Category: Game Balance/Mechanics Questions

Anonymous asks:

What would happen to the meta Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina get signature Z-moves in a potential DP remake, which activate the Room effects? They fit quite well thematically- especially Inverse or Wonder for Giratina and Trick for either D or P

Well, I’m fairly confident the ubers meta can withstand damn near anything you throw at it, and a Z-move is a fairly costly thing to give a Pokémon, since the Z-crystal expends your item slot – especially considering that Dialga, Palkia and Giratina all have fairly powerful signature items (their respective Orbs) that they might prefer to use (unless they break the rules of Z-moves, the way Rayquaza breaks the rules of mega evolution, which doesn’t seem implausible – if they get signature Z-moves, the Orbs might enable them).  Besides, auto-Magic Room and auto-Wonder Room don’t strike me as particularly game-breaking effects.  Auto-Trick Room, maybe, especially if you give it to Dialga, who’s one of the slower uber-tier Pokémon (not that that’s saying much) – but then, if this hypothetical Z-move also forces Dialga to give up a move slot to Roar of Time, which seems likely, maybe that’s balance enough.

Anonymous asks:

If you could choose to give a group of older, competitively irrelevant Pokemon the Ninetales/Politoed treatment with Electric/Grassy/Psychic/Misty Terrain setting abilities, then which would you choose? BONUS: What about auto-Trick, Magic and Wonder Rooms, and auto-Gravity?

Hmmm… good question…

Well, for Grassy Terrain the first thing that comes to mind is Florges because it fits her flavour perfectly, but Florges doesn’t really suck enough to deserve that kind of buff; likewise Torterra… Bellossom or Sunflora, I would rather give something that emphasised their solar connections… I feel like it kind of makes sense for Wormadam but would interact weirdly with her alternate forms… what about Leafeon?  Yeah… yeah I think Leafeon is a good pick for this. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

What if, instead of an EV cap, there was a total stat cap? As in, “some Pokemon are naturally good at fighting, but all can achieve the same level of expertise through training” taken literally?

I think this has consequences beyond what you immediately intend. For one thing, under this system evolution and higher base stats are a bad thing, because they mean less flexibility – more of your stat cap is taken up by things you can’t change. For another, unless you have some sort of equivalent to the EV system – some limit to how far a Pokémon can advance beyond its basic capability in each stat – you’re going to end up eroding the differences between species of Pokémon. What’s the point of Alakazam if it can push its defence just as high as anyone else can, or everyone else can push their special attack just as high as it?

Anonymous asks:

Considering Blaziken and especially Infernape, I feel Emboar got the short end of the stick in terms of Fire/Fighting starters… How would you redesign Emboar to make him more interesting? Change his typing? Stats? Movepool? Ability? What about his general design aesthetic? I personally would make him a pure Fire type, since the only pure Fire type fully evolved starter so far is Typhlosion… It would make sense among his own trio with Serperior and Samurott being single typed, too!

Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

RandomAccess asks:

Huh, for some reason I thought you were playing Sun, but since the normal trial featured rattatah instead of yungoos, I imagine you’re actually playing Moon. How do you feel about the inverted clock feature?

Well, those entries are titled “Pokémon Moon: Episode 1, 2, 3, etc”…

Anyway.  It actually took me a little while to figure out what was going on, because at the moment I’m in New Zealand for Christmas with my family, but my DS was still set to US eastern time, so in practice the game was… I think six hours behind the actual time of day?  Which is sort of how the game justifies it, of course – Alola is so far away from everything that it’s in a different time zone, and Professor Kukui actually asks you if you’re feeling any jet lag following your arrival from Kanto.  Anyway.  It seems perfectly harmless, and a nice way of emphasising what I assume will be a prominent day/night theme in the games (Yungoos’ Pokédex entry specifically talks about how it’s very active during the day and promptly collapses from exhaustion at dusk, so it makes a sensible opposite to the nocturnal Alolan Dark Rattata).  Depending on your typical play schedule it might become inconvenient, but that’s true of the basic day/night system as well, and you can circumvent it easily enough by just lying to your DS about what time it is, if you really need to.

Anonymous asks:

Why do you think gen-specific Pokemon pairs get unequal treatment by Game Freak? (Eg, Vileplume got a new evolution in Gen 2, while Victreebel got nothing, and Whimsicott was already better than Lilligant even before becoming Fairy-type in Gen 6.)

I suppose because those pairings don’t serve any gameplay purpose beyond the games in which they were originally introduced.  Oddish and Bellsprout were no longer version-exclusive in generation II, so why continue to act as if they were?  If anything, I think it would be pointlessly restrictive for future games to demand that those pairs of Pokémon continue to mirror each other.  If you have an idea for an alternate evolution for Gloom that you think is a good one, why declare it invalid because you don’t have an idea for Weepinbell?  As for Whimsicott getting a buff that Lilligant missed out on by becoming a Fairy-type – well, you’ve hit the nail on the head.  Whimsicott was already better than Lilligant, so clearly they didn’t care in the first place.  Why would they care more in generation VI, when Whimsicott’s special relationship with Lilligant was no longer relevant, than they had in V?

Cheshs asks:

You have no idea how excited I am for your opinions on S/M. The story was phenomenal, I loved the characters, all the new Pokemon, plot twists I didn’t expect … I genuinely and eagerly await your thoughts when you get the game! I just beat the main story with 58 hours clocked in.

An anonymous user also says, on a similar note:
“i’m genuinely excited for you to start gen VII because the new features remind me a ton of your “if I were in charge” series”

Well, colour me intrigued!  I thought generation VI was very well-done all around, and I approved heartily of a number of its new features, which addressed a number of the same things that “If I Were In Charge” was supposed to; I’m excited to see how VII might build on that design philosophy.  I’m scheduled to crawl out from under my spoiler-proof rock and begin my journey in Alola this Sunday (the 11th), so you can expect my initial ramblings either that day or the next.

Ultimasheir asks:

You denied Bisharp’s right to exist back when just Black and White were out. Now it’s a defining metagame pokemon, with exceptionally powerful options in Knock Off and Sucker Punch, as well as Dark/Steel being excellent offensive typing due to the changes to Dark and Steel in Gen VI. Are you satisfied with the pokemon, now?

Sure, I suppose.  I  mean, most of the stuff I said at the time about Bisharp’s design (on which I was fairly equivocal) still applies.  Rereading the entry, I feel like I could very easily have gone the other way on him if I’d found a little more to like in his flavour text or something – after all, I described him as “at least vaguely competent” in battle, which I still think is a perfectly fair assessment of Bisharp’s capabilities at that time (generation VI has been very kind to him).  So there are definitely things about Bisharp that I still feel decidedly ‘meh’ towards; it’s just that he’s now so obviously strong that I’m sort of forced to overlook them.

Continue reading “Ultimasheir asks:” →

VikingBoyBilly asks:

How much do you think the game would change if, say, pokémon had six moves? Or two tabs of “attack” moves and “no damage” moves?

I suppose “quite a bit.”  I’m actually on the record as being against increasing the number of moves Pokémon can learn, largely because – contrary to what you might intuitively expect – I think it would reduce strategy and diversity in the game, not increase it.  I expect it would slant the game towards the Pokémon with the largest and most diverse movepools, and reduce the trade-offs and calculations that go into building a team that covers its most important weaknesses with its limited resources.  I also suspect you might see a fairly dramatic increase in the importance of self-buffing movesets (which could, say, include a set-up move and some way to heal while still having room for four attacks) and consequently also things that counter those strategies (Haze, Whirlwind, Unaware, hell, maybe people would even start using Punishment).  Choice Band/Specs/Scarf, by contrast, probably gets slightly worse.  I could be completely wrong about all of this though; it’s the sort of thing might be interesting to see playtested.