sound of silence

I've speculated in another thread, but it'll be adrienne, titania, amaria, hardy and saphira last. Field effects are a good discussion point though. Adrienne I think will have the mist field, if only because of how dangerous faeries are as set-up sweepers and how annoying it would be to be unable to status them (think belly drum slurpuff, belly drum azumarril, SD mega mawile, CM unaware clefable) I have no idea what Titania's will be...I'm kind of hoping we fight her in the ametrine mountain though as it would be quite difficult to overcome the field effect there if you don't have a fast EQ user. I realise that's highly unlikely though. No other field really seems suited to helping Titania...Maybe she will have a new one Amaria should be water's surface, or if Ame is feeling really cruel, underwater. I suspect this battle will make florina's seem fun in comparison, given the cruel hax, trapping and residual damage a team of 6 whirlpool users could achieve. Hardy I think could use a field of his own, even though the rocky field or the mountain would suffice. It's just at this point of the game there will be many options to take on rock types offensively, though taking them on defensively will be a struggle with field boosted STAB rockslides, and the threat of trick room from lunatone/solrock. Saphira...Could be the superheated field again, as that would nerf her bad ice weakness while giving the option for her to set the field on fire while running a team full of flying dragons/Mega Charizard X. Dragon is a hard type to tank at the best of times let alone while your best defensive options are copping serious residual damage and eating Pseudo-STAB fire attacks to augment dragon STAB.

Based on the badge designs, I think its in the following order 14. Fairy 15. Steel 16. Water 17. Rock 18. Dragon Fairy seems likely as asides from returning to the city, the badge colours imply a mix of a color associated with girls (pink) and boys (blue) in an equal distribution across two equally shaped sides of a badge, indicating adrienne's lack of gender. Steel is next based on the shape and design appearing to be of some metal construction with a piece missing. Water as the blue badge appears to look like some kind of rain formation. Rock is a bit speculative as the second last. I think the badge looks sort of like a topographical view of a mountain. I also have a secondary theory on the badge of agate's leader being before saphira as an idea has occurred to me as to who could get past the barrier of the PULSE Mr. Mime. Additionally, I think at this point in the game is where the use of the rock climb HM will be awarded. You will need both rock climb and the help of the certain person to then get to labradorra city. The person you ask? Dragon is last. The 3 stars over the mountain I think indicate saphira and her sisters overlooking the path down victory road.

Aerodactyl does have all its STAB's and coverage in EQ boosted by the high striker effect (sky drop and smack down respectively). Otherwise a pokemon like braviary with sheer force could work as it gets strength, sky drop and superpower. Sheer force would allow it to hit hard every time too, and it gets bulk up for the defensive set up sweeper feel too. Ciel can avoid struggling with rock/steel though. I mean you have gliscor, which is just a pain to kill without ice types (also cop that excadril). Maybe a gyarados to stop being so weak to ice while abusing the field effect with dragon dance and bounce? You could have it with intimidate to weaken physical rock and steel types, or moxie to make it a nightmare while abusing high striker earthquakes. If you go with that, I'd probably replace noivern, since it just adds to a major ice weakness and there's no need for TR + Ice attacker to be so effective. I know Ciel is meant to be the weaker flying type trainer, but she needs to be challenging at the same time given how far into the game we are. DD mega Altaria might be broken, but I think gyarados would be a lot less broken given its slow to start with, the player has access to good stops to it setting up (sturdy magnezone, rotom-w, any electric with air balloon really) and there just needs to be some sort of danger aspect to her.

Actually, on second thoughts, I could think of an easy change to mega-altaria that would turn the battle into an absolute nightmare for the player Altaria @ Altarianite IDK what the EV's were Jolly -Sing -Dragon Dance -Earthquake -Return Behold the nastiest thing you can face under the big top. Dragon dance gives +2 to atk and speed under the field effect, outspeeding just about everything possible barring sand rush Excadril. Sing has 100% accuracy and shuts down any slower pokes who can beat you before boosting, EQ gets boosted to wreck all fairy resists especially considering attack boosts increase the chance of a good high strike roll for EQ. Return is for STAB via pixilate. If Ciel still needs a rock flying type... Aerodactyl @ white herb Unnerve 252 Atk, 252 Speed, 4 SpD Jolly -Curse -Sky Drop -Smack Down -Earthquake Offensive set up sweeper that has all it's STAB's and coverage getting boosts from the high striker, without any illegal moves (hint ame, it doesn't get acrobatics for that Taka battle) Curse and white herb means no speed drop and an attack + def boost so more potential to abuse the high striker rolls. Other notable options -Sheer force Braviary -Staraptor in general (high striker CC coverage anyone?) -A hawlucha of her own (If both Randomus and Luna get malamar, wynaut double up again?)

I think the main problem with Ciel is that the AI tries to set up when it should really be trying to attack instead. The AI's decision making is still atrocious (I had ciel try and swap archeops into my Rotom-W when it was spamming discharge after it's stellar job at walling togekiss). Crobat would've helped her team immensely given how OP acrobatics was shaping up to be on her field, while also giving her an option that would outspeed greninja. I think a few more of ciel's mons could've been abusing acrobatics for this fight, Also I expected M-Altaria to be abusing sing on her field, given how nasty sleep would be to deal with, though hyper voice was a nice touch. If Ciel were to abuse the field for sound moves, three words; BASED LORD CHATOT. That needs to happen. STAB, Field boosted Boomburst. Sing shutting down mons, rage from chatter. NP for set up. If I had the choice to help Ciel's team Crobat > Archeops: Defeatist just makes it a bit too easy, and crobat has nice bulk and speed to make people at least try somwhat harder for taking the easy way out. Chatot > Noivern: STAB boomburst, sing, chatter, nasty plot if needed. All the tools necessary for maximum rage inducement.

SubSplit Rotom-W was a god for me in both the double battles and Ciel's gym. Wore things down, haxed things with discharge, somehow ignored BLOODY TOGEKISS AND ITS SMEGGING FLINCHAX long enough to get a key pain split off and force the AI into bad decision making. Honourable mentions to shiny gardevoir for setting trick-room at clutch moments and walrein for making the PULSE fight easier + being good under trick room against ciel. I am stunned at the complete lack of speed investment on both fern and blakes pokemon though? Haxorus at least should've been outspeeding most of my team. That being said, curse everything about contrary serperior, who forced me to restart the double battle sequence and make sure I set trick room at a key moment (florina is much more useful if you use that field condition, let alone how damn difficult serperior is to defeat if you don't have a crobat)

If you don't want to use trick room or spend the heart scale (even though you should have heaps to use...), use an ability capsule to change magnezone's ability to sturdy. That will give you a chance to either paralyse mienshao (get T-wave from the move relearner) or hit it hard enough that you can revenge with bullet punch from metagross. Edit: And ninja'd. Good that you won though

..

Bronzor and metagross will be key to getting past this fight for you, even though you'll be stuck grinding for ages. My advice would be to take down hariyama as fast as you possibly can without losing metagross or bronzong. Once hariyama is down, the next stage of the fight involves finding an opportunity to set up Trick Room with either bronzong or metagross. This will help you hit everything but his ace first, and samson's team is frail enough that metagross will stand the best chance of KO'ing mienshao, blaziken, and hawlucha. Take care that his lucario does have a focus sash. I don't know how your team will deal with conkeldurr though. I think that you may want to get forretress out for this fight and get Toxic spikes from the move relearner, and set them as a suicide lead against his hariyama. You might be able to protect hax your way past conkeldurr in that sense, though it'll heal itself up with drain punch each time.

Oh damnit. Apologies for the misread.

When and where do you get the ability to give Titania the ice-cream by the way? That option didn't come up for me...

Yeah, for your team, do not burn the field, it won't help one bit. First piece of advice is get both escavalier and aggron out and into your team line up, and ditch sharpedo and surprisingly hariyama who actually isn't too useful this fight. Especially if escavalier has iron head + swords dance, you will find clefable so much easier to kill (provided that it's HP is not fire...I forget). Give aggron a cheri berry so it can KO wigglytuff and not get T-waved. You'll also need escavalier for porygon-Z, and I hope your special defense is higher than your defense. Fix that with some zinc otherwise it'll grab the download boost for special attack and it will cause you so much hurt. Lunatone needs more training as that might help against Porygon-Z as well. Otherwise that magneton would help provided its trained for long enough and has T-wave

I found PULSE swalot somewhat easy, since I had walrein change the field to the ice field through the use of blizzard. Set up leech seed with roserade, then sent out swampert and spammed bulldoze until it was dead (Since EQ would've reset the field and left me in all sorts of trouble). The tangrowths are easily the hardest, since you don't really have much in the way of strong moves/field changing effects at the time outside of numel and a few of the fire starters.

Thanks guys. The question was asked in the sense that will being in route 1 when the game would like me to progress elsewhere result in some sort of crash or not if I proceed to interact with that area of the game. I guess if worst comes to worst I can always go back to 14.6, get myself to agate and then switch back to 15 again. I mean, I could try and go through the mountain again, but I really cannot be arsed, much less that its confusing and I don't even know the steps I took to get there outside the glitch. That being said, the only thing I found from strength glitching so far is a TM in a dive spot...though now that I know about that egg....

So as the title says, I got lost, saw a chance to use the strength boulder glitch at an interesting point, and as a result, I found the exit out of the ice mountains into north adventurine forest. Are we allowed to be here at this point or have I done something I should not? Bear in mind I have made no story progression after beating Terra, if that helps answer the question. I'm hoping that won't stuff the game up. I didn't save in the forest itself, but I'm hopelessly lost in the ice mountains, so IDK if I can get back to a correct path.

Thought that was meant to be fixed so the cotton candy only restores 1/2 of your health from fainting...or maybe that change is being implemented in ep 15.

I'm rather disappointed we get hippopotas to be honest. Instant weather summoning mons should really only be at the very end of the game, though I guess an exception can be made for abomasnow since no speed boosting ability is linked to hail being active (although aboma should really only be available after terra). Being able to combine SS + Sand rush, Drizzle + swift swim (please never add king's rock ame) or the horrendous mistake of drought vulpix so early in the game + chlorophyll ruins the difficulty. Yeah I get you can refuse to use these strategies, but I'm sadistic and I want to see all suffer in order to make their way through the episodes, not get through on easy mode...

Point taken, but I think its still possible if only to spite corey, or perhaps noting that his skrelp was already well trained as opposed to other skrelp. I suppose it does lack some substance, it just seemed like a cool idea at the time. That being said, I'm not hugely sold on tentacruel being the PULSE pokemon as all PULSE pokemon have been shown to have natural abilities enhanced, and the flavour text for dragalgae indicates a stronger poison designed to eat through the hull of a ship (hence why no ship sails in reborn except for Amaria's). Tentacruel's makes at most a reference to a poison net, which really doesn't seem like something that pollutes the water to the extent that it is in reborn. Still thinking it'll be pulse dragalgae to fight. Maybe not Corey's though, but still it would be an interesting and cruel twist of fate.

Can't see mamoswine on serra's team as ground moves breaking the mirrors combined with its crappy special attack make no sense. I really hope Cloyster DOES NOT return. That thing enrages me given the AI has a bad habit of outpredicting me or forcing me to sack ampharos early to paralyse it. Avalugg I think will be on her team, if only for sturdy. Otherwise mons like barbaracle with shell smash can get an easy 6-0 depending on hax. I suspect abomasnow will return. Lapras > Walrein. Water absorb is the simple reason, though the potential to have lapras as a boosting sweeper is quite cruel. Vanilluxe would be evil on the field if ame chose to give that to serra, possibly glaceon as well given it has decent bulk despute mono-ice typing.

Okay, apologies if its already been posted, but my theory for ep 15 is this The PULSE pokemon that is causing further contamination of Reborn's water supply is Corey's skrelp. My theory comes from the animation when corey lets all his pokemon go that his skrelp jumps off the bridge towards the water supply. I suspect that it gets safely into the water (as opposed to corey falling into the Lapis Ward), but team meteor capture it and use it to further contaminate the water supply in the event someone shuts down the blackstream factory (where you fight the PULSE muk). If it isn't Corey's skrelp, dragalgae still makes a great deal of sense to fight as the PULSE pokemon here since I would think the murkwater field is specific for this part of the game, and adaptibility, 2x field boosted sludge waves would be insanely difficult to tank outside of a steel type pokemon. Considering that dragalgae also gets focus blast, and that ground moves fail on the field, dragalgae is left with only weaknesses to dragon (which are few, also lack of good physical hitting dragons), Ice (probably the best chance due to frost breath TM) and psychic (best time to have a medicham) I don't think we'll battle a PULSE muk again, as protean would work against it on the murkwater field the moment it changes type. It would be interesting as that just leaves 2 more of Corey's former pokemon to meet. One being grimer (IDK where that will end up, maybe we'll see that in the water plant as well?) and his crobat, which I have my theories of when we'll meet that, but that is for another thread. Feel free to start disproving a new theory.

One thing with the SR suggestion though: Anorith I think does know rapid spin, so once it comes out, it must be taken out ASAP.

I'd level up the maetric and noibat a bit more. Also get braixen to level 36, evolve it to get mystical fire and then use a common candy on it to go back to level 35 so it doesn't disobey you. Noibat and manetric will do very well together since noibat has telepathy. Just spam discharge and air cutter since noibat, due to telepathy, will not get hit by discharge. That should KO most of her pokemon that go out against you, or at least her first two mons. Anorith I have no answer for except that you need to keep training that buizel up. Cacnea is useless in this fight sadly. Your meowstic REALLY needs work. Thats just a bad moveset that needs screens (reflect and light screen are godly and why you have deleted them I have no idea).

Surprisingly, I have found Noel to be way too easy to beat except for the menace that is porygon-Z. Admittedly, I had no idea that his cincinno carried a king's rock though, but first time I stalled cincinno out with T-spikes and noivern, while the second time, the AI derped hard against chesnaught (God damn HP fire of all things on it though!!!). Clefable I used crobat with screech and cross poison, or escavalier. I kind of wish he had pyroar or something to stop excadril setting up a 6-0 sweep against him. Randomus is also too easy. He seriously needs another bug-neutral psychic, or at least not a quad bug weak one, especially given how easy it is to get good bugs to use against him (escavalier does very nicely here). Exeggutor needs to be scrapped from his line up for something else, perhaps some prankster screens from meowstic M? Terra is a joke once you understand the glitch field. None of her pokemon really abuse the field. She really needs a flygon to give another option of dragon spam, or some other fast ground types, not slow easy to kill ones like hippowdon and quagsire (incidentally ame, maybe move grass knot back to AFTER terra's gym, not before). Also don't have nidoking lead. There are enough pokes with protect that once nidoking goes down, t-spikes and protect abuse can get you quite far. Hardest, asides from charlotte, I'd say is kiki. She does not mess around in boosting and steamrolling through teams. Lacking speed against her team is pretty much instant death, and why meowstic is a godsend of a psychic mon. If you really want to make life hell for yourself, fight her when its raining too, and enjoy even harder to kill lucario and toxicroak. Aya would be nasty to fight, but the AI makes atrocious decisions for her fight. Dragalgae always comes out too early and can be turned into set-up bait through struggle bug/screens (forretress works nicely here).

Something else of note is that most people suspect that darmanitan is holding a choice scarf. There is zero way to outspeed that thing outside of priority.

I'd have to say galvantula could be worth looking at if only due to sticky web, which I think could help in later battles, even if you have to use it as a suicide lead. Very good choice against samson provided you can take on his hawlucha. It could also help vs terra as if you outspeed under the glitch field, you'll get an increased chance to land critical hits. Also good for randomus and some of luna's team. Piloswine may also be worth a look in if only due to blizzard for charlotte. Basically have a team-mate use fake out against typhlosion, hope it survives a hit from darmanitan, and then use blizzard to terminate the field. Real shame there's no eviolite in the game too, looking at your options. Good luck for ep15. Also for arbok, you don't need to go to that much trouble. Just make sure it knows acid spray. That will cut through clefable's defenses soon enough.