Pokémon General Thread

After all six of my team members reached the prestigious level of 100 midway through the Blueberry League part of The Indigo Disk in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, I've been convinced the forced EXP share was a mistake.

Those two things have little to do with each other; what level you end Indigo Disk at is more determined by how much time you’ve spent doing battles not as part of the story.

It also doesn't really matter as the blueberry league can still give you an ass whooping if your not to careful.

"if you don't like the forced EXP share just avoid interacting with like half the game"

You're not getting overleveled because of XP share, you're getting oveleveled because the XP formula wasn't created with this sort of game design in mind

What sort of game design are you talking about?

A RAGE filled update: beat both the flying titan and the dark team star boss, but lost 2 pokemon against the dark boss and in the process of training for Iono had a whole team wipe, while I can still move on from that the scars are still fresh and I'm willing to make paldea feel my PAIN.

I mean, spending dozens of hours doing side content would get you overleveled in any RPG that doesn't effectively cap experience gains.

Continuing on the forced EXP share: I never really had a problem with it, as like to switch through my team and try new mons between each city. If a mon in my team is overleveled, I just switch them with another mon I want to travel with. Sure, I pick my favorites, but I still try to give each Pokemon I keep some spotlight until I become Champion.

Tried rotating, but it really doesn’t fit me. Ending up settling on five Pokémon during my Paldea run with Finizen/Paladin taking the last spot since I wanted a Water type and for its Dex entry. For Teal Mask and Indigo Disk went in with two new teams that were around the level range.

Scarlet and Violet are balanced around not going out of your way to fight trainers or complete the Dex as you go through the story. And, of course, if you are consistently using picnics, yeah you'll get a boost to experience gained.

Game is designed to be reasonable if you don't grind. Good.

While we are talking about food (last page) :

What Pokémon do you think all the meat for the Sandwiches comes from?

The first two is why this feels like a catch situation since those seem like the things some players habitually do. Paldea not having forced trainer battles appears to be a reason not to do them unless necessary, but the game still encourages and rewards for doing so.

Edited by Cross on May 3rd 2024 at 3:17:13 PM

granted you're probably better off grinding the Tera raids for EXP candies I think

And finishing your damn classes!

If you are using Exp Candies before beating the game you cannot complain about it being too easy. You are grinding for those.

Pokemon is pretty much meant so you go through the campaign first, then do other stuff afterwards.

Edited by Eriorguez on May 3rd 2024 at 6:17:44 PM

Balancing a game around the player avoiding as much content as possible is bad design.

Having kids hit a brick wall because they didn't grind has never been good design tho.

In the linear games if you fight most trainers in your path and use competent Pokemon you shouldn't need to grind beyond maybe the early game and during E4 prep. Just play better. SV's open world admittedly make the level curve a lot harder to balance, but I'd hardly call catching some Pokemon and fighting trainers you find grinding.

Traditional level systems just inherently don't handle open-world design very well. There's various ways to handle this problem (level caps, level scaling, tying most XP to the story, etc.), and SV implemented none of them

On another note, I was browsing Smogon and saw that Alomomola is OU. I know it's a bulky Wish passer, but still how the heck did that happen?

It was given Flip Turn and retained access to Scald. Flip Turn synergizes well with Regenerator + Wish. Scald is Scald and its distribution got gutted, so Alo's relative value went up thanks to being one of the few good Pokémon to still have it.

Edited by Karxrida on May 3rd 2024 at 9:50:46 AM

Even that's quite restrictive for a kid, honestly. Not to mention the number of decoys like Tropius that a kid would think is strong but isn't.

As a kid I just picked pokemon I liked, either for their anime appearance or because I thought they looked pretty or cool. Like I had a Sandshrew in yellow specifically cause I hated how AJ trained his harshly and was rewarded for it narratively. I just wanted a Sandshrew to love. Sandy, trained to a level 100 Sandslash, actually won me a link cable battle when he got critical hit with rock slide (favorite gen 1 TM) against my best friend Micah. I still kinda go for pokemon that I like over battle tiers. I used a dewgong in my BB academy run because I've always liked them (again Seel was super cute in the anime) even though stronger water or ice types exist.

I don't think I've ever used a Seel/Dewgong before... maybe one day I'll give it a shot, along with all the other mons that ended up going unused.