Surviving sky trial 3-5 and God's descent

Today I would like to give a few advices how to fight particularly strong pve opponents. I already gave general advices about god's trial strategy here. The article below is mostly about survival.

First of all, here is the sky trial 3-5 boss. Some top players could beat it already, but for most of us, mere mortals, this boss is still too difficult. Now that sky trial bosses are unslowable, it looks quite impossible. I can't tell you how to kill it now - but I can say a few things how to improve your chances.

Earlier I mentioned that with the help of Tihh, we could reverse-engineer how combat works in Wartune. This knowledge has many uses - for example, I could understand what combat stats the sky trial 3-5 boss have.

She have an attack of 335.568! Yeah, you would like to have an attack like that, I bet :) He have 2 skills he is using. one is an AE, which hits for 120%, and another is a single-attack, which hits for 250%. He uses AE, then 2 single, then AE, then 2 single. The first AE clears your troops, so after that, you are on your own.

So how do you survive this?

HP or Armor?
The first thing you can see that your defense is pretty neglectable. If you increase your defense by 5000, then it will reduce the damage by about 1000 only. This is because in the combat formulae

(ATK - DEF) /2 * multipliers (skill, god's blessing, resist etc)

So 5000 Defense is something like:

5000/2 * 1.2 * 0.7 * 0.6 * 0.86 = 1080 damage reduction (2250 vs the stronger attack).

The same is true for other strong PVE bossess too, like dragon invasion, god's descent etc.

You remember when I said don't spend mount whips on armor? The devs make monsters stronger by giving them astronomical attack values. But this means, +100 defense means less and less.  When you increase the Armor stat in your stables by 1, you get +20 defense. So to get +5000 defense, you need to increase it 250 times. If you spend the same amount on endurance, you would get 25.000 HP. So the HP is more useful vs big bosses. Not to mention that to survive World Boss final attack, you need HP too.

Note: I don't say armor is not good. It DOES reduce the damage. Just when you can choose between armor and HP, take HP. 

Damage reducers

Damage reducers are your friend in fight such as this. Effects which reduce damage by a percentage, not by a constant, like armor. God's blessing is a must. And now you can enhance it by refining it's astral slot. Just 5% reduce can be 5000 damage less per attack.

The other key damage reducer is your resistance. PVE resist checks were bugged, the monster did not take the corresponding resist, but your highest. So a Hercules was better vs a dark opponent than Hades! Now it seems this bug is corrected finally with the last patch, so Hades is your best friend here. Try to work up your resist as high as possible - so better have 5 lvl 5 electro resist and 5 lvl 3 fire, than having all of them level 4. I don't know yet if there is a cap to resist's damage reduction- let's hope there is not and it can go even higher than 50%.

If block is triggered, you take 25% less damage. If you convert all your defense gems into block gems, you will take like 6-7% less damage in average. On the other hand, you lose about 5k def, which reduces the damage by about 2%.

Active damage reducers are not so great as passive ones, but you can use them too. The archer's IS is great, since it deals damage. The new mage skill, mana shield is not so good.

Astrals

Bosses are either MATK or PATK. So if you have both MDEF and PDEF astral equipped, one of them is useless. You can easily test which is needed, run a few test battles and see which is which (write down damages). For example, sky trial 3-5 is MATK.

Enchanted regeneration is a must. At 10%, you heal 50.000 - so that's an average of 5.000 heal per round!
Even if you are a will destroyer user, I recommend Determination + Sniper's edge vs. these bosses, where you need one lucky run from several. But at Determination 9+ and critical 7k+ you are better of with critical in average as well.

Use every astral which can reduce damage somehow, enshieldment, even the nerfed Illusion. If necessary, you can even remove the second of MDEF/PDEF (at least you don't have to test around which is not needed).





Healing
Use heal rune. Using a rune takes little time. Don't forget that now you can upgrade your level 10 heal rune further with advanced runestones (available in the arena shop).

Even if you can reduce the boss damage to something like 60-70k (with a 500+ resist, god's blessing 35%, frequent blocks etc) and have 250k+ HP, you need to heal yourself fully once every 4-5 turns. For archer and knight, this seems doable only with Iris...

Conclusion. Please don't forrget that the above advices are only for big attack PVE monsters. In PVP situation, where the damage comes from skill and other multipliers, armor is still an important stat. It's justthat  in PVP, the biggest reward you get for your efforts is like 200 mount whip (in class wars). In PVE, you get much better rewards - more hoof, dragon soul in dragon invasion, more horn for sky trial, not to mention God's descent rewards.

What would you choose?

I tried recently some of R2Games other wartune clones games. They look nice but you just keep clicking, claim reward etc. Not really much strategy, there are no hard choices to make. That's what I like in Wartune and Doomlord as well: you have to make choices. Some of them are long term, and if you make a bad decision, well... Let's see a few such choices.

Which class to choose?

My first - and very bad - decision was to make a mage. In Wartune, classes are well balanced in PVP, but not at all in PVE. All PVE events are a damage race, where the first, the faster gets more reward. And to make it worse, bosses (Necropolis, Sky trial, GD, everywhere...) go enrage after a given number of actions of that boss, making slow (ie. deep freeze) essential. So in PVE, an archer is about 2.5 times better than a mage or a knight. Also they don't have to worry about 2 sets of astral, and building a different sylph for CW. So yes, if you could change my toon into an archer at the cost of 10k balens, I would do it instantly :)

Chaos rune or amnesia rune?

This question is especially for class wars. Both runes take a lifetime to develop, so this is an especially long-term decision.

About chaos in general: if it lasts for 2 rounds, it really does little in CW. You get chaosed, you do 2x ligthning, then still kill your opponent's troop with RoF, can bleed, heal and start sylph at max hp. If it's 3 rounds, well, then things start getting ugly, that's too much delay. Fortunately, few people have lvl 10 chaos rune yet.

About amnesia: the real power is when you use it after your opponent sylphs, and he watches hopeless while you kill him. At least, that's the plan. Under the effect of a round 2 amnesia, the attack you choose first is resolved anyway, so you lose only one turn (and still do an auto-attack). Still worse than being turned off for 2-3 rounds by chaos. If your opponent has a lvl 10 amnesia (which is pretty rare) then it can be a real winner. But don't forget: in a future patch, ability to use runes in sylph form will be added. This will decrease the value of amnesia, since it might not turn off all sylph skills.

So chaos looks better, even when it's not working well for me. I also prefer my opponent having amnesia instead of chaos.

Soul crystal exchange to mount whip or runestones?

After you maxed out your SC, you can choose them to choose either into whips or runestones. In overall, I would say runestones is a better deal. Getting a truckload of whip which increases your atk by 1% is not such a big differences - on the other hand, chaos/amensia your opponent for 2 or 3 round is a big difference. There are 2 reasons why I still choose mount whips.

1.) The whip I get now, can use next event to get more soul crystals, which I can exchange to more whips, which when I use gives me more soul crystals... So it's value is increasing by time. The runestones, I get them, use them, and that's it.

1.) When you improve chaos/amnesia, you will see real difference only when you pump them up to lvl 10. So when I can finish lvl 10 instantly with an exchange, I will do it, but until then, I just keep recycling sc/whip, and take advantage of the free runestones from jewel hunt / tok chests / tank.

Enhanced deflection or regeneration?

Enchanted regeneration's cap was raised from 5000 to 50.000, making it a more useful astral. Question is, is it good enough now? I would definitely use it in sky trial, which you have to re-try multiple times, and one lucky streak is enough to win. In CW, I would still choose deflection, and it is simple math. Deflection will be useful in any round, regardless when it triggers: dealing 50K damage is always good. On the other hand, healing 50K is good only if you are already seriously wounded. Especially in mage CW, where people usually full hp at awakening, this astral is useful only in 2 rounds, opposed to deflection.

When you have to choose between 2 astrals, always make the math. Enhanced regeneration is 50.000 hp at 10% chance, so on average, it is 5000 hp per round. Even if you are wounded each round and the battle last as long as 10 rounds, it is no better than a holy brilliance which gives 5K hp as well (but more reliably).

Enhanced deflection has another big advantage in CW: if your opponent kills you and you kill him with deflection, you will win. If it wasn't this way, I'm not sure I would use even deflection.

Which sylph to use?

This is a very important question. And if you pump mahra/sepu for months into the wrong sylph, that will take you at big disadvantage.

For archer/knight, gaia->hercules is pretty obvious choice: atk type MATK (advantage in CW), increased atk bonus (everything is about damage blah blah), gives bigger damage reduction in PVE than other sylphs (since it's highest resist is 200, while apollo and hades only 100 - and in PVE, only your highest resist matters, element not), and very big damage skills. Also gaia is a free sylph, and you don't have to spend balen on evolve either.

For mage, hades for cw, and a gaia for pve content for the above reasons. But hades cost a lot of money (still 400 USD!) so if you can't afford it, you have to go with something cheaper (gaia, amazon, pan) and when you finally get a hades somehow you will cry seeing all the mahra/sepu rotting in a useless sylph...  

Class Wars strategy

Tomorrow is Class Wars, so I would like to share some thoughts on Class Wars - from a mage's view, of course, but maybe some advices work for other classes as well.

Testing. It is very important that you decide in advance what skills, astrals, sylph you will use, and make some testings. Find someone of your class with similar BR who is willing to do some practice with you. Go to altar of enoblement, you can duel there unlimited time without losing HP potions. Try out different strategies, see what works best for you. But make sure you do not go in the direction of just trying to beat the specific setup your friend is using! This practice is good for something else too. CW is some stress (at least for me), and any mistake can be fatal. So you must have a good routine at knowing what to do, what skill to use. You hands should not shake :)

Preparation. This is a good time to use all the sepulcrum you saved up (waiting for a sepu spender event), upgrading your astral, refining/identifying your last cloth. Make sure you have all the lvl 5 potions (do not buy it for balens! Just roll guild wheel each day 30 times, you will have enough), and scrolls (you can get them from guild wheel too, or buy them for crypt tokens). 5 minutes before CW, double-check skills, astrals, sylph, your PVP medallion, then drink the potions, and use the scrolls (2 of each since scroll last only for 30 minutes).

The swiss system. People complain about pairing all the time, even though it works fine. Each round, you get paired with someone with the same number of wins. BR has nothing to do here. Earlier, this system was exploitable, since the first rounds were less points than the later ones, so it was a good strat to lose the first 4 match. Not anymore. Just try your best. If you lose, no worries, your next opponent will be weaker probably.

Astrals. Some astrals work better than others. If I were you, I wouldn't use Illusion, for example. Guardian angel is great, on the other hand. It's a reason why I don't recommend a mage use crit setup: even if you like it for emotional reasons, guardian angel will ruin it during cw.
Deflection is a funny gamble astral. It's main strength is, if it triggers when your opponent would kill you and you kill him as well, you will win. If it wins you one match you would otherwise lose, it served its purpose.
If you think between HP and block, I would go for HP.

Slyph. A slyph does 3 things during cw: it determines the elemental form of your attacks, it deals some damage based on its stats in passive state, and it deals massive damage in awakened form, based on your atk and the mahra and sepulcrum you spent on the sylph.
If you have a sylph where the quality/sepu is much, much more than your other sylphs, use that - it will deal more damage, regardless of other considerations. If you have several similarly powerful sylphs, consider what others use in your category, and what works best against that (I mean here the resist / elemental type).
My personal opinion is that for mages, Hades is the best choice, for others, Gaia. Unfortunately, not everyone had 400 bucks (me included) to have a Hades.



The duel itself. Chaos rune is widely used now, so you have to be prepared for that. For a mage, it does not make much difference - troops die in 2 rounds anyway, and then you start sylph phase at max hp, but for other classes where it is a damage race, it can be lethal. It's best to wait a little at the beginning to see what your opponent is going to do, before eating/using a chaos. Besides chaos, my other favorite is still bleed rune.

The duel is decided by awakened sylphs. Before that, we just toy around: kill troops, heal up, purify each other's bleed - but the sylph delphic is usually a finisher, whoever can cast it first AFTER the 50% damage increase wins. Therefore, you must time your awaken well. If you awaken too early, eat a bleed and use sylph skills before 50%, your opp heals up and then finish you off. If you fumble too long with purify and healing, the Hades big nuke kills you. BR, ATK is not as important as timing. Practice it with someone a lot in advance.

Good luck all!