Poseidon, the master of healing

Triton - called later Poseidon, and even later Frigga - is a very special sylph in Wartune. For a long time, healing - and especially group healing - was an exclusive skill for mages. Since Triton, any class can be a great healer. Actually, a decent Triton can heal even more than an mage :) This article I dedicate to this special sylph.

Since the introduction of sylph arena, I was saying to myself: in any fantasy game, a team needs a healer to have the upper hand. So I made a strong Triton, and I could beat teams with a stronger main sylph than mine. Healing is cool - as long, as you can heal more than your opponent damages you. As damage increased, Triton got weaker and now I'm less of a Triton/Poseidon fan - but it's still cool in some situations.

Poseidon in team PVE

Poseidon was a great support sylph in team situations earlier. But with the last major patch, most pve challenges were degraded to child's play. You simply don't need healing, you just burn down monsters. Even in EF hell, you better off just having the proper resist and burning the opponents down. The only exception where Poseidon is still useful is Tower of Kings. Before the eudaemons were added, ToK was a rush of chaos runes and stuns. Now its slower, having an aoe heal each round is more important, so we use Poseidons there. I see many complaints about ToK lately, but we can do each day all 5 rooms with this strategy, aoe, heal, aoe heal (and ofc, the usual chaos and stun).
Sylph expedition also worth mentioning here. Unfortunately, Poseidon is useful only at later stages, but there, monsters hit real hard. So you need a Poseidon who can survive the massive aoes. If you have such, it can be tremendous help. My 135K BR Triton is not good enough to be useful and help me through stage 39.

Poseidon in single PVE
In any situation, where you face some monsters alone, Poseidon is a pretty poor choice. Wartune PVE is about damage dealt, if you aren't fast enough, the monster gets berserk, and you are dead. You can't heal your opponent to death. Even in old sky trials, I did the water resist stages with a different sylph. A Hades can give you the heals you needed in Purgatory etc.

Poseidon in single PVP
I see more and more people using Poseidon in Battleground, especially knights. The logic must be, people don't have water resist, and healing is handy. I can just repeat myself: you can't heal your opponent to death. Surely, you can extend the duel's duration to 5-6 minutes, but if you are weaker, you will lose at the end, even if you healed yourself to full 10 times. The only thing you achieved is to waste your time. Normally, you can finish a BG duel in 1-2 minutes. If you are stronger, you will win with a damage dealing sylph. If you are weaker, you lose anyway. So effectively, you stripped yourself of 600-1500 honor points.
So why Poseidon is not good in single pvp? First, it's subject to chaos. Second, nowadays everyone have at least 1-2 water resist stones equipped, so you are far from dealing +60% damage, it's rather +-10%. Third, Poseidon is not a premium sylph like light and dark. Maxed out, it's attack is far below of those. Fourth, he is good at healing - but as such, bad at dealing damage. Most sylphs have at least 3 good damage sylph, Poseidon has only 2.
So do a favor to the gamer community, and put aside your Poseidon for CW. Please, even neglect it even for CW. Because in CW still damage counts, not healing.
And this is true even for Frigga. No joking, but I beat Frigga in Class Wars with my puny Hades. If you cough up 600 USD, an Odin is much better - even if ppl have some more resist vs it.

Poseidon in team PVP

This is where Poseidon shows its true power. One Poseidon is a must for your team, but 2 is cool too. Damage dealt in team PVP is massive, you must heal even (and especially) during sylph phase. Also stunning multiple opponents with one spell is quite useful too. Frigga is even more deadly, with the group shield, but you must be a real rich guy to spend not once, but twice the 600 bucks - because your first merged sylph should be Odin.
Poseion (or rather, Frigga) is a real killer if the ToK opponents have it. Playing against that is especially difficult. Try stun when he is sylphing, and if your stun is not targetting it (you see which opponent you are targeting by the red circles below the opponent), you can sylph instead and try stun again (or if you do ToK with multiple characters, can try to stun with the other too). Also it is a good idea to use 2 or more Medusa (or evolved version) to drain their awakening points. Third trick is wait for it's heal, and then time all your aoe afterwards.
But all in all, it would be much more civilized if the ToK denizens unequip their Frigga before logging off for the night :)

Read More

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