I already wrote a guide about cloth synthesis a half year ago. I will try to make a more detailed one now, which can help you go as high as level 9 – with using minimal balens, or none at all.
Currently, I have lvl 9 helm and weapon, and lvl 8 armor and wing. I would love to say I never spent balen on clothing. But I did buy the 900 balen cloth packs a few times, and I spent about 4k balen on the old leather packs. But thats it.
I see many people doing the cloth synthesis the wrong way. When the event comes, they use all of their resources: try to go as high as they can. This is not how you have to do it. The goal of cloth synthesis is NOT getting better clothes. The bonus you get from higher level cloth is neglectable. The goal is to get the REWARD for the synthesis. And in that term, only one thing matters: you must get more than spent. A LOT more, preferably.
Cloth synthesis reward usually include cloth, fashion core, good luck charm, and event chest. The cloth, the core and the charm you can use to make more cloth. So the only real gain here is the event chest.
To put it simple, your goal should be to start each cloth synthesis event with at least the same number of cloth, core and charm as the previous one. This will ensure you have a steady income of free event chests.
The key aspect of cloth synthesis is that when you make a high level cloth, you can claim the reward for making all the lower ones too. This means you have to go as slow as possible. Let me show you an example.
Let's suppose you already have a level 7 cloth, and enough material to make another level 7 – so you can end up upgrading your cloth to level 8. If you do it, you can claim all rewards from lvl 4 to lvl 8. However, you can do this differently. You can make only a level 6 cloth, and claim rewards 4-6. The next cloth event, you can make another level 6, and claim rewards 4-6 again. On the third cloth event, you can simply combine the two lvl 6, and claim rewards 4-7. And on the 4th, make the lvl 8 cloth, and claim rewards 4-8. So using the same components, you could get at least twice more reward – but it took some time.
There is a cloth event once every 2-3 weeks, but sometimes, it happens even more often. I think in the past year, there was, like 25-30 cloth event. So if you did only a level 5 or 6 cloth each time, you can have a level 9 easily now. And you get 20 times more reward as the whale who made his lvl 9 cloth on the first occasion.
Of course you have to find the balance, and that's why I don't give exact numbers what to do each event. It heavily depends on how much fashion core and good luck charm you have. At start, you can make only level 3-4 clothes, but as the combo begins to work, you can go further. There is one main principle: at the end of each event, you must have at least as much core/charm/cloth as much you started with. If you have less, you did something wrong, and you will have trouble during the next synthesis event.
There are 2 more not-so-public-but-legal tricks I wanna show you about cloth synthesis.
With the first one, you can save a lot of good luck charms. Please note when you make a combine, you can choose to use good luck charm or not. If you decide not to, the chance will be „Fair” - even for high level clothing. In this case, fair really means fair – like 80-90%. I have seen people gamble and succeed even with combining lvl 7-8 clothes without charm, but I advise against this. Because if you fail, you lose a lot. You should risk it only if there is no chance to collect the required number of charms. But, otherwise, feel free to use this trick for medium level combines. It is especially useful for wings, where it requires an astronomical amount of charms. I do not use good luck charms when I combine lvl 2 and lvl 3 wings. When I have a lot of wings, I don't use either for lvl 4. For cloth, the 2-4 luck charm cost is so cheap at lower levels, it is cheaper than losing the clothes/cores I used. So for cloth, I usually skip good luck charm only at lvl 4-5 combines (and only if I have lot of cloth/cores).
The second trick is the „abysmal” chance when you try to ugprade cloth by using fashion cores. Actually, it seems the abymsal chance is not going lower than 1%. I don't go into the math, but when you want to upgrade a lvl 7 or 8 cloth, it is cheaper to gamble with fashion cores than going the old fashioned way (even with not using charms for some combines). I even have some statistics: when upgrading from lvl 7 or 8, out of 964 attempts, 7 was successful. So the 1% seems accurate. But be warned: this is a real gamble. It is possible that you get an upgrade after 5 tries. It is possible that you won't get it after 400. For this reason, I recommend the following strategy: try the upgrade until you have only 50-60 fashion cores left. That's still enough to make an item the old, safe way, and claim some of the prizes. And don't forget, they can change this anytime. Already the chance lately seemed to be less than before.
