Sylphs: long-term strategy

One of the things I like in Wartune is that you often need long-term planning. And you can make mistakes there. By doing less mistake than others, you can get ahead. Yeah, they can always correct their suboptimal play by fetching their credit card, but still... :)

Recently I read a topic on R2Games forum, where a player complained that he evolved to 3rd stage several of his sylph, and now he can't make Loki etc. and how bad is this, R2 should do something do cure this situation.

Actually, most of the time I agree that Wartune gets messed up by the developers, but I wouldn't say this happened in this case. You just need to plan wisely. When they added the 3rd evolution phase, I wrote in my blog that these new sylphs are nothing just a visual tuning: they are not a BR stronger than their previous versions. To make them stronger, you must spend advanced mahra and sepulcrum. But how much adv. mahra is needed to max. one sylph to red? Like 20.000? And adv. sepulcrum? 10.000 maybe? Thats a pretty long-term goal (or a lot of money). So okay, I evolve and start pumping my primary sylph. But why would I do the same to a second sylph as well? Each adv. sepu/mahra I spend on my 2nd sylph, I could have spent on my primary. And the primary sylph I use everywhere, in pvp, pve. The second one is useful only in sylph expedition (no rewards at all) and sylph arena (no rewards now either). Surely, it can mean some visual BR tuning to your eudaemon, but thats all. So when someone spends moon rock and dust to evolve a 2nd, 3rd etc sylph, then he is wasting resources.

So what's the future of Wartune, sylph-wise? Always look at the Chinese version, and you will see the future. There, all sylph arena teams are merged teams. Odin-Odin-Frigga, Odin-Frigga-Thor etc. So if you evolved 2 or more sylph to last stage, then you have the following options:
1.) You just trash / retire these sylphs eventually and make new orange ones for merge.
2.) You spend a truckload of money to make them red, and then merge them for double price.
3.) You just wait until adv. mahra is as inflated as normal mahra, and make red sylphs then.
All are viable options, but not evolving them is an even better choice. You will suffer a short-term disadvantage for a few months, you will miss a few chests from adv. sepulcrum events (because you save them up for your future Odin instead of pumping it into your 2nd sylph) but that's it.

Of course, there is a "little" problem with sylph merges. Right now, it costs 600 USD besides the other materials. So there is a theoretical possibility that it will stay this way, only a half dozen whales will have merged sylphs, and the rest can either retire, or bite the bullet and play the boxbag with their miserable non-merged sylphs. But I do not believe in this possibility, because Wartune devs were never the enemy of their wallets. When the milking of whales is over, eventually, merge cost will be reduced somehow - so the sheer masses can finally start spending on merge components, adv. mahra and merged sylph skills, generating extra income for Wartune.

Btw, if I were them, I would do it this way:
1.) Recharge event (rewards: merge components)
2.) "Sylph tame" event: claim 50.000 balens if you have a merged sylph.
So people would rush to recharge, make the merge they desire since long, and claim the "free" balens (which they would spend in a month anyway).

Read More

What to do with the werewolf chest?

Instead of giving a mathematical analysis this time, I try to explain my seemingly irrational decision about this Wartune chest exchange.

At first sight, you see this chest's contents are full of crap, so unless you are a gambler type who opens 400 of them and says "no mount? cool. no problem." then you should choose one of the exchanges instead. In one of my late analysises, I explained why I don't choose cloth set either. Simply, because it seems they always add cloth sets for cloth shards - and that way it's much cheaper than for chests.

Still, there are plenty of good options. First, with all these holy forge frenzy and other events, prolly you are at 400-600 chests, so mount is pretty close. With coupons, you can buy some more chests 20 balen apiece and then get the mount. This could be the best option - if this mount would come with a title as the previous ones. But it wont. Still, there are some other good choices, like beads, but I did something different.

Already the previous events, when emblem of dark & light, and moon rock/dust was in the exchange, I choose those instead. Why?

It's more an emotional thing. I always want to have long-term goals in the game. Odin seems a good long term goal. I would never pay the 600 USD for it, but I believe that Wartune devs come to their sense eventually, and give it us with a nice discount - hopefully on Christmas. And I want to be ready by then:

Yeah. I know I play a gamble. What if they never reduce the price. But the whole game is a gamble. And I better have an Odin than another set of clothes or even a +150 mount.

You know, the real big problem with Odin and Frigga is that once you evolved your sylphs, you need 2 red sylph to make them. If you make them from orange, via Loki/Freya, you need only one red. Half amount of adv. mahra and sepu. Right now, I'm getting behind because I am saving up adv. mahra for my Odin, and not evolving my Medusa and Poseidon (hoping they can become Frigga eventually). But I hope this gamble and patience pays off on the long term.

If you want to play safe, better get the beads, the mount, or the cloth set.

Read More

Wartune: Loki and Odin

Long-term goals are always important in any game, and that was a strong aspect of Wartune. I always had long-term goals. Building up two red sylph and then merging them into a kickass Odin sylph seemed a truly grand, epic long-term goal, and I liked it when I read about the first time.

Sadly, when we got the details, the whole thing became pretty disappointing.

First of all, the price. 60.000 balens, which is 600 USD. An insane price for a few digital pixels, and as someone pointed out, 20 times more as in the Chinese version. But we are used to getting things at ridiculous prices, paid mindlessly by the whales. And, after a while, it became cheaper, then it is given as a recharge gift, and even later you could get it completely free. But in this case, this will be pretty difficult. Because it's not an item you buy, its a fixed balen cost. Hard to change without loss of face, and without angering those (very few) who paid it. Still, I hope that one day this price reduction will happen. Either they change the price, or allow bound balens (although it's still too much), or give back 50.000 balen as bonus upon purchase, or simply give out free or cheaper Loki seals. So I did not give up on this long-term goal yet. But the 60.000 balen I willl never pay.

Sadly, Loki / Odin has other flaws too. When you make the merge, the new sylph will inherit random skills from the previous ones. You might lose all important skills and retain only useless ones! And after that, you have only one choice: start buying skills, and hope they overwrite the right skill. In other words, gamble - with 150 USD skills! This is as unacceptable as the 600 USD price. So reducing the price is not enough to make this sylph appealing: they must reduce skill costs too, and, for god's sake, finally allow players to delete sylph skills.

And sadly, the drawbacks do not end here. The main question is, if the new sylph will be stronger, and how. Sylph statistics are calculated by multiplying together their base stats (strength, armor etc) with the "aptitudes" (the green bars you improve by spending sepulcrum) x 0.0018. After transformation, the maximum of the aptitudes do not change. Since you already needed a maxed out Loki / Odin, you will not be able to spend any more advanced sepu after the transformation (unless you tranform Loki to Odin). However, the base stats for Odin increase. So your Odin will be still stronger (but Loki not). But there is a catch. Loki / Odin is a MATK / PATK sylph. So you have to increase BOTH stats. And this is true not only for the base stats: you have to divide between MATK and PATK on equipment, both in refine and divinity souls. So what you win on higher base stats, you will lose on using both MATK and PATK. Still, the new sylph will be stronger: but not as much as you hoped for.

There are 2 ways to make Odin. One is to make 2 red sylph with max aptitude. The cost to make a second sylph red is like 20.000 advanced mahra (this is just a guess, can be more), and at least 10.000 advanced sepulcrum.
Or, you can make 2 orange sylphs into a Loki, then advance it into an Odin, at the cost of 5000 moon rock, 5000 moon dust and 1000 emblem of dark & light, and then raise it to red. (So effectively, you have to build only one red sylph).
With all discounts and gift packs, you can get adv. sepu / mahra as low as 10 balen / piece. So this would be an additional 300.000 balen cost if you make Odin from 2 red. This compares to the 5000 moon rock and dust (cost a total of 1000 event chest in last promotion, 30.000 balens) and 1000 emblems (cost another 1000 event chests, 30.000 balens), which is "only" 60.000.
So obviously, upgrading to Loki and then to Odin is a much better way than building 2 red sylph first then making them Odin. Still just making Loki and not upgrading to Odin will get you only a useless sylph.

Of course, these prices are still ridiculous. But you can start gathering moon rock, moon dust, emblem of light & dark from free events, so when they reduce the price finally, then you have the components.... If that ever happens. But, as I said, I like long term goals.

Read More

Discussion of the new Wartune patch

Unfortunately, I do not have a high level character on tests servers, so I have only 2nd hand information of the Wartune patch changes coming to every server next week. Fortunately, there are a lot of information on the forums, so now we have a vague idea of what's coming. I write a short summary here of the big changes (there are many small ones too I don't list now, like sylph attached to eudameon, new emo icons etc), and try to analyze the consequences.

The good changes

Mounts

Several great additions here. We get 4 new free mounts, and they even move faster than the previous ones. They can be trained with whips. 
Also the developers implemented something I suggested earlier: you can recycle duplicate mount cards, and buy mounts you missed for the "beast souls" you receive. Let's hope we can exchange the old beast shards for beast souls (I wonder why they created a new item in the first place).


New mpd, Narrandera remains

A new mpd is always a cool challenge. As I heard, originally this was for 8 people on the Chinese servers, and the 2 teams had to kill 2 bosses parallel, at the same time. Our version got adapted to the more abandoned servers, here you take only the normal 4-people team, and those 4 players are split to attack the 2 bosses. It's similar to Eternal Forest's first bosses, one is physical, the other is magical immune.
This mpd is once a week. I think this a is a good change. Yes, it  means less loot, longer time to collect the mythic armor pieces which are dropped here. But I like that the time required to play the game is not increased, we can do this on the weekend when we have time.

Bounty targets
A challenge ladder for eudaemons, similar to sylph expedition. Now we have to start developing a 2nd and 3rd eudaemon, that's bad, you would say - fortunately, 90% of the eudaemon's strength comes for free, from it's level, so all you need here is just blood of zeus and buying skills chests from guild shop which you do anyway. So this is a new way to get loot, hopefully useful items, and it doesn't take too much extra time.

Sylph arena rewards upgraded
Now you can choose to get advanced sepulcrum and sylph enchant pack instead of normal sepulcrum and sylph equip shard as reward for sylph arena ranking, that's a good chance.

Circus rewards upgraded

Finally :) But prolly still not enough to waste time on this. But, when you got enough imperial seals from goodies link so you can run a complete circuit without spending too much time, then at least you will get some useful reward.





The bad changes

Wild shop changes

Wild shop changed drastically. It has a lot of new items, mostly useful ones: beads of influence, eudaemon stuff, divinity souls, advanced mahra etc. This is a good thing. But instead of paying for them only with free commodities (insignia, daru etc) now there is always a balen cost associated. And most of the prices are irrealistically high. Also, the refresh cost is now balen instead of daru. This is a very, very bad thing. And fashion cores and good luck charms are gone. This is bad too. But you can pay with bound balens too, at least. So adding new and useful items would be cool, but in overall, this is nerf, sadly. If I were them, I would have added some balen cost (but not so high as now), and would have kept the daru refresh.

Dimensions

Dimensions were already "optimized" twice in Wartune's history, and both time we got a heavy nerf. Looks like this third time is no exception :( At first glance, there are some nice things. A mini-map, you can see how many objects you need to finish, you can even locate a hidden object for 10 energy. But there are much more negative changes.
Looks like the chest contents are downgraded once more, there are less (or not at all?) bound balen as treasure. The reapers seem to be replaced by "trials" which give random treasure (much worse than the eudaemon crystals we got earlier). Some even reported lack of dragon den, and dimensions expiring faster, but that seems unbelieveable to me so still need to confirm. 
The energy regenerates gradually instead of resetting at server reset (bad thing, imho), and various moves has now various costs. Moving to an empty is only 4 energy, but moving to an object costs much more. Can't judge that part, will see if it is good or not.

Sylph merge

For me, one of the most important thing in a game is to have long-term goals. When I read about sylph merge, it sounded an exciting thing, something which will take a lot of time and effort to achieve. But the result is hugely disappointing. Merging together you Aegis and Athena costs 60000 unbound balens. Yes, thats 600 USD! (was 20k on Chinese) And the skills also cost 6000 and 15000 unbound balens EACH! I think Wartune's publisher has made a huge mistake here. As long as developments costs 300, 500 or 1000 shards, crystals etc. which cost a LOT of balens, there was always a hope that it will get cheaper one day, maybe you can get even some for free. But not here. With sylph merge, it is made clear from the start that this feature is open only to about 20-30 players in total who are willing to spend 1500 USD on this. So Loki/Odin wants to be the Lamborghini of Wartune. The big problem is with this, as soon as it becames obvious for a light or medium casher that he can NEVER reach this goal, he loses interest, and quits. There must be ALWAYS a hope. Even a slight one.
I don't even understand who is the target for this sale. People who could pay 600 USD for this has evolved their Aegis long ago...

Conclusion
We have to adapt, as always. About dimensions, I suggest that you do not open new dimension until the new patch; instead, try to clear and loot up what you already have. I will also use my spare Eternal lights to cover as much as possible.
About wild shop, I will do much more resets each day than I used to, I try to spend most of my mystery stones on free items until it's possible.
Also looks like I have to grow blood of zeus again in my farm (was growing mount whips only since a while).
If you are a super-heavy casher, you prolly don't bother much about my blog. But if you do, I recommend that you do not rush making a Loki (or even Odin). If no one buys them, maybe the developers realize that this time they went too far.
What I learned from Doomlord, never change what is working well, never nerf things, and never piss of players by setting outrageous prices. Because right now it seems their goal is not profit, but some kind of weird sociological experiment :)

Read More