Holy forge and advanced henna

I was surprised to see that although Wartune lowered the requirements for knighthood, still, very few free players could make it. I know I made over 20000 free advanced henna during events, so I know it's possible, but I realized some of you don't know how to do it, so I share with you the trick.

The big problem with the "free" advanced henna, that is costs 120 chests, and you can claim it only for 3 days. In those 3 days, usually the only event is holy forge. And, like everyone else, you probably finished holy forging most of your equipment, and only the artifact and halidom remains. Holy forging those require a lot of materials, there is no way to do enough to claim 120 chests. Then how to do it?

It's simpler than you would think. Do the old holy forge. You must have tons of unused vulcan hammers and stoves. So all you need is gold for holy forge, and components to make an item which you can holy forge.

First, you need to make a level 70 item in Blacksmith -> Synthesize -> Apply -> Lvl 70 Sets.

You need only 150 lvl 6 crystalloids. If you are doing Nirvana hell every day (which you should, if you are not KH yet) you must get 10x lvl 6 crystalloids each day. Also you can buy them for insignia in the insignia shop - prolly you have a lot of surplus insignia. After this, the second step is to make the item legendary. You can do this under Blacksmith -> Synthesize -> Upgrade -> Lvl 70 sets:

The components are: the lvl 70 armor you just made, lvl 70 legendary armor shards, and 150 lvl 70 legendary stones. The legendary armor shards are easy to get, if you do archeology each day, you will have plenty of such shards. You can find them under "Decorate" of each area in the archeology menu. The area depends on which armor you make. (Choose the one of which you have enough lvl 70 and lvl 80 shards). If you don't do archeology for some reason (you should) or accidentally sold these, you can still buy the armor shards for crypt tokens.
The legendardy stones you can buy in the guild shop. If you do guild beast each day, the cost of these in fangs will be only pocket exchange.
The last step is to upgrade the item to lvl 80 armor:

You need llvl 80 armor shards (you can get them the same way as the lvl 70 shards, from archeology or crypt shop) and level 80 legendary stones (same way as lvl 70 ones, from guild shop for fang of fears).
So now you have an item which can be holy forged. You sill need a lot of gold. Sadly, Wartune removed most ways to get gold in the game. So you have to rely on what remains:
- 2 minute World Boss sessions (still 10M gold each for me)
- plunder an inactive (4M gold per day)
- and Dragon Invasion - if you do it until lvl 18-19, you will get like 50M gold!

Be careful - this is an expensive thing in resources, and you certainly can't repeat it unlimited times. The most limiting factor will be gold. So do it wisely. Calculate how many chests you need (probably you can get only 120), and calculate how can you get this amount with the minimum amount of holy forges done in 3 days.

Also don't forget, seemingly the devs are devoted to inflating adv. henna, so you will be able to get more and more in the future cheaper and cheaper.

Free knighthood

Wartune promises that the knighthood requirements will be lowered with Wednesday patch. This means some free players will reach knighthood this week, and more / everyone will follow in the next 1-2 months. This is really good news! Knighthood was one of the few features where the price has dropped fast. First, it cost about 2000 USD for the whales in hurry, then they lowered it to like 200 USD, and due to an accident, you could buy it for even 50 a few weeks later. But those who were patient enough, and exchanged for adv. henna their chests each time when there was an opportunity, will now have KH.

Also do not forget that since many days, you can collect tatoo gift packs in Cloud city. You can find 10 henna in this pack with a high probability (like 25%?) So if you are devoted enough, and do all the 200 collections each day, you can get like 500 henna per day which is a decent amount, helping to reach knighthood even faster. I wonder why they never think of giving free adv. mahra :)

So, knighthood is within reach, here are some advices for you:

1.) Only half of the power comes from the skills. The other half comes from the talents. And those cost bound balens. A lot. Some months ago, I would have said, there is nothing better to spend on your precious bb. But now, bb is your only chance to get a bi-sylph. So my advice is, buy a few cheap talents for bb, and put it on res reduction, but as soon as it gets more expensive, save the rest of your bb. As you see, talent stones are given out occassionally, who knows we might even get enough eventually to buy talent points for them.

2.) The strength of knighthood is the 2 powerful delphic skills. With those, you can deal almost as much damage as with your sylph delphic. However, don't forget that skills are merely multiplying your current ATK. If your ATK is not high enough, KH will not make you a god either. I often meet in the arena complete teams with KH, who die easily. They did pay for knighthood, but they didnt have the other stats.

3.) KH not only gives you: it also takes away. Mages lose restoration, suntoria, blessing of light, purification. In the old times, with some well timed heals, combined with heal and guard runes, you could beat a stronger opponent. Hell, I even beat KH ppl when I wasn't KH. But after you reach KH, tactics is gone. Battles are just brute force. Higher ATK wins.

4.) Be wary of the "titan system". It's a very bugged, badly designed, useless system. Instead of your second skill, an automatic skill is used. If you try to click a rune BEFORE that, you lose 2 actions, not one. This is the same as the amnesia bug. Also, after your 2nd action, the 2nd automatic rune triggers - taking away another action from you. A 90% damage reduction shield then a heal right after it in the first 2 rounds is not very useful - but losing 2 action is. Especially since on World boss you lose not only these 2 actions, but the double hit as well. So I recommend not taking the titan rune at all until you can get the 3rd, the death rune. But I also know it gives some resist and resist reduce, so some of you wont be able to resist it... and then curse like me :)

5.) You won't get the KH skills to max automatically. You need to collect XP for that. Best XP is campfires (do all 3 each day), and MPD / ToK / Spire runs. If you saved up a crapload of xp scrolls and stamina potions, now is the time to use them. Especially during XP buff from you servers CW champion.

If you want to know more about how much henna you need and how to spend it, see my previous articles here and here.

Current recharge event

Hey guys, after some pause, finally something interesting is happening in Wartune which worth a blog entry. They added a recharge event, where one of the bonus items - after 1000 USD recharge - is a bi-sylph seal:

I know this will gonna happen eventually. But I'm rather surprised how it is happening. Some people have confirmed that now you can buy bi-sylphs using bound balens instead of real balens. A pretty neat turn of events, especially since this was never published (on the contrary, R2Games was denying vehemently this, saying first it was just a typo, and they modified the description later). So anyway, a bi-sylph seal is 60K bound balens. 

Also, with every recharge, you used to get 150% bound balens. Not anymore. A 100K balen recharge should give 150K bound balens. Now, you get a seal worth 60K balens instead. A reasonable deal? Hardly. Okay, they give more adv. mahra and beast souls than usual. But after hundreds of players hacked themselves a completely free bi-sylph, and it was never taken from them, I would say, this deal is not good. Not at all. Wait some more months, free bi-sylph is coming in hot events! Very much like Hades and orange sylph.

And anyway - who would recharge 1000 USD after all the nerfs they did in past months?

Another interesting news I read on R2Games forum is about "Voyage". No details yet, but they say, we will finally able to put our useless resources to good use. This is something we want since years, so if they really implement a useful feature (and I don't mean something like marriage tree, where you can exchange your useless stuff to even useless stuff).

Eudaemon patrol

Since not much is happening in Wartune, I decided to write a short guide on the recently added Wartune feature, Eduaemon patrol.

This is a well-designed minigame, which, unfortunately, lacks useful reward. Still, it's challenging to the mind, and does not require balens, so I do it every day, because I find it fun.

This event requires a LOT of eudaemons. The game consist of 2 parts: building base and towers, and doing patrols, where you get the reward.

Patrols
To each tower, you can assign one or more eudaemons. You bind the eudaemons there, and after a period of time, you receive reward. The normal reward is eudaemon mark shard and blood of zeus; the hard is skill scrolls or warpath crystal; and the nightmare is either resist crystal, resist reduce crystal or warpath crystal. The 3 difficulty level has 3 requirement, if you fullfill all 3 requirements, you get all 3 rewards.

The hard requirement for me is either a Scourge Mage, a Wind Ranger or a Blood Warrior. So you need a bunch of these classes, I have 3-4 of each. You should pump them up to level 3 at least, give them at least level 3-4 war emblem and corresponding resist. Also give each an uncommon weapon. (I got a lot of green flames from late chests so that was not a problem). Don't forget to give each a unique name so you can recognize which is which :)

The nightmare requirement is usually a resist between 500-1500. Please note that you can add more than 1 eudaemon to the patrol. So just check first what class you need and with what resist. Equip that eudaemon, assign him the sylph which gives the corresponding resist type, then modify his resists under the warpath menu to give the correct resists.

You might still lack requirements. In this case, add a 2nd, 3rd or maybe 4th eudaemon to the patrol so the total level / resist / warpath is sufficient. 

Buildings
If you are low on eduaemons, I recommend building with them a bit before starting patrols. Base and towers have a maximum level of 9, you will max them out all in a reasonable time. Your Wind Ranger / Scourge Mage / Blood Warrior team will be doing patrols usually, so you need a few higher level eudaemon from other classes to do the building. Please note that you can interrupt building (like Henna Labs) and you will get partial XP in that case.

As your base level increase, so does the number of towers you can have. Use the eudaemon mark shards to pick up extra eudaemons. Dont be shy, get like 20-30 so you have enough of the 3 key classes. I didn't find a limit to eudaemons yet. Also don't forget you can always fire one you don't need anymore, and get back 50% of what you spent on him.

Strategy
Try to assign your eudaemons the optimal way, ie. send each eudaemons for the patrol where he just meets the requirements. If you have a patrol which requires a Wind Ranger level 10 with 1500 resist, and another with a level 3 and 500 resist, assign your big guy to the first task and the small one to the other, not vica versa. Use the minimum needed amount of eudaemons to patrol, so you can assign the rest to building. Start assigning eudaemons to patrols starting from tower 1 sometimes, sometimes from the last tower to make sure tasks requiring the same class don't stack up.

Riots
I don't know what negative effect riots have, maybe nothing. Still, you can check from time to time friends eudaemons bases and handle riots for the small blood of zeus reward.

Patrol rewards
My main problem with this event is the reward. You don't need more than one fully developed eudaemon for battle. Which you probably already have. So all the resist crystals, warpatch crystals etc. help you to build more eudaemons to get more resist crystals, warpatch crystals etc. A useless circle :) The event should really awrd eudaemon diamonds, books of wisdom, legendary eudaemon equipment stuff, and maybe even non-eudaemon items like empire truncheons adv. mahra etc. Let's hope they add further levels in the future where we can get additional rewards.

Wartune ignorant to player problems

Dear Readers, I'm very sorry for posting less lately. I have to admit that my enthusiasm for the game has decreased a lot. For a long time I had loyalty, even at hard times, but for any sentient being there is an amount of nerf he can bear. The late ones which came with last patch were even too much for me. I still play, but I spend much less time on the game, and I skip many things. I visit the game forums even less rarely. However, on topic has catched my eye, which I recommend to you as well:

http://forum.r2games.com/showthread.php?196688-Filed-police-report-for-GRAND-THEFT-and-bank-investigating-fraud

It's started by a player who was so angry with his gems removed after the big gem exploit, that he requested VISA to refund all the money he spent on the game in the past 3 months. This forum topic has not one, but three very interesting facts.

1.) This guy have spent over 22000 (yes, twenty-two thousand) dollars - the cost of a Toyota Prius - in just 3 months on Wartune, after all nerfs, bugs, and his gems taken away. It is very scary that he is not alone, there must be a lot of such people around still. They really need to see a doctor.
2.) The second interesting fact is that VISA has refunded all the money he has spent. Ok, this is not so surprising as fact 1.) I knew paypal would do it, it seems your bank can pull this off as well. Good save, I hope others took his example who lost stuff and weren't compensated. Even when it results in his acount banned, and I am scared at just thinking how much he spent in the past 3 years, which he will never get back.
3.) But the most interesting, most shocking fact is that Kabam/7Roads didn't bother to check the logs, see how much the dude spent, and spend the 10-15 minutes to resolve his problem to avoid the chargeback. So tell me, how rich are these Chinese guys so they don't bother to spend 15 minutes to earn a Toyota Prius (or an item of equivalent value)? So rich? Or so stupid?

The story has a much more important lesson than the 3 points above. If the game devs ignore even their own money to such extreme, you can bet they will continue ignoring the players forever. If this forum topic didn't made you stop spending, then nothing will, ever. And you better know people still run around with hacked Odins and Thors. Wartune thinks that problems they ignore will cease to exist :)

Clothing set bug

(Wrote this yesterday morning, but forgot to make it live, anyway, in case you didn't hear about it from other sources...)

A new Wartune patch is always a truckload of new bugs. The only useful feature of the last patch, the clothing system revamp has brought a pretty critical bug. 

To get the title for a clothing set, you need to own all 4 pieces of the clothing. Previously, if you did not get all pieces at once, and transformed some meanwhile was not a problem: in Dressing Room, you could change your worn clothing to any you activated earlier, and "own" the cloth again. But the devs seemingly did not think about cloth sets when they changed the previous system. While engulfing your cloth, you get "Mutant Dragon Wings" which is part of the "Doomsday Cowboy" set. Fortunately, you can buy the remaining 3 pieces for 90 Jasmine chests in the current exchange.

However, when you exchange the 3 cowboy cloth, you will not get the title. Even to be able to refine these new cloth, you have to engulf them. But even after that, the title does not activate. It would be pretty simple to correct this bug: just check if the player's worn clothing makes a set, and if he doesn't have the title for it, award it. But as we know, they prefer hundreds of players bombing them with support tickets for month instead of doing this correction which might take them as much as 10-15 minutes.

So anyway, you were warned, after you buy the 3 cloth set, be ready to submit a support ticket because it's not going to work...

Wartune patch 5.6 analysis

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!