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!
As usual, here is my summary of what's good and what's bad in the Wartune 5.5 patch. I had some days to try out everything so I hope I will not miss anything.
Good features
Selling eudaemons
You can sell your eudaemons. Finally! And that's the end of good features :(
Bad features
Knighthood
I already wrote in detail about Knighthood and Tatoo requirements in my previous post. The concept itself - giving better, improved skills, new talents and extra stats if the player reaches a specific tattoo total - could be good. But the requirements are impossible to fulfill without spending thousands of dollars, and the knighthood skills, although stronger, include some heavy nerfs, like taking away healing from mages. Not to mention new talents costing hundreds of thousands of balens. All in all, this is a bad feature.
Archeology
Aside that this feature is stolen 1:1 from World of Warcraft, this could be a good feature, but it is messed up like everything. First of all, 30 attempt per day, its 15-20 minutes, mindless, boring grind, increasing game time unnecessarily. Second, the rewards have some good things, but the majority you get for your time is still daru, soul crystals, epic armor shards etc. Without the total junk rewards, and attempts you can collect up (like with great card hunt), this could be an okay feature, but as it is, it's one I don't like.
General wilderness changes
Along with the addition of archeology, the graphics and size of the wilderness maps has changed. They put a lot of effort into redrawing the graphics - but still they did not put any effort to ensure that flying mounts can fly over it, making movement incredibly clumsy over there. Also with decreasing the map size, weaker players can no longer hide from plunderers in far corners of forgotten zones. So players constantly have to buy goat for their gold, then change back when they need the money. This is such a dumb, brainless change. But at least you don't have to buy the spirit covenant anymore. You can find the bosses with one light, so no need for boss radar, and auto farm is now bugged beyond recognition, so spirit cove is a no-go.
Farm changes
I think there were some good intentions with the farm changes, but it didn't go well in the end. Energizing friends farm goes faster now - too bad no one will bother doing it anymore. Now the farm is taken into 3 separate parts. If you invite someone for bonfire, he will no longer be able to energize your tree, revive your farm and do your animals meanwhile. You can't do this either while waiting at your own farm. Also now it's much harder to find things and notice when you need to do something, you will miss revitalizing your marriage tree even more often.
Cloud city and item changes
Many things went to new places. The Henna lab icon disappeared, and went to a building - now it is much more likely that you will forgot about it. And now you can't do it while blitzing, or while waiting the others in spire or tok lobby. The same goes for great card hunt, previously I could do it while in a farm, no more.
World Boss nerf
There is no longer gold reward for high damage in World Boss. It utterly amaze me how they can spend time to nerf something, make it worse for the players, and unable to correct a sngle number, maximum HP of World Boss which is a problem since many months. Servers killing WB in 1-2 rounds, all other source of gold removed from the game... If you don't have a few alts to plunder each day, you can't even pay for your blitzes anymore :)
Other features removed
Several other features have been removed, like maps, thieves etc. If this would have made the game loading ANY faster, I would welcome these changes. But as always, with each patch, the game is more laggier, takes more time to load. Since 5-6 months, they still did not turn on caching, every time you start the game, it download every data from their server. This is such a big problem by now, everything else fades by it, the game is unplayable now.
Sadly, each patch is making the game worse than the previous one. And while the patches just add more bugs and never fix any problems, he devs are always busy to add more nerfs. For example, check out the eudaemon diamond synthesis coming up tomorrow - it get the same insane nerf like normal gems. There is no longer unlimited component for the event, you can make each gem only once per day. Which means, this event is not doable anymore, like divine soul synthesis, it is effectively "out of order". Same for the eudaemon material events, you no longer get back 25% of what you used :(
Return Player extravaganza is running now, they try to lure back players who quit - but they can't lure them back by offering some items. Whoever has quit is not interested in those. The only way to bring back some would be by fixing the problems, and undoing nerfs - but thats not gonna happen. Right now, my advice is, do not recharge anything, regardless how good offer you see. The game has reached a point where is is unplayable. In the past year, the devs made it apparent they don't care about your opinion - then show them they wont get their salary until they change their way of thinking.
