Well, here it is, the long awaited follow up to the balancing survey we held for Normal mode. Better strap in for a long read, as I’ve got quite a couple of things to talk about!
I’ve been kinda putting off making a post about this because of the inevitable complaints we’re going to get bombarded with in the comments of people who refuse to look at things from our perspective, so before I talk about any of the preliminary changes we’ve come up with at this point, I want to make a few things absolutely clear to people as I don’t feel like having to repeat myself like a broken record in the comments.
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Yes, the overall difficulty will be toned down for the vanilla experience rather than being adjusted to make fights more difficult. We do not care if you don’t like these changes because “MUH CHALLENGE”, it is not our problem anymore. We want to give the player a smooth experience where you don’t have to get stuck on the same fight for hours on end, and with the current state of balancing it’s just not possible to give that experience. If you really want to continuously get pulped by every single fight in the game, there will be passwords added in either V13.5 or V14 that will manage difficulty on a smaller scale to make things harder or easier– please use those instead. The amount of challenge you give yourself is in your hands from this point forward, we’re not going to make things purposefully insanely difficult anymore as dealing with people getting mad at us for making things too hard is just… so not worth the time and energy. If you're an intense/veteran normal player and want to retain the challenge you enjoy, I suggest you make use of said passwords or look into difficulty mods instead—we're leaving intense in the hands of the community now instead.
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We are responding to data we’ve collected with the survey. We’ve had close to 350 responses to the survey! Sure, it's not the complete playerbase (it's impossible to collect the opinion of everyone anyways), but it's a much more reliable data source than smaller circles like rejuv gen and the likes are. As a result, it gave us a much better indication of what fights truly are troublesome and which ones are fine. Turns out that fights some people perceive as “too easy” has shown in the survey that they're actually a lot more challenging for people than we thought! From chapter 2 onwards, every chapter had at least one major fight that was giving people problems one way or another— yes, even fights that we as the devs were surprised that people were having trouble with. We are simply adjusting according to the averages and read through the notes people left to sift out what the sore spots were for those fights for most people.
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“But why aren’t you appealing to the audience that likes the challenge?!?!” I hate to break it to you, but that group of people is a small but vocal minority. And besides, no matter what we decide to change, someone will be pissed off and will disagree. Jan’s somewhat recent post on tumblr best explains how it is dealing with this, it always feels like a losing game trying to satisfy everyone. Balancing Pokémon—which is inherently unbalanced to begin with—in a way that it’s fair for everyone is a NIGHTMARE. So to answer your question, at this point we’re just trying to make it fun for the biggest group of people possible, which is a more casual playerbase. As such, we’re improving overall QOL by making fights not as difficult so the game feels more streamlined to get through.
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THESE CHANGES ARE PRELIMINARY, AND NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES WE'RE MAKING. Like I tried to explain in the comments about the boss bars in Jan's previous post on the dev blog, if something turns out to not work as well in practice, we will likely change them over the course of testing and see if things work better that way. If a fight is still too difficult, we'll likely make more changes to adjust accordingly. The stuff mentioned in the post is the changes we've made prior to testing, and which we'll have to try out to see if it works out.
For now, I would appreciate it if people would hold their horses about yelling in the comments that they don't like the changes (regardless of whether they seem to make things easier or harder) because we've literally not even tested some of these in practice, thus we don't know for sure whether these changes will be definite or if they will receive further revisions. We're communicating this with you guys because we see value in being transparent about changes we make and being honest about what the current situation's like.
Sorry if the game’s difficulty is not heading in the direction you want it to, but we've decided that we want to steer the game in the direction that's the most fun for the devs to work on as well, and specifically Jan's. He's the one who has to make the game, and in the end we've agreed that this is the healthiest for both us and the game in the long run. On top of that, I want to stress that just because we're very open about communicating to people about development and therefore are generally very much within reach of the playerbase, it does NOT mean people have the right to send us pointed or passive aggressive messages constantly telling us how you don't like certain things. This is not your game, and therefore these are not your decisions to make. Once again, if Jan (and subsequently the rest of the team) stops having fun, Rejuvenation stops being made. Please, we ask you to treat us with respect over this.
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*cough*
That being said and on a more positive note… Let’s move on to the actual changes, shall we? I'll put stuff for each individual thing that I'll cover in spoilers in the case people would rather not know about specific changes! New additions are marked in green, changes are marked in yellow and things that got removed are marked in red. The new additions are added on top of the existing field, so most of the changes do not fully replace what's already there, but instead will open up more avenues for the player to make use of when going into a fight.
(Frozen) Dimensional field & Angie
This is probably one people were probably looking forward to as it pertains to everyone's favourite off-the-fucking-hinges ice lady, Angie!
Though we do not have changes for her team right now, we're hoping that the changes and new additions to the dimensional fields give the player more breathing space, allow for thawing out the field without her freezing the normal field over straight away again and as a result make her less of a brick wall you're trying to break with a flimsy wooden stick. In attempt to even things out, we decided to nerf her offensively and make it so fire types no longer get crippled offensively by the field but get a defense nerf instead. To make up for fire moves no longer being weakened, ice types get a defense boost on the frozen field.
Frozen Dimensional Field
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Ice types have increased defenses by x1.2
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Fire types have decreased defenses by x0.8
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Fire types no longer have weakened offense
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Ghost types have increased defenses by x1.2
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Ice type attacks gain a x1.2 boost in power (down from x1.5)
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Dark type attacks gain a x1.5 boost in power (up from x1.2)
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Rage becomes a 60bp Dark Type attack that always raises Attack.
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Dragon Rage deals 140 flat damage.
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Berserk boosts Special Attack on entry.
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Anger Point and Justified boost Attack on entry.
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Unnerve drops the opponent's speed stat by 1 stage on entry
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Pressure drops the opponent's defenses by 1 stage on entry
Dimensional Field
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Ghost types have increased defenses by x1.5
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The following moves get a x1.5 increase in power:
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Outrage Thrash Stomping Tantrum
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Lash Out Freezing Glare Roar of Time
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Fiery Wrath
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Rage becomes a 60bp Dark Type attack that always raises Attack.
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Dragon Rage deals 140 flat damage
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Download changes the user's type every turn
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Berserk boosts Special Attack on entry
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Anger Point and Justified boost Attack on entry
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Unnerve drops the opponent's speed stat by 1 stage on entry
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Pressure drops the opponent's defenses by 1 stage on entry
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Two uses of the following moves can turn this field into Frozen Dimensional (changed from one use):
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Blizzard Sheer Cold Cold Truth
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Sky field & Souta
Ah yes. Sky grandpa. (Thanks to the person who wrote that in their survey response by the way, I'll never be able to stop saying that now ADHFDGBD)
From the survey we've gathered that due to the way the field works and the elemental seed being rather broken on sky field, we needed to make some changes to the field in order to make his fight less "stall out tailwind for 8 turns" and more of a fight where you can get to work right away without having to bring a very specific team to combat his own. Next to that, this fight shares a similar predicament with Angie's that Souta kept changing back the field within one turn from the mountain field, which took the player two turns to set up. To counter this, Heavenly wing (Souta's signature move) will no longer change the field back to the sky field, and Smack down/Grav apple will now change the field within a single turn instead.
Sky Field
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Elemental Seed raises Defense and Special Defense (No longer activates tailwind)
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These moves deal super-effective damage to Flying-types
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Bonemerang
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Pokemon with Long Reach gain a boost in power of x1.5 and also deal super-effective damage to Flying-types.
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The following moves are boosted in power 1.5x:
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Dive
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These moves will turn the field into Mountain Field (Down from 2 uses for Smack Down and Grav Apple)
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Gravity Ingrain
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Thousand Arrows Grav Apple
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Smack Down
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Haunted field & Narcissa
While Narcissa is not as much of a sore point as Angie and Souta are, her field can still make this fight a chokepoint for some. In order to make things more fair for the player, a couple more avenues have been opened up for people to change the field or to make use of bigger buffs on fire types. Alongside that, her Drifblim will no longer hold a seed that causes it to get a burn and her Chandelure has been changed to a Lampent in order to lower the total BST (because her Chandelure was Definitely Very Not Legitimate for at that level)
Haunted Field
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Ghost types deal neutral damage to Normal Type Pokemon (changed from super effective)
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The following move(s) gets a x1.5 increase in power and gain the Ghost type (up from x1.3)
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Flame Burst Inferno Flame Charge Fire Spin
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The following moves can turn this field into a Blessed Field:
- Judgement Sacred Fire
- Purify Origin Pulse
Bewitched woods & Flora/Florin
Long story short, this field needed a nerf. Steel/Poison types getting crippled way too hard by the field both offensively and defensively made the fights with Flora or Florin harder than they need to be, and therefore have received some slight buffs in order to even the playing field a bit more. So yes, hopefully now the "Balanced woods" moniker some people have given the field will be somewhat more accurate rather than a mockery!
Bewitched Woods
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Fairy type attacks now hit Steel type Pokemon for Super Effective damage. (No longer both Grass and Fairy)
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Poison attacks deal neutral to Grass types. (No longer both Grass and Fairy)
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The following moves accuracy has been increased to 85 (Down from 95):
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Poison Powder Sleep Powder
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Grasswhistle Stun Spore
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Some more minor but notable changes...
Crawli
The field for Crawli's fight will be changed to Swamp instead of Forest. Rain will also be removed.
Amanda (West Gearen)
Hatterene's focus sash got dropped, giving an opening for players to knock it out before it can set up trick room.
Pokemon/Event changes
- New Pokémon events in Gearen City
- Route 2 gets a mystery egg
- Crawli's reward for beating Rift Gyarados after beating Narcissa will be changed to a mystery egg
- Qwilfish will now be available in the Gearen sewers with an Old Rod
As mentioned before, these are preliminary and definitely not the only things we're looking at to change. Stuff like Geara's battles, boss battles and most other gym leaders that haven't been mentioned before are being looked at—with Saki's fight likely being redone from the ground up due to that the fight is fundamentally a pain in the ass and can't be fixed with just one or two minor changes. It's taking time as people are busy, but we're still working on them and hoping we can find a solution for making the fights more manageable than they are now.
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That's all for now in regards to changes! We're adding more in the future and there'll probably be another post about it when the ideas have become more concrete, but that'll be a while away from now. For the time being, we'll keep working hard to make the game a better experience overall.
What's next on the list to do? Well for me specifically, if you've seen my twitter last week or so, I'm working on fixing up the official artwork for almost all of the characters as I've come to realize I really should've utilized flipping the canvas more often to see if what I drew makes any proportional sense........... of which a lot I'm ashamed to say they did not. BUT I'M WORKING ON IT. Will it get a separate post detailing EVERYTHING? Probably not. But I'll be making a post when everything's been uploaded and fixed! Here's a couple of the more notable changes.
Oh, and I'm considering making completely new wallpapers with the character art that doesn't blast your eyes out at 2 am. But that's up in the air. we'll see.......................
anyways this post has gone on for long enough. i'm done hogging the dev blog for today, so until next time!!! please don't kill me in the comments!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
o7
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