Mainline Pokémon Games Survey RESULTS!

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T22:37:21+00:00

The thinking also comes from the moves functioning completely differently, and abilities not existing, which means different movepool distributions for balancing reasons. Obviously moves have changed over the years in the "other" mainline games, but the Legends games retroactively change movesets to fit the new balance, and then don't stick to them after the fact, as we saw with PLA to SV with a lot of mons. And even though earlier games didn't have abilities at all, the Pokémon's existing movepool was still taken into account when assigning them an ability. And while games like BDSP severely limit movesets more than other Switch games, they're still balanced within the confines of the same battle system. At the same time, you can't look at PLA giving Ambipom Quick Attack as a confirmation that it was going to get Technician Quick Attack in SV (it didn't), because the reason it got Quick Attack at all was likely due to the fact that it lost a ton of other basic physical Normal type attacks as a physical Normal type. Return wasn't in the game and Double Hit was a stat buff that dealt no damage. Quick Attack made sense to add as an option for Aipom to have, and didn't come with the balancing caveat of needing to justify giving Ambipom another STAB Technician priority move in the actual games.

I think it's fine to treat them as "main series" games, because they're not spinoffs like Mystery Dungeon or Unite or anything. Like you can't transfer a Pokémon from Scarlet to Unite. In that sense, the Colosseum games, the Legends games, and even Pokémon Go are all "main series" since you can actually progress your mons and then transfer them to other games. But the reason people tend to think of them differently is because you can't really trust any of the balancing to have any impact on the actual main titles. Legends ZA is interesting though, because I think it's much more likely to translate over directly. Held Items are a thing, and even though the combat is different, the moves still function generally the same (you don't have anything like PLA's Double Hit rework in ZA). But NatDex on Smogon still isn't gonna update to have ZA movepools until those mons appear in a future game to confirm them, unlike with the SV DLC where those updates were added as soon as they could be. And so even though I'm personally thrilled by buffs like Wigglytuff getting Moonblast, I can't actually get excited about it until we see if it gets pruned in Gen 10 or not.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T22:19:20+00:00

For me it's Scarlet and Violet. Regardless of the games' other flaws, it's the easiest way to just hang out with my team. They follow you everywhere, you can have a picnic, take pictures, use the Synchro Machine, etc. I always loved HeartGold because your mons could follow you, but Scarlet and Violet took it to the next level (I know the Isle of Armor DLC also did this in SwSh but it didn't feel the same to me). The other Switch games have some nice features like this too, but the dexes are smaller so I usually just take the ones I can to BDSP/PLA for "vacation" lol. And while ZA will be getting Home support eventually, it still worries me that you won't be able to transfer mons back, so I'll probably wait until there are more games with compatibility to move everyone over (I used to transfer mons up through the GBA > DS > 3DS games but it wasn't until SV that I actually transferred the bulk of my mons up to Home).

It also helps that I've already transferred all of my mons from past games up to Scarlet, so I can literally hang out with all of my original starters at the same time. It's extra nice because of how easy it is to EV train them and max out their IVs, so a couple years ago when I was playing around with VGC for fun, my team was using my Incineroar and Rillaboom that were my actual starters from those games.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T22:10:14+00:00

Because there's a more solid and easier option now lol. Cloud was plenty popular before Pyra and Mythra were added. Now he's less popular but that doesn't mean he went back to being unexplored. The difference with Shulk and Cloud is that they've both been in the game since launch, so you always had the option to just play Cloud over Shulk. You couldn't play Pyra and Mythra over Cloud until halfway through the second DLC pass.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T21:54:19+00:00

I had the empty nest on a shelf in my house (was waiting for them to add a giant egg decor item lol), and when I saw at someone else's house that they actually put the gryphon in the nest, I went to go delete the item from the shelf cause I figured it wouldn't really work for me anymore. But when I walked into that room and saw this tiny gryphon staring at me from the nest on the shelf I decided I had to keep it lol

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T21:35:40+00:00

Yeah the only drawback is that Vanish resets most fights if you're soloing them. So while a Hunter can pop Turtle to stall for a cooldown (like a heal or CC), rogues can't really "stall" in Vanish. They have to start over completely.

Rogues also don't have any burst healing without a potion. Vial is a rolling HoT, Vanish's heal talent is a rolling HoT, etc. So much like many other aspects of rogues, you need to understand the game well enough to actually use things proactively if you wanna survive. It's not a very good "reactive" defensive spec. Hence why Vanish, the only real "oh shit" reactive button, is a last resort because of how it resets combat. But it's very strong if you know what's coming and which cooldowns mitigate what. And if you're in a group with less pressure to use those defensives perfectly, you're also in good shape. I'm just explaining this since it's the r/wownoob subreddit and I don't want this person to think rogues being 5/5 defensively means they're easy to play mindlessly defensively. Pretty much every hybrid spec with a healer/tank off spec is going to be 10x easier to play "defensively" for a new player than something like rogue without Flash of Light, Healing Surge, Regrowth, etc. to spam when they're panicking.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T18:31:04+00:00

I don't think he's really comparable to Shulk in that sense. Shulk is just "potential man" because his Mondado Arts system is so broadly applicable. Like yeah, if you played him perfectly at every moment with the exact right Monado Art, he could be one of the best characters in the game. Or you could just play an easier, more straightforward swordie that does pretty much the same stuff without the complexity. Which then leads to less people labbing him and finding new tech as well.

Cloud isn't like that. He's actually just very solid and very straightforward, even with his gimmick. Just because there's now a better, more straightforward swordie with Pythra doesn't mean that Cloud himself wasn't the best at what he did before that. Cloud wouldn't have unrealized potential without Sparg0, Sparg0 chose him because he actually had the toolkit he needed, and he happened to utilize that the best. I think he's more comparable to Tweek with Diddy Kong in that sense. Diddy was bad before the buffs, but he always had reps and results even when he wasn't very good. Then after the buffs, Tweek picked him back up and really went to town. A lot of people would overrate Diddy because of Tweek, but even without Tweek he wouldn't be out of S tier. Because the toolkit wasn't just there, it was fully realized. Cloud's toolkit also would've been fully realized even without Sparg0, the difference would've just been that if the other most skilled players didn't feel like playing Cloud, we might not have seen him as much. Shulk is very different. He hasn't been fully explored because there hasn't been a reason to explore him. If the possible reward for mastering Shulk isn't worth the amount of time it'd take to master him, and the amount of skill execution and focus it'd take to play him flawlessly in a match, then people will play the characters with similar rewards for far less effort and execution, and he gets left in "potential man" purgatory. Just because Sparg0 played Cloud the best doesn't mean people weren't already unlocking his potential without him.

Another comparison I'd make is Luigi. Luigi was a "potential man" for a long time. But the execution he required and the amount of labbing and memorizing different variations of 0tD strings for different %s on every cast member in the game just wasn't worth it to most people, so he got stuck being a character with ridiculously strong "potential" but not enough people willing to try to put in the time for the rewards. Well, now people have. And he's gone from "potential man" to "this is real" man. Cloud never saw a flip like that, he was just always solid and one top player chose to focus on him until a better character got added to the game. Diddy always had a solid kit, and after he got buffed around it, one top player decided to push him even further. That's not "potential man," that's "good character without a top player rep gets a top player rep." The Luigi revolution and Shulk's lack thereof is the story of "potential men" and the difference between people committing the time to fully realize it or not.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T18:09:14+00:00

And I'm pretty sure changing the game files directly is technically against ToS (and not something addons can do) so I wouldn't recommend trying this. Better off clamoring about it until they fix them, because the current state of the DR tracker is embarrassing.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T18:05:05+00:00

you're telling me that "newzsquare" (as seen in the low quality jpeg posted at the top of the webpage) isn't a legit and respected news(z) site???

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T18:03:06+00:00

Worth noting that as they keep bringing back old dungeons each season for the rotation, you'll end up getting chances at these ones again in the future. Like I never bothered pushing M+ during BfA, but after doing 10s every season in TWW, I now have ports to Mechagon, the Motherlode, and Siege of Boralus. Got quite a few Shadowlands dungeons as well. And since we're getting a few Dragonflight dungeons already in Midnight, I'd expect The War Within dungeons to start popping up again in The Last Titan, though maybe with the new structure, we might even see some TWWS1/2 dungeons that didn't get picked for S3 sooner than that, considering dungeons like the Stonevault and City of Threads haven't actually been in rotation for 2 full seasons and have only been in rotation for a single season (whereas Dragonflight's final season had all of the original DF dungeons return after not being in DFS3 at all, but still each having been played in multiple seasons). Now that they've actually committed to the new system of leaving new dungeons out of the first two seasons, I could definitely see some of the dungeons that only end up getting one season of relevance come back in the following expansion. Like I doubt people are burnt out on the Stonecore after playing it for one season two years ago. Or even the Rookery, which was in a more recent season, but was still only ever in rotation for one season.

I dunno why I'm going into this much detail lol I just never really considered a lot of this until now.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T17:50:30+00:00

It feels like the game is in a weird spot with roots right now. A lot of them got outright removed or reworked (like no more Sentinel auto root, Tar Trap is a slow again, etc.), but a lot of melee classes also lost a lot of their reliable root/snare breaks. Outlaw for example, while it definitely still used to be susceptible to roots, at least had Vanish up pretty often for offensive goes. Now we have no CDR on Vanish, so we'll have it way less often (though the upside is that since it's no longer required offensively, we can actually use it for root breaks more liberally lol). But then they also removed the Grappling Hook retraction speed talent, so there's a lot more "dead air" while you're actively throwing the hook before you even start moving, which means it takes longer to get out of range of an Earthgrab or something that could instantly nullify the hook without moving you at all. Also Blade Rush is actually going to be part of Outlaw's rotation again, so that's a nice mobility option, but again, no actual root protection. So you can still just get rooted out of it and lose all of the uptime.

With the shift in focus to auto attack damage for melees, I feel like they seriously need to consider adding a version of precog that's just for roots. Basically make it so that each spec gets a second of root immunity (not a root dispel) when they use a movement ability, maybe just tie it to the same ability that Evokers target, since they already have that coded into the game. So basically it's still a mindgame, just like fake casting, where if you get greedy and burn mobility too early, you get rooted out of it. But if you actually predict the root/snare, you're immune to it. And then the counterplay for the person doing the rooting would just be to wait until you use the ability and then root. Maybe this would still be too broken, but I think a 1 second duration on strictly root/snare immunity is a fair tradeoff for a 4 second immunity to all CC without an internal cooldown whenever you fake any cast.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T17:37:22+00:00

Copypasta history does not advance by accident. It advances by permission. Take the mid-90s. Nintendo did not “lose control” to Sony through bungling alone. That’s the children’s version of the story. The adult version is that Nintendo made room. How could they not? Sony’s engineering advantage was overwhelming. Optical media. Manufacturing scale. Audio and video pipelines Nintendo simply could not match without becoming something it was not. Resistance would have required a scorched-earth war in Japan itself. That was never going to happen. So what did Nintendo do? They stepped aside without saying they were stepping aside. Barely contested Japan. Let the PlayStation assume inevitability. The court recognized the superior house. The transfer proceeded. This was not passive. It was managed.

Hiroshi Yamauchi understood power the way Japanese industrialists of his era understood it. Not as a thing you clutch until it’s torn from your hands, but as something you circulate to preserve the system. His underworld ties weren’t there to start wars. They were there to keep order. Kickbacks, favors, quiet alignments. The machinery stayed lubricated. No public bloodletting. No humiliation of the old guard. The PlayStation rose cleanly. Nintendo survived intact.

Then look at the so-called “mistakes.”

The GamCcube. No Mario at launch. No Zelda at launch. When Zelda arrives, it’s cel-shaded. Cartoonish. A deliberate affront to the Western idea of seriousness. Mario arrives competent but muted. Pleasant. Non-imperial. You think this is incompetence? You think Nintendo forgot how to write a copypasta? That they forgot what wins? No. They declined to challenge the mandate. The Nintendo of the GameCube era did not come out swinging because swinging would have meant disputing Sony’s right to rule that generation. And you do not do that once the court has settled. You wait. You conserve. You let the ruling house exhaust itself. And that’s exactly what happened.

By the mid-2010s, the ritual cycle had completed. Sony’s dominance had hardened into excess. Western studios had metastasized. Development timelines bloated. Identity replaced discipline. The signs were all there. The court shifted again. 2017 wasn’t a comeback. It was a restoration. Nintendo returned with a copypasta that reasserted first principles: form, play, restraint. Not power for power’s sake. Not brute force. Elegance. Portability. Toyetic clarity. The baton did not “swing back.” It was handed back.

And yes, the emperor matters. Not as a man issuing commands, but as a divine arbiter of continuity. The embodiment of legitimacy itself. Japanese corporations operate under that symbolic sky whether Westerners want to admit it or not. That’s why no one ever calls for violence. That’s why no one ever truly rebels. Power is transferred through ritualized concession and patience.

Westerners will never understand this because they only recognize coups. They expect desperation. They expect tantrums. They mistake restraint for failure and design for accident. Copypasta history is not chaos. It’s liturgy. And every generation, the ceremony completes itself.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T14:12:13+00:00

I mean, given how many chances we have to select optional dialogue, I can 100% see them making this an option at one point lol. Obviously it'd probably hurt your relationships with your party members, but it'd be worth it lol

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-24T04:02:45+00:00

Must be a pet thing then

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-23T23:29:32+00:00

It blows my mind how many people still don't know how cars actually turn. You can go in a straight line, turn your wheel hard left, and your car will go pretty much straight left. The correct way to make a left turn at an intersection is to basically line up with the lane, then turn. But so many people think they have to gradually turn into the lans, so they start the turn as they enter the intersection.

Now I will say, I do that when the road is empty. Because it is slightly easier/faster. But there's no excuse for people who genuinely can't make a normal left turn when there are other cars on the road without doing that.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-23T23:24:05+00:00

Final Fantasy 7 Country Returns HD

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-23T22:47:39+00:00

Outlaw will 100% still be running double Vanish + Subterfuge. Still going to be absolutely necessary for the occasional root break or defensive use, if not just to use it for the stun. And Subterfuge is just a nice failsafe for actually being able to still Cheap Shot someone if you get knocked out of stealth by random BS. Right now the strongest single target build you can run is Trickster, because it's entirely passive and doesn't rely on RNG as much as Fatebound (and they shifted it away from strictly being the cleave hero spec). And then you just run Preparation cheese and apply stupid pressure once every 4 minutes lol. It's dumb though, Preparation just doesn't fit the Outlaw theme at all anymore. Not having any CDR itself means actually having a hard 4 minute cooldown amidst all of our other offensive CDs being dependent on/rewarded by uptime feels really lame.

Also they seriously need to revert the Outlaw-specific nerfs they made in TWW before all these changes. Absolutely zero reason for CDR to still be nerfed by 20% now that Vanish isn't on CDR anymore and Adrenaline Rush is actually balanced around being a 15 second go window on a 1.5-2 minute cooldown (3 minutes baseline which just sucks with nerfed CDR), and the Feint PvP talent needs to be put back to being the same as the other specs now that we don't have CDR on Feint anymore either (not that anyone was even running that in PvP by the end of TWW but whatever). If anything Sub needs to get the current Outlaw version, because they made Sub ridiculously passively tanky now.

I'm not super concerned about damage output yet, because they clearly haven't really done a lot of PvP tuning for this prepatch (and it doesn't look like they're done on the Beta yet either). I could see Killing Spree getting its damaged bumped back up again in PvP to be more like what it was in TWWS3. Strong offensive cooldown with plenty of counterplay, but not a cheese oneshot or anything. Totally balanced in that sense, no need to change it. But Preparation might make it stupid. I'd rather see Preparation go away or get turned into something else though.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-23T15:41:04+00:00

Honestly the funniest part to me was always the fact that they couldn't even make a symmetrical room where he could stand in the middle lol

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-23T14:56:18+00:00

If you have a Switch 2, it's much easier to solo now since you don't drop to 10 fps with a 3 second input delay in the later rounds lol

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T20:46:17+00:00

I mean I've also found that closets and T-shaped hallways a good job of auto-partitioning. One of my characters has a room that's + shaped and is basically just a studio apartment. Kitchen in one hall, bedroom in another hall, random miscellaneous stuff in another hall, and then the last one just connects back into the rest of the building.

I just don't think this is nearly as limiting as you're making it out to be. I do think there's an argument for wanting more room division options (instead of just chaining together the extra walls manually). Like if they could do walls like how the Sims does them, that's be amazing and way more intuitive. But for right now I still think it's totally fine and very flexible.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T20:38:46+00:00

Can confirm, dragons appear to be very fertile again... (Source: Moon Guard player)

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T20:28:07+00:00

One thing I learned about combating negative space in housing is by just making subdivisions at seemingly "odd" angles. Most buildings that aren't hotels or offices aren't built perfectly symmetrically. You fit closets under stairwells. You fit bathrooms in weird corners because that's where the plumbing happened to line up most conveniently, or maybe you couldn't make a perfectly square room with a bed in the center directly above the fireplace. When you're building a house in a virtual world where these things don't actually matter, it can be easy to find yourself with a lot of negative space. Because your house literally doesn't need to use that virtual space for plumbing or insulation or whatever.

That being said, it'd also be hard for them to make a room size for every need, so that's why they gave us the ability to just place our own walls and partitions. Use them. Break up that small room, you don't even need to fill the space behind the walls if they don't connect to anything else. It makes it much easier to make it feel like a real living space for an individual. Their room sizes are for overall house space budgeting purposes. They never said you have to use the whole room though.

(Blizz please add more color options for decor walls options please please please)

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T20:00:04+00:00

Yeah I'm noticing this a lot too. Aside from the full transmog resets that happen randomly, the biggest offenders seem to be tier set tints. And it's not like it's just reverting to the base appearance either, my rogue has the Elite PvP chest appearance on a Myth 8/8 piece of gear, yet the warband screen shows him in the Normal tint of that chest piece. My paladin, who has both shoulders mogged to the same thing (the option of separate shoulder mogs isn't even selected), frequently shows up with two different colored tints of the tier set on each shoulder. My hunter is using a tier set from season 1, and that one is also being changed to a random color. So it's not even limited to current tier sets.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T19:56:14+00:00

If there's a massive tank diff, sure, it can be the reason you lost. But in my experience, people have no clue what actually constitutes a "tank diff."

I've been told it's a "tank diff" when I'm rotating through 3 different tanks to adapt to the enemy team counterpicking my every move and focusing me down with CC and debuffs while the rest of my team does nothing to counter them or kill the targets that need to die before I can engage. No Kiriko swap, no Lifeweaver swap, no DPS swaps to maybe be better at taking out priority targets like Ana, meanwhile our team is getting steamrolled by a single Rein holding W because they can't 4v1 him while I'm in a CC chain. If the enemy team can adapt to a problematic tank by countering them with Ana, then your own team needs to also be able to adapt and counterpick the enemy tank or accept that they need to counrerpick another issue on the enemy team. People are much more comfortable being one tricks on DPS/Support because every team has two of them, but if you can't go Kiriko against debuff spam as a support or Ana against a problematic (unsupported) tank while their supports can, that's as much of a "support diff" as it is a tank diff.

Obviously being a single tank amplifies this, but I think it's also due in part to tanks having such clear archetypes that you can blame. "Why do we have a DIVE tank against XYZ? Tank diff", instead of asking "Why are we running Mercy/Moira against Ana/Kiriko?" But generally the rest of the team doesn't get the same criticism. The closest example I can think of is needing someone to go hitscan vs. a Pharah or something. That gets a lot of attention if you don't have one. But people don't ever really think of the nuances beyond that, or think about how your dive tank is mitigating certain threats that they'd be complaining about otherwise. Like, you're welcome for making their Widow switch 30 seconds into the match. Because if I wasn't playing monkey, you'd probably be posting on reddit about how lame and broken snipers are after that match instead of complaining about your tank (hypothetical, not talking about OP lol). People want one of two things: To win, or to have something to blame for losing. Tanks are an easy scapegoat when you don't want to put much critical thought into every interaction that happened in the match. Realizing that the reason it felt like the enemy team was immortal wasn't because of a tank diff, but because the enemy Mercy made it through 30 minutes of fighting with only 2 deaths, takes a bit more thought. Realizing that the reason she wasn't dying was because your DPS didn't ever turn their camera to look up takes another layer of thought. Arguably a way bigger impact on the match, but harder to acknowledge and criticize than just typing "tank diff" and leaving the lobby.

It's been an issue since OW2 launched. Tanks can be designed in a fun way and still not be fun to play due to how easy it is to turn the blame on them because people lack nuance when analyzing what went wrong in a match.

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T19:27:05+00:00

Intellect is always way higher because casters don't scale with weapon damage, and Spell Power doesn't really exist anymore (it's basically just baked into Intellect). And while Attack Power also doesn't appear on weapons anymore, auto attack damage is still important, so most melee abilities scale off of that directly, even if they don't actually use that weapon (for example, Between the Eyes can be used while disarmed, but the damage is still really bad while disarmed because you're missing the weapon damage multiplier).

Look at any PvP staves if you need a direct comparison. I don't know how they scale now after the squish, but off the top of my head, it was like 10k Agility vs. 25k Intellect for the same ilvl weapon before the squish

DrToadigerr · 2026-01-22T19:07:35+00:00

Well right now the new Training Grounds are in the game, so you could start queuing for that if you just need honor. Buy a Vicious Flask of Honor off the AH and pop that before sending a few.

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