Astral refining guide

Upon reaching lvl 80 in Wartune and completing class advancement quests, players are able to refine astral slots. Okay, everybody knew that, I guess, but how to do it is not trivial.

Here you do the same trick I use all over in my blog. You have to calculate how much BR you gain at the expense of a given amount of resource (in this case, gold).

Let me show you a few examples.

You have a lvl 9 red MATK astral, giving 2592 ATK. It costs 737K astral points to level up to 10. You need approx. 368M gold for that. So 368M gold for +288 MATK: 1,27M gold per MATK.

OR you can refine your 3% astral slot to 4% at the cost of 128M gold (actually a bit less,like 100M  due to lucky refines). So you win 1% more MATK from your astral: 2592 x 0,01 = 25 ATK. So here you gain +1 MATK per 4M gold spent.

Obviously, improving your MATK astral to lvl 10 is a better deal.

In general, refining astrals slots where you instert red astrals help you a little. 10-40M gold for +25 stat is ok,but at 128M gold it gets just too expensive.

However, the green astrals (goddess blessing, determination, guardian angel) are cool to refine. Because here, the refine slots work differently. For every refine, your determination gets +1%, so it's +0,8% ATK. If you have 80K ATK, then its an equivalent of +640 ATK. It's even a good deal to refine to level 7 for 686M gold, since you get +1 ATK per 1 million gold!

So here is the strategy I suggest:

1.) When you begin refining, hopefully you have at least lvl 7-8 astrals.

2.) Improve all slots to 2% first (it cost nothing anyway).

3.) Build up your astrals - ATK astrals, Determination, goddess blessing to lvl 10, the rest to lvl 8 at least, if you didn't do it earlier.

4.) Improve all slots to 3%, but stop here, and improve only 2 slots further, to 7%, determination and goddess blessing. (guardian angel to 5% ok too). 

5.) You can now play around with improving snipers edge, enshieldment to lvl 9 or 10.

Love thy mount

Today we get a love thy mount event in Wartune with a decreased reward - and additional lvl 1-3 gem pack (worth about 0.3 balens) instead of the usual 5 soul crystal (worth about 2 balens). Well, that is, if we suppose there will be useful a soul crystal event ever - if not, the gem pack is of course better :) 

But this poor man's love thy mount is still great - since everyone can claim again the stable rewards. I'm still not sure this is just some laziness from the programmers or an intentional feature, but honestly, I don't care - we got 10k free whips, yeee :) that's all what counts. And not only whips, but about 100 turkeys. I opened all, got 3 skeletal dragon cards, exchanged 2 back for drumsticks, and now I evolved my Apollo - for completely free! So yes, I'm happy today :)

Some people said Wartune is actually just a casino, and this seems true. For a very long time, I had no luck with the free chests, but some time ago I pop 5 blazing taurens from one series, and now this. If you play this game long enough, eventually you will be lucky, you will find some free mounts and other rare treasures from the free boxes, and it always feels good. 

At least my regret over my blunder during HoF is gone... I followed all my own instructions to increase BR (converted block/crit gems to mdef/pdef, switched sylph points to endurance, used all hoofs, soul seals, converted non-BR astrals to BR astrals, made all temp mounts). I reached some 372K BR this way. I entered Necropolis and used a Warrior's call, and I saw it could bring up my BR to 394K. (without potions/scrolls of which I knew for sure will not work). 6K more BR is pretty tough, if I use all my sepu and whips could have made like 3-4K more. Since the mods on forum said clearly WC will not work, I did not bother spending balens to get the final 3k (would have been expensive anyway). I did know there will be at least 50% chance that WC still does work, but would have hated to waste money if not. A few days later, during the tailoring event, I realized I never refined my weapons (since they give almost nothing to a mage) so that could have been the 3k BR is was looking for, so I missed the +100 mount. 
And to be honest, this is why I like this game so much still: because it is difficult enough that you can make mistakes and bad decisions. And you can best others by making less mistakes than they do. 

Maximize Battle Rating

Battle rating is used to compare strength of players. It is derived from the total of your statistics. Whenever you upgrade your character - enchant equipment, improve gems, level, academy skills etc. your BR improves. It is similar to the Ability total in Doomlord.

How is BR calculated?
1 ATK, 1 DEF etc. worth 1 BR, and 5 HP worth 1 BR, so it's pretty simple. If you are a mage and gain +1 PATK, your BR will increase. But it will not make you any stronger. So if you have slightly higher BR than another player, it does not mean that you will be able to beat him. The BR itself is rather for "showoff", for being 1st in rankings, and winning rewards in BR events.

Which stat should I increase?
Sometimes you can make decision which stats to improve, like when spending mount training whips. When you spend whips on intelligence, you gain +20 ATK and +5 DEF (=25 BR) if you spend them on armor, you gain +20 PDEF and +20 MDEF (=40 BR). So it would seem improving armor is better, since you gain more BR. However, Wartune is based on offense. Attack is more valuable, since you get more multipliers on attack. Also, +1 ATK increases your dmg more than +1 DEF decreases it. (See my article on combat to learn why)
And don't forget that the main resource generator, World Boss takes into consideration only your attack power, your defense is irrelevant there (after reaching a minimal level).
So in general, you should go for ATK first, and when it's maxed or too costly, begin improving the other stats in stables, in academy, in guild skills etc.

Spending balens
When you spend balens, you actually buy BR. You have to make sure you get the maximum amount of +BR when spending balens, otherwise you are just burning money. See this article how to maximize the BR/balen gain.

Maxing out BR
Of course you still want a BR as high as possible, for being 1st in BR ranking, and to grab the occassional nice rewards for BR events. There are some things you can achieve this:

• In Academy, improve PATK for mage (and MATK for knight/archer). Although it is a useless stat for you, you can get a good BR increase for a minimum amount of kyanite. 
• You can improve the other attack as well in stables. When you need to use 200 whips to gain +5 intellect, it's okay to spend 30 to gain +5 strength. It not only gives some pdef, it helps you in BR events.
• In guild skills, max out every skill.  Even charisma.  Those all give some BR, and in the long term, the gold cost will be insignificant.
• An archer should use crit gems - but before BR reward events, convert them to mdef of pdef, since they give more BR.
• A sylph's only stat which is added to yours in HP. So when a BR event is coming, reset your main sylph's attribute points and spend all on HP to gain extra BR.
• Some astrals are nice, but don't give BR at all. Such are will destroyer, determination, goddess blessings etc. Before you log off, equip the brilliance, charisma astral you otherwise not using to improve your BR. With a good reward event, you might even consider converting one non-BR astral into a PATK/MATK astral as well, then convert back later.
• Potions/scrolls no longer work in BR event and rankings so don't waste them. But if you log off in a dungeon, your card bonus will count.

Wartune big sale analysis

There is a big sale event in Wartune. I help you decide if it worth spending or not.

Whenever a sale event is running, you should decide 3 things:
1.) what is the worth of the bonus packs (ie. how much discount you get).
2.) is there anything worthwhile to buy.
3.) you still stay in the spending boundaries you set for yourself.
Big sales are nothing just a psychological marketing trick. Don't buy just because you feel you miss something. There is always another sale.

To determine the worth of packages, I use this article.
For value of clothes, I calculate with the standard shop value of 400 balens, 2000 for wings.
Please also note, that the average discount for recharge promotions, sales etc. is 20-25%. So you should consider buying if you get at least that discount.

Pack value of pack: 70 balens.   Total discount.  3.5%. Isn't worth it.

Pack value of pack: 325 balens. Together with the previous, you get a total pack value of 395 balens. having spent 5000, your total discount is 7,9%. Isn't worth it.

Pack value of pack: 598 balens. Together with the previous ones, you get a total pack value of 993 balens. having spent 10.000, your total discount is 9,9%. Isn't worth it.

Pack value of pack: 4900 balens. Together with the previous ones, you get a total pack value of 5893 balens. having spent 20.000, your total discount is 29,4%. Sounds okay IF you are willing to spend 200 (!!) USD (usually a full year subscription for a 3D mmorpg, and you can be a champion in the other browser game Doomlord by spending that much).

Pack value of pack: 2896 balens. Together with the previous ones, you get a total pack value of 8789 balens. having spent 30.000, your total discount is 29,3%.Any honest merchant should give a bigger discount if you spend more :( Especially, the clothes are poor quality. I don't recommend going this far.

Pack value of pack: 5114 balens. Together with the previous ones, you get a total pack value of 13903 balens. having spent 50.000, your total discount is 27,8%. Even worse than the previous one. The reason for this, because they know the whales buy it anyway, and us mere mortals don't.

Now let's see if there is anything worthwhile to buy?
There are a few reasonable things to spend balens on:
1.) You can buy some treasure maps in advance (until all your crystals are level 4, it worth buying an orange map each day, if everyone in your group does the same).
2.) You can buy some crypt keys too to open up 1-2 shields.
3.) Jewel Hunt now worth going until points 1600, you can spend some balen on this for these 3 days.
4.) Personally, I have some sylph skill I didn't buy, was waiting for a similar event.
5.) You might consider buying some fashion cores for clothing refine (but it worth ONLY if you refine an S cloth, with only 1 star).
6.) You shouldn't buy: mother's love pack (sold for 39 balens, worth only 25.68 balens, see sample calculation here, And for god's sake, don't buy rune pack either, it's a very bad deal.

So calculate for yourself, how much you can spend reasonably. If you think you can spend 20.000 balens on buys where you get at least +2000 BR, AND you can spare so much money, go ahead. Otherwise, ignore big spender.

One final note: you should wait with most of your purchases until the last day. You never know if they add a recharge event or something else which can make this look better.