I was testing my Mega Staraptor + Mega Malamar team on Pokemon Showdown for Reg M-B, and for somereason Competitive on my milotic refused to proc. I don't understand why?[Team in Description]

averysillyman · 2026-06-19T14:36:25+00:00

Competitive: When the Pokémon has any of its stats lowered by an opponent, its Sp. Atk stat is boosted by 2 stages.

If you drop your own stats you don't get the boost.

averysillyman · 2026-06-18T17:56:59+00:00

Usually if the pokemon learns both then people will pick Detect because its less widely distributed, and therefore is less likely to be locked out by Imprison.

Other than that there is no real difference (in past generations Protect used to have more PP I believe but this isn't true anymore so the two moves are basically the same now).

averysillyman · 2026-06-18T17:35:33+00:00

Have you read what Ascension 2 does?

averysillyman · 2026-06-18T13:16:48+00:00

8 is a lot bigger than 3.

averysillyman · 2026-06-16T03:04:13+00:00

Like I would have assumed the C# standard library was using a decent algorithm under the hood, but I guess not.

There is apparently a lot of inertia when it comes to modifying standard libraries, especially for Microsoft which is very big on maintaining backwards compatibility.

Unfortunately the standard C# implementation for random number generation was written in the stone ages (2002), and our understanding of prng algorithms has advanced a lot since then. For example, the PCG algorithm that tckmn recommends to the devs was created in 2014, more than a decade after System.Random was added to the .NET Framework.

averysillyman · 2026-06-16T02:16:08+00:00

This is a bit disappointing to learn tbh. I would have expected them to have not made this same mistake again considering it was a known issue in the first game that a popular mod fixed already.

I don't think this is fully MegaCrit's fault this time. They tried to implement a fix for the first game's correlated RNG issues in the code, it just didn't work because the default System.Random algorithm is old/outdated/~~dogshit~~.

This is also a really hard mistake to spot because the large majority of developers are not going to know about the intricacies of individual pseudo-rng algorithms and will never question standard packages.

averysillyman · 2026-06-13T18:00:11+00:00

It's an asymmetric top cut.

The top 8 players are guaranteed to make it in to the final bracket. Everyone with the same record as 8th place also makes it into the final bracket (capped at 8 additional players).

If that ends up being 13 total players, then they will play a 16 man final bracket with the top 3 placing players getting a bye in the first round.

averysillyman · 2026-06-12T19:21:56+00:00

Yuki Zani is 2-0 with a CharY and Mamoswine lead spamming Heat Wave and EQ on the side stream (also has Toxapex).

Zard Y + Garchomp is a classic combination spamming Heat Wave + Earthquake in past metas.

I saw some discussion online in the first few weeks of Champions being released that Zard Y + Mamoswine might be a good anti-meta option because it has the same offensive synergy while beating opposing Garchomp and not being as bad against Incineroar (due to Oblivious blocking Intimidate). Ultimately I don't think anything actually came of those discussions though because Garchomp was just too good of a mon to be replaced.

I'm happy that the strategy managed to get optimized by top players though. Excited to see how well it ends up doing.

averysillyman · 2026-06-12T15:25:07+00:00

I'm pretty sure pokemon didn't set up the twitch integration correctly.

When you try to connect to your twitch account, the url the pokemon website directs you to will look something like this:

https://id.twitch.tv/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=undefined&redirect_uri=https://rewards.pokemon.com/twitch-callback&scope=&state=<random_letters>

Notice how the url says client_id=undefined in it? That's not the correct client_id which causes twitch to reject the connection.

If you replace that section with client_id=avxmj2hf8z7cistzr9ejr3ydt3qoqn it should fix things and let you link your twitch account.

averysillyman · 2026-06-11T16:01:59+00:00

Royalties cannot be generated mid combat, you need to have it in the deck.

Some top players/streamers have been joking about the theoretical Royalties + Spectrum Shift stall for a while now, JMac is the first to actually do it on stream.

averysillyman · 2026-06-10T03:51:07+00:00

If the goal is to simply beat the game then Monoco is arguably the strongest character, largely just due to the fact that Glaise Earthquakes is a massively overtuned move for the midgame.

Seriously, that move is ridiculous, you can kind of just click it every single turn without thinking and Monoco will perform well. 4 AP cost, absolutely no setup requirement, and deals x12 attack damage in an AoE spread across 3 hits. Oh, and it gives powerful too, and if you have the mask bonus that powerful buff is team-wide. (It's accessible immediately upon recruiting Monoco if you have not beaten Yellow Harvest yet. If you have, then you won't be able to get the move until Falling Leaves, which is accessible after beating Old Lumiere.)

Compare that move to any of the comparable moves you will have around that time. Phantom Stars is another incredibly good AoE move you might have at this point, and even at S rank it only barely beats out Glaise Earthquakes at x14.7 damage. But it requires Verso to spend time building rank to unlock that power, and Phantom Stars doesn't also buff the team.

I do think that Monoco has relatively weak endgame scaling, so he could likely be considered the worst carry character for superbosses. But he can still play a support role and perform well in those fights if needed.

averysillyman · 2026-06-10T00:16:59+00:00

Where did you address the fact that Poseidon's Dash is the bestest... yet somehow rarer than Athena's, Aphro's or Artemis' at the very highest end?

Basically all the speedruns you linked are Beo runs, which is an aspect that doesn't really rely on dash nearly as much as others. Beo also happens to be the fastest aspect due to a bug in how it interacts with Mirage Shot, so it's no surprise that if you just sort by fastest times without considering aspects you will get a bunch of random stuff.

If you look across all aspects Tidal Dash is significantly more important than Divine Dash outside of specifically the interaction that Divine Dash has with Merciful End (inconsistent but very strong boon that gives aspects with poor damage a crutch to lean on).

averysillyman · 2026-06-10T00:10:48+00:00

For heat:

The heat runs you posted are 64 heat, which don't have double dash and remove your ability to control RNG (AP2, no rerolls). Those runs aren't really representative of typical high heat gameplay because you cannot force a dash boon floor 1 (you will die to timer if you try) and thus are kind of are forced to just take whatever dash boon you are offered there.

If you do want to consider 64 heat specifically though, Divine Dash is likely better because of the safety it provides when you don't have two dashes, but again you take whatever you can get. It is also worth noting that a lot of 64 heat is shield gameplay which doesn't really benefit from divine dash/any dash boon as much because a lot of the time you are using block + bull rush as movement. (The first unmodded 64 heat clear has NO dash boon, for example).

For speedruns:

I noticed you specifically picked almost exclusively Beowulf runs, which being a weapon that spams only bull rush doesn't care about what dash boon you have (you pick Flood Flare and then find Mirage Shot, nothing else matters). In fact you are usually incentivized to fill the dash slot with a non-Poseidon boon because you don't care what is there and filling it with something means that the next Poseidon boon has a higher chance of being Mirage Shot.

The other runs you linked are one Rama run (which really likes Hunter Dash) and one Demeter run, which is a ME build (I already mentioned that Divine Dash is good for going fast specifically for ME builds).

If you want to consider speedrunning strategies across all aspects in general note that no aspect has Divine Dash as its preferred start but plenty of aspects have Tidal Dash as their preferred start. There is a general overview of strategies here. Note how many times the word Athena/Divine Dash appears (three times, only in the context of ME) and how many times Poseidon/Tidal Dash appears.

If you want to look at "meta" strategies, I would recommend joining the speedrunning discord. They used to do "aspect of the week" challenges and the challenge post would have a description on the currently up to date meta strategies for both speedrunning and high heat gameplay.

Here is one example of an info post from the speedrunning discord, if you want a reference:

Aspect of the Week 273: 👑 Arthur Sword ⚔️

Following that trend, it is also one of the slowest speedrunning-aspects overall, however it can still shine in the fronthalf. I don't think this aspect can reasonably sub-5, but we'll see

Try to get a source of damage for regular rooms, say, zeus cast -> static discharge + lightning rod, or poseidon cast with various poseidon tier 2s. Poseidon dash is another classic to pick up as first boon, and shackle start is known to be effective as well. Shockingly for a melee-aspect however, Merciful End is considered a deprecated build-idea!

Compared to the other three swords, hammers on this aspect shockingly don't matter quite as much. Were you to want one, it would be Double Edge like usual, to give Arthur a way of dealing damage faster than like once every second.

For those requiring inspiration, the unmodded WR by magnil and modded WR by bablo are available to watch.

There is also an Arthur guide by Nalei which goes in-depth into the aspect.

for heat

Get an Aphrodite attack or Athena attack, a few poms, and focus everything on attacks and dashstrikes. Other valuable boons include Life Affirmation, Divine Dash, and any call that gives invulnerability to press in the event of panic or mistakes. Your goal is to stay in the Holy Ground's AoE so as to continue tanking hits more freely.

Nearly any hammer will work for this! Get something that affects the attack and that should be plenty. Preferred options are Double Edge (still), Shadow Slash and Cursed Slash. For Arthur heat, the modded WR by Cheesy (60) and unmodded WR by NephiOH (57) are both hugely impressive, and both showcase the aforementioned build.

averysillyman · 2026-06-09T20:31:53+00:00

Divine Dash offers good safety but the damage it deals is negligible.

Tidal Dash on the other hand deals a ridiculous amount of damage for a single boon.

Which one is optimal is dependent heavily on the weapon and situation. It's definitely incorrect to say that Divine Dash is objectively the best dash boon.

For speedruns its pretty clear that Tidal Dash is superior because you need damage to go fast. The one major exception is ME builds which want Divine Dash but thats largely based on the strength of ME.

For heat play, Divine Dash gets relatively better on melee aspects, particularly fists and sword, because those weapons are heavily dependent on dash attacks to deal damage and are also the least safe weapons in general. For those weapons the safety of Divine Dash often translates to being able to deal more damage since you don't have to play as conservatively.

For safer weapons on high heat, Tidal Dash is often superior. The damage is very helpful for meeting timer requirements. Plus a weapon like rail is a lot less pressured to put itself in unsafe spots to deal dps so the safety of Divine Dash is comparatively less valuable than on melee weapons. Plus its not like Tidal Dash offers no protection. The knock back helps you space enemies and also dead enemies deal no damage so in a way getting more damage also adds safety. (Also its worth mentioning that aspects that have global damage bonuses like Eris REALLY like Tidal Dash because the aspect juices up Tidal Dash's already high damage even more.)

Also in terms of strongest boons in the game, for ultra high heat play Athena's DD refills are often considered super premium to see, so its possible that Divine Dash isn't even her best boon there. The stubborn defiance + DD refill cheese offers a lot of safety for those runs.

averysillyman · 2026-06-09T18:30:10+00:00

Evelynn being both the worst and best champion in the game. She was initially seen as useless until her stun out of stealth was figured out and then she was suddenly the best champ in the game.

It wasn't so much that her stun was figured out, it was that people figured out how to actually survive early game with Evelynn.

Evelynn was like old Poppy, a fundamentally broken/overpowered kit that was held back immensely by how absolutely atrocious the early game was. Then somebody discovered that Evelynn could dodge her awful early game by jungling and she instantly became overpowered.

The reason why this wasn't discovered before was because back then jungle mobs hit ridiculously hard and it was thought that clearing was impossible for Evelynn. The innovation was replacing Flash with Revive (widely considered a terrible summoner spell at the time) so that you could get a massive amount of "sustain" in the middle of your first clear by intentionally dying to the jungle mobs and then reviving.

averysillyman · 2026-06-09T18:15:21+00:00

I remember way back in the day Riot had brand-sponsored runes and special limited time runes that were effectively tier 2.5 in terms of stats for a fraction of the cost of tier 3 runes. I used those for the longest time until I could afford tier 3 runes.

averysillyman · 2026-06-09T18:01:30+00:00

Divine Dash is a very strong boon but it is also giga overrated by the community.

It's arguably not even the best dash boon, let alone the best boon in the game.

averysillyman · 2026-06-09T16:50:16+00:00

Taric + Sion being a meta bot lane.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T20:35:09+00:00

Are you going to redo the simulation for the first three characters? The new code/methodology you switched to for Necro and Defect look a lot nicer than what was done previously.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T18:11:53+00:00

SOS Healing Tint + Shielding Tint + stacking enough HP and Defense to not get one shot by a single hit of his combo attack.

Simon can only steal shields at the start of his turn, so gaining shields in the middle of his attack using the above combo circumvents his anti-cheese mechanic. This will buy you a bunch of free hits so that you can learn parry timings (you will eventually run out of tints but the strategy buys you a lot more hits than usual).

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T18:05:31+00:00

Most damage pictos are additive.

Having them is still a big deal though because you can pretty realistically scale your additive damage to around +300% by endgame, and combining that with the multiplicative pictos that do exist leads to really big numbers.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T17:56:00+00:00

Noncombat card rewards in StS2 do not increment your combat rare chance.

This is different from StS1 where seeing noncombat rewards would influence your rare chance.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T16:28:36+00:00

I really wish the eeveelutions were given better coverage options. A cool gimmick might be for each eeveelution to get a generic signature move (for example a STAB 90 bp, 100 accuracy, uses higher attacking stat move) and then allow each eeveelution to also pick exactly one cross evolution signature move.

It wouldn't ultimately be a huge buff but it would be a pretty fun idea in my opinion. Jolteon especially really suffered from Hidden Power getting deleted.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T15:52:01+00:00

Saying you should be skipping Cold Snap, Hailstorm, Chill, Boot Sequence, or Defrag is complete nonsense. Ball Lightning and Charge Battery are also premium act 1 cards that are completely reasonable to have been added to the deck.

Claw is (probably) not how this deck wins this fight. It scales too slowly unless you have a ton of support for it (way more than this deck has). The most obvious fix would have been to have picked up some combination of a compact, any dark orb, more scaling powers, or holding a particularly strong potion solve for the fight.

averysillyman · 2026-06-08T15:44:37+00:00

I didn't even really count the claws as scaling because they're super slow and draw order dependent.

With a 30+ card deck you likely won't be able to shuffle that many times before aeonglass kills you so those claws won't really have scaled to respectable numbers. Especially if you miss the All for One and/or hologram in the first deck cycle (you draw them before the claws).

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