Nice!! The other belly drum pokemon is Iron Hands and I’m thinking of making one of those too. Orbs slapping themselves is so powerful, haha
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I am now trapped away from my PC which means that I cannot play the game I got sucked into after SV anymore (Dwarf Fortress). I do have a Switch with me though so I went back to Pokémon and started making more maxed-out lvl100 raid build Pokémon. So far I have completed that Azumarill, a Gholdengo (steel SpAtk attacker… nice), the raid Charizard, and I’m nearly there with a Kingambit and Wo-Chien. Next I’m probably doing a Tyranitar and my Skeledirge.
The more of these raids I do the more respect I have for the Tera Type mechanic. I think it’s actually rather brilliant in a PVE context… when you do a raid you are solving a 5-way type weaknesses puzzle sometimes. You gotta defend agaibst the attack types/STAB capabilities of the raid pokemon’s original typing, but attack against their Tera type, and if they’re dual-typed then you are bringing your typing against three relevant enemy types. Usually the problem is only five-way because you need your Tera type to match one of your base types in order to do STAB moves on the enemy’s Tera type, so I wouldn’t recommend bringing a truly creative Tera typing to PVE… nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun. High level raids fail constantly because the typing puzzles are genuinely quite hard and most players don’t seem to have the library of leveled Pokémon ready to use in any situation yet. Many people seem to just bring an Azumarill or Iron Hands to every battle and fail miserably at half of them.
I haven’t tried PVP yet but I imagine Tera typing is also a big brain game there, as you need to know quite a lot about all moves available to every Pokémon in the enemy party to anticipate what kind of Tera typing they’d use. I’d be surprised if anyone is bringing anything but a STAB advantage to those though so maybe it’s not very complex.
Anyway! It’s a cool mechanic. It’s definitely cooler as something you’re attacking against than something you’re attacking with, though, which is a bit of a flaw, but I’m having fun anyway.
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There’s an odd glitch I’ve been noticing in this game, where whenever I go into an interior location where a cutscene occurs, there’ll almost always be a small pokeball embedded in the ground somewhere.
The first time I noticed it was in a cave cutscene after beating a titan, and there was a red pokeball right there in the middle of the cave during the scene. So I figured after the scene ends I could go back in the cave and pick up the item, but you can’t actually go back in there.
The other times it happens tends to be in the gyms when Nemona or someone shows up, and there’ll be a tiny one embedded in the floor in the middle of the doorway. It’s non-interactable and the type of ball varies.
My theory was that Game Freak were using pokeballs as visual markers for event triggers and just forgot to make them invisible or something, but looking up online at least one other person has seen it and it came up that it’s probably just the ball for your top pokemon needing to load in somewhere in case a battle is triggered, but because no battles can happen in these locations the game just glitches out and sets it to a 0,0 co-ordinate or something random.
Anyway, I found it kind of amusing because with all the pokeballs with items littering the countryside, having these random unremarked-upon balls just discarded on the floor in sandwich shops etc kind of makes sense
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I’ve been terribly preoccupied lately so I haven’t played. I’m almost afraid that, once again, The Magic Has Worn Off and I’m going to wind up bailing out on this. I have one more titan and one more Team Star base, then what lies beyond which I guess is most of the really good stuff, so I want to persevere. I just haven’t been able to muster the focus.
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I tried getting back into the caves to get these balls and came to the same theory that it’s likely a placement marker they forgot to hide.
The most apt description I’ve heard for the jankiness of the game is it is legit haunted.
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Haunted jankiness is definitely a saving grace for some games. It’s definitely the only memorable thing about Skyrim, at least.
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New best track
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if you try to do the cinderace raid this weekend: top builds are
- slowbro with iron defense, psychic attacks, nasty plot, stored power, and psychic tera type
- armarouge with psychic, clear smog, expanding force, and psychic terrain. However I have also seen sites make a good case for armarouge with calm mind or psychic. basically just use psychic shit and psychic tera type if you can
- espathra with feather dance, lumina crash, helping hand, and roost
I have seen sites suggesting azumarill but in my experience the fairy types are not great to bring in to this fight. Cinderace has Iron Head and is not afraid to use it!!
also I did not use any of these. I used Slowking with psychic, iron defense, and reflect. I was a team player!!
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Re: the typing puzzles in raids, someone’s done a calculator for it, finally:
Curious to see if the typing puzzles are still fun when using a calculator. They probably are, since it does still require immense recall of the entire game roster to choose an attacker during the countdown timer before the raid?
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Finally finished this (well, I unlocked Ed Sheeran). This is legit my favourite Pokemon game despite the crazy jank. I’ve never been so engaged to actually finish the dex. The story still has too much fluff (Team Star I’m looking at you) but I like many of the little details and goals they’re shooting for. The interview is a good example, as is Area Zero where the game becomes a mini modern-JRPG.
I’m probably gonna put it down for a bit since there’s other stuff I wanna get to but I’m definitely dipping back in occasionally or when inevitable DLC comes.
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i finally got a shiny via the sandwich grinding method. I think it maybe took me 3 or 4 tries before finding one, which was over several sessions maybe 1.5-2 hours of grinding. Per shiny, that’s actually not that bad… I was just listening to podcasts I wouldn’t have otherwise found time to listen to and trying to turn all the other parts of my brain off.
The shinies have no visual tell besides their coloration so I think that hunting them this way would be extremely difficult for pokemon which are too small to easily notice, or pokemon which have unobtrusive shiny colors too similar to their normal forms. This is a pain because Arceus already solved that problem… shinies in Arceus make a small chiming noise and emit stars from their bodies occasionally. They shoulda done that here too!
The shiny I got was a shiny Slither Wing in the crater. My husband chose the name so he trolled me and now it’s named Jumbaco.
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The next big raid pokemon is a poison-tera-type Greninja.
A lot of places online where folks Do Posts about Pokemon are now full of folks dreading the inevitable wave of belly drum Azumarills in these raids… you see them everywhere now, including in matchups where they are extremely vulnerable. A belly drum Azumarill is not gonna do well vs Ripped Greninja.
We don’t know its moveset yet but I’ve seen some early build speculation about Ground Tera type Clodsires, Quagsires, and Gastrodons, and Steel tera Vaporeons, as well as Lucario as an attacker against it… but Greninja has a very large move pool so it’s unclear what kind of build they’ll give it.
I personally think it’s likely that they’ll have it spam Double Team or smokescreen or whatever to force some Clear Smog countering builds or similar–any of those moves that make a Pokemon easier to hit. Charizard’s raid build was meant to “teach” high damage near-exploit movesets, I guess… Cinderace was meant to teach raid team buffs and debuffs, because successful teams often either stripped its attack buffs or buffed the team’s defenses. I can see Greninja going for a slightly more complex “lesson”… who knows though!! It’s really impossible to know who to bring to this one until we see the move pool.
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It turns out that the best guy to take on the Greninja raid this weekend is just the same Slowbro from last time. So I used my subpar Slowking and just got it that way by playing support to a team of three Slowbros, haha.
The ideal move set for this slowbro is apparently:
- Stored Power (TM41)
- Iron Defense (TM104)
- Nasty Plot (TM140)
And like, whatever else you want, I guess. Healing Pulse is good for keeping the team alive. You just stack iron defense and nasty plot and then use stored power.
Many big doings in the land of fake pokemon Spain!!
I have been totally out of the loop for weeks recoving from Covid and losing myself in a Marvel Snap hole, but someone warned me just in time that there is currently a two-week special paradox Pokemon raid event going on in SV-- and it’s ending on Monday! There’s a robot Virizion called Iron Leaves and a fucked up dino Suicune called Walking Wake. These are 5-star guys who do not come maxed or anything.
- I spent two hours tonight trying to catch them and I can report that Iron Leaves is way the fuck harder. It took me like 12 tries. I ended up using Kingambit on that one with swords dance and kowtow cleave.
- Walking Wake seems comparatively simple. I used Annihilape on that one and got it first try.
Also now you can connect SV to Pokemon Go for some gimmighoul shit so I guess I’m doing that too.
There was a big pokemon DLC announcement that I also didn’t pay close enough attention to, but it is already for sale. The DLC is a single-price pack of two updates which both take place in novel locations. The first one is called “The Teal Mask” and it features you going on some kind of field trip to an island called Kitakami which appears to be a brand new variety of imaginary Pokemon Japan. It is also apparently the very real name of an actual small city in real-life Japan. Someone with subject matter expertise will have to help me speculate what the hell this means.
The other one is called “The Indigo Disk” and it is based around your little Pokemon dude going to be an exchange student at an UNDERWATER SCHOOL! called BLUEBERRY ACADEMY??? The Game Freaks have done it again folks, I am constantly stunned and surprised by the names of Pokemon things
Pokemon DLC is now focused heavily on new legendaries. Who are the new legendaries? Well, looking at them made me think I was having a stroke:
Here is what they look like:
Okay, when you put the names to the pictures like that, they are actually pretty dope. These look like saucy pranksters… I’m excited to imprison them in my vast and neglected collection of digital animals
When you collect all of them you apparently get some kind of guy called “Ogerpon” which is a much less cute name
The other DLC’s new legendary is called “Terapagos” and it is just a big turtle with all the pokemon elements drawn on its back. This is worrisome to me. I am envisioning some kind of boss fight with a weird ass gimmick. I like how the turtle is hairy though.
Also they announced that across the two releases they are adding a buncha old Pokemon back into the game. I am curious to see how many pokemon are gonna be omitted from both SV and SWSH because I’m always fascinated by this kind of product planning and I am excited to see how completely brainboggled the fans get if, like, their favorite dude gets exiled from the cutting edge of Pokemon. It’s probably hard to pull off though since the remake games exist and they have a shit ton of old pokemon in them.
Anyway this has been your POKEMON UPDATE… i’m still occasionally playing this game when I’m not too wiped out by work and disease. I’m gonna catch all the weird raid guys. I got a living dex two weeks before these games came out last year and I’m not gonna lose it!!
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