(Prepared by Ashira of the DolyGames Team)
Character Overview – Ashira
Hey guys,So I am sure most active mages are following Eliatan’s character overviews and archers can follow Thethrell, but since there is no char overview of any Top 16 knights, I’ll try to take you through my character and explain a thing or two.
Let’s start with the general character window:
As you can see, my current battle rating is just under 450k, this is of course with academy blessing, but otherwise unbuffed. I did manage to meet the 450k requirement for the recent HoF event – which I did waste some future rewards for, as I used a couple of whips and had to upgrade my wings without a clothing event to bring my BR above that level (and of course did the things most people did, using stats astrals, MATK gems – as I use Hercules mainly – and tuning my sylph to Endurance). This kind of sucks, as I brought my BR to 452k that way, and in the end Warrior’s Call or some other buff did count and they recorded my BR as 486k, which means I could have avoided using whips and upgrading wings without event. But hey, better safe than sorry when it comes to rewards that we can only obtain once per year (or that may not be obtainable anymore at all even in a year, just like the rewards from last year’s HoF – none of which I got *sad face*).
My main focus at this point is working on my physical attack as much as I can, because it maximizes my gold income (which is really my main shortage in the game) and helps for Dragon Invasion and Atoll Boss a lot too, since my teammates are all well below 300k BR and two of them even below 250k BR and only one apart from me uses Warrior’s Call. Of course the formula for critical hits is one of the big secrets in the game, but recently people have commented that the best crit rate is about 20% of your PATK, which suggests that my crit probably is a bit on the low side given my PATK. This may matter in PVP, but for PVE I find that I crit most of the times and when I am fully buffed, I can get more than 1.5 million gold/daru from World Boss per round in both normal and sylph form, which is quite a bit more than I have seen in Thethrell’s recent video (despite him being an archer and having a lot higher crit). The reason – as far as I can tell – is that in World Boss the crit rate just caps at some point and that his higher crit isn’t helping him much, whereas my much higher PATK does help a lot there. Bear in mind that our rotations are different, so it might have to do with this as well, but he’s a decent player and his rotation is definitely not completely awful, since he works with double-hits and inbetween runes as well, so that suggests that extremely high crit is not all that important for World Boss. Another reason why I focus on PATK rather than crit is that I tend to switch between Will Destroyer build and Crit build quite frequently compared to other players, which is why I do not use any crit statistics on equipment refinements.
As regards my defensive aspects, I do try to focus on HP a lot. It is not a secret that the benefits of high HP are higher than those of high defense. In group situations, my HP means that I get almost 32k HP back every turn from Suntoria, which is helpful for sure. It also means that the heal effect from Healing rune is a lot stronger, which is also definitely a reason why knights should focus on HP, since we do not have a natural healing skill (like mages or like archers’ Bloodthirsty Strike), so most knights will use Healing rune for both PVE and PVP. As for defense, in everyday gameplay, I focus more on PDEF than MDEF, for the main reason that damage is almost only dealt in sylph form and I protect against both magical damage sylphs with resistance, but do not protect against Fire element at all. The only occasion when I increase my MDEF at the cost of PDEF is for Class War finals, if I happen to do them, since the common sylph I’m facing is Hercules. My block stat is amazingly low for a top knight. I do enjoy block, but other than MDEF, PDEF, or HP, it is like crit and makes your gameplay more volatile – you might or might not block. I prefer to have a fixed defensive build instead, with attack being volatile to some extent. The only times I do have high block (around 18k) is again if I choose to switch to EWD build for Class War finals, when I switch all my crit gems to block gems and run with 8 times PATK, 8 times MDEF, 8 times Block, and 8 times HP. I might try to sacrifice some block for PDEF and include maybe 2 PDEF gems next time, since I took too much damage in normal form this time, which made me place 2nd due to the damage dealt tie-breaker. However, I enjoy PVE more, so I’m not sure I will really do that.
Marriage Level
From the picture, you can also see that I got marriage Level 3 and yes, given that there are top players like boilwash who have Level 7 marriage rings this is quite low. I will surely try to get the ring to Level 4 soon at least, since this is when the marriage skill includes an automated revive of your spouse during a battle, but as of now I find the cost of upgrading these rings way too high compared to the benefit and I’m willing to wait a bit longer for a better deal (also, I don’t seem to be super lucky with Eternal Hearts from Marriage Tree chests). As regards marriage satisfaction, we only have Level 5 – I do not do marriage quests, for two reasons: Firstly, the stats gained are not permanent stats and even in the group situations when they count they are not that pivotal; secondly, my spouse lags like hell, which makes marriage quests last three times longer than they should normally.(COSMOS: my favorite phrase here: "my spouse lags like hell" :P hehe)
Soul Engraving
Fate Level
Just as for the vast majority of top players, my fate levels are long maxed out and as you can see I have over 11k spare fate stones and am longing for the field saying “Coming Soon” to vanish and to be replaced by some new statistic. However, we all know that “Coming Soon” in Wartune translates to “Maybe, if you’re lucky, we introduce something new here in 2020”. If your fate level is not maxed yet, it is a good idea to put an emphasis on Brutal Edge (rather than Resistance), since it directly affects your gold/daru income and the chance of ignoring 5000 of an opponent’s defensive stats is quite nice too (that said, it was much nicer when Brutal Edge was introduced and players only had 20k defense stats, so it is a bit of a shame that this is not a % value).
Dragon Soul Core
Clothing
My clothing levels are mainly Level 7 and I do have to admit that even though I tend to care about playing efficiently in most parts of the game, this is one aspect where I enjoy gambling more than maximizing rewards. My satisfaction is much higher if I manage to synthesize a Level 7 armor with a Level 6 armor that only has a Medium success rate and to obtain a Level 8 armor that way (which is exactly what happened) than if I wait until I have two Level 7 pieces and have to get a huge number of Good Luck Charms just to get a 100% success rate. I do not recommend my approach to anybody and especially if you think you’d be frustrated about losing for instance a Level 6 piece of clothing, rather choose a conservative strategy with clothing synthesis like Eliatan does. As regards clothing styles, I do have most of the weapons (exceptions are only the sword you get for obtaining level 9 on the weapon clothing, last year’s HoF sword, and for some reason Royal Touch, which probably was a reward in an event that I did not deem worthy to cash on before clothing could give you stats) and armor (same three styles missing). For headpieces, apart from those three styles, I also miss another S-rank item (Glistening Helm) and another A-rank item (Nocturnal Helm), which is okay, since Intellect is not that important for a knight. As for wings, I also miss the usual suspects (both former HoF reward wings and the max clothing level wings), as well as the Nocturnal Wings and all of the D-rank wings (which I have no idea about when they were even given as rewards, it must have been before I started playing the game).
For clothing identification, I first focused as much as possible on weapons and armor, which are by now all at least 4-star refined. I do think that the identification stats are good in general, but there is also a lot of work to do here and getting an item that is 4-star refined to 5 stars can be horribly frustrating and cost a lot of fashion cores. I will be in a much better place here when I finally get to fishing level 25 (which I will only reach in about 2 weeks’ time due to a combination of laziness, lag, and catching bounty scroll fish for way too long in order to do 20 orange bounty maps per day to catch up on EXP) and can get up to 2 cores per day from fishing.
I am slightly excited about the HoF clothing that the top warrior on each server will obtain on 10th December, as it looks awesome – so fingers crossed that they’ll actually manage to send the rewards this time and do not create another huge mess.
Minor Aspects in Main Char Window
I will not show card bonuses in detail, since I find them rather insignificant and everybody has similar stats here anyway. I do have a purple card for all but battleground, which is slightly annoying, as battleground is the only event where I would love an additional +100 for all stats.My honor is maxed, and if you are not Level 80 yet, do try to max your honor (or at least bring it to a very high level) before that, as you will not have an easy time in Flame Temple with a low honor rank. That said, level-holding is not very attractive anymore these days given the awesome strength boost that class advancement and daily Dragon Invasion can give you, so I might have to eat my own words here.
Battle Protection
I have already written above that I choose to protect against Electro, Light, and Dark. Due to Hercules being my main sylph (and because most opponents have it), I focus on Electro resistance most and I do have almost the maximum possible resistance against that element with 4 Level 7 crystals and 1 Level 6 crystal. With an Electro resistance of 632, I am usually not very worried when fighting other Hercules or Eve users, and it also means I do survive the ultimate hit of Atoll Bosses on Level 4 almost every time. All of my other crystals are Level 5 at the moment. I do not have any protection against Fire and Wind, but since I usually keep my PDEF high, I am not that concerned about it, and yes, I do not have Water protection either, but Hercules has a natural edge against Water sylphs and also usually only 2 out of 5 skills that Water sylph users have even deal damage to me, so I am not that concerned about the amount of damage I take against them, but more about how much damage I deal to them. Another benefit of maxing the crystals for one element, rather than having all Level 6 crystals before that, is that I can relatively easily convert them all to the desired element in case I feel I am close to beating a previously unbeatable boss in Sky Trail (or – to a lesser extent – God’s Descent).
My Will Crystals are currently 2 Level 6 and 1 Level 5 and I usually exchange League Insignia for Will Crystal shards, since the incremental increases at high levels are really huge (for instance the difference between a Level 5 and a Level 6 Will Crystal is 45 points of reduced resistance, which makes a big difference).
Titles
Academy
My main page of academy is maxed to Level 80, and most of my advanced academy page is as well. As many other players, I did max my Hero MATK as well, not because it adds strength (it doesn’t!), but because in HoF or in other situations when BR is used as tie-breaker, every little bit counts. I try to keep around 500k kyanite before I train another level, in case some good item comes up in Wilds Shop that requires to spend kyanite. The reason why I maxed Troop HP and Troop PDEF after I had maxed all Hero stats and the Gold stat is because I wanted my troops to be as tanky as possible for the early part of the fight in Class Wars, other than that I don’t really care about the troops so much, which is why I did not yet upgrade their MDEF or PATK any further (I will eventually!).
Sylphs
My sylphs – while having an evolved version of each element – are far from maxed out, other than for other top players. My only orange sylph is Hercules, which is also maxed out on Sepulcrum. Other than that I work on my Athena at the moment, mainly due to the reason that I have a hard time ranking high enough (i.e. Top 3) in Sylph Arena without another maxed out sylph, as a couple of players on my server have (semi-)maxed out Dark Sylphs that hit Hercules really hard in Sylph Arena. Athena is close to 5-star purple now and maxed on Sepulcrum (currently 82844 BR) and I am excited about next Mahra/Sepulcrum training event, as I will be able to max it out and to hopefully finally be able to claim the Sylph Champ title. Also, I can start working on one of my one-star purple sylphs, which will probably be my Dark one, as it is my main sylph for things like Wilds Bosses and Sky Trail (ironically, when I first was able to beat stages III-5 and III-10, my 87k BR Hercules died like a little crybaby and my 21k Dark sylph did the job – however, for stage IV-5, I am much closer to beating it with Hercules than with Gaia). In my opinion, a good strategy for sylphs is to really push for a strong main sylph, but also to try to focus on two others at the same time, since soon enough we will use 2 support sylphs as troops in some events. I have the feeling that at this point I will regret not choosing to work on either my Triton or my Medusa next, since they sure are the most helpful support sylphs, but I guess I’ll worry about it when it becomes really relevant (who knows when that is!). When I see things like Thethrell saying he doesn’t cash a lot and then see that he made a 7 th purple sylph just to feed sylph EXP scrolls into, then I really wonder where people get all that Mahra from, so if anybody has an advice on where to obtain those huge numbers of Mahra to even make spare purple sylphs, I would like to hear about it (this is not to be interpreted as criticism, but as genuine interest).
Equipment Refining
All of my equipment is Level 80 for quite some time now. For refinement, I aim for Strength, Defense, and Endurance on each piece, as they give most BR and also most strength, and for PATK, as high attack is so crucial in so many parts of the game. For reasons discussed earlier (mostly because I tend to switch a lot between crit and EWD), I do not choose crit as the 5th stat, but rather opt for one of the defense stats or block as the final one. Thank God for all the refinement locks the game throws at us these days in Jewel Hunt, so at least it is possible to try to refine the equipment easily for free, but refinement crystals are really scarce.
I think there are two possible strategies with these refinements that make sense: Either (a) you don’t really care about the stats as of now and aim to get Level 10 refinement faster, then you can lock only those stats that already have Level 10 refinement of a stat you want to keep and refine all the other stats. Take as example my weapon with Strength (10), Defense (8), Endurance (3), PATK (9), and MDEF (9). So in that case I could lock only Strength (10), and have 4 chances to get another Level 10 refinement stat that I want with just one refinement step. However, this strategy also means there is a risk that we have to bear undesirable stats like Charisma and to lose overall strength and BR temporarily. Or (b) you want to keep the 5 most desirable stats on the equipment at all times. In that case, I would have to lock 4 of the stats mentioned above and refine only for one and hope that the same stat will go to Level 10. The probability of a successful Level 10 refining step in this case is much lower, but at least you keep all the stat types that you want to have at all times this way. It would be interesting to hear how you guys handle refining, so let me know in the comments.
Holy Forge
Holy Forge is an Advanced Class feature that is just huge and is basically about enchanting your Level 80 gear even further. I have not seen exact information on it, but I estimate that full Holy Forge can increase your BR by almost 200k BR. And of course a powerful feature like this comes at a cost: It is extremely difficult to gain high Holy Forge levels.The two items you need for it are Vulcan Stoves and Vulcan Hammers. Stoves you can get relatively easily from Atoll Boss (for every 2% of damage dealt, you obtain 1 Stove). Hammers are a bigger problem, since (more or less) the only free way to get them is cross-server guild battle. I am not a fan of this approach, since nobody should be punished for being on a weaker server (just because R2 does not manage to keep up with mergers to keep servers at roughly the same overall strength). Also, I think it is a bit insane. We can obtain stoves every 6 hours in general, so everybody can work on them. For hammers, not only do we have to be in a strong guild, but we do have to be online playing Wartune on Sunday evenings, which is the only time you can obtain free Hammers at all (and even so only in certain weeks). It’s fine to make Hammers a lot more rare than Stoves, but restricting their availibility to one fixed time every week makes this too extreme – at least for me, so I don’t do cross-server guild battles (in fact, I moved to my original guild that does not even have enough BR to qualify for cross-server GB nowadays).
So since I am not willing to make the time commitment to give up my Sunday evenings, but still consider Holy Forge an important feature of the game, I am choosing a cash approach for this feature of the game. At this point, let me say that you have my fullest respect if you really turn up for those laggy and bugged battles on Sunday evenings for gaining a – usually rather low – amount of Hammers.
As pointed out earlier, I am really pushing my PATK higher at the moment, so I chose to max out Holy Forge on my weapon before working on anything else. The idea of Holy Forge is that you have 8 stages of upgrades and each stage is again divided into 10 sub-stages. Then for an attempt to upgrade, you use up 15 Stoves and 5 Hammers and a certain amount of gold (that depends on the sub-stage you are at). The probability of success also differs depending on the sub-stage: At the start of a new stage there is a 50% chance of success, at sub-stage 1 it is 40%, then 30%, 20%, 10%, and from sub-stage 5 to 10, the chance of success is as low as 5%. That said, I have not had a single occasion when I really needed 20 attempts to move to the next sub-stage, so these numbers (as expected from R2) cannot be accurate, but it is perfectly possible to waste 150 Stoves, 50 Hammers and more than 20 million gold without even moving one sub-stage.
So is it worth the trouble? Well, in the picture above you can see my weapon that is currently at Stage 7 Sub-Stage 6 and gives me a boost of 15285 PATK just from Holy Forge. So decide for yourself!
Gems
I was lucky enough to be able to do those whip events that gave a huge amount of gem packs when some other top players had already capped their stables. So my gems are something that I am quite happy with. I am using 8 times PATK, 8 times HP, 8 times Crit, 4 times PDEF, and 4 times MDEF in my usual setup. The HP, Crit, PDEF, and MDEF are all Level 10 gems, the PATK are three Level 12 and five Level 11 gems. Making Level 12 gems before having all Level 11 gems might appear inefficient to some players, but I do it for 2 reasons: Firstly, damage dealt is really my main emphasis (not because I prefer it in general, but since the game rewards it so much) and in PVE I don’t seem to need higher crit. Secondly (and more importantly), keep in mind the current gem event that gives us rewards for making Level 10 gems. Since it is limited events now, I assume that in the not so far future there will be rewards for Level 11 gems too. If I made all Level 11 gems now instead of making Level 12 PATK gems, I could not use any of them to get rewards once we get those events. But by making those Level 12 PATK gems now instead, I will have 24 Level 10 gems that I can use to make Level 11 gems then without breaking up my gems at all, since I can just use 2 Level 10 gems to make a Level 11 gem, and will get a Level 11 gem back from the rewards and thereby made 2 Level 11 gems from 2 Level 10 gems without using any other gems. And I can still participate in the current events and gain those rewards too.
Astrals
Most of my gold in the past weeks has been devoted to Holy Forge and to Astral Refining, so the Astral Level itself has not changed all that much. I spent a lot of gold on astrals before that in order to get Determination, Goddess Blessing, Illusion and Guardian Angel to Level 10, as I do consider them important for both PVE and PVP (I know that quite a few people tend to take off their Guardian Angel astral for PVE situations, so they can benefit from crit heals more, but I usually don’t have an issue with surviving, so I still prefer to wear the astral even in PVE in order to avoid taking crit damage). Regeneration is a must-have astral in my opinion, especially for knights who don’t have that many ways to heal up and who can benefit considerably from this astral that has a rather good trigger rate – but there is no real reason to upgrade it to a really high level before the other astrals are maxed. At level 7, I will heal for 70% of the damage I dealt if it triggers and the healing is capped at 50k HP, so in order to benefit from the full healing effect there, I have to deal damage of around 71.5k, which I usually do. Because I have a PVE focus, Deflection is not one of my usual setup astrals. Knights still have the deflection talent (which is uncapped other than the astral), so even without the astral, it still happens that opponents deflect against me in PVP. In months I am doing Class Wars, I usually feed the Determination astral into a Will Destroyer astral and the Crit astral into the Deflection astral for the finals, which is a more competitive PVP build.
As far as astral refinement is concerned, my Determination and Goddess Blessing astrals have a 4% increased effect, the Illusion astral is close to a 4% effect, the Guardian Angel is at 3% and the rest is at 2%. I do not think that I will increase the stat astrals to more than 2% anytime soon, I will probably rather work on a 5% increased effect on the four main percentage astrals.
Runes
That said, Amnesia is a great rune, but it never really changed the result of any fight for me, and I would have to use a lot of runestones to get it to a level where it can really be considered as decent, so it is not a priority for me. Blood rune has become a bit useless in my opinion with those high HP values. The ironic thing about this is that Salata did win Class Wars with a Blood rune on and that it may well be that he only dealt more damage to me because of those 11k damage ticks from Blood rune, but I still don’t think it is my preferred option as far as runes are concerned. Now usually a part on Talents would follow, but there’s nothing new or interesting about Talents anymore, so I will skip this part of the char overview – my talents are maxed. I will also skip troops, like most people I am using templars with Level 10 enlightenment on PATK.
Mounts
My mount stats are maxed due to the insane amount of whips the game threw at us the past couple of months. I have a mount strength of 18800, which means I have most mounts, so it’s easier to list the ones I don’t have: Nether Rhino (which definitely was in an event and also for sale when I already played, so no idea why), Underworld Steed (I didn’t play when the server was opened and we never had a merge…and Prosperity Wheel is a scam!), Therion-Sand Rider (well, as mentioned before, I’m in the 7th strongest guild on the server), Evil Unicorn (I do have enough spirits to synthesize it again when I needed though, since I consider them the best option in Class Wars shop these days), Demonic Civet (crafted it for HoF, but expired already), Plump Hippo (was this already obtainable? If so, I must have missed it), Manticore (phase when I did not cash), Chimera (phase when I did not cash), Darknight Panther (last year’s HoF mount, I was level 39 then I think), Iron Cart (again from Preposterous Wheel – they should really call it that!), and Magical Anteater (which is the Underground Palace mount, fingers crossed that we get that event back soon).
Let’s move to mount hoofs! Many players keep them in their vaults, cause they want to “get back hoofs for trained hoofs in an event”. I’m interested why. The entire stables that are available in the game at the moment are: 12 five-star mounts, 10 four-star mounts, 17 three-star mounts, 16 two-star mounts, and 9 one-star mounts. Without getting lucky and immediately upgrading to the next level with 1 training, a one-star mount requires 50 hoofs to max, a two-star mount 150 hoofs, a three-star mount 350 hoofs, a four-star mount 550 hoofs, and a five-star mount 800 hoofs. So if you never get lucky, this means in order to max all the mounts that are available in the game at all at this point take a maximum of 23900 hoofs. I get why weaker players hoard them, as 23900 hoofs is a large amount if you make 50 hoofs on average per day from Dragon Invasion. But for top players, it makes little sense in my opinion, since killing Level 8 in Dragon Invasion usually gives you around 100 hoofs per day, which means it takes roughly 200 days to max all of these stats for a person who has ALL of the mounts – not even considering hoofs gained from any other source here. Taking into account how long Dragon Invasion is already around, it is a lot less than 200 days that are needed to max out the hoofs stats already and personally, I think it is a bad idea to wait for an event rather than enjoying the benefits of all these added +10 all stats on an everyday basis. But this is probably because I play the game following the principle “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. In any case, from this analysis you can see just how common mount hoofs are in the game and I can only recommend: If you happen to see hoofs in hot events shop or as an event exchange item, think twice!
I hope the overview was interesting for you! I think I covered everything, but in case you have any questions about build or about strategies in specific events (mostly for knights), then I’m happy to answer them. Also, if you have any recommendations on how to do certain things in a more efficient way (apart from clothing upgrade, where I enjoy my inefficiency more), then please let me know!
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