Grinding in Pokemon Reborn

[David0895]

Since the last two episodes, I noticed that leveling up the new pokemon has become very boring.

That's because we have a lot of fights to do for gaining the levels that we need, and even if the Grand Hall trainers have high level pokemon, the process is still slow due to their mixed base experience yield.

The fastest solution should be a trainer with 6 Blissey, but this will drastically lower the difficult of the game (even if he were available only at the end of the last playable episode).

So I want to ask you: which could be a good solution?

[HUEnd]

A good solution is not having a rotation team composed of 4 generations worth of pokemons. Just catch/breed mons that you're gonna actually use for the story.

[FairFamily]

@HUEnd even with a condensed roster levelling a low level pokemon is just a pain. From 1 to 85 is just huge amount of grind. At least the switch madness has stopped which makes it easier pre-exp share.

 

Personally I would just lower the price of rare candies after the restoration. 

 

[Taska]

I think that having a bunch of blisseys feels cheap because we aren't actually 'earning' the xp. I would prefer, like @FairFamily said, to lower the price of rare candies.

[Sr.F]

Titania´s Castle (Somewhere) is best place to grind with Audino and Chansey. (Low encounter rate of course) With Lucky Egg is more easy with 3500-9000 exp. 

[David0895]

31 minutes ago, Sr.F said:

Titania´s Castle (Somewhere) is best place to grind with Audino and Chansey. (Low encounter rate of course) With Lucky Egg is more easy with 3500-9000 exp. 

How can it be the best place if their encounter rate is so low?

[Sr.F]

(?) Low encounter doesn´t matter. It is still the best place to reach level 85-90 easily with wild Pokémon. 

[David0895]

46 minutes ago, Sr.F said:

(?) Low encounter doesn´t matter. It is still the best place to reach level 85-90 easily with wild Pokémon. 

Ok thanks for the tip. I will try it tomorrow

[HUEnd]

The best exp grind in my opinion is at the Grand Hall on saturdays where you can have a double battle with a couple.

 

I often level my mons until 78-82 and complete the remaining levels with rare candies I managed to buy along the farm.

[Paperblade]

5 hours ago, HUEnd said:

A good solution is not having a rotation team composed of 4 generations worth of pokemons. Just catch/breed mons that you're gonna actually use for the story.

My experience only using teams of 6 non-rotating (I have nearly 20 different files): In Episode 16 the EXP curve/grind was fine because we got so much money that one could spend a majority of it on Rare Candies and avoid the grind that way. Episode 17 reduced money gain by something like 70-80% which makes this no longer viable, so even just using 6 pokemon you'll have to grind Grand Hall/Indra to not be mid 70s going into Titania, which is super unpleasant unless your team is basically ideal. Personally, I feel the EXP problems stem from the lack of random trainers in the second half of the game. Once you get into Route 1, trainer density between major battles goes down despite requiring more battles to level up relative to lower levels. It feels like I'm expected to do all the sidequests and very sparsely use repels, especially in Episode 17 content where there are very few random trainers (Titania's gym has like 5 trainers but each only have 2 pokemon, then there's a few random dudes hiding out in the desert).

 

That said, making it easy to grind to level cap would make the game significantly easier--having lost a file and had to play through from a backup 6 gyms back, using the debugger to put my mons at level cap trivialized most encounters. However, there is technically nothing stopping people from doing this already totally legitimately if they're willing to spend an extra hour or so at the grand hall/Indra.

[Salad Table]

The easiest way I've found is using Indra up till around level 65 - 70, then using the money I get from this to buy rare candies to do the rest

[Commander]

6 hours ago, David0895 said:

The fastest solution should be a trainer with 6 Blissey, but this will drastically lower the difficult of the game (even if he were available only at the end of the last playable episode).

So I want to ask you: which could be a good solution?

That's not a solution but more like a lazy patch to help with the problem. There's a lot of ways this could be fixed but we'd need to deduce what the problem is before saying what needs to be fixed. 

[David0895]

1 hour ago, Commander said:

That's not a solution but more like a lazy patch to help with the problem. There's a lot of ways this could be fixed but we'd need to deduce what the problem is before saying what needs to be fixed. 

The problem is that leveling a pokemon from 1 to 90 is too much slow

[Zane0144]

Sadly this is an issue with the main series as well.

 

I like the rare candy solution though. Maybe could have a side quest for it. Training a gible 90% into a game is pretty tough.

[lifesapity]

In particular trying to level up my Metagross to the same level as the rest of my team is starting to get tiresome.

[Salad Table]

I'm changing half my team atm, got my silvally to 85, now getting togekiss and snorlax. Gonna take a while as I'm also shiny hunting them

[David0895]

Ok I tried both tips that you said and:

- Indra teams are random and cannot be selected, so it's worst than the Grand Hall's trainers

- Titania's castle is ok until level 60-65, then the process becomes slow. Also you cannot gain money so you can't complete it with rare candies

So the Grand Hall remains the best method

[grayruby]

@Commander  (Sorry Idk how to quote your reply yet)

 

The main problem that a lot of people (myself included) are having is that grinding levels is becoming tedious. 

 

I've been grinding for weeks now to get all of my Pokemon to level 75 so I can beat the Coral Gym. I've been grinding so much that I've just straight up stopped playing the game because I'm burned out. 

 

I think the best solution to this would be to do what Pokemon Rejuvenation and Spork did; add in a trainer at each gym who only has Audinos. To keep players from using them to grind for money (if that's something the developers don't want players doing), they can give the player very little or no money when they're beaten. Maybe this can even be a separate mode for players who are struggling with the game, stuck in a certain section of the game, or who just really want to focus on the story. 

[Commander]

I suppose I can throw my cap in and explain what I meant earlier (I'm getting a little busy due to school so I don't always have time to respond). Personally from my standpoint adding a Blissey/Audino trainer is a bad move as it's merely addressing a problem instead of fixing it.

 

Addressing the problem is merely accepting that something is an issue. You can add stuff to the game in order to help reduce the problem and issue that resides like a trainer with good exp, but the problem still exists. I know some RPGs give rare monsters who drop really rare items, tons of gold, and exp but in modern RPGs it takes strategy to figure out how to take them down. These are bells and whistles that should be added to make grinding more enjoyable.

 

Now we get into what the problem is. You say grinding takes too long, but everyone is skipping over the elephant in the room. Grinding takes too long because combat is boring. I said it. It's boring. Add small amount of exp yields (post E15 is a bit ridiculous) and pathetically easy battles and it just all stacks together. The random encounters also really doesn't help (but it's a necessity for bigger games like Reborn due to heavy resource using). This is a really detrimental factor to Reborn as it's heavily focused on exploration with the desert being the key highlight on top. Boring combat and big areas really don't go well together. It's sad because there's so many really well made areas in the game that people have 0 incentives to try and work and explore those. I really hate saying that as well. Audino trainers will not resolve this issue.

 

It's also hard to give suggestions as it grinds down to what someone wants to do but there's things that could be centered upon:

-promoting the need to use different mons and swapping them up (right now you can beat the game once you settle with a static team)

-overall higher exp yields to reduce time needed to grind (random trainers, wild mons, rebattable trainers, earlier exp share, lucky egg, etc)

-a more structured and obvious soft level cap system (Adrienn is like 72-75, Titania is 77-78 as well as Amaria leaving a 12 level cap from the hard)

-better grinding spots (remember when Unknown was a best method of grinding)

 

Designing things around those won't make a combat system less boring, but it helps tackle the actual monster instead of brushing around and ignoring it. Jasper Ward is one of the best grinding spots and overall best designed areas to take notes from because there's a healing machine right where you can encounter Beedrill who give good exp.

[lifesapity]

I had never had a problem with the grinding required previously in Reborn, getting a Pokemon up to 70 isn't too bad.
I think my problem mainly lies in now that the Pseudos-Legendary and Legendary Pokemon are becoming available, since they have a Slow leveling rate, it  is starting to seem like such a chore.
Even getting my Alolan-Ninetails up to the high 70's, to use against Amaria, tired me out.

[ExaFlare]

Hi there.

 

So, this might be considered as cheating, but after i read this thread an idea came to my mind. If it's indeed cheating, i'm sorry and will delete this post if needed.

 

->If you have a controller or something that can be used with JoyToKey, you can use the Auto-Repeat function to spam the C key (or Enter/Space) by just holding one of the buttons of your controller. (I use L2 on my ps4 controller).

->You just have to map the C/Espace/Enter keys to one of your controller's buttons, make it repeat X times per second.

-> Bam, you can just hold the thing and watch Netflix or whatever on another screen

 

Here's a screenshot to clarify a little bit. 

If anyone needs help, i'll be glad to answer.

 

Spoiler

 

[keltena]

I agree with Commander that adding in easier methods of grinding would only be treating the symptoms, not addressing the actual problem, but I disagree pretty strongly about what that actual problem is. The root problem isn't that there's nowhere good to grind or that the grinding is boring because combat is boring; the problem is that grinding is ever necessary in the first place. Grinding isn't boring because the combat is boring; grinding is boring because grinding is boring, regardless of whether your combat system is fun or not. (I mean, I don't actually think Reborn's combat is boring—I wouldn't be playing it in the first place if I did—but grinding would still be a tedious, well, grind regardless of whether it was. That's kind of the definition of grinding.) It isn't necessarily an easily fixable problem, mind, but the source of the problem isn't that the game or the combat isn't suited to grinding, it's the fact that you have to grind at all.

 

While I can only speak for myself here, I've always thought the general level curve of the game is fine—just playing through the trainer battles and a decent chunk of the wild encounters that come up during story events has always gotten me to an appropriate level by the time I hit the boss fights, without any need for extra grinding. The place where grinding becomes an issue for me, like a couple people in this thread have mentioned, is when you want to switch a new pokémon into your team, but you have to grind it all the way up to your current level before it'll be usable. It's a huge pain that can grind everything else you're doing to a halt while you finish leveling the pokémon in question (sometimes I've had luck just throwing the under-leveled pokémon in the back of my party with an EXP Share and going about my business, but that only works if you have enough story or sidequest content left to do it with), and honestly it ends up discouraging me from trying out new pokémon at all if they don't start at a usable level. Which is a really big shame, because trying out different pokémon is otherwise something Pokémon Reborn specifically encourages you to do, and imo it can be one of the most fun parts of strategizing; it just ends up being too inconvenient to bother with some of the time.

 

In a lot of instances, this isn't really a problem that can be easily addressed by game design, save for finding a way to make it easier to grind under-leveled pokémon up to speed. I mean, for the most part new pokémon are initially distributed at levels that make it easy to throw them right into your party if you want to try them out (which I really appreciate), and it's not like the game can help it if I caught this Espurr in Episode 1 and only just decided to use it now. But in the case of some event pokémon, the game design is actively contributing to the problem. For example, someone earlier in this thread mentioned Gible? Gible is an event pokémon that first becomes available in E17, at a point in the game where wild pokémon's levels range from 70-90... and yet for some reason it's given to you at level 30. I have no idea why it's not, like, level 65 at least—as is, it's just literally impossible to use without having to grind it up like 40 levels first. And a number of other event pokémon have the same problem (sometimes even worse), especially the later you get into the game. As far as I can see, there's no reason to hand out pokémon at such low levels; the only purpose it serves is making people suffer through a bunch of unnecessary grinding if they want to actually use them. The level 5 Magikarp is an exception by virtue of being comedy gold.

 

Fixing that still isn't going to change that sometimes people are gonna have to grind an under-leveled pokémon up to speed to use it, obviously—different pokémon are obtained at different points in the game, after all, and hatched pokémon will always start at level 1, and even with event pokémon you can't guarantee people will get them when they first become available. (...Though I dunno, maybe it'd be possible to set the level of event pokémon based on how many badges you have when you get them, or something? Would probably be a lot of work, though; it's just a thought that occurred to me while I was writing this.) So finding a way to make grinding up under-leveled pokémon less painful would still be really useful if possible, imo. I don't really know enough about game dev to know if there's actually any feasible way of doing that, especially this late in development (like, would it be possible to adjust EXP scaling to make significantly under-leveled pokémon level up faster or something, or would that just raise more problems?); but if there is, I do think it would be worth doing. It's still treating a symptom, yeah, but in this case I'm not sure the base problem is ever going to be fully solvable, so anything that helped would be worthwhile.

 

(Actually, the best solution to this problem I've ever seen has been in RPGs with a system where fighting a single battle with an under-leveled character in a higher-level area will automatically level them up to a specific minimum level—usually one that's just slightly under-leveled for that area—and then you can continue getting them up to speed like normal without all the extra grinding. But I don't think that's really feasible to implement in a Pokémon game, so.)

[Imperial]

I've made nearly a dozen runs of Reborn. In my main run (a Shiny one) started in E12 I was nearly at two boxes full of lvl 85-89 EV trained pokemons, all trained on Woobat for EV (with power items and tamato berries to remove speed EV if unwanted) and Grand Hall trainers for levels. And surprisingly I barely got bored. Grinding is something I usually hate, but Grand Hall trainers (and sometimes Indra) are overall interesting to fight. I used Exp. share to get them at something like 15-10 levels under the trainers (that before E16 were limited to something like lvl 60), at a point where they could begin to fight themselves. Using them underlevelled was a good way to see if they were good, and made fights more challenging. And doing that, I would give the exp. share to a new pokemon so that I would train two at once without getting bored.

As I said I filled two boxes that way. Then with E17, changes in previous episodes and relationship points I wanted to restart my run, but I didn't want to lose all my pokemon. So I dropped them to lvl 14 with candies and transferred them to my new save. But taking time, in the middle of the story, to level my 60+ pokemons whenever I wanted to change, this would have been really boring. So this time I hacked the game and made rare candies cost 10$.

 

So overall I don't feel like there's a real grinding problem in Reborn. Increasing the level of event pokemons like Gible would probably be a good thing, but except that, Grand Hall trainers give good xp without being boring (unless maybe if you take the perfect pokemon to take them down fast and optimize your time), and unless you train dozens of pokemons like me just going through the game should keep you at a good level. And if you still find that too boring, I don't think hacking rare candies or things like that is much of a problem. As Ame says, the point is to enjoy the game, if you prefer it this way that's your choice

[David0895]

4 hours ago, Imperial said:

And if you still find that too boring, I don't think hacking rare candies or things like that is much of a problem. As Ame says, the point is to enjoy the game, if you prefer it this way that's your choice

Fun fact: some time ago (after this post was created), I discovered the Sandbox Mod that pratically solved almost my problems.

 

While I still think that non-modded grinding should have a faster speed, I agree that using secondary methods is not a problem

[Borbland]

You also get an Amulet Coin in the desert, with it you can get quite a bit of money to buy rare candies while grinding up in the Grand Hall.