backstab them, always do what is best for your team. Because they are your family. You don't want to lose them.


I will write a similar article about guild socialization too.

2014/11/04

Wartune: Hall of Fame 3

People were waiting since long for the „Hall of Fame” event in Wartune, where you can just claim awesome rewards just based on your BR. Last HoF's rewards included the golden Apollo Wings (wasn't very difficult to reach) and Darknite Panter (a mount only a ver heavy casher could reach). The HoF 3 is finally announced, but players are very disappointed.

400k required for the mount - a condition which is very difficult for even the top whales who spent 100k+ USD.
Additional item rewards for 250/300/350k BR: Even the 300k is not easy for medium cashers.
There is no Apollo Wings or Darknite Panther, but there is a new set of clothes and wing - available only to one player per server.

Moderator Greenfireflygirl was kind enough to ask some info for the players from the developers:

Potions/Scroll not working, we are used to that since long, but blessing wheel not working either, thats new (and not making much sense). Most of us live with 200% Academy blessing most of the time, so we don't even know how much is our BR without it :)

To be honest, I do not trust entirely the developers giving us correct information. This blog is about giving advices, so I give you guys the following advices regarding this Hall of Fame event:

1.) Do not spend balen JUST to increase your BR for the sake of this event. Do spend keeping the limits you set for yourself, to reach your goals, and only on excellent deals. If in the last day you see you just miss a tiny bit, then you can use up something you stocked up, but thats all.

2.) On the day before the patch, before you log off, pump up your BR, do everything I suggest here in thisarticle. I recommend that you even log off in a dungeon so map bonus apply, and you can fire up a warrior's call as well, just in case. Also do the same the next day, 10 minutes before the patch when you log off. Academy, map bonus etc. might count or might not, but better be prepared for any case.

Btw, my personal opinion is that they do this event the perfectly wrong way. People are in a complete stress when the BR is taken. There are many ways to make mistake here, which is very difficult to correct (last HoF gave the customer service and programmers work for 3 MONTHS!) So this is what they should do instead:

Make a Hot event with keys „Claim 250K reward”, „Claim 300K reward” etc. And in any moment when the player has that BR, let him claim the prize. Put this button only on the main page so players can't player around with dungeon, map and other bonuses. I do remember they already did one BR event that way. I don't understand why they can't do it that way again. Also, I wouldn't fumble around with giving the cloth set only to the top, just add it to the 350K reward.

2014/11/03

November big spender analysis

We have plenty of big spender events in Wartune, and most of them are very bad. Now there is a variation, which deserves an analysis:

You need to spend 10.000 balens to claim the whole package. The best value sale is the sepulcrum pack II. It's still very expensive, selling sepulcrum at 20 balen apiece, where a sepulcrum worth only 10-12 balens, but maybe it's an okay deal combined with the above bonus and the option to get +5 sepu whenever you use 20. Let's see what we get for 10k balens:
700 sepulcrum   value: 7000 (8400 if you have evolved Hades / Apollo)
gives +170 sepulcrum during event: +1700 (+2040)
100 mahra         value: 500
gives +25 mahra during event: +75
14 pumpkin       value: 420
200 soul crystal value: 100
50 mount whip  value: 100
gold / daru: we get so much for free so it doesn't represent a value (but if you insist, the 1.9M gold+daru is approx 76 balens), Same for the gem packs, total worth is like 8 balens.

So we get a total value of 9.895-11635 balens, if we spend 10.000. So, if you have an evolved Hades / Apollo which gives increased BR for your sepulcrum, even then you get only 16% bonus. We have seen much better events lately, with 30-50% bonus. 

As usual, if you are impatient, you can buy for money what you can get for free in a month anyway. It's your decision, I gave you the numbers :)

2014/11/02

The perfect VIP wheel

Getting lvl 7 gems from the rigged VIP wheel is quite impossible, but still, there are better value wheels than others. Here is what I think the perfect VIP wheel is:
What you need to look for is the 500k gold, two mount whip x 5 (it is important that you get two! if you get only one, that will not be rolled) and mount whip x 2. If you have these 4 items, you can roll, it is a very good value wheel. An additional whip, and 20k, 60k gold can augment it even further. So after the roll, it looks like this:
So 560K gold (worh 11 balens) and 8 mount whips (worth 16 balens).

Long ago, I was happy with skeleton keys x 5 too, but since I got like 1200 skel keys in an event, I'm good with those for a year or so. If you low on skel keys, you can go for skel key x 5, 2 x whip5, 1x whip2 too.

Another good value board is 500k gold and extreme stamina potion. You see, the extreme stamina potion's 2.5 blitz gives 2.5 chance to convert your skeleton key into a crypt key. But thats a very, very rare board, you have to roll for a very long time, so I suggest better go for the above.