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).

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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.

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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 :)

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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...

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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!

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Knighthood

As I wrote in my previous post, I reached knighthood, and now I would like to share with you my thoughts about this Wartune feature.

As you know, the prerequisite for knighthood is at least 12000 points in tatoo. I wrote in more detail how much henna / adv. henna you need for this. As a mage, I can choose between arcane and restoration path. The arcane talent is damage skills, the restoration is heal skills. It's even simpler than the previous skill tree: there, you had to choose 5 skills to put in your skill bar. Here, you have only 5 skills to put there. The skills themselves are very simple too: 1 small 1-target spell (aka lightning), 1 small aoe (aka rain of fire), 1 big 1-target spell (aka delphic) 1 big aoe spell. Also there is an 5th skill wich restores 1200 rage and dispels 1 negative buff, for a mere 100 rage. There are also 4 passive skills with miscellaneous effects.

You can switch to the restoration path if you like, for that you need either 16000 total in tatoo, or have to use normal henna to change what bonus your abilities give. The 3 heal skills do nothing just heal, and they do it quite poorly. So even in group situation, I think the arcane path is better as long as there will be a time limit for fights. If you need heal, bring a poseidon :) 

Advantages of the new skill system
1.) The big skills base damage is really big. 480-530% damage, you will deal almost as much damage with these as with your sylph skills. Comparison: criminal trial 530% damage, Odin Apocalypse Judgment 400%+ damage. Surely sylphing boosts my ATK rating by 20%, but still, the knighthood skill can compete. In World Boss, now I deal about the same damage in sylph and non-sylph. In arena, now I can kill opponents with the first aoe, and many I kill before they can sylph.

2.) Acquiring the skills grant you +20% ATK, +20% HP, +30% MDEF. That's sounds an enormous boost. BUT. Do not forget that you lose "Mana Master" (+15% magic attack boost), "Healing empowerment" (+20% MDEF)  and "Sturdy" (+10% HP), or the equivalent of skills for other classes. Also there are some talents, like "Iron Wall" (damage received 14% less) which some say you will keep some say you will lose too. So the actual gain is much less than you would think.

3.) Talents. The talents are the real boost here. I had 90k bound balens, of those I spent 50k and got 14 talent points. You can buy offensive talents (+10% res reduce per level, +10% intensity/crit per level) and defensive talents (+10% tenacity/block per level, +10% to 2 resists per level, +10% influence/penetration per level). These gave me more BR boost than the skill bonuses.

Disadvantages
It has some disadvantages too - as you know, Wartune is never without a nerf, and any new feature is a good opportunity to take something away.

1.) No heal skills. No suntoria or restoration. I undertand that the devs wanted to resolve the problem with the forever-lasting fights. Still, a mage who can do nothing just nuke is just an archer. So yeah, we mages are now archers. Although I stopped using suntoria since a while, I miss restoration badly. It makes difference in many situations.

2.) No stun. Yeah, your influence skill does nothing after knighthood, just gives you partial protection vs non-knights stun. There will be a moment when everyone will be knight, and stun will be irrelevant. But until then, its a bit funny when knighted people stand stunned for rounds due to delphics and frost bolts and can't return the favor.

3.) No purify. Really, the 5th skill which dispels ONE negative buff for 100 rage is NOT a purify. So make sure you play with people who do not make knighthood and can still purify you.

4.) Rage. The skill "hear Elemental" (receive +2 rage each time you deal damage) is no more. Although the basic damage spell gives 10 rage instead of 6 now, you can't just cast an aoe and gain rage instead of losing it. So rage is now a problem. Especially with the cloth nerf taking away starting rage, prolly we will need to use rage rune again. Which is a pain since it means no more guardian rune. (Heal you must keep it, it's the only way to heal now).

Summary
So in summary, you lose EVERYTHING (heal, purify, rage, stun) but you will deal more damage. If you do not have a truckload of bound balens saved up for talents, the gain is just slightly better than the loss. Right now, knighthood is for cashers only, so these people have the bound balens for talents. When knighthood becomes free (I'm sure non-payers can reach it in max 4-6 months) then this will be a problem - although it seems a new item will be added, which you can substitute for bb when upgrading talents. If you have only limited access to talents (like most of us), I recommend offensive talents instead of defensive ones. And yes, casher will have a gigantic advantage here with talents, which you can't compete with up, even if you reach knighthood eventually.

Consequences
Still, do not think that knighthood is an optional thing. All must reach it before or later. Knighthood equipment, titan system and I bet a lot other stuff will require it as a prerequisite. 
Also do not forget that getting the skill points takes an enourmous amount of XP. It takes month to max out your "knighthood level" and take full advantage of skills. So the eariler you can start it, the better.



Salsa

And here is one final point. I have been to a salsa weekend with my wife. It was an insane fun, we danced like 8-10 hours each day. On the pic you see us, in Sat evening there was a costume party with dress code from years 1920-30. And I didn't miss Wartune at all :) So there is life beyond the game, and if anything, I can suggest you dancing. If you have a partner already, you can get a better bond with her/him. If not, you surely will meet someone there, lot of singles. If everyone on Earth would dance, there would be no wars and no crime :)

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Current expert tatoo events

The Wartune expert tatoo event is back, without change. Since everyone and their grandmother on my server is running around with knighthood skills, I checked how far I am from it. I made the strict math, and it seems with a recharge of 50 USD I can reach it as well. I didn't recharge since 3 months, and this should be the real last one :)

So here are is the math - so use see how I'm thinking:
I have 5300 balens remaining which I didn't spend since December.
I have 10295 adv. henna collected and saved up from previous events.
I have 181 free chests collected last week.

First let's see how much adv. henna I can get in total.
In the following 3 days, with mount training, holy forge and free chest from shop, I can get 105 more chests. If you have some unrefined mount, or 5k+ mount whips, then you can get even more.
For 5k balens recharge, and 10k balens spent, I can get 214 chests and 3900 adv. henna. For 10k balens, I can buy 3x129+31=418 chests. Also, if I do the expert tatoos the way I described here, I will get 91 more chests. That's a total of 1009 chest, for which I can get 8000 more adv. henna in the hot events exchange. So it will look like this:

I'm just short of knighthood, I realized... I would need 1000 more adv. henna, For which I would need 71 more chests. And then I remembered what my friend Panzer told me earlier, and realized how to get those. In archeology, I got a bunch of crystalloids, epic armor shards, and legendary stones. I hope you didn't sell those. I did sell the crystalloids, but can buy them back for insignia. So, anyway. I will make a lvl 80 armor, and holy forge it with the otherwise totally useless vulcan hammers and stoves, so I can claim the otherwise unavailable chests in the holy forge event. It will cost a lot of gold, but gold is free, so converting it into chests is a good deal: especially if this gets me the last 1000 adv. henna required for knighthood.... 

I just wrote this article to explain you how to use math to optimize your play (and yeah, minimize balen spendings :) Wartune's spender system is overcomplicated for a reason: so you recharge / spend a lot more than you need. If you start doing this without making the math, you might realize too late you are short of something, and then it becames expansive. So whenever you headjump into an event like this, do the match with an excel like above.

And yes, I know I said I stopped spending - and I did so for last 3 months. But I decided to give this last 50 bucks to Wartune. I still plan to play for a while, and it's like +1 million BR. But this should be really the end of it :) So now just let's hope I didn't miscalculate anything...

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