AyTales

Going to replace Smeargle with Carbink. Let's go.

I haven't picked this up in about week because I kinda hate Smeargle and planning for him means I either become super OP or he stays useless. Similarly, Aegislash (Shield Forme), while cool in theory, really isn't great. I'm thinking of replacing one or both of them with Carbink and/or Bastiodon. Decisions, decisions.

So I didn't take screenshots of either Tangrowth battle since they were both very easy, and Shuckle / Pyuku alone really carried them. Soak + Toxic is such a great combination. I did lose once with Zel + Taka by PP stalling myself out, but most of that came from parahax and confusion bad luck. I did learn that Redux has an insanity mode, so I turned that on. Insanity increases the level of all enemy Pokemon by 10% +1, so that'll be good. Corey was well-designed, but I ended up turning his advantage against him because of this little fucker and the highlighted move. Changing Corey's Pokemon to Water type causes the poison mist field to poision all of his Pokemon, and many take extra damage due to one reason or another. I essentially put Pyuku in the field, Soak'd them, Recovered, and swapped in another mon to stall the time. Pyuku's recover couldn't last forever, and Zangoose ended up knocking him out. Shuckle carried at the end, though. Singles format just does a lot for this type of stall team. Note: I did use Rare Candies on Honedge to get him to Level 35 to evolve him, but it didn't really change anything. And with Corey down, I now have 2 badges and 3 medals!

Oh, I realize I haven't shown these were masters fights. Tada!

Let's fucking go! Florinia has historically always been the most difficult gym leader for me. She consistently fucks me up in challenge runs, and this masters fight was no exception. Shuckle, again, clutches it out and outstalled Commander's well-designed stall team. Here's the well-thought-out and trial and errored early game plan: Start Happiny and Smeargle She starts Gogoat and Smearlge Happiny uses Sweet Kiss on Cradily Smeargle uses Minimize Gogoat uses Grassy Terrain Cradily uses Rock Slide. Misses Smeargle. Happiny uses anything. Smeargle uses Minimize. Gogoat uses Energy Ball to KO Happiny Cradily uses Rock Slide and misses Smeargle Send out Wobbuffet Smeargle uses final Minimize Wobbuffet uses Mirror Coat Gogoat uses Energy Ball on Wobbuffet Cradily uses Rock Slide and either hits itself in its confusion or misses Wobbuffet Gogoat is KO'd by Mirror Coat Florinia sends out Cherrim Cherrim uses Sunny Day Cradily uses Rock Slide Wobbuffet uses Destiny Bond Smeargle uses Toxic on Cradily Wobbuffet uses any move Smeargle uses any move Cradily uses Rock Slide and hits / doesn't hit / hits itself. Cherrim uses Solar Beam and KO's Wobbuffet, taking itself out in the process Send out Shuckle Florinia sends out Roserade (It gets tricky here, and idk how consistent the AI is) Shuckle uses Power Split on Roserade Smeargle uses Night Shade on Roserade Roserade uses Magical Leaf on Smeargle and KO's him Cradily uses Rock Slide, probably hits Send out Honedge Shuckle uses Shell Smash Honedge uses Aerial Ace on Roserade Roserade uses Magical Leaf on Honedge Cradily uses Giga Drain on Honedge Honedge barely survives bceause of the Power Split Honedge uses Shadow Sneak on Roserade Shuckle uses Shell Smash Roserade uses Magical Leaf and KO's Honedge Cradily uses Rock Slide, hitting likely Send out Pyukumuku Cry because this looks like another failed attempt Use Soak on Cradily because its ability means you can't Soak Roserade Shuckle uses Shell Smash in a greed play. Rest if not greedy. I think used Rest in my final attempt. Roserade uses Magical Leaf on Pyuku Cradily uses Giga Drain on Pyuku Realize you wasted a turn with Pyuku Shuckle uses Rest (or sleeps) Pyuku uses Recover, knowing its over Roserade uses Magical Leaf on Pyuku Cradily uses Giga Drain Pyuku survives with 1 HP! Oran berry activates and he recovers 50% HP. Shuckle sleeps Pyuku attempts Recover again Roserade crits Magical Leaf. Crying ensues. Cradily rock slides and faints from poison Florinia sends out Abomasnow Shuckle wakes and uses Wrap on Abomasnow Roserade uses Magical Leaf Aboma uses Blizzard Play by play gets boring here. I use Power Split on Abomasnow just in case since it was mostly physically attacking and the earlier Power Split only boosted its special attack. From that point on, it's just "Use Wrap whenever its effect runs out and use Rest when the next set of attacks would drop you below 25% health. Pray you don't get crit at the worst time." Noteable, though, is that Hippodown is a clearly inferior stall here. It uses Smack Down on Shuckle and does no damage at all, and Sand Tomb does more damage to it than Wrap ever could. Roserade uses Synthesis often during this part of the stall, but runs out of PP for it and eventually stalls itself out.

Oh, yeah. So I suppose the Torterra-solo stopped at Kiki, thinking about it, since Turtonator was available. The run ended up being fairly easy after getting all six mons and I stopped after Radomus. Turtle team is: Turtwig Squirtle Shuckle Turtonator Tirtouga Lapras Torkoal Also, if you don't want to grind Charmeleon that whole way, you can use the daycare. It doesn't take very long nor much mental focus to run up and down in Peridot ward's train tracks and you can get it to that level fairly quickly that way to learn Flamethrower.

So, I didn't need to hack in an Oval Stone. Turns out you can bypass the level limit through the daycare which is within my current rules. I did so to get Shuckle and Pyukumuku to levels where I can get their final movesets. I initially then battled Florinia with a lvl 45 Pyuku and a lvl 44 Shuckle and won, but that seems cheap as hell so reset and common candied them back down to lvl 25 to keep the challenge. We'll see where this takes me: Trying my hand at Florinia with this team now, since Pyuku and Shuckle are no longer gutted by a lack of moveset. We'll see how it goes.

First rule break of the run: * Hacking in an Oval Stone to evolve Happiny I don't think I can beat Florinia Master with my current team.

Welp. Florinia masters looks impossible. I might believe that Smeargle could solo by getting lucky with misses, but Roserade has Magical Leaf so that's bust. Florinia master starts out with Gogoat and Cradily. Gogoat uses Grassy Terrain and then spams Energy Ball. Cradily spams Rock Slide. If I knock out one of the two, she sends out either Cherrim or Roserade. Cherrim sets up sun and Solar Beam spams while Roserade has been seen only once and Magial Leaf'd Smeargle. I'm kinda back to the drawing board on this one, and I'm not sure where to go. Maybe substitute? I'm not sure how well it would really help, though. I'll think it through.

Unfortunately not, no. Here's what I remember. General: Curse was a very important part of the run Leech Seed was very useful You need to over-level, for sure. So there's RNG on when Torterra listens to you. Thankfully it's bulky enough to not have that much issue. I may have used battle items? Honestly unsure at this point. It's been a few months. Julia Ground type. I evolved into Grotle for this, but I don't remember much about this fight Scraggy Gang It'll become very clear, very quickly if you need to over-level here. I'm honestly unsure if I did. Tangrowth Don't remember any issue here. Tangrowth wasn't doing much damage to Grotle, IIRC. Florinia Biggest first hurdle, if I remember right Used the Elemental Seed for the extra defense May have even over-leveled to Torterra at this point and to get Synthesis Shelly You need to take in a second Pokemon into this fight because the game bugs out if you do not. I brought in a level 1 Pokemon that didn't do anything first turn but eat an attack. I unfortunately don't remember past that. Shade took a handful of tries but I was able to OHKO most of his mons, but I may have needed to EV train to outspeed his Gengar and OHKO. This is really only possible in vanilla Reborn because of the soft level cap.

If you're willing to overlevel, I know Torterra can make it all the way through Aya solo. I've done it as part of my 'Turtle Squad' run where the second available turtle was Squirtle after Aya. That gives you a fair amount of breathing room when it comes to Pokemon choice.

Circling back to today, I came up with the challenge in my initial post! I debugged in Happiny, Wynaut, Honedge, and Smeargle. I planned out their (admittedly limited) movepool for Julia. Smeargle was a treat. I literally only had wild Pokemon and Grand Hall trainers to choose from for Sketch, so I mapped out the attacks the Grand Hall trainers had for each day of the week. Turns out there were a few great choices. I ended up going with Minimize, Poison Powder, Night Shade, and Reflect. They all seemed useful for upcoming battles. Night Shade in particular would make Smeargle a surprisingly heavy hitter. Now it was time for Julia. It... was not easy. I knew I wanted Smeargle to set up. A +6 Evasion Night Shade spamming nightmare would do well against Julia, but that turned out to be harder than expect. Julia continuously would target Smeargle and would hit surprisingly often. Even at +6, one of her two Pokemon would manage to hit. It was a bit of a nightmare. Here was the winning strategy: Happiny + Smeargle Happiny Sweet Kisses Smeargle Reflects She Sparks Happiny twice, knocking it out Send out Honedge Honedge Shadow Sneaks Electrike Smeargle Minimizes Both of Julia's mons (hopefully) miss Smeargle Honedge Shadow Sneaks Electrike Smeargle Night Shades Electrike Electrike faints Julia's metal Pikachu clone misses with Spark If all that happened perfectly, I'd be good. Smeargle could get hit three times with Reflect before fainting generally, so I was good there. Eventially Julia starts targetting Honedge and it's a bit of a crapshoot from there. In the end, Wobbuffet came out with Mirror Coat to knock out Electrode. And so Julia is down and I'm on to the Scraggy gang, Tangrowth, and Florinia. No major changes to movesets are planned. Here's what I plan to have by level 25 for everyone. I'll keep you all informed on how it goes!

The beginning took a lot of grinding, and I don't have screenshots for most of it. This run initially started out with a Pyukumuku and Shuckle buddy cop run, but I learned quickly I would not be able to beat Redux this way. I had hopes, though, and figured my best shot was overleveling the two of them and just dealing with the disobedience. To that end, I got a Zigzagoon with Pickup! I trained it to Level 20 and used the one available Rare Candy before Julia. And so my Rare Candy hunt could begin. I power leveled 5 Meowths with Pickup to level 20 as well and grinded against Noibats in the Underground Railnet. It took a while. After a few hours spread across a week or so, I'd gotten enough Rare Candies to maximize my Rare Candy drops from Pickup. I continued to grind, aiming to get Shuckle to a high enough level to take out Aster and Eclipse. Turns out just Pyuku and Shuckle don't work well against those two. This is where I found out Redux has a second hard level cap. I couldn't go above 23 regardless of how many candies I got. Bummer. So while I did manage to beat Aster and Eclipse with a level 23 Pyuku and Shuckle, I could not beat even Singles Julia. This is where I initially dropped the challenge.

I've done a few stupid challenge runs of both Reborn and Memeborn, so I wanted to try my hand at Redux. I enjoy stall playstyles even in single player, because the "set up and sweep" playstyle isn't quite to my taste and I enjoyed when my Pokemon take forever to put down. With that in mind, I added together the Attack and Special Attack of all evolved Pokemon. I was going to take the bottom six and use those to beat Redux which would have been these: Shuckle Smeargle Wishiwashi (Solo Form) Wobbuffet Luvdisc Blissey However, I ignored Wishiwashi during these things because it's a pain in the ass to keep it below 50% through an entire battle. Also not fun. So we get rid of Wishiwashi and add the next weakest. I also noticed a fun addition at 14th place. Aegislash Shield Forme. Essentially, I could include Aegislash if I never gave it any attacking moves once it to go an Aegislash. That sounded fun, so my final team is this: Shuckle Smeargle Wobbuffet Blissey Pyukumuku Aegislash (Shield Forme). So, we're off. However, a few rules: * Set mode * Item Clause is on. No items in battle. * I will debug in the above six Pokemon at level 1. * I can use other Pokemon during grinding. * All gym leaders must be defeated in their Master mode. * Honedge cannot keep Swords Dance And that's all! Let's see how this goes.

Do you still have that sheet?

Thank you! I'll have to go into that area and see what Pokemon are there and update the gym leader availability.

That'd be awesome to have, yeah!

Thanks for this. I will update. Sorry, I hadn't seen this until today.

Yep! They've been a huge help.

Possibly. So far the only items I have listed are megastone. I'd likely create a new spreadsheet for items, because the current one is already so large it lags. So in summary, yes, I'd be interested in creating another spreadsheet for items.

If you notice other things missing from my spreadsheet, let me know, and I'll update it. Always appreciate help.

Thanks, I'll look into it and update.

Thank you! I've updated this. Also huge shoutout to Tari for all of the comments on the spreadsheet. All of those have been updated as well. Sorry for the delay, I was taking a break from Reborn.

I'm having trouble finding when suspicion first fell on DigitalAmber. What was the initial reason everyone started voting for them?

Haven't heard an reason to note vote for him. I'll change my vote if someone makes a good argument otherwise. Eliminate Castiel