Cyphre

It's a considerably rare encounter in Badlands, desert place where

Budew => Friendship for Roselia => Sun Stone for Roserade (Ground/Fighting). It's pretty good, very different pokemon from Gliscor. Best use for this Roserade, in my opinion, is a Technician Vacuum Wave Roserade with Modest nature. It's comparatively frail and not too fast, if anything, i would compare it to something like Chandelure. Still, its a very good pokemon in it's own right.

I might not remember it correctly, but didnt she use Zoroark on top of the Pyramid in a double battle with Aelita?

Would be more correct to say her team in chapter 15 is built to function the best on the Fairy Tale field, this is what i meant (where is her Zoroark i wonder). Sorry if my wording add confusion sometimes.

I never made out early game as very hard, i do think that pushing EV training cards after a later gym is a nonsensical desicion that only wastes a player's time without adding anything to the challenge. You are indeed not "required" to EV train until Narcissa, however a lot of people will still do it, it will just take much more time. You know it's still a 31 IV, 252 Atk EV, +1 from seed 150 base attack Aegislash? Of course it wont OHKO "everything", it's still not "just a Shadow Sneak". Furthermore, we havent been fighting Melia on a field that was custom build for her pretty much. Maybe instead of being aggressive for no reason and trying to undermine other people, implying their "struggles with teambuilding", you could actually read the initial post and see that i fairly comfortably adapted and was able to build my team to defeat Geara and v13 trainers, but didnt find it enjoyable or well designed? And in my, i believe, absolutely valid opinion, there is also a way to design things not around making half of the fights a monotype Lollapalooza that will just abuse the Field. And you again had some struggles with understanding my point with that message. I dont NEED to be manipulating fields, yes. Claiming that changing Fields isnt a clever strategy is such a ridiculous claim i dont even know where to begin with this. Maybe Trick Room against faster teams is a cheap way to play now? Entry Hazards put enemy into a disadvantage, maybe forbid them too? From what i can see you didnt try to understand or maybe even read my point and went all self righteous and aggressive into this, i believe, civilized discussion of conflicting opinions. I will defend my position, while people that disagree with me will defend their position. I believe this is how fruitful discussion should go and it will allow developers to see all sides of arguments and decide, what is a more fitting way to design their game. I am not insisting on anything and cannot and will not force them to do anything. As i claimed in the beginning, if this is how the game will decide to be, i will just do it on Normal next time and i fail to see a problem. So i would prefer for people to not go into personal "childish and toxic" attacks in this topic, if you want to say something personal, do it in the messages.

And why manipulating Fields, which is a MAJOR mechanic in the game and is one of the advocated focal points of the entire experience, is a lesser option than abusing them? Why not give the player an option to either be prepared to directly abuse Haunted Field and counter Spiritomb, OR give him an option to be prepared by having a fitting team in the box that can change the field to YOUR advantage? I do not understand this advocating of "less options = better difficulty". It doesnt have to be a singular solution. I am a player that prefers counters and deflects in fighting games and i like to play chess with black, and in the same vein, as a human, in pokemon i much prefer ruining advantage of the opponent instead of abusing it myself to a higher degree. And now forced fields like Misty Terrain and moves as such dont even override existing Field, which was, again, another viable strategy to counter a spot in the fight you had troubles with before. (Which i understand now that Indeedee and such are in the game, but still).

If he was even worse and unbeatable i would have a rage rant, not a critique. You also heavily overestimate, first, amount of players who will be prepared for such a threat immediately, as well as amount of pokemon who are capable of one shotting spiritomb in this situation while surviving Shadow Sneak from hell. Again, im not advocating for a Crest nerf, im advocating for an opportunity for me to counter the entire field and use a different approach. Edit: Nvm, read message above.

I want to try to apply it directly to the damage formula. Level 87 Spiritomb with 252 Atk EV got 270 Atk, while Mega Altaria with 252 Defence EV got 271 Defence, so basic damage should be around 47, 46.98 from my calculcaitons. WIth added 30% x5 increase (assuming it's flat from base attack every time, which might not be the case at all), Shadow Sneak on 31 Iv 252 Def EV should deal 175 damage, that is true. Now if your Mega Altaria is not invested in Defence, basic damage becomes 57, and with boosts + field it becomes 213 damage. We are talking here about 31 Hp and Def IV, however without EV training. Such Mega Altaria has 248 HP. While it doesnt outright one shot, the picture changes entirely if some of it's IVs are not perfect. And that, again, assuming we add same 30% bonus of its basic attack to calculations every time, and it doesnt scale with every consequtive boost. Which can be tested, but i do not have backup saves this far back, so only developers can tell which one is the case here. As well is Mega Altaria having very respectable bulk with 75 base HP and 110 base Defence. While it might be a given for a lot of players that they should breed perfect IVs, far from most players will pour so many hours into such things, especially considering a lot of pokemon will have to be changed for a lot of fights, with berries or without. I understand what you are trying to say, but we are, again, talking about just several selected direct counters, and even then they need to be very well attuned. Not to mention it's just Shadow Sneak with pathetic 40 base power, anything that will not one shot Spiritomb will be a subject to a much more deadly Phantom Force or 100% Hypnosis. I do not deny it is possible and there are ways to do it reliably, my main argument is still that it bottlenecks you into naturally preferring several types and strategies, while completely closing off a lot of others.

My bad, meant Sucker Punch. And of course there are ways to deal with it, it's not "unwinnable" by any means, berries can definitely help with that, but the amount of things that even can counter it at all is miniscule. This is exaclty what i mean by restrictive. That doesnt seem like you took x5 30% attack boosts into consideration here, as well as 1.5 boost from Haunted Field. I doubt you can calculate this with calculators that exist for base pokemon games, so this one is void and null anyway. Would appreciate if you applied this to the damage formula directly, although it is hard to say if this 30% boost applies to base attack every time or percentages go up for every death. That's great and all, but this is 1 particular team that uses Rest Talk, Mega Mawile and Endeavor Wishiwashi. I suppose a lot of fights also could be dealth with by breeding several Ice Shard Donphans with Endeavor, or just use Wobuffet, if this is how you want to play pokemon. And even with such specifically tailored and trained team, as it stated under the video, for some fights it took 50 to 60 tries. If you claim that every team can win every fight, i think we are playing different games. I will again emphasize, that pokemon, as a series, as a genre, is a game where you can use a team you want and you like, and bring this team to victory. There are much more team combinations and pokemon that will never work in those fights under those conditions, and Intense difficulty or not, this is not how it should work with a skilled player. And how many people, in your opinion, would fully invest in Defence on Delphox naturally? Because even with a berry this is hardly an uninvested Defence stat.

I highly suggest you to read what Spiritomb crest does and actually try to fight this Spiritomb yourself in the haunted field. It easily one shots and outspeeds both Defensive Mega Altaria and Mega Mawile (who cannot one shot him with 252 EV Attack Adamant 31 Attack IV Bullet Punch) and even Carbink, and of course easily tear apart any special wall with physical moves.

Ah yes, that very slow extremely powerful boosted by a seed Shadow Sneak from Aegislash with precognition about when to use King's Shield and when not to. Understandable. I agree with Fairy, but this "majority" of dragons consist only of Hydreigon if i remember correctly. And as i stated, i used powered up Bullet Punches against Fairy types in the end. My assumption is based on the fact that Intense, combined with enemy teams hand-tailored to abuse every single field, forces players to spend an extraordinary amounts of time to specifically breed and train complete counters to the teams, at times up to 5-6 members for every fight. Which is far beyond of what should be expected from a player, as one should not spend dozens of hours for a single fight because it left only a couple of tiny strategies to abuse. Then you clearly didn't fight Geara on his field, since Spiritomb in the end, by the graces of onmiscient AI, will not be defeated by any ghost type ever. As i very clearly stated in my post, it is the combination of Spiritomb Crest and the power of the Haunted Field, along with it's lack of counters to it, as well as an AI that makes decisions after you pick a move, that makes it a badly designed encounter. And i think it's fair to have a pokemon game, a game all about individual teambuilding options and expressing yourself through your team, be open to more options for defeating a challenging fight than just building a direct counter team for every major fight. The problem with Intense is not how inherently hard it is, it is how restricting it is in it's approach because of the Fields. I believe in this case i represent the majority of Intense players, who want to have a considerable, however fair challenge, that also respect your time and strategic prowess, not your patience.

What you describe is normal difficulty, which is a winnable fight, Intense is a bit of a different story. The only way to even survive Snarl after 1 boost with 3 hp is when Houndoom got -Sp. Atk Nature, and even then you are in a dead end situation, not to mention Item ban.

Flying types are your best bet here, stuff like Talonflame, Crobat, Dodrio and others, yeah.

Yeah, i gave up in v13 on Intense in this fight after 5 hours of retries. 2 boosts in a row cannot let you outspeed Houndoom and it will always kill you on turn 3, and with metronome even Water Spout or Head Smash crit wont kill it. I just do not possess amount of free time, patience and cracks in my head to try it for more. This was just another fight that wasnt properly thought out for Intense difficulty, but since it's such an early and obvious one, i hope future versions will address this.

Can we have a moment of appreciation for how much of an untouchable god in this version is Pyukumuku? Not only this absolute chad carry Purify which is the only skill that can counter some Fields, his Memento is vital in beating a lot of Rift bosses.

I think those are fine, but you definitely at least need to be able to rearrange a starting pokemon between fights, and difficulty of back to back fights like this, once again, will be back to normal if Fields will be adjusted appropriately. You gonna enjoy the Goomink quest fight with Kawabunga or whatever was this whale's name. I swear this thing got like 999 HP EV and infinite Dive + Rest. In a moment of brilliance, as a thought, i tried to Skill Swap Insomnia to him, to only be met with "denied, smartass". Only double Memento + Knock Off full Grass team with Water Absorbs and Nasty Plot Cacturne with his crits carried me through this nightmare.

In my opinion, it's in top 3 hardest fights in the entire game, in large parts because of how Melia's team was positioned, with her Meganium with screens being dead last and almost always being left vs Typhlosion or Poison types. My best advice is probably to hard focus on 1 team while manipulating Melia's AI to use certain moves and attack same side whenever possible. From my experience, killing Geara's team first is much faster and easier, while Zetta got some insanely hard hitters you dont want on the field at all, like Crest Sylvally or Eruption Typhlosion. You can also use Trick Room to bait their slower pokemon to appear and use your even slower pokemon to gain momentum. I dont remember exact levels you can be in there, but Camerupt learns Eruption at level 52, and combined with -Speed nature in Trick Room, after getting rid of Gyarados, Eruption can deal a lot of damage. Another of my MVP pokemon was Sturdy Togedemaru,who baited a lot of attacks from Sylvally and Marowak with Spiky Shield. Oh, and couple of turns were vital when Throh with WIde Guard came to protect Melia from Rock Slides. Basically, focus on killing Geara's team, while staying alive for as long as possible, after that 2 v 1 Zetta if possible.

Yeah, my Cinncino was completely useless against shields, so i had to bench him every time.

Steel types, in particular you can catch Copparajah in Safari zone. Also get Oranguru from Hula meadow, he is the only pokemon who naturally learns Trick Room. Thick Fat Hariyama is a great addition too.

1) Yes, it dependant on stats. I cannot fully say how much damage you need to break a shield, but it is dependant on HP and defences of the Rift pokemon. 2) While speed get reduced, they cannot skip turns with paralysis or confusion. 3) Multi-hit moves dont work properly, only first hit out of 5 connects. 4) Poison and toxic doesnt seem to damage shields, however can reduce the actual health bar.

No. While their speed become halved, they cannot skip turns through para or confusion.

Lord Pyukumuku is your god in this fight if this is the one im thinking. He can cleanse the field with Purify, making Lovely Kiss much less of an issue. After he cleanse the arena he can use Memento, which will ease the fight a lot.

So, at this point i finally finished this behemoth of a version from the beginning of the game. So much was improved by abusrd degree in v13, from visuals and music to dialogues and pacing, but there is one thing where i feel the game failed miserably to an embarassing degree. It was in it's difficulty. To begin with, i would consider myself a skilled and experienced pokemon player. I know and remember most abilities and can apply them when needed, can plan around gimmicky strategies, not a stranger to specific EV training e.t.c., and i've been replaying this game on Intense since... v7 i believe for every release. With that i might as well address the question: why not just play Normal and without those rules if Intense is such a dumpster fire? Mostly because Normal is still way too easy even with the same ruleset of Set/No items and cannot satisfy me, and about items, couple of max revives can solve any battle, which just cheapens every fight for me. Thus i naturally turn towards next available option, and this time... this time it all fell apart. Let me tell you why. I will not address in here issues like very late EV training that was done for absolutely no reason and is counterproductive to everything in the game, or just absurd spam with OP items even in the beginning of the game, since slapping Life orb, Focus sash and Assault Vest on everything seems to be the get go method for most trainers. What i want to address is a horrible mess that are Fields, especially combined with Crests, that become more and more overpowered, how it dampens experience and takes away from the immersion and enjoyment. In fact, 2 of the hardest and worst, in my opinion, fights in chapter 15 are a prime example of how badly designed are Fields. One of them is a very early Melia fight for the normal badge, and the second one is Geara's fight. So, Melia fights on a Fairy Tale Field and her entire team exist to maximize it's potential. So your first thought would be most likely to change the field. Then you go into the Field Manual to check, how can you give yourself some advantage. Lo and behold... you cannot. There is no existing way to change this field, meaning you are forced to fight on this one with it's ridiculous bonuses. Okay, let's see what we can use. Dragon boost is useless for us, since most of her team is Fairy or Steel anyway, but we can abuse 1.5 boost to Steel and Fairy to some degree. In fact, Bullet Punches are the main reason i was able to win at all. In the end, attempting this fight looked like this: counter first pokemon, she uses next. Find an exact counter for it, breed for IV and EV train it, then see next one, rince and repeat. In the end you see that this strategy falls apart in the end, so you scratch that completely and start making a new one, pokemon by pokemon. Because you have no other options. Because there is no other counterplay. It's time consuming to a ridiculous degree. Geara's fight brings the worst out of both worlds. First let's talk about Haunted Field. 1.5 boost to Ghost moves and they STAB Normal types now. Hypnosis and WIll o Wisp now will never miss, considering Intense also boosts ALL enemy moves by 20%. And huzzah, we can change the field! We even got couple of options now. Let's go over them. We can change it into a Blessed field, with Purify, which sounds great, right? Now here is the problem, two of them in fact. Geara will spam Phantom Force like there is no tomorrow, especially on Pyuku. And what would you know, this particular move IMMEDIATELY turnes Blessed Field back to Haunted one. Meaning Blessed field will never stay up. And even if it did, both STABs that can harm Ghost types are now weakened to 0.5 of their strenght, so the only way is to fight with neutral coverage and abuse AI with normal types so that they never again used anything that ups Haunted Field back. Now, let's assume you decided to fight in the Haunted field and Sucker Punch'd your way to the final pokemon through Dragapult and Mega Gengar. In there you find a crest Spiritomb and this thing is... Let's put it this way, it's almost impossible to get through this in the Haunted field. You are given only one tool against Haunted Field, Blessed Field, which is also countered by things that create Haunted Field itself, making it a system that collapses on itself. I will give one more example of a thing that bothered me a much earlier point in the game. You fight Amber in a Volcanic Top field. You can turn it into Sky or Mountain Field. In turn, you can turn Mountain one into a Snowy Mountain or back into Volcanic top one. Mountain and Volcanic top fields share the same idiotic self collapsing system from Blessed and Haunted field, in that almost every attack from Amber's pokemon will turn Mountain Field back into her own. And Snowe Field is an another dead end field which every fire attack will melt back to Mountain Field. So if you want to keep Snowy field on board, you have to spam Blizzard, which is not effective against Amber at all. Sky field is the only one that directly weakens her. Remember that before her gym Jan says someone managed to take the fight with her Underwater? Well, that was a huge fat lie to the player, a relic from earlier versions. Another example is a Grass leader's field, Bewitched Woods. The only thing you can turn them into, and ONLY with purify, is into a normal Forest Field. Which still powers up Grass moves tremendously. And Forest Field is another dead end terrain that cannot be transformed into anything at all somehow. Im giving all those example to show how much is stacked against you inherently instead of it being a two way road. While it might give just some advantage and be somewhat reaonable on Normal difficulty, on Intense combination of maxed IV/EVs, absurd items, overpowered crests and overpowered fields that has no counterplay creates a toxic and miserable experience, where you spend hours on retries and training pokemons for one fight that can only be beaten with couple existing strategies, which, in my opinion, goes directly against everything pokemon stand for. Some people compare those fights to puzzles, and you are wrong. Puzzle is when you have a square hole and a square block, and you fit this block in there. When you have a square hole and a triangle block, which you smack against the hole until one of those pieces break, this is a horrible designed system, and not a puzzle. What could be done instead? My suggestion is instead of a million gimmicky absurd fields that just exist in a vacuum, make a system of interconnected Fields that can be changed into one another to create a truly dynamic experience. Example: i have a Volcanic top field. If i use moves like Surf and Hydro Pump, it becomes a Misty field, from water vapors. From there i can use Blizzard to make a Frozen field, or use something like Curse or Ominous WInd to make Haunted Field. For example, from Frozen field i could use fire move to melt the ice and create Water surface field, with Dive taking me underwater, from where i could swipe the rest of her team. This could also be used to make much more varied and interesting teams for enemies, and they would need to adapt to the fields as well as you, with Fields constantly changing around. For now, none of the teams Xen admins or other strong trainers use feels like their own teams. The feel like gimmicky bullshit that exist only for this one Field, for this one fight, with their teams never being their "own" teams, when it could be a great reflection of a personality. Remember Geara's team on the mountain? It was a bunch of evil pricks, like Krookodile, Gengar and generally evil themed pokemon. Now? Now he is another ghost gym leader, because the Field demands it. This is a horrible design choice that, again, goes against everything pokemon stand for. I still love the game, but if this will not be fixed, i do not think i will touch Intense mode ever again and next time, for the first time in my Rejuvenation experience, will roll the entire game with just Normal, because i want to enjoy the game and have some fun, and i still value my time. This Intense run was the most miserable time i've ever had with Rejuvenation, and probably with pokemon in general, which is a huge shame.

Surprised no one talks about our lord and savior Lord Pyuku. Purify will cleanse the arena and Gard has no way to revert it back, making Lovely Kiss a move that can actually miss, which helps a lot, and reduces her damage, and gets rid of passive sleep damage.

It seems like this version is bugged and night events simply dont trigger after Ryland. That includes Mosley, night pokemon and night zygarde cells.