2016/07/06

Reaching devotion 300

It seems reaching the 300 devotion in Wartune is possible for a free player, I could do it in the past days. But you have to do literally EVERYTHING. Fall asleep for the 10 seconds while the world boss is alive, or engage in guildbeast a monster before you reach the boss, and likely you are not going to make it. You have to do 5 bounty quests, 5 circuit quests, 5 duels, nether forest cross-server and many other things you prolly didn't do before. Also it sounded cool that I have to do tok, spire, DI, BI only once per week: but actually, I still have to do them each day for devotion! Okay, in DI, BI, tok do only the first monster, and in spire run it afk, but still, this takes time. Add to this that you have to check voyage every 20 minute to refresh for orange trips, and we end up playing more hours daily than before the patch. Getting +40 devotion from being VIP can help, you can have the luxury of skipping 2-3 things, but for me it's still not a good enough timesaver to spend money on it.

Another disappointment for me is the voyage shop. It seems this shop only have a few items, and most of them are as useless as the items you spend to get the coins. Who needs vulcan stoves, blood of zeus and normal henna? And this is 90% of the goodies you can buy there. There are also the gift / blessing / compliment of god series for upgrading sylph. Well, I got the 6 red equipment for free in the past events, but sure can spend a bit more time collecting a set for my secondary sylph. But that's all, the end of this failed experiment called "voyage". Some say there are wraithstones too, but I haven't seem those since a week, and that's also an item we get for free anyway and will need only a limited amount. If you have seen some unusual, rare item in the voyage shop, please let me know so we can post it here!


2016/07/01

Wartune Patch 5.7 & 5.8

Finally we get a Wartune patch which brings positive changes to the game, yeee :) It's still not so earthshaking so it would compel anyone to pay money for this game again, but still, I appreciate their attempts, even if the features are ridden with bugs which will never be completed. So let's see what are the good and what are the bad changes.

Good changes

ToK, Spire and DI once per week
These 3 events were always the most trouble, because you needed a full party to do these. Either you had a fix party (which is still trouble to organize together), or beg every evening others to help. After this patch, you have to do this only once per week, freeing up a tremendous amount of time! This is a great change. However, the implementation is far from perfect. You get 7 chest for your run, but you do not get 7 times more shadow souls. Getting even less beast souls is always sad. Still, this change is good in total, I hope they fix this problem eventually.

Voyage
Another great addition. I spam forums since like 2 years for some events where we can put to use all the hoarded and useless resources. And finally our pleas were heard! Now you can exchange all the crap for something useful. Anyone else besides me saved the 100.000 soul crystals in mail from the 3-year old events? :) Of course, like any other events, this is not bug-free. You can "upgrade" your ship, so the trip lasts for 2 less minutes. Sounds like a quite useless feature, since you can do only 5 trips per day anyway. But of course I was curious and clicked it, wrong move. Upgrade lasts for 10 hours! Kindof kills your chance to do voyages for the day. There is an option to ask help from friends to speed up the process - to bad this feature is bugged and not working :)
About the tasks, you can refresh then every 20 minutes, and there are 3 options, so you should be patient enough to get an orange one, which requires real trash resources.

Kitten club
Now its okay to do the few clicks in the kitten club. One furniture costs 10k gold, and you get back like 30-60k. You also get a lot of components, so using premium furniture and getting even more gold is easy.

Spirit Covenant additions
Spirit covenant was a useless feature lately, now it has 2 more features. Circuit master helps making circuit quests faster by auto accepting them. Although the circuit quests have been made easier, it's still too much time for no reward imho, so this covenant features is useless for me. The Archeology auto-path function does not really reduce the time to do archeology. To me, the ideal spirit convenant for these would be where I just click one button and I get all the rewards, then I would buy it :) Still, some might be happy with these.


Titans can be rearranged
Titan skills can be rearranged or even removed. Great feature! You can get rid of this bugged feature where you don't need it (for example World boss), or use the heal / rune skills a bit later when you need them more.

Don't have to click on treasures
Drops from monsters go directly to your inventory. Very good feature, again. We lost so many treasures due to DC, team moving to the area too fast etc.

Misc. simplifications and improvements
Any sylph can wear red equipment, don't have to roll the academy each day, you keep even temporal titles, greater farm output etc. All these small changes are very positive. There is one thing only which is either not working or misworded. "You can now double click eudaemon mark shards to exchange for items." I was excited first that I can exchange these useless junk for something useful, but double click allows nothing else just claiming an eudaemon.

Outland contest
I'm afraid of this one, all multi-player events in the game are bugged and laggy beyond repair, and take up too much extra time, my guess is this won't be different. But we shall see soon.

Bad changes
Maybe first time in Wartune's history, a patch has less bad changes than good :) Actually, I found only one feature which I did not like:

Devotion
The devotion system have been completely revised, to make it much worse than before. The devotion system was good as it was, the only changes it needed was to add devotion for a few more activities, so we can use this feature as a checklist for daily action. Unfortunately the devs ruined the system instead. First of all, they put activities in many sub-menu. Previously, I could see with a glance what I sill miss. Now I need to do endless clicking to learn the same. While previously you could get 3 chest with just 85 devotion, now you get the first chest after 100! And while you would think you can get waaay more devotion now, the truth is, they actually removed activities which gave devotion, like astral and fate. Previously a free player could get the fashion core, now you need to be a casher to get anywhere close. And to top it off, they again require manual clicking of checking. One step backwards again.





2016/06/12

Holy forge and advanced henna

I was surprised to see that although Wartune lowered the requirements for knighthood, still, very few free players could make it. I know I made over 20000 free advanced henna during events, so I know it's possible, but I realized some of you don't know how to do it, so I share with you the trick.

The big problem with the "free" advanced henna, that is costs 120 chests, and you can claim it only for 3 days. In those 3 days, usually the only event is holy forge. And, like everyone else, you probably finished holy forging most of your equipment, and only the artifact and halidom remains. Holy forging those require a lot of materials, there is no way to do enough to claim 120 chests. Then how to do it?

It's simpler than you would think. Do the old holy forge. You must have tons of unused vulcan hammers and stoves. So all you need is gold for holy forge, and components to make an item which you can holy forge.

First, you need to make a level 70 item in Blacksmith -> Synthesize -> Apply -> Lvl 70 Sets.
You need only 150 lvl 6 crystalloids. If you are doing Nirvana hell every day (which you should, if you are not KH yet) you must get 10x lvl 6 crystalloids each day. Also you can buy them for insignia in the insignia shop - prolly you have a lot of surplus insignia. After this, the second step is to make the item legendary. You can do this under Blacksmith -> Synthesize -> Upgrade -> Lvl 70 sets:
The components are: the lvl 70 armor you just made, lvl 70 legendary armor shards, and 150 lvl 70 legendary stones. The legendary armor shards are easy to get, if you do archeology each day, you will have plenty of such shards. You can find them under "Decorate" of each area in the archeology menu. The area depends on which armor you make. (Choose the one of which you have enough lvl 70 and lvl 80 shards). If you don't do archeology for some reason (you should) or accidentally sold these, you can still buy the armor shards for crypt tokens.
The legendardy stones you can buy in the guild shop. If you do guild beast each day, the cost of these in fangs will be only pocket exchange.
The last step is to upgrade the item to lvl 80 armor:
You need llvl 80 armor shards (you can get them the same way as the lvl 70 shards, from archeology or crypt shop) and level 80 legendary stones (same way as lvl 70 ones, from guild shop for fang of fears).
So now you have an item which can be holy forged. You sill need a lot of gold. Sadly, Wartune removed most ways to get gold in the game. So you have to rely on what remains:
- 2 minute World Boss sessions (still 10M gold each for me)
- plunder an inactive (4M gold per day)
- and Dragon Invasion - if you do it until lvl 18-19, you will get like 50M gold!

Be careful - this is an expensive thing in resources, and you certainly can't repeat it unlimited times. The most limiting factor will be gold. So do it wisely. Calculate how many chests you need (probably you can get only 120), and calculate how can you get this amount with the minimum amount of holy forges done in 3 days.

Also don't forget, seemingly the devs are devoted to inflating adv. henna, so you will be able to get more and more in the future cheaper and cheaper.





2016/06/06

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.


2016/05/31

Current recharge event

Hey guys, after some pause, finally something interesting is happening in Wartune which worth a blog entry. They added a recharge event, where one of the bonus items - after 1000 USD recharge - is a bi-sylph seal:

I know this will gonna happen eventually. But I'm rather surprised how it is happening. Some people have confirmed that now you can buy bi-sylphs using bound balens instead of real balens. A pretty neat turn of events, especially since this was never published (on the contrary, R2Games was denying vehemently this, saying first it was just a typo, and they modified the description later). So anyway, a bi-sylph seal is 60K bound balens. 

Also, with every recharge, you used to get 150% bound balens. Not anymore. A 100K balen recharge should give 150K bound balens. Now, you get a seal worth 60K balens instead. A reasonable deal? Hardly. Okay, they give more adv. mahra and beast souls than usual. But after hundreds of players hacked themselves a completely free bi-sylph, and it was never taken from them, I would say, this deal is not good. Not at all. Wait some more months, free bi-sylph is coming in hot events! Very much like Hades and orange sylph.

And anyway - who would recharge 1000 USD after all the nerfs they did in past months?

Another interesting news I read on R2Games forum is about "Voyage". No details yet, but they say, we will finally able to put our useless resources to good use. This is something we want since years, so if they really implement a useful feature (and I don't mean something like marriage tree, where you can exchange your useless stuff to even useless stuff).

2016/05/09

Eudaemon patrol

Since not much is happening in Wartune, I decided to write a short guide on the recently added Wartune feature, Eduaemon patrol.

This is a well-designed minigame, which, unfortunately, lacks useful reward. Still, it's challenging to the mind, and does not require balens, so I do it every day, because I find it fun.


This event requires a LOT of eudaemons. The game consist of 2 parts: building base and towers, and doing patrols, where you get the reward.

Patrols
To each tower, you can assign one or more eudaemons. You bind the eudaemons there, and after a period of time, you receive reward. The normal reward is eudaemon mark shard and blood of zeus; the hard is skill scrolls or warpath crystal; and the nightmare is either resist crystal, resist reduce crystal or warpath crystal. The 3 difficulty level has 3 requirement, if you fullfill all 3 requirements, you get all 3 rewards.

The hard requirement for me is either a Scourge Mage, a Wind Ranger or a Blood Warrior. So you need a bunch of these classes, I have 3-4 of each. You should pump them up to level 3 at least, give them at least level 3-4 war emblem and corresponding resist. Also give each an uncommon weapon. (I got a lot of green flames from late chests so that was not a problem). Don't forget to give each a unique name so you can recognize which is which :)

The nightmare requirement is usually a resist between 500-1500. Please note that you can add more than 1 eudaemon to the patrol. So just check first what class you need and with what resist. Equip that eudaemon, assign him the sylph which gives the corresponding resist type, then modify his resists under the warpath menu to give the correct resists.
You might still lack requirements. In this case, add a 2nd, 3rd or maybe 4th eudaemon to the patrol so the total level / resist / warpath is sufficient. 

Buildings
If you are low on eduaemons, I recommend building with them a bit before starting patrols. Base and towers have a maximum level of 9, you will max them out all in a reasonable time. Your Wind Ranger / Scourge Mage / Blood Warrior team will be doing patrols usually, so you need a few higher level eudaemon from other classes to do the building. Please note that you can interrupt building (like Henna Labs) and you will get partial XP in that case.

As your base level increase, so does the number of towers you can have. Use the eudaemon mark shards to pick up extra eudaemons. Dont be shy, get like 20-30 so you have enough of the 3 key classes. I didn't find a limit to eudaemons yet. Also don't forget you can always fire one you don't need anymore, and get back 50% of what you spent on him.

Strategy
Try to assign your eudaemons the optimal way, ie. send each eudaemons for the patrol where he just meets the requirements. If you have a patrol which requires a Wind Ranger level 10 with 1500 resist, and another with a level 3 and 500 resist, assign your big guy to the first task and the small one to the other, not vica versa. Use the minimum needed amount of eudaemons to patrol, so you can assign the rest to building. Start assigning eudaemons to patrols starting from tower 1 sometimes, sometimes from the last tower to make sure tasks requiring the same class don't stack up.

Riots
I don't know what negative effect riots have, maybe nothing. Still, you can check from time to time friends eudaemons bases and handle riots for the small blood of zeus reward.

Patrol rewards
My main problem with this event is the reward. You don't need more than one fully developed eudaemon for battle. Which you probably already have. So all the resist crystals, warpatch crystals etc. help you to build more eudaemons to get more resist crystals, warpatch crystals etc. A useless circle :) The event should really awrd eudaemon diamonds, books of wisdom, legendary eudaemon equipment stuff, and maybe even non-eudaemon items like empire truncheons adv. mahra etc. Let's hope they add further levels in the future where we can get additional rewards.



2016/04/27

Wartune ignorant to player problems

Dear Readers, I'm very sorry for posting less lately. I have to admit that my enthusiasm for the game has decreased a lot. For a long time I had loyalty, even at hard times, but for any sentient being there is an amount of nerf he can bear. The late ones which came with last patch were even too much for me. I still play, but I spend much less time on the game, and I skip many things. I visit the game forums even less rarely. However, on topic has catched my eye, which I recommend to you as well:

http://forum.r2games.com/showthread.php?196688-Filed-police-report-for-GRAND-THEFT-and-bank-investigating-fraud

It's started by a player who was so angry with his gems removed after the big gem exploit, that he requested VISA to refund all the money he spent on the game in the past 3 months. This forum topic has not one, but three very interesting facts.
1.) This guy have spent over 22000 (yes, twenty-two thousand) dollars - the cost of a Toyota Prius - in just 3 months on Wartune, after all nerfs, bugs, and his gems taken away. It is very scary that he is not alone, there must be a lot of such people around still. They really need to see a doctor.
2.) The second interesting fact is that VISA has refunded all the money he has spent. Ok, this is not so surprising as fact 1.) I knew paypal would do it, it seems your bank can pull this off as well. Good save, I hope others took his example who lost stuff and weren't compensated. Even when it results in his acount banned, and I am scared at just thinking how much he spent in the past 3 years, which he will never get back.
3.) But the most interesting, most shocking fact is that Kabam/7Roads didn't bother to check the logs, see how much the dude spent, and spend the 10-15 minutes to resolve his problem to avoid the chargeback. So tell me, how rich are these Chinese guys so they don't bother to spend 15 minutes to earn a Toyota Prius (or an item of equivalent value)? So rich? Or so stupid?

The story has a much more important lesson than the 3 points above. If the game devs ignore even their own money to such extreme, you can bet they will continue ignoring the players forever. If this forum topic didn't made you stop spending, then nothing will, ever. And you better know people still run around with hacked Odins and Thors. Wartune thinks that problems they ignore will cease to exist :)


2016/04/19

Clothing set bug

(Wrote this yesterday morning, but forgot to make it live, anyway, in case you didn't hear about it from other sources...)

A new Wartune patch is always a truckload of new bugs. The only useful feature of the last patch, the clothing system revamp has brought a pretty critical bug. 

To get the title for a clothing set, you need to own all 4 pieces of the clothing. Previously, if you did not get all pieces at once, and transformed some meanwhile was not a problem: in Dressing Room, you could change your worn clothing to any you activated earlier, and "own" the cloth again. But the devs seemingly did not think about cloth sets when they changed the previous system. While engulfing your cloth, you get "Mutant Dragon Wings" which is part of the "Doomsday Cowboy" set. Fortunately, you can buy the remaining 3 pieces for 90 Jasmine chests in the current exchange.

However, when you exchange the 3 cowboy cloth, you will not get the title. Even to be able to refine these new cloth, you have to engulf them. But even after that, the title does not activate. It would be pretty simple to correct this bug: just check if the player's worn clothing makes a set, and if he doesn't have the title for it, award it. But as we know, they prefer hundreds of players bombing them with support tickets for month instead of doing this correction which might take them as much as 10-15 minutes.

So anyway, you were warned, after you buy the 3 cloth set, be ready to submit a support ticket because it's not going to work...

2016/04/15

Wartune patch 5.6 analysis

If you thought there is nothing left to nerf in Wartune, here is a list of what was made worse with patch 5.6:

Fishing nerf
A last row fish worth now 10 nickles instead of 80. So yes, reward have been decreased to 1/8. No more beast souls for free players, bye bye. They doubled the attempts per week - so you can gain 25% of what you did before, in twice as much time. Fishing was already time consuming, now one more activity I don't have to do.


Chat messed up
The heart icon used for chat have been moved to the upper right corner. Besides being harder to notice, that wheel is not present in many screens where the icon bar is. So you can no longer chat while in Hall of Heroes and many other locations. Killing the ability for players to communicate is not a great idea.


Tank nerf 
If you leave tank now, you can't reenter. You can no longer retry to get paired with a friend, or flee from a hopeless fight and retry. Damn stupid nerf.

Rage nerf
With the new clothing system, people have a lot less starting rage than before.

Class Wars nerf
This might not be connected closely to this patch, but it happened at the same time, so i have to mention it. All PVP championships (CW, TW, Chaos War, Steel War) use all players from all platforms / servers now. Which means, most players will lose more match, will rank lower, will get less rewards, and many will miss finals / warlords hall who made it consistently before. If moving these events to weekdays wasn't enough reason, this one is surely one to quit for some.

Cross-server spam 
I'm not sure this was an intentional thing, but now you can chat to all servers via dungeon invite. An excellent way to spam and advertise. Will mention my blog there a few times :) But I'm not sure if this should stay this way.

Bounty target nerf
Now in bounty targets you get useless, low-level items, like white irons and turquoise instead of eudaemon HP diamonds. Since the event nerfs, it was hard enough to advance diamonds, but from now on, it is completely impossible. You get diamond only for the last targets - which you can't kill because then you will get only unkillable opponents next time.

New features

Titan system
A complicated, but quite useless feature. The game auto-cast buffs on you in the first few rounds of the battle. Which is quite useless, significant damage is done pre-sylph only if one of the combatant did not reach knighthood yet. Now this only messes up skill use (sometimes I can double attack now, sometimes I can't even use my skills for 2 rounds) and spams your team members with useless extra icons on their screen. Titan system also grants extra resist and resist reduce, which everyone will gain at the same rate, so it is useful only for 2 things: knightood players can kill non-knights even faster, and whoever is fool enough to push in a truckload of balens can gain a slight advantage here.

Eudaemon patrol
Obviously, the devs tried to figure out a system which makes useful all the eudaemons we have. They failed miserably, for a simple reason: the rewards are eudaemon-related items. Since I need only one eudaemon for combat, and it's already maxed out, whats the point of growing more eudaemons just to be able to grow more eudaemons? This system could be good if they reward non-eudaemon items, like adv. mahra, empire truncheon, tenacity marks etc.

Fate max levels increased 
I had like 30.000 fate stones saved up, so I had no problem maxing the first ability. Beads of influences is a different matter. Even with regular beads for chest exchange in events, it will take some time to collect 20.000+ beads of influence (years). The good news is, whoever is willing to spend a lot of money to buy the beads, has knighthood already and can't stun me :) About tenacity marks, even level 20 was beyond grasp for me so it's irrelevant for most mortals.

Clothing revamp
The clothing system have been totally reworked. I like the new system, in fact, this is the only good thing with the patch. I really hated the fizzle/gamble factor of making cloths. Now this stress is gone, you just throw all your garbage in your clothing level bar and keep advancing. Also now you can refine clothes without worrying about losing stars which is great, I already put all my hats to 5 star. Of course 7road can't make any new thing without nerfing something. My starting rage has been reduced from 99 to 60 as a result of this. This is a very bad change, considering the high rage cost of knighthood skills. Rage rune is now mandatory in most situations if I want to use your skills, which leaves us only with 1 rune choice :(

Conclusion
What will remain the biggest mystery of the universe for me - if they put such a tremendous amount to make new systems, change the existing ones, and nerf what was working well - why they did not spend a few minutes to increase the HP of the World Boss? Or to fix cloud adventures (ie. revert to previous, working version without moving backwards and fighting yourself)? Or to enable caching finally so the game doesn't download each time I log into the game? Or to undo so many nerfs which ruined the game and made players quit? And so on... you all now the list.

One side note on knighthood: as I learned, last night - due to a typo - people could buy advanced henna at 10% of normal price. 1000 cost 499 instead of 4999. Funny accident :)

I would say, the devs are complete, utter idiots, but I don't think this is true. They are quite capable of implementing new systems in this complex game in a limited time, that shows skill and intelligence. I think they are just simply purely evil, who enjoy torturing and harming their own players. The darkness which engulfs their mind prevents them realizing that with their constant childish sadistic nerfs they actually get rid of their own income. But well. We know nothing is gonna change, so just play while you can... without spending!

2016/04/11

Knighthood

As I wrote in my previous post, I reached knighthood, and now I would like to share with you my thoughts about this Wartune feature.

As you know, the prerequisite for knighthood is at least 12000 points in tatoo. I wrote in more detail how much henna / adv. henna you need for this. As a mage, I can choose between arcane and restoration path. The arcane talent is damage skills, the restoration is heal skills. It's even simpler than the previous skill tree: there, you had to choose 5 skills to put in your skill bar. Here, you have only 5 skills to put there. The skills themselves are very simple too: 1 small 1-target spell (aka lightning), 1 small aoe (aka rain of fire), 1 big 1-target spell (aka delphic) 1 big aoe spell. Also there is an 5th skill wich restores 1200 rage and dispels 1 negative buff, for a mere 100 rage. There are also 4 passive skills with miscellaneous effects.

You can switch to the restoration path if you like, for that you need either 16000 total in tatoo, or have to use normal henna to change what bonus your abilities give. The 3 heal skills do nothing just heal, and they do it quite poorly. So even in group situation, I think the arcane path is better as long as there will be a time limit for fights. If you need heal, bring a poseidon :) 

Advantages of the new skill system
1.) The big skills base damage is really big. 480-530% damage, you will deal almost as much damage with these as with your sylph skills. Comparison: criminal trial 530% damage, Odin Apocalypse Judgment 400%+ damage. Surely sylphing boosts my ATK rating by 20%, but still, the knighthood skill can compete. In World Boss, now I deal about the same damage in sylph and non-sylph. In arena, now I can kill opponents with the first aoe, and many I kill before they can sylph.

2.) Acquiring the skills grant you +20% ATK, +20% HP, +30% MDEF. That's sounds an enormous boost. BUT. Do not forget that you lose "Mana Master" (+15% magic attack boost), "Healing empowerment" (+20% MDEF)  and "Sturdy" (+10% HP), or the equivalent of skills for other classes. Also there are some talents, like "Iron Wall" (damage received 14% less) which some say you will keep some say you will lose too. So the actual gain is much less than you would think.

3.) Talents. The talents are the real boost here. I had 90k bound balens, of those I spent 50k and got 14 talent points. You can buy offensive talents (+10% res reduce per level, +10% intensity/crit per level) and defensive talents (+10% tenacity/block per level, +10% to 2 resists per level, +10% influence/penetration per level). These gave me more BR boost than the skill bonuses.

Disadvantages
It has some disadvantages too - as you know, Wartune is never without a nerf, and any new feature is a good opportunity to take something away.

1.) No heal skills. No suntoria or restoration. I undertand that the devs wanted to resolve the problem with the forever-lasting fights. Still, a mage who can do nothing just nuke is just an archer. So yeah, we mages are now archers. Although I stopped using suntoria since a while, I miss restoration badly. It makes difference in many situations.

2.) No stun. Yeah, your influence skill does nothing after knighthood, just gives you partial protection vs non-knights stun. There will be a moment when everyone will be knight, and stun will be irrelevant. But until then, its a bit funny when knighted people stand stunned for rounds due to delphics and frost bolts and can't return the favor.

3.) No purify. Really, the 5th skill which dispels ONE negative buff for 100 rage is NOT a purify. So make sure you play with people who do not make knighthood and can still purify you.

4.) Rage. The skill "hear Elemental" (receive +2 rage each time you deal damage) is no more. Although the basic damage spell gives 10 rage instead of 6 now, you can't just cast an aoe and gain rage instead of losing it. So rage is now a problem. Especially with the cloth nerf taking away starting rage, prolly we will need to use rage rune again. Which is a pain since it means no more guardian rune. (Heal you must keep it, it's the only way to heal now).

Summary
So in summary, you lose EVERYTHING (heal, purify, rage, stun) but you will deal more damage. If you do not have a truckload of bound balens saved up for talents, the gain is just slightly better than the loss. Right now, knighthood is for cashers only, so these people have the bound balens for talents. When knighthood becomes free (I'm sure non-payers can reach it in max 4-6 months) then this will be a problem - although it seems a new item will be added, which you can substitute for bb when upgrading talents. If you have only limited access to talents (like most of us), I recommend offensive talents instead of defensive ones. And yes, casher will have a gigantic advantage here with talents, which you can't compete with up, even if you reach knighthood eventually.

Consequences
Still, do not think that knighthood is an optional thing. All must reach it before or later. Knighthood equipment, titan system and I bet a lot other stuff will require it as a prerequisite. 
Also do not forget that getting the skill points takes an enourmous amount of XP. It takes month to max out your "knighthood level" and take full advantage of skills. So the eariler you can start it, the better.



Salsa
And here is one final point. I have been to a salsa weekend with my wife. It was an insane fun, we danced like 8-10 hours each day. On the pic you see us, in Sat evening there was a costume party with dress code from years 1920-30. And I didn't miss Wartune at all :) So there is life beyond the game, and if anything, I can suggest you dancing. If you have a partner already, you can get a better bond with her/him. If not, you surely will meet someone there, lot of singles. If everyone on Earth would dance, there would be no wars and no crime :)

2016/04/04

Current expert tatoo events

The Wartune expert tatoo event is back, without change. Since everyone and their grandmother on my server is running around with knighthood skills, I checked how far I am from it. I made the strict math, and it seems with a recharge of 50 USD I can reach it as well. I didn't recharge since 3 months, and this should be the real last one :)

So here are is the math - so use see how I'm thinking:
I have 5300 balens remaining which I didn't spend since December.
I have 10295 adv. henna collected and saved up from previous events.
I have 181 free chests collected last week.

First let's see how much adv. henna I can get in total.
In the following 3 days, with mount training, holy forge and free chest from shop, I can get 105 more chests. If you have some unrefined mount, or 5k+ mount whips, then you can get even more.
For 5k balens recharge, and 10k balens spent, I can get 214 chests and 3900 adv. henna. For 10k balens, I can buy 3x129+31=418 chests. Also, if I do the expert tatoos the way I described here, I will get 91 more chests. That's a total of 1009 chest, for which I can get 8000 more adv. henna in the hot events exchange. So it will look like this:
I'm just short of knighthood, I realized... I would need 1000 more adv. henna, For which I would need 71 more chests. And then I remembered what my friend Panzer told me earlier, and realized how to get those. In archeology, I got a bunch of crystalloids, epic armor shards, and legendary stones. I hope you didn't sell those. I did sell the crystalloids, but can buy them back for insignia. So, anyway. I will make a lvl 80 armor, and holy forge it with the otherwise totally useless vulcan hammers and stoves, so I can claim the otherwise unavailable chests in the holy forge event. It will cost a lot of gold, but gold is free, so converting it into chests is a good deal: especially if this gets me the last 1000 adv. henna required for knighthood.... 

I just wrote this article to explain you how to use math to optimize your play (and yeah, minimize balen spendings :) Wartune's spender system is overcomplicated for a reason: so you recharge / spend a lot more than you need. If you start doing this without making the math, you might realize too late you are short of something, and then it becames expansive. So whenever you headjump into an event like this, do the match with an excel like above.

And yes, I know I said I stopped spending - and I did so for last 3 months. But I decided to give this last 50 bucks to Wartune. I still plan to play for a while, and it's like +1 million BR. But this should be really the end of it :) So now just let's hope I didn't miscalculate anything...

2016/04/02

Cloth event analysis

As you know, the cloth system in Wartune will undergo a drastical change. There will be no more separate levels for each cloth, there will be only a combined cloth level. A level 1 cloth will worth 300 XP, a level 2 600 XP, a level 3 1200 XP etc. Cored and good luck charms will be 200 XP. Cosmos described the whole system perfectly, I don't want to repeat the detailed info you can find there. There is a cloth synth event currently going on. I just want to help you with the math: does it worth making items for this event, or just wait for the cloth changes?



Cost for making different levels of cloth
A level 2 cloth requires a level 1 cloth and a fashion core. Success chance is 100%. This cost you 500 cloth XP, and will yield you 600 - so you should make all your level 1 cloth into level 2 before patch, if nothing else.

A level 3 cloth can be made from 2 level 2 cloth. That's 1000 XP. if you don't use good luck charm, you have approx. 20% chance to fail. So actually it will cost 1250 XP. Or, you can use a good luck charm, in this case your cost will be 1200 XP. Also, you can use cores to upgrade the level 2 cloth. In this case, you need an average of 3 core for success: so your cost is 1100 XP. Obiously, this is the best method to make a lvl 3 cloth.

A lvl 4 cloth requires 2 x lvl 3 (2200 XP). Without good luck charm, your cost is 2200 x 1.25 = 2750. With 2 good luck charms, it's 2600. Using cores you have a very minimal chance, I don't recommend that at this level.

A lvl 5 will cost you 2 x lvl 4 (5200 XP). If you risk, with 20% fail chance your average cost will be 6500. With 4 good luck charms, it will be 6000 XP. It is surprising it is better to make with good luck charms? Well, before the new system, getting lvl 1 cloth was much easier than getting a luck charms. So in that case, you better risked. But now the situation has changed.

Cost to make lvl 6  is 13,600 XP, cost to make lvl 7 is 30,400, cost to make lvl 8 is 67,200, cost to make lvl 9 is 147,200, and for lvl 10, it's 320,000. (if you have that much good luck charms at all).




The rewards
Now let's check out the rewards. In the new system, you get 4800 XP for your level 5 cloth, but here it cost you 6000 to make. However, you will get as reward 2x luck charm and 5x fashion core, and 1 chest, worth ath least 1700 XP, and you get 2 additional chests. So it worth making it.

A level 6 will require 2x lvl 5, and luck charm worth 1600 in addition. The Xp you get back is 3600 at least, plus 4 chests.

 The same applies to every following level. However, please note that this applies only if you don't have to make lvl 5+ clothing without getting prize. So my suggestion is, if you have enough good luck charms, do the event, bu do only one of each level at most each day.

About wings...
Making wings require 5x more materials. However, the reward is only twice as much. So I do not recommend making wings.

2016/03/28

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...

2016/03/23

What to do with Ham Chests

Among all the late Wartune nerfs, we get another evil twist: the long-awaited sepulcrum and mahra event is back, and the amount of chest rewarded is still the same - however, you can't exchange these chests for anything useful - no adv. henna, no cloth set, no mount.

So what to do with them? First of all, check the contents: eudaemon junk (completely, utterly useless unless you are a new player), mount hoof, pure refine crystals (even more useless) and as rare drops, cloth pieces  - useless, since you can't get the title without the wings. As additional rare drops, you can also get cloth shards. But the problem is, the cloth shard exchange list is not updated since a while, and instead, they offer the newer cloth sets for a lot of chests (ie. balens).

So let's check the available exchanges:


Maybe you can consider exchanging 600 for an orange seal, then sacrifice it for adv. sepulcrum. Also getting a purple seal for 100 chest can be okay if you still need it for some reason. Here is the second exchange:
If you need components for a bi-sylph, and either willing to spend 600 USD on it, or hope that getting the first version will be free somewhere in the future, you can grab these components as well.
Also, there is the third, basic exchange, where you can get beads of influence, and the 3 cloth (without wing).
And ofc there is the above mentioned sacrifice trick, so if you need adv sepulcrum still, and got 600 chest, you can  exchange it for adv sepulcrum (but not a great ratio, 160-200 adv sepulcrum for 600 chests).

Whatever you choose, it's a kind of gamble, hoping for a future change in the game - either the first version of bi-sylph becoming free, or cloth shard exchange list expanded eventually. I think the later one has a higher probability of happening, but it is good to prepare for the first version as well, so this is what I will do:

Buy some emblem of wind and water, and open the rest (except for 90), for the cloth shards. Depending how many of the 3 different cloth pieces I got, I will exchange the remaining chests to complete the set, and open the rest. Update: I did this (exchanged 200 for wind&water emblem, opened 400 chests - got 100 cloth shards, and 5 cloth, excluding helmet).