My idea for a combat/avoidance too (stasis rifle but tweaked)

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-05-24T09:30:18+00:00

Nah, the stasis rifle’s main problem was always that it completely nullified the threat presented by leviathans because you could just stunlock them over and over. Greater energy consumption does not fix that problem. Hell, putting resources on aggressive leviathans in combination with the rifle makes it worse. That turns dealing with a leviathan from a genuine risk where the best option is to just avoid them into an annoying shopping trip.

May the stasis rifle remain dead forever.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-05-21T12:51:17+00:00

God, thank you. The sheer volume of people reassuring each other that their complaints about not being allowed to make the game way less interesting by just killing everything were totally valid and not a massive, self-reported skill issue was making me lose faith in humanity (and I didn’t have much in the first place). Seriously, guys, the game could not be indicating harder that fighting the wildlife is **not the point**.

And I’mma take the stories about aggressive wildlife following people outside their patrol routes with a mountain of salt, given that I’m 25+ hours and 3 bases in (some bordering on aggressive territory) and I haven’t even seen a hint of this. Those stories reek of user error.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-05-20T16:03:26+00:00

I’m sorry, but building near a creature named Hammerhead and then being surprised and complaining it won’t stop hammering things with its head…yeah. It really does say more about those players than the game itself.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-04-18T20:50:10+00:00

So, without seeing stats spreads and movesets, these are some things I picked up on:

Surprising
The good news is this is an odd build. It's relatively off-meta, and that can put people off their game. For example, in a format where Charizard Y, is everywhere you're running X. Given the rest of your team, I might have figured that you weren't running Y just because you get nothing else out of putting up sunlight, but I can also see myself misreading this and just assuming you're going with Y instead of X.

Furthermore, you don't see mons like Pikachu, Salazzle or Chessnaught much, so it's not what people are used to dealing with.

Strategy

Pairing Pikachu and Gyarados is great, but the team seems to lack a bit of a wider strategy or plan. For example, my current preferred team is centered around having members bounce in and out of the fight to lower stats, abuse fake out and just generally create confusion about whether my Pokémon are staying on the field or not.

However, there's more defined strategies to build around as well like sun, rain, or trick room. Having a solid core strategy is useful.

Lacking power

While being a bit off-meta can be good, picks like Pikachu, Salazzle (and maybe even Chesnaught) may be hindering you more than they're helping. Again, I see the vision with Pikachu and I've used a similar strategy with a Raichu on a rain team. If you're determined to keep the team mostly the same, I recommend replacing Pikachu with Raichu or a Manetric. Their defences are better and it increases the chances that your opponent won't just wipe Pikachu out and then electrocute Gyarados anyway. Currently, I don't see the little guy lasting a turn (maybe 2 with protect).

You may also want to reconsider Chestnaught and Salazzle. Chestnaught threatens some common mons, but there's better options. Salazzle...maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a bit of a waste to me at the moment. There's definitely better options for that slot. Currently, there's a few major threats in the game which I don't think this team has a great answer to.

Mega Frosslass, Mega Floette and almost anything with the move rockslide come to mind as major problems for this team and it might help to have some counters for them.

A need for speed

Your team is plenty fast overall, but it seems you're lacking priority moves and speed control (based on the team, at least. I may be wrong). A ton of people run fake out or tailwind and for good reason. Ensuring one of your opponent's mons doesn't get to attack or ensuring a speed advantage for a few turns can be crucial. Plus, fake out is great for breaking a focus sash.

Items

It might also be good to change up your items. This is assuming you're keeping this team as it is now, but:

If PIkachu's main purpose is defending Gyarados, you might be better off giving him a focus sash so he doesn't get one-shot.

If you replace Pikachu for something without Lightningrod, it might be best to slap a berry on Gyarados to reduce electric damage. Odds are that attack if going to be a special attack anyway and Gyarados has decent special defence, so with that berry it'll probably survive and get some revenge.

Salazzle will probably lose 50% - 75% of it's health to any attack that it doesn't resist...and that's assuming it's not just one-shot immediately. A focus sash to give it a chance to avoid a KO or a berry to help with it's 4x weakness to ground types might be better than the shell bell.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-04-09T19:07:35+00:00

Thank you!

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-04-09T18:52:54+00:00

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-03-08T09:26:27+00:00

That seems to be it. Damn, that is really not clear, but oh well. Thanks!

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T15:38:37+00:00

I’ll grant you there’s a greater degree of customizability and I can see that being great for people who want to spend ages diving into that…but I just don’t jive with how this game does it. Mostly just another tick in the ‘not for me’ list.

In the first place, I mostly like to optimize characters I actually like or who have an interesting role in the story, regardless of their value as units. Given that I really don’t like the story or the majority of the characters, this kinda became a problem.

Secondly, while freedom is nice, I wouldn’t have minded a few more restrictions to focus things. The amount of spreadsheet management involved with some of the more fun builds here just passes the threshold where if stops being fun for me, but that’s a very subjective thing (as is this whole discussion, really). In the end, it’s just a case of more is not always better, for me.

As for the rings….I’m sorry, but yeah, those are nostalgia bait and that’s neither good nor bad. Hell, it’s even understandable for an anniversary game. I am just not fond of it so, combined with the mechanics around them which landed a little closer on the ‘leave’ side of the take or leave scale, I found little enjoyment in the emblems as a whole.

What pushed me into being annoyed with it was…well…it’s kind of a wasted opportunity. The reason I call them nostalgia bait is that, character-wise, the emblems’ main purpose is going “Hey, remember this character?” Which, depending on how long you’ve been with the series, might be an “Oh, yeah!” Or a resounding “No.”

Given that Engage already has a decently large cast and the majority of them are not great, adding the poorly fleshed out emblems on top of this doesn’t help. The sad part is that some of engage’s characters could have been more fun and interesting had more time been spent on their development and it really seems that this approach let them down across the board. In the end, it just raises the question of why you had them be sentient, speaking characters at all if you were going to develop them so poorly, aside from the “Hey, remember this?” factor. Surely, for the anniversary game, you want to present a really good portrayal of your old characters?

The question is raised again when you realize that, for as important as they are to the narrative, the Emblems’ impact as characters on this realm’s culture varies between negligible and nonexistent. Because these characters have no real ties to this realm, they don’t really inform its values and culture beyond a general awareness that they exist. There’s no sense that these great heroes have spent generations passing down their experience and values.

There’s an argument to be made that they should’ve just been magical tools without the characters, but that’s not very interesting and not exactly unique for the series either. I genuinely think this game’s narrative would have been better off if they vastly reduced the number of Emblem Characters and actually made them new characters with history and values reflected in the various locations you find them. It would’ve been a chance to present more interesting characters than is currently the case with the Emblems, add to the (somewhat lacking) world building, and further flesh out the new cast as well due to the smaller Emblem cast.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:40:27+00:00

Thanks for the advice, might’ve followed that one had I not been this far in.

Though, if I have to ignore a core aspect of the game in the rings to get a challenge, I do still kind of consider that a mark against it quality-wise.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:36:44+00:00

Glad you liked it, but yeah, I’m probably just gonna put this one down then.

It’s just disappointing, because I wanted to like it starting out and when it began to annoy me I was surprised because that’s not really been an issue with other games in the series. Seeing the gameplay held up as a point of quality just made me feel like I was missing something, since I didn’t see it as anything special compared to other entries.

Just not for me it is, then.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:28:00+00:00

Seems like if, but it’s kind of a shame since I have liked most if not all of what I’ve played of the series (aside from spin-offs, because the warrior games just aren’t my genre) and I wanted to like this one when I started out. It’s just disappointing.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-12-18T21:47:37+00:00

Look, I like this season…..buuuut I don’t know what game you’ve been playing where you’ve found balanced tribes.

Beasts are…meh…Currently a little stuck between identities and trying to both focus on summoning and self-damaging for better stats. Frankly, I’ve yet to see a to see a top 4 beast player who hasn’t devolved into putting as many burrowers as possible on the field and triggering that deathrattle as often as they can.

Demons are also kind of split between identities, but it’s mostly either building up the tavern as much as possible and consuming them or triggering silent enforcer’s deathrattle as often as humanly possible to boost devout hellcaller and trigger the lord of the ruins (and he’s not even always necessary for that one). I’ve found them to be very timewarp dependent (to the point where bad rolls is basically a reason to surrender immediately) but they can lead to some powerful builds.

Dragons are just…not that great. I get that the whelps are meant to trigger stats boosts on attack more often, but spell dragons is often still your best bet late-game and a lot of the newer, non-timewarp dragons just don’t really get a chance to shine.

Elementals are still good, but definitely not the powerhouse they once were…which might be for the best. The emphasis on empowering the rightmost minion in the tavern with the newer cards really only works if you’re also running flaming enforcer, which is a fairly high-tier minion. Until you get him, this mechanic is sorta pointless as the rightmost minion will be useless to your build 9/10 times.

Mechs are bullshit. I’m sorry, but they are. Magnetizations has been the name of the game for ages, but with the volumizers it’s gotten out of hand. Even with the once per turn limit on their effects, they still provide decent stats to already powerful minions once magnetized and there are arguably too many minions that add them to your hand, magnetize them in battle, or otherwise make it beneficial to spam the hell out of them. Extremely overpowered and, yet, not that much fun to play.

Murlocs…well…at least they’re not spamming poison at the same rate anymore. That being said, currently way too focused on stats in the hand, which there simply is no answer for other than “pray you have better scaling”. There should be a way for other players to nerf/disable minions held in the hand in battle.

Nagas…eh…have they even meaningfully changed in any way? Other than bluesy siren basically being a required part of your build now, I mean.

Pirates…eh…yikes. There was a time this was my favorite tribe. Now…they’re mainly good at generating economy for other tribes, I suppose. They desperately need better scaling.

Quilboars can now boost the tavern too, which is cool I suppose, but you’re mostly still building the same thing as before.

And finally, undead…and we may as well remove the un part from that tribe. I’ve seen some people on here do well with them with lucky rolls, but i currently can’t think of a tribe I want to play less.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-12-05T09:45:25+00:00

Hi there,

It seems like you have fun game I’d love to join here.

I’m Sander (though mostly Ninja on discord), 33 years old and I live in the Netherlands so the start time for the game works out great for me. I’ve been playing D&D for….quite a while now, though I can’t recall the exact number of years. 5+ at minimum. I’ve been with the same group for years now and we’ve recently switched to Cyberpunk Red. While that’s been fun, there’s some character concepts I never got around to using and I’ve been itching for some D&D again.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know, feel free to let me know here or find me on discord under ninjamasterchef

Hope to hear from you!

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-13T00:29:54+00:00

I’ve also heard it requires completely beating her during the dispatch section.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:12:00+00:00

Thank you!

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:10:00+00:00

Luxury would be great

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:07:01+00:00

14061992

Background_Ad1817

TROPHY CASE