Re: Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon: Spoilers ahoy ☀

by OverlordJ Wed Nov 30, 2016 12:57 am

d_what wrote:- Synchroniser overworld nerf sucks voltorbs >
- destiny knot is pointlessly difficult/luckbased to obtain (either pickup, or 48bp)
- berries that heal but can cause confusion have been buffed, might see use on Wishiwashi, I like Wishiwashi so yay

Oh :(

d_what wrote:- Golisopod looks crazy cool, probably won't be all that great tho, but still, fucking wow

I think it looks awesome, too, but I dislike its ability :/

d_what wrote:on the other hand...
holy fuck game freak I hate you and everything you stand for! They've more or less eliminated all of the benefits that XY and then ORAS introduced to the series. SOS battles are *not* that good for EV training, and the loss of Super Training makes precision EVs even more difficult. Hyper Training would be nice IF bottlecaps weren't awkward to get and there was any decent method of training postgame (besides the daily Morimoto battle and a Restaraunt, but at least XY's restaraunts were worthwhile.) And so much of the stuff needed to get into all the juicy inner workings (battle items, breeding items) is locked behind the battle tree/dome's BP cost, or simply not available (macho brace, multiple lucky eggs) which wouldn't be too bad only they upped the difficulty on them, so it's a bit of a catch 22 for people starting. Total grindfest. Not to mention that loss of the dexnav *really* stings, as does the PSS. Having played a game with, and then a game without them... They should both be made series staples. Jesus Christ. I know every new game we lament the stuff that Game Freak takes out, but this gen takes the cake, and I really liked the cake :<

PSS for DPPT remake c'mooooon!!!

...Fuck :/

by Spark Eletran Wed Nov 30, 2016 3:34 am

boy salt it Very Bugs Me to see you call an UB he, especially one that I see as primarily feminine if anything mspa

by d_what Wed Nov 30, 2016 4:53 am

I don't expect to start team building until the meta settles, XY took months because of the headaches induced by Mega Kanga, then Mega Lucario, Genesect, Deoxys, Aegislash, Mega Mawile, Landorus... But it worked out in the end. Generally, excepting in BW which was a shitshow (in hindsight, keeping rain was a bad idea) there isn't a slippery slope of continuous banworthy threats. That said, things that aren't broken now might take a while. Aegislash has gotta go before we get to a decent meta, as has Hoopa, and Genesect, and Landorus, probably 'Ninja too, and they'll all be suspected with delays between.

Spoiler:

EDIT: whoops haha Aegislash got quickbanned today! Kinda surprised there wasn't a suspect test, but a test would have had to wait until a bunch of other stuff left and it was a foregone conclusion anyway. Every time Aegis gets tested it's had an increasing amount of people who want it gone, and it's no worse this gen (it's actually marginally better). No loss. NOW ON TO UB-02!

by cephalopodAscendant Fri Dec 02, 2016 3:29 am

Well, I've gotten through most of the plot, so it's safe for me to look at spoilers now. And can I say, holy crap did this game deliver. Although it did have an annoying tendency to ping-pong between excessive handholding and brutal difficulty. I also wish the new Pokémon had been featured more prominently, because the only Gen VII member of my final team was my starter (for reference, four were from Gen I). I also feel like the type distributions were really off; I had a hard time finding Pokémon that would be useful for the challenges I was facing, and my type coverage is still a little weaker than I'd like.

Anyways, out of vague interest, I went back and checked to see if the official site had added any information since release; as I half-expected, pretty much every new Pokémon and Alolan form is on there now, with only two obvious omissions (barring the next event legendary after Magearna, naturally). Sadly, they really phoned in the latest additions; while all of the prerelease pages have pretty detailed descriptions, the new ones are only the in-game Pokédex descriptions, making for a very sparse page. There's also a woefully-incomplete list of version exclusives which only lists three per game; I realize there weren't quite as many this time around as there usually are, but that just seems ridiculous. Meanwhile, on the page for Ultra Beasts, UB-03 and both variants of UB-04 have completely empty description boxes.

by d_what Sun Dec 04, 2016 10:12 am

If anyone intends on breeding a Salazzle, I've got a female salandit caught (in a nicely matching Luxury ball) that has a 50% likelihood of being timid. Purely accidental; I started SRing for Nihilego and had my timid Synchroniser out front.

I've said it already, but Jesus Christ why'd they have to nerf Synchroniser's overworld effect???

Don't expect to actually catch a Nihilego either because HP Ice :/ but I can try, since it's not like I'll be breeding much without a destiny knot. I've been picking-up stuff with 6 meowth for 5 days now! Sure, I have 6 leftovers, but no knot ;_; whoever spearheaded SM had the same amount of disinterest in competitive players that the ORAS had in regular interest. So many steps back this gen, sheesh.

Edit: guys guys! Go to Solgaleo's/Lunala's pokedex number in the pokedex, but don't select the entry! Then tilt your screen back and forth! Very Happy

by cephalopodAscendant Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:11 pm

The weird thing is, usually they just drop features that were new in the previous game, which I've heard is because they're usually working on two games at once. This time around, they dropped a ton of stuff from two games ago, which would presumably be a deliberate choice.

Also, am I the only one who felt that Trials weren't really a satisfying replacement for Gyms? All of the Trials really just boiled down to "fight a couple wild Pokémon with a couple trivial challenges optionally sprinkled in, then fight the Totem Pokémon". Meanwhile, Gyms always have wildly-varying gimmicks that keep things interesting.

by d_what Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:17 pm

I didn't notice that, as such, since I found the trainer battles in gyms pretty boring generally and the toughest gym leader fight was rarely as interesting as the best of the totem fights. BUT... There's no puzzles. Where's Volkner's gears, or Wulfric's rubik cube, or Skyla's blasty cannon? Although iirc ORAS just ported the gyms and XY's gym design was relatively poor overall so maybe it's just the tail end of a trend. Best we got in SM was the Tapu's strength maze, which was frankly an insult to intelligence.

E: okay I'll be frank. I'm glad sun and moon exist, and the stories are top-tier, but if we could have swapped the gen order and have SM before ORAS and XY/Z after it, with the newer graphics, I'd be much, much, much happier. After doing post game stuff, I genuinely prefer to spend time faffing around doing my normal self-imposed side quests in Kalos or Hoenn.

EE: just realised what it was. If SM didn't have the Poke-Ride system replacing HMs and the better story, I'd be slating them, because the things that the other games brought to the table were my métier.

by cephalopodAscendant Sun Dec 04, 2016 3:17 pm

I was mostly talking about the puzzles; the battle difficulty could be scaled up or down relatively easily, but it takes a lot of creative effort to come up with new Gym puzzles. And even if we are taking the battles into account, the Totem Pokémon were the only interesting parts of the trials; the other battles were indistinguishable from your average random encounter. And ORAS porting the gyms isn't really that unexpected, since FRLG and HGSS did the same thing. I'll agree with you that the Kalos Gyms were pretty underwhelming, though.

by Spark Eletran Mon Dec 05, 2016 11:27 pm

A few of the trials were pretty eh, yeah. Kiawe, Mallow and Acerola's were all enjoyable tho, imo, since they actually tried to go for a sort of certain mood and were pretty charming.

Also, on Kalos - literally the only good Kalos gym is the last one. It's... kind of stupid.

by d_what Tue Dec 06, 2016 7:00 am

I think the mood that Kiawe was going for and the mood he actually achieved were very different things, though.

Jesus that Salazzle gave me the heebie jeebies. I'd never seen one before then, to see this freakishly human alien-like predator with long limbs and digits suddenly appear behind people was unsettling!

TODO list:

Spoiler:

Things I'm not going to do:

Breed a Pelipper

Breed a Mantine

because fuckin' defog tutors, man. I want a DPPT remake and I want it yesterday.

E: oh yeah might try to SR for a Magearna, since apparently the method you receive it in-game makes Synchronize work 100% of the time. Some sets probably use Hidden Power, but I'll be shooting for a really slow Speed IV since Magearna is almost mandatory on Trick Room teams - even if it gets banned (it's a hyperflexible special-attacking Mega Mawile, so...) I might want it in a future gen. Never ran a TR team before!

Editedit: Get this (and I can't because I don't have Sun): Timid Kartana. No ATK EV investment. And reset to have 19 IV in Atk. (up to 22 if at level 50.) Fuckin' genius. Pain to SR for, though, but with SD you have a really neat sweeper that a Jolly or Adamant Kartana wishes it could be, despite the obvious Atk drop.

by cephalopodAscendant Tue Dec 06, 2016 1:05 pm

About your edit:

Spoiler:

On a tangent, yesterday was my last day of classes as an undergrad. I just have to get through my undergrad research presentation today, then finals for the remainder of this week and the start of next, and then I'm done. It still feels really weird that it's happening at all.

by d_what Tue Dec 06, 2016 1:21 pm

Yay

Congrats cA! What's up next for you? Or is it too early to tell?

about spoiler:

Spoiler:

by cephalopodAscendant Tue Dec 06, 2016 1:22 pm

I'm headed right into grad school. I've heard back from everywhere now, so I just have to figure out which one I want to go to.

by ilikeoctopus Tue Dec 06, 2016 1:37 pm

Heyy congrats, cA! May I ask what your research is on?

In game news, I just finished the ghost trial yesterday and was apparently pretty unprepared--I didn't know Mimikyu's ability nor typing and it ended up knocking out four members of my team and bringing a fifth to 1HP. Only after the battle did I realize it was part fairy and I could've been hitting it with my Magneton...

by d_what Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:27 pm

I can say from experience, if your Magneton was like mine level-wise... it wouldn't have helped as much as you may have thought Neutral

Yeah Mimikyu was nicely difficult! Though, a +1 to all stats will do that for you...

I don't know much (anything) about postgrad stuff so I don't know the questions to ask that will have interesting answers. So yeah Imma jump on Octi's question. What's your research on cA?

by cephalopodAscendant Tue Dec 06, 2016 4:50 pm

I think I've probably mentioned this before, but the research is on computational aesthetics. The group's long-term goal is to create a computer program that can judge how attractive a human face is perceived to be. This semester, we ran a survey to gather our training data, and fortunately our results were much more consistent than the results from the previous survey two years ago.

by d_what Tue Dec 06, 2016 5:13 pm

What's the input? Curious as to what the computer has to work with besides the images of the faces. E.g. face #1, 14 and 67 = attractive, and that's a typical (though difficult and subjective) use case for a neural net.

by cephalopodAscendant Tue Dec 06, 2016 5:18 pm

So we're using this mathematical model that treats faces as points in a 110-dimensional vector space, where the axes represent different facial features such as head width, brow depth, nose length, etc. We feed the coefficients for those features along with the normalized user ratings (on the interval [-1, 1]) to a machine learning algorithm.

by d_what Thu Dec 08, 2016 8:24 pm

Ugh. Hate to drag the thread. It's been a while coming, and I think I was in denial for a while, but...

I hate sun/moon. I love what they did for the story and I can understand why reviewers gave them top marks since reviewers play "the story" and then do the review, but to quote a different me: "Actual experience? Piss poor, given that I spend the first 40 hours of a game on the story and then max out the fucking clock on the stuff that SM has made so unnecessarily awful."

I hope everyone else has a vastly different experience. BW hit a bum note for me too, but that was a tone/atmosphere thing more than anything else, and I still pumped hours into it. I feel I'm already actively avoiding playing SM when I have other things (read: Splatoon, reading about a SM metagame that clearly I'm never gonna be able to play) to do instead.

by Spark Eletran Thu Dec 08, 2016 10:06 pm

SR/Reassemble a Jolly Zygarde; can't decide between 50% and 10%; they take identical Identical IVs so if the machine lets me swap between forms with Aura Break without losing stats that'd be pretty awesome because Thousand Arrows is REALLY cool

it does not let you :v

also: that's hilarious bc this might be the gen where i actually get Into more competitive stuff mspa

by cephalopodAscendant Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:49 am

Yeah, in some ways it feels kind of parallel to XY's issues. Both of them had one thing they did really well, but everything else was kind of half-baked. And neither one really had a postgame to speak of. Plus the new species all got overshadowed by older generations, especially Gen I. Why does GameFreak always have to leave the initial games in each generation with such glaring flaws?

by Spark Eletran Fri Dec 09, 2016 6:09 pm

I'd argue SM's postgame is better than XY's, because there's at least a more interesting sort-of-story and a whole part of an island to explore. Still not much, though.

oh yeh btw I forgot to mention here, I did a test for an art college here in brazil (bc we get into colleges thru Large Tests) and I paaaaassed

still don't know if i'll study there mostly bc it's far away (in the Big City São Paulo) and Money, but it's lookin p likely

by ilikeoctopus Fri Dec 09, 2016 7:04 pm

Still haven't finished the game yet, and finals week is upon me. I was hoping to get back into the competitive scene, but if it's as tedious as it sounds I may just wait around and see what happens.

Also, congrats, Spark! I'm curious--what's an art test like? Most of my art friends submitted portfolios to colleges, is it something like that or is it "hey draw something in front of judges" or what?

by Spark Eletran Fri Dec 09, 2016 8:29 pm

It's not exactly an art test - it's 60 objective questions, an essay and a drawing prompt of some sort within four hours.

by d_what Fri Dec 09, 2016 9:08 pm

Ooh that sounds interesting :0 I bet you have people complaining that art tests should all be practical tests, but honestly there's value in theory. What kinda questions do you have to answer? Congrats!

((Secretly: I'm hoping if you get an official university level art education you can start giving me tips heheh))

I'd also like to recant; synchronise was not nerfed, that was something badly communicated that I'd picked up from reddit. Everything else still applies though :/ if any of you guys want Leftovers, I have, like, 6... Preferably for destiny knots...

E: honestly unless you're a) primarily playing VGC or battle spot and therefore can't use older pokemon, or b) really interested in using new pokemon or buffed things like Pelliper and Mantine, you can do all of your training, breeding and all the other stuff in ORAS and move things over through bank. Especially since getting to level 100 is easy with Blissey bases and then you can properly make use of Hyper training.

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