Wartune character overview

This is something I promised earlier, an overview of my Wartune character, Fairlight. I play the game since 3 years, and I play it a lot daily, usually 4+ hours. Also I spent a significant amount of money on balens, 100-150 USD a month, sometimes even more, way too much for a game. I also tried to optimize my play whenever possible, both optimizing spendings (to get the most BR for my balens) and other strategies (like accumulating resources and trying to use them in the best moment, choosing the best rewards when multiple choices etc). 

I was drawn into the game by a friend of mine, who spent like 200 USD in total. He said, "I just want to spend an amount I won't regret when I stop." He stopped long ago, then restarted some month later on a new server, completely free. He was a top player even so, until a merge happened, when he stopped finally. I never forget another thing he said, actually the first thing he said about Wartune. "This game is really weird, you can spend ANY amount of money on it." Which would have chased away me at the start, but it didn't - actually, I thought it would be a real challenge to compete with heavy cashers.

With my character, I was in top most of the time. Not 1st always, but in top3. There is an amount of money you can't counter with skills and time invested. After each merge, we got a bigger spender, but each time I was always able to catch up with him, slowly. The game is all about patience, and I envy those who spend only 10-20 USD a month, or even nothing, and can find the fun. I always used to say, if you don't spend anything, you will be just a punchbag, and wish for things all the time you can never get. Also, I think it is okay to spend on a hobby, which is fun for you, and you spend a lot of time on it each day. The amount you can spend on this game should be something you can afford, and something you are not ashamed to admit to your friends and family :)

Character stats

When building my character, I always prioritized ATK. Thats the first thing to be maxed for holy forge and stables, and thats the stat which I always pump with at least an MATK scroll, using my never-ending stockpile of crypt tokens. The game is all about damage.

The second highest priority stat for me is defense. Since we reverse-engineered how combat works in Wartune, the reason is obvious. Hit points, it's importance is lesser, although it gives now the highest BR - due to a bug with eudaemon BR calculation (if it is still around). Critics and blocks, I always keep saying the effect of these are capped, and there is no point in improving them beyond a level, because the gain will be only almost invisible. But I also know a lot of people don't believe me. Well, everyone can find the fun in the game his own way, be it colorful mounts, cute clothing or high crit, I will not argue.




Resists

About resists, I have all level 12 gems. I do not believe that there will be a level 12 event ever, and they give too much advantage anyway to wait. I use a mixture of all 6 resists, dark and light prioritized a bit more, since Hecate/Odin is more common as the other sylphs. The stats could be higher if I would bother more about dimensions, but usually I have only 2-4 (one expert and the rest int). Please note that now you can play around with resists to get higher BR - if you have an expert dimension for fire, equip 6 fire resist gems and you will have a lot more BR.

Sylph
As you know, I have the Odin (thx again to those who donated). Took me a lot more time collect than for others, since I get all the materials for free, and saved up adv. mahra and sepu for 8-10 months. But now I have a 4-moon Odin. SA friend asked if I didn't collect the materials in advance, what sylph I would make now. And I answered, Frigga. Odin has some higher stats, but since it was first, people have higher resist against it. Also, I consider the Frigga skills a bit more versatile: aoe heal, aoe awaken drain, and aoe absorb shield, cool stuff, while Odin have only one skill which affects ALL opponents. 

But now I have Odin, and I'm happy with him. I'm already collecting materials to make red equipment when I have finally enough adv. mahra to make my Odin red (still a lot of time).
My current sylph is far the top on our server, also I made the furhest in sylph expedition (boss 47).

Eudaemon
My top eudaemon is an archer, since that was an obvious choice for a mage at start. Leveling up and building war emblem is not a problem for eudaemons, but equipment takes a lot of time, if you don't want to spend balen there. Wind ranger is better now that archer, but I just don't want to build equipment again for it. Too bad you can't switch equipment here like with sylphs. But I don't give so much importance to eudaemons anyway, they are just "chaos rune magnets", often it's  just easier to leave them home.

Mounts

For me, the top priority was always to get as many mounts as I can. This is the thing where I spent balens mostly. Everything else, from soul crystals, sepulcrum, eudaemon items to cloth sets, I never spend balens, because you can get them for free eventually. But the mounts are still mostly casher-only items. And that's why I was a bit sad when I read that with an exploit, some players could get all mounts for free.

Mount whip is one of the very few resources which is designed well. You can get a fair amount, and you can spend an unlimited amount. So ToK is one of the few events still worth grinding daily.
Of course I try to collect cloth as well, especially sets which give title. Fortunately, most of these you can get for free.

Battle Rating
As you can see on the above screenshot, my current battle rating is 6.73M, this is without any buffs, just academy bonus. 

That's it, I guess... about the future: I'm not too optimistic. I decided to stop spending, and I don't think anything will change that. The devs can't fix the cache since a half year, the game keeps reloading everything, it's at the edge of being unplayable. They keep nerfing everything. Just check the late resist crystal event, I couldn't do even two level 11 crystals, using all I collected since last event.
And now they moved all main championship preliminaries to Tuesday - the day, when I can't be in front of the computer. I will not stop, no worries. I keep grinding,  just while I do dimensions, archeology, arena  - but meanwhile, I just play something else on my second monitor, like Doomlord or Hearthstone. I still hope one day they at least turn caching back on, that would help a lot :)

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.

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.