When to spend balens in Wartune?

You can spend any amount of balen - ie. money - in Wartune. You can do it efficiently, and less efficiently. I remember a guy who stopped looong ago. At the end, he was just buying totally senseless things just to reach VIP9 and avoid losing honor in battlegrounds. He spent 5k USD in a record time, then he quit. 

What can make people spend? Major reasons are to reach a goal (like getting a wing, being immune to honor loss, getting a bi-sylph etc) or just keep up the competition with others. The later one is a real motivation. I remember R2 servers once had a character named "Zebq". In like 3 months, he became the top BR, he maxed out everything. If you do it in such a short time, you skip all events, you just buy everything for the basic price, which is horribly high. So we could calculate, the guy was supposed to spend rougly 1 million dollars. Of course I'm pretty sure he didn't spend. He either was a good hacker (but this is quite unlikely, I'm sure if someone gets so much attention, the devs check him), or he was an insider, who just had access to unlimited balens. But nonetheless, his streak inspired the top players to race with him, and spend more. So either this was an intentional goal to milk the top cows, or just an unintentional result of an employee "trying the game", it generated extra income for them.

It usually starts little: you buy a wing or something else you cant get for free, and after you opened your wallet once, it gets easier and easier to open it again. After you spent 10 USD ten times, making a recharge of 100 USD doesn't seem so horrible - after all, you already spend this amount, and for lesser reward. After a longer (or shorter) time, if you did several 100 USD recharges, you will even consider the 500 or 1000 recharge, which is truly ridiculous for a game. And soon you won't even admit how much you spent and look for excuses like "I can afford it" "I spend 1000s of hour on it, it's still a cheap hobby".

As you know, I believe that spending on a game is okay, if it's not such an amount which you will regret after you stop playing  / spending. However, now I believe the game has reached a point after which spending money on it is totally pointless. Lag, freeze, load times, complete and utter nerf of everything, hacks going uncontrolled, and this is going on since a very long time. We see no sign that anything will change. I admit that in the 3+ years since I play this game, I became quite and addict. The time and money I spent made me addict. And I'm sure I will continue to play for a while. Not because I have hope that something will change - just because the addiction, and because after a long day I can still find some fun in it. And secretly I hope that one day, they will explain all the fumbles, bad decisions they made. But I'm not recharging again, I'm pretty positive of that - unless these issues got solved by some miracle.

Ocassionally, when players get really pissed off, someone always says on the forum "boycott them, dont recharge." I don't think it works that way. Players will not sto precharging just because someon says so, or to "punish" the company. They stop recharging because they lose interest. I'm sure some of you still have goals, which, if you can buy it cheap enough, you will pay for it. Like "reaching knighthood" "getting a red sylph" etc.

But here is some advice: if you want to spend money to reach a goal - stuff will get free eventually, or at least much cheaper. Everything does. Just from the near past - first adv. henna sale, you could buy knighthood for 2000 USD. 1 month later, last hot events, you could get it for 400. So just to reach your goals, no hurry.
If you want to spend to compete with others, to keep up: I see a lot of players have quit in the past half year, which is no wonder. But note that the whales, who spent the most, stayed. So do not hope to gain rank by the top players quitting. They won't. They spent too much. Go to battleground, the only opponents you meet will have red sylphs. Go to titan wars, each team is a heavy casher team. So spending to catch up is also pointless, because you will never catch up.

So my answer to the opening question, "When to spend balens in Wartune?" is actually, never, anymore. 

Wartune new spender events

Wartune always loved to overcomplicate events, mainly to ensure no one can exactly see what's the optimal way to do it, and spend more than necessary. Too bad I'm here to make the math and help you :)

Wartune must inflate things, they must give better and better gift packs for spending money or people will stop spending. Looks like we reached another milestone. But instead of simply increasing the spender gift packs, they added more reward events under "recharge debate". I don't say you should recharge. I just say if you want to, here is how you should do it:

You can get far the best bonus for recharge ratio if you recharge only 40 USD. Simply recharge 30 USD on the first day, then 5-5 on the following 2 days. This way you can get the 20 and 40 packs from Gift pack, the 3000 balens single day bonus from recharge debate, the 3 x 500 bonus from recharge debate chests, the 6000 bound balen from recharge gift, and 3 bonus for consecutive recharge bonus. (If you did an 5 USD recharge yesterday for consecutive, you can also do +5 on the 5th day too to grab the 300 extra beast souls).

If the stuff you get for 4000 balen recharge does not seem enough, you might consider the 100 USD recharge. This is a significantly worse deal in bonus:balen ratio, but still decent. In this case you should recharge 80 USD on the first day, and 20 USD on the next. This way you can grab the first 3 pack from recharge gift pack, the 8000 balens single day bonus from recharge debate, the 2x2000 bonus and the 1x5000 bonus from recharge debate chests, the 15000 bound balens from recharge gifts, and 2 bonus from consecutive recharge. (If you did an 5 US recharge yesterday you might consider doing an extra 5-5 on 4-5th day too).

Going as far as 30000 balens is a much worse deal, even further, not even the dumbest whale should go. Below is my calculation in excel. It contains the major bonuses (recharge gift pack and recharge debate). The recharge debate chests themselves give only a smaller bonus, of which especially the 2nd day is useful, with the divinity soul - the gem and and diamond are not so great. Recharging for more than 3 days counts for consecutive recharge, but not for recharge gift packs, recharge debate or one-time recharge gift. 

Column "total bonus" is total balen value divided by recharge. This is the indicator, which is the best ratio recharge.

Clown mask analysis

Here follows an analysis of the current event item in Wartune, clown mask.

First, here are some samples of what did we get so far by opening these:

As you can see, the expected value is pretty good. This is mostly because of the high value of coin of ancestry: you can exchange 4 for 80 vulcan packs, which is a decent deal.

Now let's see if you exchange directly, what can you get:

The best value exchanges are fashion core / good luck charm, and will crystal / crystal shard. 

Comparing the 2 tables, I would say, you should open the masks, not exchange them. There are some exceptions, though. 

The resist crystal synthesis event running now gives nice extra rewards. For this event, it is advised that you make at least one lvl 5 resist gem each day. But for that - unless you are a casher - you need a lot of crystal shards. In this case, you should get some crystal shards from the exchange. I do not recommend will crystals (although they are supposed to be the same value) - since resist crystals now have an extra use for reducing dimensions, and you can synthesis in the event much cheaper using crysal shards than will crystals.

And about fashion cores and good luck charms: if you can't make at least a level 5 of each cloth during each cloth event (ie., you have difficulty to launch the cloth synthesis machine because you lack resources) this is a good opportunity to stack up on munitions.

Conclusion:
1.) If you are a free player who lack fashion cores / good luck charms, grab them so you can start harvesting more of these and event chests during cloth events.
2.) If you okay on clothing, but don't have 5+ lvl 7 resist crystals yet, jump into the crystal synthesise business and get crystal shards.
3.) If you are a veteran player, go for the coins and get vulcan packs.

A few good jokes

I really appreciate when Wartune can make me laugh. And the late recharge promotions and sales are really good jokes. Big sales and recharge promotions follow each other more and more often, several times multiple of them at once. Prolly they follow the old wisdom, you can catch more fish with multiple baits. Still, most of these promotions are so silly, so we just laugh:

Earlier, there were no recharge promotions, only once a year, plus during server merge, so these were good opportunities to get some free goodies. But now we get one or more each month, can't (or rather, don't want to) spend so much balen anyway. It seems their income is really getting lower and they try to make up for the loss by milking the few whales even more. I already told several times that Wartune prices will drop, the items will be cheaper and cheaper, so the later and less you buy, the stronger character you can build from a minimum amount of balens. It seems my propechy is becoming a reality. 

For a while, it seemed a good idea for Wartune developers to assign a different resource for every aspect of the game. You can develop many things, but each requires a different item. So heavy cashers will pay a lot for every new resource.
But now this is becoming a problem. Cashers who play since a longer time, have most things maxed, so don't need most of the items which are offered as lures in recharge promotions and big spender events. Look at the above.
1000 soul seals? C'mon, I have 13000 rotting in the vault, waiting for an SS event. 200 honor medal? I have 750k honor, the problem for the next medal is empire truncheon, not these. Lvl 7 crystals? I got already 10 completely free in resist synthesis events. 1200 sepulcrum? My sylph need mahra, not sepulcrum, thx.
Maybe these are all aimed at newer players, but I doubt they rush to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The more desperate these promotions become, the more consistently we have to refuse them, so Wartune developers finally understand that we do not need more recharge promotions and spender events. We need the lag reduced, bugs corrected, the required game time reduced, and no more nerf, and reverse the latest nerfs - like dimension chests.

And here is the biggest joke:

Are they really serious, that there will be any player in Wartune, who is willing to pay 500 USD for a lvl 9 gem? All free players on our server, who never bought a single balen, have lvl 9 and lvl 10 gems in every slot. For free. So who is the target of this sale? 

To calculate it the other way: during a 3-day gem synthesise event, you can use 9 lvl 6 gems to create 6 lvl 7 gems, which can get you 4 lvl 8 gems, where you will get 2x lvl 9 gem and 1x lvl 8 gem at the end. In other words, a lvl 9 gem worth about 4 lvl 6 gems: sold for 8 coins of ancestry currently. One coin worth about 200-300 balens - both in acquire and spending value - so this gem is actually sold at 20x of it's realistic value.

I say it again: they sell an item at

20 x of it's realistic value

And they do it all the time!

Glass slippers and Paper cuttings

Obviously, Wartune has changed the way the chest-gamble works. Previously, you got an event shard + a random item from each chest. If you were lucky, you could get the rare treasure. If you weren't, you could still exchange it for the event shards. Not anymore. With the new system, you either open the chest, or exchange it directly. Personally, I like the change, because now people can't complain anymore that "X got lucky by opening 3 chests and me not by opening 200". Now it's your decision if you go gamble-mode or safe-mode. Also it's good because now you have to be smart to make the right decision. But, I also admit, that with this current system, you get less reward in average. So far, this is not a big tragedy, since we get  a lot more free chest than before. 

I already published an analysis about pumpkin carriage. My advice was to open the chests and gamble instead of doing the exchange - at least until you got a full cloth set - because the expected value is much better this way. Now the game gets more complicated with Valentine chests which give a glass slipper or a pumpkin carriage, and with the chinese new year chest which can either give those or a "paper cutting." So what's the optimal strategy now?


Unlike pumpkins, glass slippers can give you mounts. Mounts are usually the highest priority goal in chest events, since they give the most BR, and they are unique items which you can't get from other sources. So here, I recommend a different strategy.


First of all, Wartune was nice enough to give the free Valentine day's packs, including a Royal Steed. And they were even nicer to allow us to exchange the Royal Steed for a bunch of glass slippers. So if you had the Royal Steed, you could grab now the Chimera as well. Getting 235 more crystals for the Persian cat is more difficult, and depends entirely on your resources.


Lately, I used all my coins of ancestry to get mount whips. So I had 7000 whips to use, also had 2 mounts I got free since last hoof event, so I got 170 glass slippers. Now there are 2 options:
Use the glass slippers, and hope for persian cat (0,1% chance) or an apollo seal (which I can exchange for more glass slippers), or try to collect the 235.

I decided to do the following:
1. Try to get as many glass slippers with the current mount events. This included exchanging my amethyst for whips, and exchanging all remaining pumpkins for whips as well.
2. Save up the glass slippers and see how much I can get. The event still runs for 14 days, cloth event or anything else might come.
3. If, at the end, I miss only like 10-20 glass slippers, I buy them, good value for a +40 mount. If I miss more, I open the glass slippers, and hope for my luck.

Update: gem synthesise event tomorrow, so we can get a lot of free chests (hope you saved up the gems you get for valentin event).

Boiling the frog

Probably many of you have heard of a classic experiment. They say if you throw a live frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out immediately and survive. However, if you put the frog into cold water, and warm it up slowly, the frog will not jump out and gets boiled eventually. I'm not sure if this experiment would work in practice, but it is a classic example to model human behaviour.

Why do I bring this up? Because Wartune is a master of boiling us like a frog. I remember when I started playing Wartune. I was excited that I don't have to spend money, I can get everything, just a bit slower - except for the pretty wings. Then, after some weeks, when I knew I like the game, I made my first recharge to buy a pair of wings. In a game like this, making the customer to do the first recharge is always the most difficult task. It must be always a small sum - 5 USD is just perfect as the weekly tempting recharge bonuses suggest.

After you recharged 5 USD a few times, you will be confident to make a bigger one - 10, 20 or 40 USD, if there are some tempting sales. You spend 10-50 USD monthly, and you still playing. And, after like a half year, you say, gee, I already spent over 100 USD! So making a 100 USD recharge now looks more reasonable. Time passes, and there comes the big mega-ultra recharge promotion, for 500 or 1000 USD, offering treasures beyond your dreams - and you don't even have to spend it, you get this huge bonus pack for recharging! And since you recharged 50-100 USD several times, you say: I will play for a year more, I would recharge this amount eventually anyway. Of course, after you have the balens, they disappear much faster; not like when you have to touch your credit card each time when there is a sale. And, you get boiled, like a frog.

The first year (10 months) when I played Wartune, I spent an average of 70 USD monthly (10-20 only first months, more later). When our server merged in 2013, they put up a recharge bonus of 500 USD. I said it's too much money, so I passed. In the next 7-8 months, I spent that amount, and told myself, it was a mistake not to do the recharge, I lost all the bonuses. So when the next merge came around in 2014, I was ready to be boiled: I made the 500 USD recharge. Saying myself, this will be enough for another half year at least. Of course I was wrong, a gadzillion of big spender events started to follow, and the 50.000 balens disappeared in 2 months, making my monthly spending increase from 70 to 250: so the game became more expensive - due to a „good offer”. What a paradox situation...

My blog is about how to build a strong character using a minimal amount of balens: but this „minimal” is quite relative thing :) As things get cheaper and cheaper, as you got bigger and bigger bonuses and more sales, it is harder and harder to resist. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you could see that I say „don't buy” to 9 sales/promotions out of 10. But sales became so common, there is always one which is just too good to refuse. And then we begin finding excuses: „I can afford it”, „Others spent more”, „I am a god on my server for this price” etc.

When I started playing Wartune, my friend told me: „Wartune is a game where you can spend an unlimited amount of money. But still, whenever you buy balens, always think of the possibility that you can quit tomorrow. Will you regret the total amount you spent?” He played for a year, spent 200 USD, and quit without a second thought. Some months later, he restarted on a new server. He never bought a balen but he still have fun.

This game creates a very strong addiction. And when you have the balen, it is much harder to resist. Btw, the current event („balen lode”) looks interesting. Looks like I spend 5k balens, then I get it back, +2k bound balens. But the trap is here, to use this, you must recharge. And then you have the balens, you spend them much faster... Very smart, I have to admit.

So always keep in mind how much you spent in total, and what is your monthly spending. Is that increasing? If yes, be careful: you are just getting boiled!

Pumpkin Carriage analysis

As I promised, I made an analysis of the current Wartune "chest" event, Pumpkin Carriage. Here is what I got from the free chests I got from clothing synthesis:

The chest's average value is calculated the usual way: multiply drop rate of each item by its balen value, and sum it up. I set mount hoof value to zero: if you are a low casher, with fewer mounts, then you maxed your hoofs for that reason. If you are a top player, then you kill 8+ boss in DI each run, and you maxed hoofs for that reason. 

Anyway, the chest's expected value was 28 balens for me, which is still no-buy. Especially after a massive nerf to dimensions and adding VAT to balen prices, I don't think too many players are in the mood of spending.

But the original question was, whether to open these chests, or exchange them for cloth / mount whip. Obviously, opening has a better value, so I strongly recommend going for that. If you want the clothes at all cost, do this: Open all Carriage but 90. If you dont get any cloth, exchange the remaining 90 for them. If you got 1 cloth, then open 30 more, and exchange 60, etc. 

About the new Valentine's chest, will post an analysis as well when I have enough statistics. If you have any, please don't hesitate to post it. Thanks!

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.

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).

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?

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.

Super spender analysis

We see some big promotion in Wartune today: super spender, big spender, one-time bag at the same time... You would think this is the perfect time to buy, right?? Well. They are smarter than that. So do the math BEFORE you spend a cent. It's pretty complex, so I made a table for you.

You see the amount of balens spent, the bonus items you get, and their value. Please note that I did not list items like gold, daru, dragon soul and gems since these are items you get for free in such an amount that they do not represent any value. Mount hoof is a questionnable commodity as well, for me, I will max it out for free in 1.5 months. 

Next to each amount spent, you see the total value of bonus (including wheel of prosperity, where I found the average value of a roll was 70 balens), and how much percentage bonus is this compared to what you spend.

Please note that you can copy-paste this table into your own excel or google docs, and modify item values where you think it is different for you. (For example, you have whips maxed or hoofs close to max, so you set them to zero.)

As you see, the bonus is a bit better than previous big spenders, but not so great that you should buy items you otherwise don't need (like whips and hoofs for sale today). The average bonus is 50-70%, which means if you buy something which R2 sales for "just" double of realistic value, you got no bonus at all. And, usually, they sell for 3-20x of realistic value, so you have to be very careful. 

My advice for the first day: the only thing you might consider buying is some divinity souls. It is sold for double of realistic price (99 instead of 50), but you can't get it for free (yet). And let's hope they add better deals later. Mounts and cloth you still miss can be still a good deal, but don't jump on anything what you can get for free in large amounts.

Please note my table goes only until 500 USD pack, although there is even 1800 USD pack. This is because I think whoever spends that much is a real whale, who don't care about optimize spendings, just buys everything Wartune sells - so they don't need my table anyway.

December big spender analysis

We have a big spender + sylph upgrade + mahra base pack sale combo coming tomorrow in Wartune, so here is a quick analysis.

If you look closely at the picture, you will notice immediately the problem: you get the same weapon cloth with all 3 packs. Hopefully they correct it by tomorrow.
Other than that, these packs are pretty focused, just useful items. If you buy for 100 USD, the approx. value is 4000 balens, if you buy up to 200 USD, the approx. value is 8200 balens. So the bonus for 100 and 200 USD is about the same, if you spend less, the discount is much worse, however.



What you should buy is obviously either the mahra or the sepulcrum pack. This packs looks very, very similar to the crystal shard pack, so we can assume the drop rates are the same. Cosmos blog has a nice statistics on this, so based on that, we get an average of 80 sepu / mahra per pack.






The above combo with the now-permanent feature, prosperity wheel, and the sylph enchant / upgrade feature.

So, if you spend 10.000 balens (buying 10 packs):
 you get 800 mahra, which, when used, gives an additional 200 mahra (worth a total of 5000 balens) you get items worth 4000 balens value from big spender, and you get an average of 900 balens value from 10 prosperity wheel rolls. The same math works for 20.000 balens.
If your main sylph is far from maxing sepulcrum, then you should buy sepulcrum instead, it's even better BR gain for the same amount of balens.

So this is an okay deal, green light if you wanna spend :) Just wait until they correct the clothes.

Just two precaution notes:

• 10 (or 20) pack is very little for the average value work. It can happen easily that you got 10 packs with 30 mahra :(
• This is big spender I. So maybe something even heavier is coming for Christmas :) Also don't forget, sylph equipment is coming too, so if you have limited financial resources, you might save balens for those.

Black friday "sale"

Really amazing! We cant event get a real discount on "black friday" sales in Wartune.

mahra normally sells for 25, sepu for 15. so 1 mahra+1 sepu is 40: exactly the same they sell it here. Btw mahra's realistic value is 5, sepu is 10-12, so this "sale" is double of realistic price.
mount whip worth 2 balens, SC is 0.4 balen (well, it actually worth nothing, since no SC event since 2 months) but anyway, the value here is 600 balen, they again sell for double price.
mount hoof and soul seals value is approx 10 balens each. So the third pack is 2k balen. Why buy it for 5k balens?
Vulcan's hammer worth approx 20 balens at the stage where I am, but price drops quickly as chance decreases. Stoves hold no value to me, have a lot from sylph boss. So 6k balens for a 2k pack, pretty ridiculous.
Will crystals approx 3 balens, crystal shard 0.4 balens (these are normal ingame prices!!) so this is 700 balens. Again no discount at all.

I see there is an extra 1M gold in each pack, but it worth nothing, really. So my question is, with all the SC and HoF fumble, wouldn't it be wise to do a REAL SALE at once? Because there will be only a very low number of fools who fall to these scams (even with the big spender combined) and Wartune lose a LOT of money.

Turkey exchange

Here is Wartune's new gamble-chest exchange. The only new about it is that it's combined with a "group buy" - if enough people buy this chest, you get a discount. First, let's see what we can get for the turkey drumsticks:

Gold, kyanite and mount whips are obviously not why we should collect these.
Divinity shards can be useful to some people, 1 shard is still as expensive as 20 balens, so there you get 20 balens for each drumstick.
Will crystal is another option, unless you have lvl 5+ will crystals, each will crystal shard worth at least 3 balens, so in this case you get 45 balen per drumstick. But now, I strongly advise against this. There are just too many ways to get free will crystals. 
Mount hoofs worth only 10 balens, so exchanging Drumstick for those is a no-go.
A Skeletal Dragon can be cool, but for Drumsticks, it's just too expensive. Either hope to be lucky and get it from a chest, or wait until they sell it for balens.

So it's either divinity shards (if you want to evolve Hades/Apollo) or will crystals.

Now let's see how much balen a plump turkey worth:

• Turkey Drumstick x1 - converts to either 1 div.shard or 15 will crystal shard
• 100,000 Gold - we don't need more gold (at least not for balens)
• Fate Stone x3 - most of us don't need fate stones either
• Mount Training Whip x3 - a lot of people don't need whips either
• Runestone x2 - we wait on the SC exchange event to get tens of thousands
• Soul Crystal x800 - no SC event since 2 months, so not excited about this either
• Divinity Shard x10 - this is a super-rare drop, so expected value is neglectable
• Skeletal Dragon Card x1 - 0.1% chance to get a 8K balens mount

So 50% chance for a drumstick, and 0.1% chance for a Dragon:
0.5 x 20 + 0.001 x 8000 = 18 balen value (if you need a divinity shard)
0.5 x 45 + 0.001 x 8000 = 30 balen value (if you stil need will shards)

The gamble factor is here again, maybe you buy 100, 200 etc boxes and win a dragon, maybe you won't. If you buy plump turkeys for 12000 balens, you get divinity shards worth 3000 balens, and will have 30% chance to get a dragon. It is definitely a bad deal, better buy the dragon for 8000 later.

If 6000 plump turkeys are sold on your server (not gonna happen on ours), then you get the chest for 29 balens instead of 39. Even then, you can spend 12000 balens to get divinty shards worth 4000 balens, and you will have 40% chance to get a dragon. Still much worse than just buying the dragon for 8000 later.

Fortunately, a nice amount of free chests are given out. So if you need divinity shards, grab the free ones, and wait for the future events, there will be much better ones.

November big spender analysis

We have plenty of big spender events in Wartune, and most of them are very bad. Now there is a variation, which deserves an analysis:

You need to spend 10.000 balens to claim the whole package. The best value sale is the sepulcrum pack II. It's still very expensive, selling sepulcrum at 20 balen apiece, where a sepulcrum worth only 10-12 balens, but maybe it's an okay deal combined with the above bonus and the option to get +5 sepu whenever you use 20. Let's see what we get for 10k balens:
700 sepulcrum   value: 7000 (8400 if you have evolved Hades / Apollo)
gives +170 sepulcrum during event: +1700 (+2040)
100 mahra         value: 500
gives +25 mahra during event: +75
14 pumpkin       value: 420
200 soul crystal value: 100
50 mount whip  value: 100
gold / daru: we get so much for free so it doesn't represent a value (but if you insist, the 1.9M gold+daru is approx 76 balens), Same for the gem packs, total worth is like 8 balens.

So we get a total value of 9.895-11635 balens, if we spend 10.000. So, if you have an evolved Hades / Apollo which gives increased BR for your sepulcrum, even then you get only 16% bonus. We have seen much better events lately, with 30-50% bonus. 

As usual, if you are impatient, you can buy for money what you can get for free in a month anyway. It's your decision, I gave you the numbers :)

How much did you spend on Wartune?

There is something very important you should be always aware: how much money you spent on Wartune. You keep spending 10, 20, 50, 100 USD here and there on balens, who knows how much in total. Well, do know it, and you will think twice before recharging next time :)

A lot of people have no clue how much they spent on Wartune. Do you?
Okay, first, take a paper and write down how much you think you spent. Then:

1. Open the VIP panel. Note down your VIP xp.

2. Calculate for how many days you were VIP. If you are VIP since the first day, then just check when you started playing, and calculate how many days has passed since that. If you started VIP later, you have to know when you subscribed first.
3. From your VIP xp, subtract 10 x number of VIP days.
4. The result is the number of dollars you have spent. But also, don't forget to add to this sum 8 USD x VIP months played (cost of VIP).

Well, did you guess accurately?
How much you spent in total is one thing: it's more important how much you spend per month. One of my friends climbs wall, and spends like 100 USD on that per month. Another of my friend saves each month about 150 USD so he can go to ski once a year. Everyone needs a hobby, and if you enjoy it, don't worry about spending money on it, just be consistent. I set myself a limit of max 150 USD per month in Wartune, but I already spent the December budget as well, so I'm holding back now :)

To figure out your monthly spending, just divide the total spendings by the months you played.

Please also be aware if you spent more than you are willing to admit, or you can't hold to your limit, then you are a game addict. Yes, the same way as someone can be a game addict in a casino, for example. The realistic amount depends on your country and your monthly income, of course.