2015/01/25

Resist and resist reduction

When Wartune introduced resists, I thought finally there is the answer to the sylph delphics which one-shot people regardless of their HP. Well, it wasn't, but the problem solved itself - because the smart developers corrected the lord divine medallion bug with patch 3.1 (which counted LD damage bonus twice), and people get a lot of HP and defense from other sources. Resist itself didn't help much because the initially so-rare will crystals became super-common later. So it was pretty difficult to have a higher resist than the opponent's resist reduce. For thsi reason, resist didn't do much in pvp, it helped only in pve like sky trials or god's descent.


Probably the developers have sensed this flaw, so they added a huge resist boost with dimensions. They did add will crystal bonus too, but to a less extent. Right now, my resists looks like this (see to the left) with Hades equipped. I have 5 electro dimensions (1 advanced, 3 intermediate and one basic). If we suppose the strong players have a similar reduce resist like me, then their Hercules deals 62% less damage on me. (see here how resist damage reduction is calculated.) Also you can see that I don't bother having a significant secondary and tertiary resistance. Couldn't make them as high as 870 anyway, so in pvp they wouldn't help. In pvp (sky trial, god's descent), I just convert my best crystals to the proper element when necessary.

So with dimensions, resistance finally became a useful stat. And it is an important tactical element which dimensions you do. With this super-high resistance, I was able to kill God's descent boss 29 - with one attempt - AFK!!

And resist is now important in PVP - in battleground, I could kill R4GE, while he had more than 100k advantage in BR:
(And this is not a boasting - I have maximum respect for the live player behind the ToK NM shadow - it's just an example what resist can do now.)

So, be careful what dimensions you do. I seem to find a lot more dimensions than I use, so I can select. I was lucky to get a lot of electro and keep getting more, so I will stick around with that for a while. Although Hercules is the most common sylph, people will change tactic eventually. Going heavy-dark is another option, for a mage, it is a must if you want to be good in Class Wars. I really like when in a game, tactics becomes important, and its no longer just a who-have-the-higher BR competiton.


2015/01/23

Eternal longing pack analysis

Looks like now we are getting more complicated chests, so it is more difficult to determine the real value of these. As for start, let me show some statistics of these chest's contents:


Had a lot of data on new years chests, so those stats seem pretty accurate. The rare stuff (mount, cloths) are the usual 0,1% drop rate. The event shard (7th page) drop rate is reduced to 30% from previous 50%. There are now 5 common items instead of the previous 4 items, and there are more uncommon items. Ancient coin is a nice addition to these chests. 

I have much less data on the new chest yet, but it seems it follows a similar pattern, so it's easier to make a good analysis now. Let's see what we can get for these event shards. 

Obviously, you not gonna exchange the shards for gold, daru, soul crystals or sylph equip shards, these items are junk.

The top value item - as usual - is the mount. If you are unlucky and won't get it from the chest, try to exchange for it. Sadly, you will have enough shard for that only if the stable reward got bugged for you and you could claim the 10k mount whips.


Sadly, whips are more expensive now than before. Here, you need to spend 3 Whispers to get items of 30 balen value. But don't forget - if you spend 50 whips, you also get a free chest and 5 hoof. So this trade is rather approx. 50 balen value, 16 balens / whisper.


Another highlight exchange is getting a cloth for 23 Whispers. A cloth worth approx. 300 balens, so it's a 13 balens / whisper deal.


I do not recommend getting sylph enchant gear or golden holy water for whispers. Both are ridiculously overpriced here. Sylph enchant gear: we get tons for free from variuos sources, and golden holy water, you can get it for 4 bound balen apiece in Cloud Adventures. The divinity soul exchange could be ok, but you get more than you need from free chests and divinity soul events. So I would either vote for cloth (since it's a unique item you can't get for free), or, if you are far from maxing your stables and hoofs, and you think they will sell the cloth set for 900 balens later as usual, grab the whips.


Prolly the best bet is to exchange you remaining ancient horns for runestones, they are never enough.



There is a final question: is the pack good enough to spend balens on it? There are 2 reasons why I say a definite no to this:
1.) This pack has a very bad balen value. It's expected value is approx. 27 balens (a bit better, if  you still need a Hades - but I think that unlikely).
2.) You can get tons of this chest for free.



2015/01/17

Bloody inferno and cloud adventures

Here is a short overview of Wartune's last 2 additions, Bloody inferno and cloud adventures.

Bloody inferno
Bloody inferno is a multi-player event, you can access it at Hall of Heroes, Events, where ToK and Spire is. You can do it only once per day, so you can't help others. Please be aware of a bug: Dragon Invasion and Bloody inferno attempts are connected. Ie. if you do 2 DI runs, you will not get reward in Bloody inferno! 

Bloody inferno is similar to Dragon Invason. You kill bosses, and you collect loot afterwards. Instead of 30 minutes, there is a 20 minute limit here. There is one big difference, before each boss, you have to kill 4 waves of trash mobs. There are only 6 bosses, if you kill all, the event is over. Bloody inferno does not require balens and it relatively easy, seemingly designed for new players. People with medium BR can reach the last boss. You can also use buffs to help in the fight. In par with that, the reward is much weaker than what you can find in DI.

Rewards:
- shards for a temporal mount (requires 4-5 runs per week). Temp mounts are a failed invention in Wartune. You should make it only once, to increase your max mount whip level. Also it's okay to make for BR events (not that there are many) and that's it...
- blood crystals. These are used to buy buffs, and drop from the trash waves. Since with a decent BR you don't need buffs, then you don't need these either. You can do the mpd a bit faster if you don't loot these.
- chests. You can make treasure chest I, II or III from 100, 150 and 200 shard. We made some chest III. Contained randomly one of these: 30 bound balens, 12 whips, 12 fate stones, 20 crystal shards. Since this requires 2 runs, I would say this is a neglectable treasure. 
- sylph gear. Have more than enough from other sources already.
- gold. This is the only useful loot here. You can get a few million. But the game already has enough gold-farm events daily. World boss, DI, Atoll boss, all giving better reward/time. 

Cloud adventures
Unlike Bloody Inferno, Cloud adventures is fast, and gives good reward. You can do it only on the weekend. It's very simple, you run through a course by rolling a dice, and you fight waves of monster and bosses. You have 15+1 fire rolls. The +1 roll is a magic dice, there you can choose the number instead of rolling it. You can buy additional magic dices for 180 bound balens each.
The 16 roll might or not might be enough to complete the run. My advice here is that when you are getting near a boss (5 or less moves) use the magic dice to be able to attack it. This way you sure to finish the adventure and get nice loot from the bosses.
In fights, you use +2 sylph instead of troops. You can ask assitance from other players. There doesn't seem to be any confirm button on that like with jewels, the other player don't even know if he is helping (so grab the top players if the bosses are too hard for you). There are some treasure chests too, do not use magic dice for those. For me, it contained only war flags (extra assist attempt, useless), and once there was a magic dice inside.







2015/01/15

Wartune player types

I collected for you some player types, or rather, player characteristics, „archetypes”. Which one you feel most similar to yours? Which is the one you don't like?

Jane, the casual. Jane plays 1-2 hours a day. She does not buy balen, does only a few events, and always spends her resources before there is a spender event for them. Every time she wants to do a multi-player event, she have to yell in guild/world chat to find partners.

Joe, the IT specialist. Since Joe works with computers, he can be online all day. He does every action, every event each day, never miss any of them. He plays even when he sleeps, a script is farming sylphs for him.

John, the solo player. Unlike Jane, John doesn't like yelling on world chat. Fortunately, he plays on a merged world with S300, S301, S302, ... S320. So he have a character on each of those worlds. He have several computers with even more monitors. He does all multi-player events alone. His army energizes the tree, he does a tank with 8 characters, his chars plunder each other for 4M gold daily.

Jim, the team player. Jim has a team of players like him. They do mpds and other multiplayer events on a schedule. They share their passwords, if someone can't log in / busy, a team member does everything for him.

Jack, the smart. Jack plays the game on purely mathematical basis. He hoards every resource, and spends everything in the right time. He optimize his stats, knows every game formulae. He spends only when it is super-optimal. He makes comments on the forum but people usually don't understand him :)

Judy, the casher. Judy has no financial problems and happy to spend money on her hobby. She regularly buys during sales, jumps into every recharge promotion and has most of the mounts and clothes.

Jeremy, the whale. Jeremy is rich. Whenever a new resource appears in the game, he buys it to the maximum during the first sale, at 5x price, and when he finds those items for free later, they will rot in his inventory for the next year. But this is not a problem, because he can be first without spending too much time. And as we know, time is money. Jeremy spent a car's/house's value on a game - without actually playing it and having the joy of achieving something by hard work.

James, the wanna-be top player. James plays all day like Joe. He have a good team like Jim, who can help him when he can't be online. He have multiple accounts like John, for plunder, tanks etc. He is smart like Jack, and buys balens like Judy. He wants to be a top player at all cost - but he will always lose to Jeremy, unless Jeremy gets bored and quits.



Disclaimer: any similarities to actual persons is a pure coincidence.

2015/01/12

Divinity soul and other great combos

I spent a lot of time on the weekend converting all my leftover cloth into sepulcrum and mount whips. I had about 70 chest of cloth (where I really need only like 10 for the next 3 cloth event) so converted 60 into like 4000 sepulcrum and 12000 mount whips, which, in turn, netted me like 240 extra new year chests. 

The cloth chests I got for free from the last 4-5 cloth events. I got like 100 new year chests for free from resist crystal and other events, but had no real luck so I bough 52 more for 1600 balens. At the end, I got a full set of cloth, mount, 70 divinity souls, 4000 sepulcrum, 12000 mount whip and other goodies. Pretty good deal in exchange for 1600 balens and items I didn't really need anyway. 

The usual sylph gear events are up now: divinity soul and sylph gear enchantment.

Divinity soul

Making higher level divinity souls need a LOT of lvl 1 gems normally. 4x for lvl2, 16x for lvl3, 64x for lvl 4, and 256x lvl5. Considering the shop price (100 balen / divinty soul) and how little BR they give, this looks a very bad deal. Fortunately, you could farm some divinty souls for free with the above cloth conversion combo, and the hot event rewards halve the cost of making them.

If you can do every combines each day, it can save you 170 divinity souls daily, 680 in total!

I did both previous divinty soul hot events, spent about 2k balens each time. After the second event, I had 5x lvl 4 gems, 3x lvl3 gems and a bunch of lvl1 gems. Using these and the 70 gems I found from the new year chests, now I will end up with 3x lvl5 gems, and several lvl 4 and lvl3 - without spending balens.

The theory is the same as with the resist crystals. If you do as much combines as possible during (and only during) the hot events, then you do the upgrades at mega-discount. If I would just buy a large amount of lvl1 gems and make them into 3x lvl5 and some lvl4, it would cost me 100k balens! But this way it cost only 4k, giving approx. +4k BR to my sylph (and me). So you can achieve very good BR / balen if you make the right investment which can multiply by time.

I do the same with clothes and resist crystals. With a total of 3k balens spent, now I have 2x lvl7, 2x lvl6 and many lvl5 resist crystals. But you have to be patient, always do the proper amount of combines during events which get you the maximum reward.

Sylph gear enhancement


This is the biggest gold sink in Wartune's history. I had a purple sylph gear which I could upgrade to orange, but waited until this event to do this. Making a lvl 20 purple equip cost me like 200M+ gold. Unfortunately, when you upgrade it to orange, you have to enchant it from level1. And while my lvl 20 purple equip gave 3262 ATK, the brand new lvl1 orange only 750. After spending all my gold and reserves (like 150M in total), it's only lvl 15 and gives only 2379ATK. So it looks like when you upgrade a lvl20 purple to an orange lvl20, it will be only 50 more attack (!!!). Max. enchant level is 24 only, so you don't gain much. 

So the funny thing is, we have the sylph gears, we even have the glints/moonlights do upgrade them - but lack gold (or at least, I do). Fortunately, this event lasts for 3 days so I can spend everything I earn during this time as well.

Right now, it looks like that the only sylph equip which might worth upgrading to orange is the one which gives attack (and even that is a hell lot of gold for a neglectable bonus).

2015/01/08

Running out of goals

Compared to most other games, Wartune was pretty good at constantly giving new goals to players for a long time. But lately, it's getting harder.

I'm building my precious Hades since a year, and yesterday it became orange as well. so one less goal... I thought I will be happy when I make it finally orange, but I'm just sad, since I can't advance him further :( And now everyone is running from me in BG, while it was purple, it was easier to find opponents.


I have maxed out the following:
- XP
- astrals
- mount hoofs (well, almost)
- soul crystal
- fate stone
- dragon soul
- gems (well, all lvl 10, can't really get anywhere further)
- equipment

What I can still work on:
- astral refinement
- enchanting sylph gear
- soul seals (although I have 16k SS saved up, so if they add the SS event I wait for, I might get close to max it immediately)
- honors (to gather up for the future medal update)
- mount whips
- runes
- holy forge
- resist crystals

I would love to see some exchange mechanism in Wartune where I can turn my extra dragon souls, soul crystals, fate stones etc. into mounts and clothes I don't have :)

Tomorrow is a big spender event, and it is quite funny:

It gives sylph gear and enchantment (we get too much for free, worth nothing), gems (got 100+ lvl 10 for free, so dont need them either), sepu and mahra (orange sylph! don't need them either), soul seal (did I mention I have 16k and never paid for it?), dragon soul (maxed since a long time!). So the only valuable item here is the event chests.

And why I say funny? Because I started the playing only 1 year later, and didn't spend tens of thousands of dollar on it - still, these packs are useless to me. Then what do the real whales think, who are the primary targets of these sales?

Yeah - big spender packs should include vulcan hammers, resist crystals, mounts, crypt keys, bound balens, mount whips, lvl 11+ gems and not a few million, but a few 100 million gold to look appealing.

By the way - how do you like the new silent nerf? That crypt keys almost never drop in blitz now. Nice, isn't it?


2015/01/05

January events / chest analysis

During Christmas, we have seen a really massive series of events in Wartune. We were promised to see the biggest sale of the year. When I read that first, I thought we will get some nice discounts. We did not, but they really sold different things and events each day. Which resulted for me (and prolly for you as well) missing on important rewards. But it was truly intense.

Now things seem to slow down again, a 16 days chest event is coming up. Of course there is a new tweak we have seen already in December. In the past year, chests always had a shard item (50% chance), 4 useful or semi-useful common items (each 12% probability) and 3-4 rare items (0.1-1%), But this chest is new. A lot more items, and most of them is total junk. Gold, equip shard, luck stone, star sand, I don't think there is any Wartune player who would pay for those. And you don't want to open either moonlights or glint of magic for 39 balens.
Unfortunately, we don't even know the probabilities yet. The cloth are prolly 1%, and the mount is the usual 0.1%. 
The divinity soul and the coin of ancestry is good - but we don't know the probabilities yet.
Also an interesting twist is that you always get a "1st calendar page", and sometimes you get a "7th page". You can exchange 5x "1st page" for one "7th page". And most rewards require submitting both resources, so there will be some toying around with these.

My primary advice is that DO NOT buy these chests for balens. Gather some free chests first, and see what's coming out of them. Although the contents are either junk or super-rare, the pages can be exchanged for some useful stuff.


Don't go for anything that you can get by many other ways. These are the junks, on which you spend only your last remaining 1-3 pages. But whip is more limited now, especially to newer servers, so you might consider buying that.
4 whip: 1 page worth 8 balens = 8 balen / page





You will probably need the 5x page1 to page7 exchange, but do it only when you already decided what you are going to buy.
I do not recommend buying gear shards. Everyone will have these maxed pretty fast for free from sylph arena.
The gem seems overpriced, these packs give usually only lvl 3 gems, which value like 2 balens.
The soul seals are overpriced too, you get 20 from one battleground, and the cost is, 74 calendar pages, giving you like 1.35 balen/page.


Better take a closer look here. We can get page7 for 5x page1. So let's examine these exchanges:
25 mahra: 65 pages worth 75 balens = 1.15 balen/page
5 enchant pack: 110 pages worth 50 balens = 0.45 balen/page
30 hoof: 120 pages worth 240 balens = 2 balens/page
cloth: 138 pages worth 300 balens = 2.17 balens/page

The +40 mount (valued at 8000 balens) is 200 x page1 and 200x page7: being your best deal at 6.6 balens/page. But you can't get it without buying chests.





So here is the strategy I recommend to follow:
Do not buy chests. Wait how many you got for free as usual, and keep track of chances.
If you are very far from maxing out your stables, do not exchange page1s to page7, but use them to buy whips. Whips are common, yeah, but still the best BR you can get here. (But if a soul crystal to whip event comes around again, don't blame me, anything is possible.)
Otherwise, buy what you need most, probably it's mahra or the cloth.




2015/01/01

Wartune gold guide

First of all, Happy New Year to all Wartune players! I would like to thank you for following my blog and reading my articles. If you like them, please recommend them, post links to them, and follow. And if you need some break from Wartune, try Doomlord, my other browser-based favorite game :)

I would like to start the new year with an article which is hopefully equally useful to all. Not some general gold guide, but something prolly even I will re-read :) Some events in Wartune require a lot of gold. When a 1-3 day event gives unlimited reward for an action which requires a lot of gold (like clothing identification, astral, or especially, sylph gear enchant) then you need that gold fast – even when usually you can't even spend it. So here is my collection how to hoard gold and what sources you have available when you want it.


World Boss rewards in mailbox. When you get gold reward for WB in your mailbox, don't claim it. Thats your gold reserve for 30 days. You can apply this to other gold rewards (from recharge, from compensation etc).

Gold chests. When you find gold in forms of chests – gold chests, sack of gold from Jewel Hunt, even Atoll Boss 1st prize chests – don't open them, save them up. When they take up too much space, you can just use the „put in guild altar, ask a kick-reinvite, and store it in your mailbox” trick. Try do 5 jewel hunt helps each day to accumulate such chests.


Gold items. There are many items which can be sold for a decent amount of gold, 500-1000 gold each. Crystalloids, legendary stones, luck stones, xp books are useless items which most people sell instantly like every other junk. But if you save these, they can be a great gold reserve as well. If you have too many of them, you can just store them in your mailbox until you need them. When you replace a previous armor set, save the old items, you can sell them for lot of money when you need gold.


You can even „generate” gold-store items, although it is recommended only when you can't even spend your golds on astral. In guild shop, buy the lvl 2 potions. They cost 5 contribution and sell for 1000 gold, so this „banking” is quite expensive. But first, contribution you can get for free (like from CW goblin thieves and GB victories), and second, when you have nothing to do with the gold just spend 600 million on some micro-astral-bonus, then you can save it this way.


If you are a VIP member, save up VIP tokens. They can get you a lot of gold. Just keep rolling if you have 500k gold + 2x 5 mount whips. If you are more patient, wait for the 20/60k gold too and 1-2 whip as well.

You can exchange insignia into gold. Buy lvl 3 xp books, they sell for 2k gold each. Do this only if you have a lot of extra insignia from tok NM etc. Insignia was great resource while you could use it for marriage tree, but it is not possible anymore.

You can exchange crypt tokens into gold chests in crypt shops. Please note that although lvl 80 chars don't need crypt tokens for making item sets, buying ATK scrolls in large numbers is still a good use for them. So spend crypt tokens on gold only when you have a lot of extra, and in desperate need of gold.

You can buy gold sacks for syph crystalloids (the ones you get for killing Atoll Boss) at the sylph exchange NPC. Since soul crystal became useless, it's okay to exchange some of these for gold when you are in dire need.



You can get gold in amethyst exchange, but do that only if you have so many extra whips you know you never need more.


Since the hero dungeons are added, there is an SSS clearance bonus for each map with HUGE gold reward. This is a good gold reserve too. Just do each campaing map to SSS except for one. When you need the gold, do the last dungeon too, and claim the millions of gold.




Don't forget that sky trail gives gold too. Effectively, you can sell your celestine stones for 20K gold each. You just have to die quick :)


And, of course, on gold-intense days dont miss Wbs, DI, try to do multiple Atoll bosses, grab 2 gold mines and do 5 plunder on some rich target :)


I DO NOT RECOMMEND:
  • Spending balen on World Boss (even when you need the gold). It's a very, very bad deal.
  • Doing alchemy. It's even worse than World Boss.
  • Spending balen in any other way to get gold.