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Pokemon Center 2: Woah, That's Tough!  I was unbelievably excited to get my hands on Magikarp. There is a lot of competition for Water-type Pokemon, tied with Normal for the most members of its type, so something needs to be absolutely excellent in order to stand out from the crowd. Gyarados's name is synonymous with any character in an RPG who starts weak and turns into an unstoppable shitwrecker, and it lives up to that reputation in RBY with aplomb. Just like before, we'll be rating it on the metrics of Power, Bulk, Speed, Width, and Depth. Power: Gyarados has some absolutely monstrous offenses, with 125 Attack and 100 Special. That 125 isn't quite as impressive as it sounds, as without any STAB Flying attacks, it's mostly running Normal moves with an effective Attack of 83, when compared to a Normal Pokemon using the same moves. That is still very, very respectable, edging out all but the most powerful of the Normals, and few of them can also echo Gyarados' other qualities. Bulk: Said 100 Special works defensively just as well as offensively, paired with 95 HP and 79 Defense. That is obnoxiously bulky for a Pokemon with as much offensive presence as Gyarados. Its Water/Flying typing is completely unique in Gen 1, providing it with a mix of benefits and drawbacks compared to its other Water type brethren. It's gained a weakness to Rock, a double weakness to Electric, and lost its Ice resistance, but it's traded that for a Fighting resistance, neutral damage from Razor Leaf, and a complete immunity to Ground. If I had to choose, I'd rather it have a different secondary type, or be mono-Water (especially given the complete uselessness of its Flying type offensively), but it's not a pure hindrance. Speed: Cheekily pulling a single point from Defense allows Gyarados to put that point into Speed, a much more binary stat that gives it the opportunity to outrace two excellent Base 80 Pokemon, Venusaur and Dragonite, neither of whom appreciate eating a Blizzard or Hyper Beam, as well as the rare but not unheard of Kabutops and gives it a very slightly higher critical hit rate, at about 15.8%, compared to their 15.6%. Outside of this specific niche, Gyarados does have some trouble with several Pokemon who are faster than it, including every fully evolved Electric type except Magneton. This is probably Gyarados's Achilles heel, and the only thing keeping it from being completely unstoppable. Width: Oh, you thought Normal and Water were Gyarados's only tricks? Nope! That 100 Special is put to excellent use in coverage moves from TMs, including everything from Fire Blast for another option to dent Grass types and let it get a solid hit in a predicted switch to Jynx, to Blizzard and Ice Beam for the standard Water/Ice pair, and even Thunderbolt for chunking other Water types and winning the mirror match. On the physical side, it learns every Normal move worth having besides Mega Kick, and while it won't get Earthquake until Generation 3, it has no business staying in against the Pokemon you'd want that as a coverage option for anyways. Depth: While all of its coverage tricks require TMs, that doesn't mean it requires them to do what it does best. It learns Hydro Pump by level up (though Surf often does the job just as well with better accuracy), and the 10% flinch chance from Bite sometimes allows it to come out unscathed against an opponent it'd otherwise have to slug it out with. Hyper Beam isn't as good in Stadium, as you still lose your turn after a KO (a bug fixed from the cartridge games), but in Stadium's 3v3, it can provide a crucial finishing move against something it might not otherwise be able to take out safely. So, without TMs, Gyarados is predictable, but far from linear, and it still does its main job just fine. Overall: Gyarados comes early, evolving before even the very next gym with a bit of love. Its almost unmatched Base Stat Total (only 20 points behind Dragonite!) means it stays good throughout the whole game, and whether straightforward or tricksy, it is excellent at whatever job is given to it. There's only one rating I can give to a Pokemon that does so much so well. Viability: 5/5 girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Oct 7, 2019 19:01
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drat, a whole mini-update for one mon. That's some impressive praise. Not like it's undeserved, Gyarados is pretty good, but drat. I can't imagine how long that will get once you get to the best mons in Gen 1.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:29
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hell yeah gyarados my favorite stat thing is always when a dangerous pokemon has one or two points more speed than a bunch of other pokemon  What's better than 100 speed? 102, of course!
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Oct 7, 2019 19:38
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Oh. Garchomp. I know that.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:39
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Blaze Dragon posted:drat, a whole mini-update for one mon. That's some impressive praise. Bogart posted:Oh. Garchomp. I know that.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:41
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Weavile worked fine. Bunch of babies at Smogon. 
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Oct 7, 2019 20:14
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Bogart posted:Weavile worked fine. Bunch of babies at Smogon.
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Oct 7, 2019 21:26
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Dome Fossil because Kabutops is just plain cool.
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Oct 7, 2019 22:47
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SirSamVimes posted:Dome Fossil because Kabutops is just plain cool. drat straight E: also, y'all are too hard on parasect. Like sure it'll probably die before doing anything, but it does get slash in the game where that auto crits 9 mons out of 10, and if it survives getting outsped by the enemy spore IS the only guaranteed sleep in the game. Plus it's both kind of cute and horrifying at once. FoolyCharged fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Oct 7, 2019 |
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Oct 7, 2019 22:52
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I never loved Gyarados in RBY, honestly. I'd rather have Lapras and/or Starmie.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:18
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FoolyCharged posted:drat straight Cythereal posted:I never loved Gyarados in RBY, honestly. I'd rather have Lapras and/or Starmie. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Oct 7, 2019 |
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Oct 7, 2019 23:21
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Cythereal posted:I never loved Gyarados in RBY, honestly. I'd rather have Lapras and/or Starmie. Yeah, but lapras shows up late and under level, and starmie doesn't pop up until seafoam. Actually, for how prolific the type is; water types are super back loaded. Before you can surf there's what? Gyrados, poliwrath, goldeen and blastoise?
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Oct 7, 2019 23:22
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FoolyCharged posted:Yeah, but lapras shows up late and under level, and starmie doesn't pop up until seafoam. Vaporeon and Tentacruel as well. You might also be able to get Cloyster from fishing, can't quite remember.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:27
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I always liked Parasect to be honest, and I've definitely had it on endgame teams before. But it's very hard to argue it doesn't have the deck stacked against it in quite a lot of ways, and I wouldn't want to use it on a competitive-style team (like in Stadium). The sad thing is that it's probably at its strongest in RBY, too. Despite having the extra weakness, it still has Slash and the brokenness that was gen 1 sleep mechanics. And then once those were gone, to add insult to injury along come Smeargle and Breloom to be better at using Spore, its one real redeeming quality.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:30
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FoolyCharged posted:and starmie doesn't pop up until seafoam. You can fish up a staryu from Fuschia's shoreline IIRC.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:39
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quote:Nuzlocke Meh, I must be some kind of casual scrub who needs to git gud, because I could not get into that sort of "one catch per route ironman" challenge. I can handle "one catch per route" no sweat (I think there are enough gifts to guarantee enough HM slaves), but the second rule is not my idea of fun. The wilds are too low level to grind on, and your only other means of guaranteed huge gains (throwing myself at the gym until I win) are locked behind "death = release" rule. So I either have to be super paranoid in order to avoid getting owned by RNGesus, or overgrind my powerhouse 'mon like I were playing Pokemon again for the first time. And then there are the even more restrictive challenge (like no overgrinding, no items, no PC, no socialized medicine, etc., or some unholy combination of the above) that sound like maybe people who like Pokemon could use a game designed to be balls-breaking challenges, say, Persona.
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Oct 8, 2019 01:12
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[obligatory SMT shill]
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Oct 8, 2019 03:08
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What's the next most prominent monster catching series/franchise after Pokemon and SMT?
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Oct 8, 2019 03:15
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Mraagvpeine posted:What's the next most prominent monster catching series/franchise after Pokemon and SMT? Probably the Dragon Quest Monsters subseries then Yokai Watch
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Oct 8, 2019 03:18
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Honestly Persona is a lot easier than Pokemon, especially with some of the more recent bullshit fights like necroz
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Oct 8, 2019 03:21
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I love this concept so much. What are the major hurdles you're anticipating? I'm thinking, similar to earlier posters, this is the sort of challenge that gets way easier the further in you get.
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Oct 8, 2019 03:33
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Polderjoch posted:Honestly Persona is a lot easier than Pokemon, especially with some of the more recent bullshit fights like necroz Outside of challenge runs, so long as you at least kind of have a balanced team, pokemon really is pretty easy. Gen 7 took some other steps to be a little more difficult, like giving trainers actual IV spreads, tweaking the level curve and the Totem boss fights, but over all it is almost always in the player's favor and there's a bucnh of misc systems to make it even easier on you. Totems can be scary but after the shock wears off they're pretty easy to dismantle for the most part, for example. Or how most trainers dont use more than 3 pokemon until like end game where you might see 4; you can count the trainers that use 6 pokemon on one hand. Otherwise the difficulty spikes are pretty localized, often to end bosses and even then it's a bit up in the air based on the level curve and the pokemon in play. You hear a lot of complaints about Miltank but you rarely hear any problems arise from anyone else in that game until Red, the game's true final boss with a huge level advantage. Norman in gen 3 can be a road block with his Slaking but you don't hear too many complaints levied at the other leaders or Steven/Wallace. Gen 5 is pretty smooth sailing until Ghetsis throws a Hydreigon at you. Ultra Necrozma stands above the rest within its generation by like a mile. e: You know I should bring this back around to this challenge specifically so we're not full on general discussion thread: Gen 1's biggest problem spots are probably Misty because Starmie is kind of ridiculous to throw at someone, Sabrina, maybe Koga, and let's say Blue. Sabrina is mostly because Psychic types were not properly balanced at all, Koga is more of an annoyance if he spams minimize or smokescreen, Lance & Blue are the final bosses. You generally wont have to omuch of an issue with any other boss in the game, and that's with gen 1's move pools being so (SO) bad and having a really harsh level curve. Stadium meanwhile is pretty mean in a hurry and that's mostly because it's designed around it assuming you're a pokefiend with already trained up Pokemon and ramps up from there. rannum fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Oct 8, 2019 |
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Oct 8, 2019 03:37
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I'm not saying Pokémon is really difficult at all outside of challenge runs, but eg. necrozma/norman was a massive roadblock for me that either needed grinding or itemspam while nothing in Persona reaches any level of actual roadblock outside of just swapping out maybe one party member and then steamrolling whatever was giving me issues. Gen 5 was personally also pretty difficult with Lenora and Elesa but aside from those, yeah that's about it. Pokémon is easy, but it had some roadbumps while the only similar roadbumps I can recall ever having in Persona were the table in tartarus and the p2is final boss Have to agree that Misty's Starmie and Sabrina are the big actual difficult spots in the game, especially since there also aren't many good options against Starmie if you didn't pick Bulbasaur. I don't think Koga really counts as difficult as much as obnoxious though, and I can't recall ever having issues with Lance or Blue either, but both of them have godawful movesets on their mons anyway. Am looking forward to seeing how the fights translate to Stadium, because it's one of the few games I've never actually touched.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:13
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You can get both fishing rods pretty early, so there's a whole host of Water types around. Hell, you'll stumble on the Super Rod before the Good Rod depending on your path to Fuchsia. But other than that, you're just waiting for the more interesting Water types in Seafoam Islands, so Gyarados is an interesting decision, even if it's not immediately obvious what it does.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:15
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AlouetteNR posted:What are the major hurdles you're anticipating? I'm thinking, similar to earlier posters, this is the sort of challenge that gets way easier the further in you get.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:40
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Crosspeice posted:You can get both fishing rods pretty early, so there's a whole host of Water types around. Hell, you'll stumble on the Super Rod before the Good Rod depending on your path to Fuchsia. But other than that, you're just waiting for the more interesting Water types in Seafoam Islands, so Gyarados is an interesting decision, even if it's not immediately obvious what it does. oh that reminds me, pmush are you going to do the sequence breaking to get pokemon earlier than normal but still following the gym route, or are we just sticking with the purely intended path way?
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Oct 8, 2019 04:51
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PMush Perfect posted:doing it all again in Round 2. You poor, sad, doomed fool.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:55
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rannum posted:oh that reminds me, pmush are you going to do the sequence breaking to get pokemon earlier than normal
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Oct 8, 2019 05:02
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So, since the rental pokemon in stadium generally seem to balance unevolved/weaker rental pokemon by giving them better moves. I'd been a little bit worried about the early part of the game for stadium because of that... I also feel bad for your first team, they didn't do anything wrong, they just got a bad deal ::(
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Oct 8, 2019 05:58
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Polderjoch posted:Honestly Persona is a lot easier than Pokemon, especially with some of the more recent bullshit fights like necroz Eh. I was really worried about the Necrozma fight because everyone talked about what bullshit it was, so I worked out a careful strategy, and then almost killed it while I was still getting set up. I was somewhat disappointed, legendaries should be bullshit hard and they really haven't been since Gen 1 Mewtwo. Pokemon's really only hard if you're hampering yourself. I don't like 'wasting' EXP raising anything that's not going to be on my final team, so in the earlygame I occasionally run into problems because I've only got two pokemon and I've just met someone with a team I'm weak to and can't damage much. That's also why, say, Misty can be an issue - Starmie's leagues ahead of anything the player has by that point, your only electric option is Pikachu which will only have thundershock, and every grass type is /poison and slower. Whitney's the only other gym leader I've really struggled against and that's as much luck as anything; if Attract catches you and then you get locked into Rollout, you're dead, otherwise you're fine. If you have access to anything half way reasonable, Pokemon is a cakewalk, and the game generally hands you a decent thing with a type advantage on a route adjacent to the next gym. Crosspeice posted:You can get both fishing rods pretty early, so there's a whole host of Water types around. Hell, you'll stumble on the Super Rod before the Good Rod depending on your path to Fuchsia. But other than that, you're just waiting for the more interesting Water types in Seafoam Islands, so Gyarados is an interesting decision, even if it's not immediately obvious what it does. I noticed the scarcity of water types in Let's Go, more than the originals. There's no fishing at all, no water starter, and you don't get the Surf-equivalent for a long time, so your only options are Magikarp or Psyduck for a huge chunk of the game. Eevee gets a broken water move before the second gym so it doesn't matter much, but it was still noticeable.
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Oct 8, 2019 09:02
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More rating spoilers: The only Water Pokemon with a rating below a 3 are Seaking and Seadra. Even Golduck has a niche in Gen 1.
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Oct 8, 2019 09:07
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Black Robe posted:That's also why, say, Misty can be an issue - Starmie's leagues ahead of anything the player has by that point, your only electric option is Pikachu which will only have thundershock, and every grass type is /poison and slower. Not actually an issue. She doesn't give it a psychic move outside of the stadium games until hgss and even then only on the rematch. Those grass types wall her pretty solid if you raise one up in the cape. Early pokemon was pretty good at giving you counters right before each gym. The big thing with misty is that starmie is nearly double the level of anything in the area and a stupid good sweeper so theres not much that can get a hit in, and by the time you think of those grass types you could be out of reasonable exp in the area.
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Oct 8, 2019 09:32
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 Well, there was a big push for Helix right at the end, but it looks like our winner is still Dome!
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Oct 9, 2019 05:54
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I remember in Stadium 2, Morty’s Ariados was a motherfucker since he could out speed and one hit the rental Kadabra.
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Oct 9, 2019 15:16
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Bogart posted:I remember in Stadium 2, Morty’s Ariados was a motherfucker since he could out speed and one hit the rental Kadabra. And thus was the one time Ariados was allowed to be scary. I want to like the cute little spider so much, but it's just so bad. And this is coming from the guy who liked paras(which admittedly got thrown in the same boat after gen 1)
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Oct 9, 2019 15:52
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Brother let me tell you about Altered Emerald
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Oct 9, 2019 16:08
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PMush Perfect posted:[obligatory SMT shill] Darn, and here I missed the chance to be swimming in the sponsorship dollarydoos. 
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Oct 9, 2019 21:55
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Been putting off making the next update, so to tide you over, here's another mechanics update, directly copy-pasted from the previous LP! PokeStop 2: Critical Hits I touched on it a bit before, but why don't we talk for just a minute about how critical hits work in Generation 1? In every further generation, criticals have a flat 1/16 chance, before factoring in moves like Slash and Focus Energy, and deal 2x damage. (This changed again in Generation 6, but that's neither here nor there.) In Generation 1, however, the critical hit ratio is based on the Pokemon's Base Speed, with the damage multiplier based on the Pokemon's level. The percent chance of a critical hit is (roughly) (X*100)/512, where X is the Pokemon's Base Speed, rounded down to the nearest multiple of 4. Don't worry about calculating that out, the  Focus Energy was intended to multiply this chance by 4, but due to one of RBY's many bugs, it instead divides the chance by four. That makes sense, putting a / instead of a * is far from unheard of. What's more surprising is that somehow, Focus Energy also makes it impossible to land a critical on anything faster than you. Thankfully, in Stadium, this was fixed, and Focus Energy correctly multiplies your critical hit chance by... 6.2? Okay, sure. High critical hit moves (Slash, Crabhammer, Razor Leaf, and Karate Chop) properly multiple this chance, not by two or three as in later generations, but by eight. Bruno's stupid Karate Chopping Machamp that seems to always critical? For once, that's not just confirmation bias, that is the move literally having an 82% critical hit chance. So, what are some of the consequences of this? Venusaur will always critical with Razor Leaf, Kingler will always critical with Crabhammer, and Sandslash or anything faster will always critical with Slash. (This was actually used to give Persian something of a niche in competitive, though given Persian's frailty, it was rarely more than a gimmick.) And rather than simply doubling the damage, it instead multiplied the damage by (2L+5)/(L+5), where L is the Pokemon's level. This means that for most Pokemon, the multiplier past level 20 is somewhere around 1.85, capping out at x1.95 at level 95. No, I don't know why it was made this needlessly complicated in a game that needed cart space so badly that it stored encounter data in the same place as your name. TL;DR: Generation 1 is weird, y'all. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Oct 27, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 04:17
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The critical hit system in Gen 1 was hilariously complex and I'm glad all of that was dropped for the more clear, more normalized version from Gen 2 onwards. I can't imagine being a kid and trying to understand that mess...then again, even as an adult some calculations in Pokemon are impossible to understand for me, like catch chances.
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Oct 10, 2019 04:26
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Judging by Gen 1's dev time and how many overhauls it went over, I've become much more lenient to gen 1's weird rear end ... everything. Like yeah cart space was at a premium but critical hit rates probably got a billion overhauls through development and changing it once they got it to this point probably would cause issues elsewhere. It's easy to put on the back burner and probably didn't take as much space as the more important things like Pokemon that absolutely needed to be kept prim and proper (& then morimoto adds mew at the last possible minute without telling anyone, good job bro coulda ruined everything!). All that said, the crit stuff may be my favorite bit of gen 1 jank because for once its all intended. People thought Speed ruled the land before but imagine if this carried forward? Imagine at any time, anything above 100 speed has a flat 19% minimum chance of critting you with any move Also a gentle reminder that Stadium's changes to assorted formulas/mechanics (whether those were just solid bug fixes or trading one jank for another) is because Iwata had to read the original source code and recreate it because they had no documentation. quote:When Game Freak were developing Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64, they realised that they had no specification documents left for the battle system. Iwata didn’t work at either Game Freak nor Nintendo, but he acted as an intermediary between them. He studied the original source code for the battle system and was able to successfully implement it in Pokémon Stadium in just one week. http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/2
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Oct 10, 2019 04:35
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