Pokémon Thread XIV: Return of the Pokémon Thread Strikes Back Harder

[Thormag]

Well, my first attempt at trying for a specific natured pokemon was an exercise in frustration; out of 60 goletts I was finally able to find one with an Attk positive nature, the Iron Fist ability (stupid Klutz...), and halfway decent Attk IVs.
...
Trying to get a pokemon that's anything remotely resembling uncommon is going to be a living hell, isn't it?

Welcome to the world of breeding.

I remember, when I was breeding for a Skarmory in ADV, how I managed to get a shiny before the Pokémon that I wanted (Impish with Sturdy and 31 Def and HP IVs). The shiny I got was Impish and had decent IVs, but it had Keen Eye. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to use it and decided that I was not going to settle for mediocrity, shiny or not.

It took me like 100+ more eggs to get a another decent Skarmory.

Breeding for nature is not hard (Everstone helps a lot). Breeding for nature and ability is annoying (but still not hard). When you add to that "decent IVs", you are forgoing entertainment from Pokemon for several days at least.

Breeding requires either tons of patience, ridiculous luck or RNG abuse.

[Mando Knight]

I remember, when I was breeding for a Skarmory in ADV, how I managed to get a shiny before the Pokémon that I wanted (Impish with Sturdy and 31 Def and HP IVs). The shiny I got was Impish and had decent IVs, but it had Keen Eye. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to use it and decided that I was not going to settle for mediocrity, shiny or not.

Keen Eye was the better ability then anyway. Sturdy was terrible (except when facing things that actually had Horn Drill, etc.) until Gen V.

[Mindfreak]

I had to breed oh so much until I finally got my Yanmas. One Compound Eyes and one Speed Boost. Both with perfect IVs.
It wasn't fun =/
But worth it!

[Thormag]

Keen Eye was the better ability then anyway. Sturdy was terrible (except when facing things that actually had Horn Drill, etc.) until Gen V.

Skarmory had no need for Keen Eye. Its function was that of a wall, so a drop in accuracy was pretty meaningless. Also, even though it was illegal to use OHKO moves in a tournament setting, Pokemon on the catridge liked to use Sheer Cold a lot. Fricking Lapras.

[Foeofthelance]

So, I'm considering putting together an all Lapras team to go through the Triple Battle Subway. The team looks as follows:

Flanker A: Water Absorb Lapras SpATK/SpDef EVs
Surf
Blizzard
Thunder
???

Tanker: Water Absorb Lapras SpDef/SPD EVs
Surf
Blizzard
Thunder
Rain Dance

Flanker C Water Absorb Lapras SpATK/SpDef EVs
Surf
Blizzard
Thunder
???

The idea is to swamp the other side in joint attacks, while constantly self healing via Surf/Rain. I recognize the inherent weakness to Grass/Thunder, as well as the fact that this will bounce of Steel. So thoughts on what to make the last two moves?

[Mando Knight]

So, I'm considering putting together an all Lapras team to go through the Triple Battle Subway. The team looks as follows:

Don't bother. There is no Triple Battle Subway.

Triples are possible at PWT, though.

Unfortunately, all that Lapras can really put in the last spot are Dragon Pulse, Signal Beam, and Hidden Power. Also, Grass is less of an inconvenience to you defensively than are Rock and Fighting, which Lapras is weak to thanks to being Ice typed as well as Water. With its low speed and offenses, and your total investment in SpA and SpD, it's completely vulnerable to many offensive opponents, such as Lucario (which can OHKO with Close Combat)... Water Absorb only provides 25% of your max HP back with each hit, and a focused strike on the center Lapras by three faster opponents is guaranteed a loss anyway.

[Thormag]

Don't bother. There is no Triple Battle Subway.

Triples are possible at PWT, though.

Unfortunately, all that Lapras can really put in the last spot are Dragon Pulse, Signal Beam, and Hidden Power. Also, Grass is less of an inconvenience to you defensively than are Rock and Fighting, which Lapras is weak to thanks to being Ice typed as well as Water. With its low speed and offenses, and your total investment in SpA and SpD, it's completely vulnerable to many offensive opponents, such as Lucario (which can OHKO with Close Combat)... Water Absorb only provides 25% of your max HP back with each hit, and a focused strike on the center Lapras by three faster opponents is guaranteed a loss anyway.

Wouldn't that team also be horribly walled by certain Pokemon like Snorlax, Blissey or Gastrodon? Sure, you might be recovering HP with Water Absorb, but walls usually have Toxic or some other type of "I win" button on stall wars.

[Mando Knight]

Wouldn't that team also be horribly walled by certain Pokemon like Snorlax, Blissey or Gastrodon? Sure, you might be recovering HP with Water Absorb, but walls usually have Toxic or some other type of "I win" button on stall wars.

Oh, yeah. Toxic on Blissey is also big trouble. Sure, you can keep up with the pain for a few turns, but then Toxic ramps up to where you take 50% and then 100% of your total HP per turn...

[Ryuho Tsugu]

Just when I think I can start to take it easy in the Dream World, something always happens...

Finally replenish my berries after the last round of furniture? A new set of furniture shows up.
Finally get close to finishing my DW female collection? A new area gets released.

At least Anticipation Eevee isn't a limited time event now.

edit (II): I guess they accidentally released some of the Dream Park early... the entries for "<furniture> has been added to the Plain Catalogue" are in my history, but the items themselves aren't in it.

[Qwertystop]

Oh, yeah. Toxic on Blissey is also big trouble. Sure, you can keep up with the pain for a few turns, but then Toxic ramps up to where you take 50% and then 100% of your total HP per turn...

Actually, AFAIR, it adds (1/16)/turn and stops at (15/16)/turn. So it never quite does 100%, though it does get pretty nasty.

Question: Does Toxin (because "bad poison" just sounds stupid, and Toxic is the main move for inflicting it) turn to the normal sort when you switch out? If so, if your current poke is Toxined and you Baton Pass to a poisoned poke, does the Toxin apply to the new one's poison? Seems like something that might happen depending on how it's coded.

Actually, about the Baton Pass - does that happen with any other non-tagging status effects?

[Forrestfire]

Nope, the pokemon stays badly poisoned. It just resets the count back to 1/16.

[Alabenson]

Well, it seems the RNG gods decided to smile on me for a change. I made it to route 9 in White and grabbed a pawniard for my pokedex, and when I checked its stats I found that not only did it have the ability I wanted, but it had an Adamant nature as well, along with IVs that aren't terrible (aside from Speed, but for the first one I catch I'd say it's pretty decent).

[enderlord99]

News on my "don't catch anything" run of Emerald:

Spoiler

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I finally won a symbol at the frontier.

Sure, it's only one of the 7 silver ones. And sure, there are 7 gold ones too. But still: I GOT A SYMBOL!

...Can you tell it's the first time I've gotten one on any playthrough?

So... yeah. Pretty cool, right?

[boj0]

Nice, which symbol? What team did you end up using?

[enderlord99]

Nice, which symbol?

Luck symbol.

What team did you end up using?

I used Metagross, Armaldo, and Cradilly. The other Pokemon I have are Swampert, Castform, and Wobuffet. No other teams of 6 are possible without catching Pokemon, trading, or using cheats, by the way, and those are the rules I followed.

[Geno9999]

I've beaten Palmer (Battle Tower) in Pearl and Dahlia (Battle Arcade) in Soul Silver.

[tgva8889]

I used Metagross, Armaldo, and Cradilly. The other Pokemon I have are Swampert, Castform, and Wobuffet. No other teams of 6 are possible without catching Pokemon, trading, or using cheats, by the way, and those are the rules I followed.

The only other possible teams switch Swampert for Blaziken or Sceptile, but I don't think you can actually finish the game with either of those teams because you can't use Surf.

Also, I am highly impressed and I will consider trying to run this one time.

[enderlord99]

The only other possible teams switch Swampert for Blaziken or Sceptile, but I don't think you can actually finish the game with either of those teams because you can't use Surf.

That's correct.

Also, I am highly impressed and I will consider trying to run this one time.

Great!

[Beacon of Chaos]

SO FULL OF RAGE!

Finally got to fight the subway boss for the first time over both White and White 2. There was some back and forth between us until it was just my Serperior vs. His Garbodor. He hit me with toxic, then repeated venoshocks. I managed to whittle him down using return and got him to the last sliver of red on his health bar before he kills me!

The annoying thing is that if I hadn't missed with a snarl earlier (95% accuracy) I would have weakened it enough to win.

[Thormag]

SO FULL OF RAGE!

Finally got to fight the subway boss for the first time over both White and White 2. There was some back and forth between us until it was just my Serperior vs. His Garbodor. He hit me with toxic, then repeated venoshocks. I managed to whittle him down using return and got him to the last sliver of red on his health bar before he kills me!

The annoying thing is that if I hadn't missed with a snarl earlier (95% accuracy) I would have weakened it enough to win.

I hate when that happens, but didn't you have something better than a Serperior to kill his Garbodor? I realize that the other two (three) probably fainted, but the subway bosses usually use the same Pokés.

[Beacon of Chaos]

I hate when that happens, but didn't you have something better than a Serperior to kill his Garbodor? I realize that the other two (three) probably fainted, but the subway bosses usually use the same Pokés.

I've never gotten that far in the battle subway before so I didn't know what he had. Not that it matters, I rarely plan ahead like that. I'm not very good at this game.

And yeah, the other two had fainted. I took Serperior (leaf blade, return, coil, dragon tail) Golduck (role play, psychic, surf, ice beam) and Arcanine (flamethrower, wild charge, snarl, extreme speed). Golduck's psychic would have been the only super-effective attack against Garbodor.

[Aotrs Commander]

After frag knows how long this past week and a bit of on-and-off searching (a lot while I've been waiting for Civ V's crawling slow loading times...) I finally got an acceptable Emolga. I got about five marginal - which, were you able to breed in BW2 before the league, I'd have just attempted to breed (one max attack, one max speed, one near-max SpA, but each one fairlt dismal in one of the other areas... sadly I wasn't able to cadge a spare DS so I could send them to Black and breed there or something). I was worried I was going to be there until I managed to grab one from the Dream World (I've been trying to get up enough dream points, and got about 60% of the way there...!)

Naughty, 30 Attack, 19-20 HP and SpA and 27 ish Speed. Def and SpD are crap of course, but I don't really care. All I wanted was a +Att or SpA nature with reasonable speed and attacking IVs; passable HP is a bonus.

Wow, I can actually PLAY Black 2 again for a bit...!

[Mindfreak]

You know, after looking over their stats and movepools, Simipour, Simisage, and Simisear are pretty decent pokemon. 101 Base Speed and 98 Atk/SpAtk is pretty spectacular. Not to mention they get Nasty Plot, and Torrent/Blaze/Overgrow, boosting their STAB moves even more. I just wish their defenses were better, or that they at least had better health -.-

Glutton isn't too bad either to set up for a sweep more easily. You can Nasty Plot, eat a stat boosting berry, and then start sweeping someone's team. Like a Petaya Berry. +3 SpAtk by perhaps turn 2? That's a bit dangerous.

[Mercenary Pen]

You know, after looking over their stats and movepools, Simipour, Simisage, and Simisear are pretty decent pokemon. 101 Base Speed and 98 Atk/SpAtk is pretty spectacular. Not to mention they get Nasty Plot, and Torrent/Blaze/Overgrow, boosting their STAB moves even more. I just wish their defenses were better, or that they at least had better health -.-

Glutton isn't too bad either to set up for a sweep more easily. You can Nasty Plot, eat a stat boosting berry, and then start sweeping someone's team. Like a Petaya Berry. +3 SpAtk by perhaps turn 2? That's a bit dangerous.

Salac berry might be another good choice with Gluttony, because speed is often handy.

[Gullara]

<= My face while grinding a Vullbaby up to level 54 to evolve it. All these high level evolutions in Gen 5 are so bothersome.

[tgva8889]

Actually, 101 base Speed is okay but not the best, and 98 attacking stat is pretty low. Compare to most attackers and you see that few good ones have less than 120. The Monkeys also have low defenses, so they can't really switch in very easily. You pretty much have to revenge with them, which really limits their options compared to many of the best Pokemon.

Overall, not the worst, but competition is fierce these days and the monkeys are not very high on the sweeper totem pole.

[Othesemo]

Actually, 101 base Speed is okay but not the best, and 98 attacking stat is pretty low. Compare to most attackers and you see that few good ones have less than 120. The Monkeys also have low defenses, so they can't really switch in very easily. You pretty much have to revenge with them, which really limits their options compared to many of the best Pokemon.

Overall, not the worst, but competition is fierce these days and the monkeys are not very high on the sweeper totem pole.

Yeah. I've never seen any particular reason to use them above the (conveniently also NU) starters.

[Beacon of Chaos]

So, if you want to improve your Join Avenue quickly I found something that can help. People are trading magnemites for magnemites over the GTS. Each time you trade, the person you trade with visits your avenue. Do it over and over again and get loads of popularity points. People are calling it the Magnemite Coil.

If you find a Magnemite named "Magneto", "Demonman?", "Turanga" or "Nick Fury", or if some idiot named Diego starts spouting Moonbase Alpha inspired garbage at you, you'll know you've found me

In other news:

Spoiler

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(not mine, found it on Tumblr)

[dgnslyr]

Well, if you are running an all-Lapras team, don't forget everybody's favorite sea turtle has a surprisingly decent Attack stat, which is just as high as its Special Attack. Have on spec'd for physical attacks, then, with, say, Waterfall and Earthquake? Return? Stone Edge? Whatever works for coverage, I guess.

[Mindfreak]

So I have a question.
If I trade someone my Tornadus/Thundurus/Landurus, and they turn them into their Therian forms, can they then trade them back to me and I'll get to keep the Therian form?