2015/06/27

Steel Wars

Hey guys, for a long time, I thought we shall see no worse event in Wartune than cross-server guild battle. A laggy, bugged and lengthy event with crappy rewards. But Steel Wars has arrived!

Seriously, I would love to break the hand of the designer who created this, and also the programmer's who implemented it so poorly. First of all, tank itself is a bad event. What the heck tanks do in a fantasy game? And your performance doesn't really depend on your character strength and advancing skills, its just a stupid video game. For a long time, there were rumours it will be removed. And now instead they make it even a big team event? What did these guys smoke..

The lag I could endure, but the bugs? When I tried to move through the teleporter, I stuck. I refresh, try again. Stuck again. Third time succeed. I meet players who are shooting at me merrily why I get the message "he is under protection". We destroy their revive tower, kill all of them, and nothing happens. The event is supposed to end at this time, right? No. After some 5-10 minutes, the revive tower respawns, and the fight is on again. And some people who are actively participating get no reward whatsoever after 30 minutes!

To top it off, the rewards. 30 Warpath soul, some gold, medallion... What kind of crap junk is this? 

I'm usually a calm person, but now I think the proper behaviour from the people who made steel war would be to shot themselves on the leg at least.  This event was not tested, not balanced, not anything. 

So many bad things happen in Wartune lately, and nothing good. The cloth event, first they remove lvl 3 rewards, then lvl 4 rewards, then remove chest reward... Now they remove cloth reward as well. There are more and more bugs, events are bugged on a daily basis. Chest event exchanges last for 1 week where chests are awarded for several weeks. And the list goes on. In a normal game, the goal should be to make players happy, not to frustrate them.

There are a lot of recharge events going on, but my advice is, do not recharge. All the events happening lately point in one direction: last desperate attempt to milk players before they shut the game down :(

2015/06/24

Ideas to recycle junk in Wartune

We have a new event in Wartune, Sky Adventure. To access higher rewards in this event, you will surely need to spend balens; however, ALL rewards but the very last are completely useless for anyone who is playing Wartune since a while and spent some balens. I think it's time to bring up the topic again: most events in Wartune award only useless junk.

The game has many events, with many different rewards which can be used to advance different things. This was cool at the beginning, it was fun to advance so many things, I had so many goals. But now I play since 2 years and 3 months, spent some balen too - and 95% of the rewards I get are useless junk. I wonder what the people feel who play since longer, and spent a lot more?

For most of us, rewards, goals, advancements are important things in a game. If they are no more - the game is dead. To me, it is particularly frustrating when the game has one thing to advance, I do events, earn reward: but after a certain point, I can't use the items I earned, I can only use items to advance the VERY SAME stat if I buy something at a ridiculous price - while, at the same time, the resource used for that stat is rotting in my inventory.

Examples are refinement locks (can't use them for sylph equipment refining), advanced sepulcrum and mahra, fate stones vs beads of influence.

But this is the problem with most other rewards as well.

Experience points, crystalloids, legendary stones, fate stones, soul crystals, refinement locks, star tears, star sands, sylph equip shards, sylph exp scrolls, golden holy water, dragon souls... we keep getting these literally everywhere. Sepulcrum, mahra, runestones, mount hoof can be still useful to some, but not to veteran players.

And this is not an old problem, lack of upgrading rewards for old events. Even new events - like sylph expedition - award crap. Even chests - which you can buy for balens! - contain useless junk.

My real problem is that this generates more and more frustration to me. Why the developers ignore this obvious problem? Why they try to sell newer and newer resources at astronomical prices? Gift of god, for example? Who would pay 20.000 balens - 200 USD - to increase a sylph's HP by 1500? Or empire truncheon? Next medal for me requires 1600, which is 128 USD. No, thx.

Anyway, I have my solution. This is something my other favorite game, Doomlord is using. It could make happy the players, and as such, it would be good for the game and it's owners as well. Also it wouldn't require much effort. In Doomlord, you can exchange use / useless items as resources in activities. They could do the same here.

Make a new exchange, where you can sell junk items for some new resource, like „junk coupons”. Crystalloids, soul crystals etc. Also allow players to purchase „junk crystals” for 500.000 XP each. And allow players to purchase items using junk coupons, junk crystals and balens/bound balens. For example, you could buy a vulcan hammer for 100 junk coupon, 1 junk crystal and 5 balens. Or a empire truncheon for 20 junk coupon, 1 junk crystal and 1 balen. Or an advanced sepulcrum for 60 junk coupon, 1 junk crystal and 3 balens. And so on... This way, exp would be useful again, and people would be happy to utilize their junk. Prices / ratio etc. subject to change...


Because right now, Sky Adventure, with the grand reward of 100 soul crystal or fate stones is not... very appealing :)

2015/06/21

What to do with chaos iron box?

Lately the Wartune event designer can completely amaze me by creating event chests which contain nothing but junk. The current chaos iron box is no exception. Besides the divine energy and the jumping dragonfish mount, there is nothing in this chest which you can't get for free in large quantities.  And those items are rare like hell. So opening these boxes is out of question: even without making a detailed analysis of the content's value.


Among the exchanges, there are several good value items.
Jumping fish - of course a new mount is always good, trouble is that this is just too expensive. You wont buy chests and wont get enough for free - so this is out of question. We will buy this mount later at 1/4 price for beast shards.

However, 100 beads of influence for 30 chests is a good deal. The atk and hp bonus from beads is quite neglectable now, but influence is powerful. With high enough infulence, you can stun your opponent for 3 rounds. So maxing out this stat is a top priority.

The 10 titan stones and shards also worth mentioning. My recommendation is get as many beads as possible, and exchange the remaining ones for these mythic equipment materials.

Recharge event analysis
As often lately, a recharge event is running currently. It's not great - gives only very few chaos iron boxes, and of the rest, only the boxes with the flames worth something. Fortunately, you get an 50% bound balen bonus as well. So the bonuses are:
133 balen value. (1 chaos chest x 33, 5 x flame chest 20 each).  26% bonus + 250 bound balens

606 balen value + previous pack (133) = 74% bonus + 500 bound balens
1012 balen value + previous packs = 1751 balens: 58% bonus + 1500 bound balens
1716 balen value + previous packs = 3467 balens: 69% bonus + 2500 bound balens
2530 balen value + previous pack = 5997 balens: 60% bonus + 5000 bound balens

Not going further, this recharge is not so great, compared to previous ones. But because of the "Consecutive Recharge Bonus", it might worth to recharge a small amount, like 1000 balen, for a good bonus.

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2015/06/14

Titan Shop and interstellar ball exchange

Wartune's new arena class-wars, Titan War is over, and now the obvious question is, what to buy for your titan crystals.
First of all, don't choose item which you can get in large number for free:
soul seal, beredin's wine, will crystals, gling of magic, magical moonlight, honor (medallion). I would also put turquise, blue crystalloid and red copper here. Although these items don't came in large numbers, you still get the for free in dimensions, you need only a limited number, and they are way too overprices.

Azure Deer card would be cool: but unless you are top in Warlords hall, you won't get it. Maybe you think it's worth spending some extra balen on wager to buy it. But I say, just keep wagering - eventually you will win and you can buy it then.

Titan Iron shard and stone shard: getting a mythic equipment would be cool, but these seem to me very expensive. From the 3k titan crystals I got, I could have bought only 25-25 of each: where I need 300-300 for just one item. So I rather hope to collect these from sacrifice and other sources. Same for the mythic specific vulcan stuff.

Blessing of god: seems to expensive as well (otherwise it would be good choice).

So the only viable choices which remain are empire truncheon and bead of influence. These items are cash only since many months, give very good bonuses you can't get other way (intensity and influence), and have good price. If your medal is still low, I recommend you buy empire truncheons. If you need 1600 or more for one upgrade, prolly the beads of influence will make a bigger difference for you.

Interstellar ball exchange
First, about beast shards. It seems you get an average of 1 beast shard per chest opened. In Golden Road, you can get beast shards for 15 balen apiece (or even cheaper if you are lucky). Btw I checked this, and it still works, I spent 7k balen in Golden Road, and collected 457 beast shards (and along with the recharge bonus and the shards I had remaining, I could buy all 6 mounts I missed).

Here is the statistics of the free interstellar ball chest statistics I collected from people who opened:

As you see, this chest have useful items (warpatch stuff besides the mount) and also the occassional beast shard increases the value. Still, its very bad value. But the exchange items are the same as the ones you can get by opening, so there is really no difference in those. There are 2 exceptions:
titan shards, and the mount itself.

The titan shards are good, but you are limited by the weapon scraps. So prolly its okay to get those for your weapon scraps.
About the mount, if you can't get 300 balls for free, dont buy, thats obvious. If you can get 300 for free, the question is, exchange, or gamble and open.

Actually, its almost the same. In golden road, now you can get mounts for 1/3-1/4 price. So now a +60 mount worth only about 4k balens. A 4k mount with 0,1% chance increases the chest value by 4 balens. So average chest value is 14 balens. If you open 300 chests, expected value is 4200 balens. But if you don't get mount, it will be only 3000, if you get it, it will be more. So if you can get 300 free chest, I say you better exchange than gamble. But if you don't get 300, don't buy more chest, go for the gamble.

2015/06/08

Titan weapon rune exchange

Looks like the Wartune developers finally dropped the the matrjoska-chest concept (when you buy a chest, it will be a gamble what chest you get). Still, chest contents are pretty disappointing lately. Here is a quick analysis of the titan weapon runes.

Let's see the contents:
Blood of Zeus - junk, I will max out my eudaemon in a month, completely free, using only farm.
100k gold - junk.
Eudaemon skill chest - junk, you can buy it for gold in guild shop.
Green flame - a 20 balens shop item, you certainly don't want to pay 39 balens for it.
Ice Spirit Core and Soul Core - junk, you get a lot more in elemental forest than Divine Energy. So you will have piles of these rotting in your inventory while you still lack Divine Energy.
Divine Energy - could be good item, if it wasn't super rare. Got like, 1 from 100 chest last time.
Skeleton Dinosaur card - the ONLY good item in the chest. Too bad that the chance is prolly the usual 0,1%.


Now let's see the possible exchanges:
You know I'm not a big fan of gambling. Since the developers again managed to mess up something (eudaemon diamond synthesis is told to be "once per event" but it's actually unlimited) I managed to have enough free titan weapon runes to exchange for a skeletal dinosaur and a hat.






The question is, what should you do if you don't have enough weapon runes to get the mount.
1.) Buy enough weapon runes so you can exchange for the mount. If you need to buy only a small amount for (max 2k balens), guess it's still an okay deal for a +50 mount. But if you need more, I wouldn't spent if I were you.
2.) Just open the chests and hope for good luck. I advise against this. If the chests would contain some useful items too, it would be okay. But if you have 100 weapon runes, open all, and get NOTHING, that would feel real bad.
3.) Exchange them for clothing instead. If I didn't have enough free runes, I would have done this. Cloth is always +BR. I wouldn't buy wing, though, wing is no more valuable than any other clothes in my eyes, so I will buy / exchange for them only when the developers realize this too.
4.) Along with weapon scraps, exchange them for Wartune mythical equipment pieces, ie. Titan Stone and Titan Iron shard. I strongly disagree with this. First, you are in no hurry to make mythical equipment (unless you maxed out holy forge, which I doubt). Second, there are too many other sources to get these items: class wars shop, titan shop and prolly the new 8-person mpd.

What to do with weapon scraps? It's an item for all events in June, so it can be useful, save it up. Or, if you in need of runestones or fashion shards, get those.






2015/06/05

Sylph expedition: boss 30 beaten

Now I spent some time to experiment with the Wartune sylph expedition, and finally has beaten boss 30. I expected to enter the royal treasure on the next map with gift of gods, advanced sepulcrum and mahra... Well... I was wrong. Up to boss 45, you can get only sylph exp scroll, sylph equipment shard, and an occasional glint of magic and mahra. As I mentioned earlier: I have never seen a company which is trying so hard to get rid of its customers. Anyway, this is the next map:
And some words about setup and strategy.


I have an 1-star Aegis with 150k BR as main tank. Also have a 100k Athena and 100k BR triton. And I borrow another orange triton from a friend. The tritons use rain dance and delphic of course. The third skill is ice shield for one, ice bolt for another.

Until 25, I don't really need skills. Just use a safe dispel at boss23, and a spirit chain when boss24 buffs up. But these skills reset by the time I reach 26. 26 is very, very tough. After all my sylphs used their 1st turn skills, I use enhanced attack, and if I didn't stun the boss, spirit chain. After spirit chain wears off, I use stun then divine guardian because this boss can one-hit my Aegis from full hp if he don't have ice shield up.


Boss 27 is much weaker than 26, fortunately, don't need many skills there. 28 is rough, has reflective shield. I dispel the first and then pray that the tritons heal plus the heal skills are enough. 29 is a little stunner devil usually damaging 2 targets. And what I discovered is, skill use makes a difference. Earlier when I got here, I already used the skill reset and had only few skills left. Now that I time skills better, I use the reset only during 29 or Boss 30. Always wait for your sylph to use his main skill, and use the expedition skill right after, this way you don't lose the sylph skill. Also pay attention when you are going to use stun - if it's successful, you can save a skill or too. Learn the pattern of the bosses, so you know what attack comes next.

Anyway, 31 seems impossible now, very huge aoe attacks, and because boss 30 is tough, I use up most skills there. But it is relaxing that this makes no difference. The next map has no better loot, so it doesn't really matter if you get to boss 26, 27, 30 or 35 - as long as you are first.