WarTune Tips - Troops

This post is one of our series of tips for WarTune, a 2.5D MMO converted from the Chinese version by 7th Road  It is free to play, with optional features you can purchase with money.
In this post, we will talk about troops. Obviously they are a rip-off from the Heroes of Might and Magic V Haven faction. Click here for our review and list of tips.

There are two sets of troops: Those you can hire from Barracks, and those Creature Units you can get from monster lairs in dungeon maps or as rewards.

• When hiring troops, try not to hire the maximum, but instead 200 units short of the maximum. The reason is that you sometimes get Bounties that require you to hire 200 units of a troop type. If you have maximized your troop population, you cannot hire that 200 and will have to disband troops (or lose them in combat) first to make that room.
• Hiring quests only choose from units you can hire, so if you have a few units left of a type you are not going to hire anymore, you may want to keep them around for a while until a Bounty comes up.

Barracks Troops
There are basically two types of units: Defensive infantry, and something else. Defensive infantry units such as the Lancer and Paladin have a high PDEF score and are typically more useful because most of the enemies you encounter will have an attack that is defended against by PDEF.
In the early game, when you need meat shields in front of you to keep your hero alive, then these types of units are mandatory. Later on, if your hero has a very high PDEF, you may want to actually put your hero in front to keep your troops alive to deal damage. At that point, you may want to consider taking a variant unit. Knights and Archers are the ones who primarily have this option, and units like the Hunter and Priest can actually be viable. Mages will typically need to use Lancers and Paladins as they can't really soak hits by being up front until much later, around level 30+.

The stats here have the syntax <stat name><base value><bonus per level upgrade>.

Level 1 stats

1	ATK	PDEF	MDEF	HP
Lancer	64	50	40	323
Hunter	80	40	50	258
Priest	128	60	128	396
Paladin	128	128	60	396
Gryphon	156	100	80	762
Knight	292	224	184	1409
Angel	292	184	224	1276

Bonus per additional level

	ATK+	PDEF+	MDEF+	HP+
Lancer	20	16	9	9
Hunter	20	9	9	7
Priest	41	14	30	12
Paladin	41	50	24	15
Gryphon	49	23	19	24
Knight	91	38	28	43
Angel	91	28	38	39

Lancer
The basic choice, and there is a quest to level them up to 3rd. They can only attack the front row of enemies. Their special ability is a 50% chance to do 150% damage -- in the long run, this works out to an average of 125% damage.
I like the lancer for all hero types because their special ability, plus their front-rank-only attacks means concentrated damage against fewer opponents, and concentrated damage tends to mean the enemy stacks die more quickly, which in turn means you take less damage overall. In WarTune, how hurt a stack presently is does not affect how much damage they inflict.
You can reach level 20 very, very quickly, so you may want to be cautious about upgrading past 15th level, if you even want to invest in daru for that sort of upgrade. A level 20 Paladin will serve you very well for a very long time -- it can be a very long way to Gryphons at Barracks level 30. There is, however, the interesting option of just staying in town or on the lowest-level Wilds Map, and waiting for level 30 by doing Bounties and easy Daily Quests.
You can even wait from level 20 to level 40 (!) and delay your progress in the Catacombs and the single player missions. For Group Arena and Battlegrounds, you can still lose or do something else to grind for insignias. If you do NOTHING to farm Daru (e.g., run around in the Wilds attacking enemy stacks for Daru pearls), but do all the other daily activities (such as World Boss) you will probably still have over 3 million Daru, which is enough to immediately get you a Level 30 Knight or Angel when you  hit level 40.

Hunter
This can be a good choice IF you can keep them alive, which in turn means your hero having a good enough PDEF to survive on the front row without them as a shield. Unfortunately, by the time you have that kind of PDEF, the unit may well be obsolete.

Their special ability is 30% chance to fire two shots instead of one. Both shots do 100% damage, and the unit has a higher critical hit rate and critical damage rating. This looks good, except that it can hit any formation position. Against large formations, it can actually show down your ability to kill stacks, which in turn means you are getting hit by every stack for more turns than if you had concentrated damage on the front ranks. Remember that attacks randomly choose 1 target from all valid stacks in the enemy formation.

Priest
A very interesting choice, but one which I don't think I want to gamble the daru to experiment with. Priests will be weak against almost every enemy -- only the few with magical attacks will have a tough time with them and you won't see a significant amount of those until the Level 38+ single player maps. However, their attack uses MATK (magic) and is defended against by MDEF, which very few units have much of. Only Hunters have more MDEF than PDEF.
Definitely a unit that needs a hero shield. Their special ability is a 20% chance to hit every enemy unit for 80% damage, and that has a lot of potential, especially when most units will be weak to their damage. However, as combat progresses and units die off, the benefit starts to shrink. Also, only single player dungeons or the Wilds will have massed units like that. Even in Solo Arena, you are facing only 3 stacks in total.

Paladin
Their special ability is 40% chance of a second hit for 135% damage, as well as slowing the enemy by 50% for 1 turn. Not as powerful as hitting every stack, but it is concentrated damage that works out to 154% damage per attack.

Gryphon
They can hit anyone in the enemy formation, but suffers from the same issue as archers: Diffused damage means longer combat and more damage taken. Their high Health compared to the Paladin can't be ignored, though, especially as level 31 enemies will be extremely tough even against troops that are +/- 2 in levels. However, I think it is still an okay choice to continue upgrading Paladins as you already have a significant investment there. In any case, it is 20-30 days from level 20 to level 40 and if you can struggle through that, you can jump straight to level 40 units.
As with the Lancers, if you have already upgraded your Paladins to 20th-level, you may want to consider staying with easy maps or grinding the Catacomb (making sure you get Crypt Tokens) until you can get Knights. You won't do well in the Arena or other PvP events, but if that is not important to you, then put your hero in front of your troops and wait for Gryphons. In the long run, you'll save a lot of Daru.

Knight

As of the 1.45 patch, this is still the ONLY choice to take because the Angel troop is bugged. The special ability is a 30% chance of 140% damage to an entire row, which sees optimal use only in single player dungeons or the Wilds as you don't get enemies lined up like that elsewhere. However, 140% damage to a single unit is still very powerful concentrated damage.

Angel

If this unit were not bugged, it would actually be powerful and useful. The special ability is supposed to be (according to the text) a 20% chance of fully healing the most damaged unit. However, this is absolutely wrong and that it has not been fixed in the 1.45 major update is another sign that the developers simply don't care or are utterly incompetent.
The angel unit will essentially randomly heal, even when a unit is not damaged at all. Further, a unit is not "fully healed", but rather healed for about the same amount of damage it can inflict with its Magical Attack. When it heals itself, this is generally about 1/8th of its Health (for a Level 30 Angel).

Creature Units

Generally it will be better to just sell these for gold since they are invariably never of a higher level than your character, and you have no way of hiring more whenever you want, so you could end up with a residual few units that still use up your Population total.

That said, they are typically more powerful for their level than regular troops, so if you have enough to field a full army, you may want to use them for a special occasion and disband any remainder.

The gold you can get varies according to the troop level.