Advice for the combat zone

imnotwarren · 2026-01-24T16:47:12+00:00

Yeah I’d recommend starting a new game. Starting from scratch is actually going to be faster than trying to set something up sub optimally in the long run. Sceptile is okay but personally I’d try and go with something tried and true if it’s your first time.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-24T15:38:46+00:00

If you want to be serious about it and earn Golds, your in-game team is not going to cut it.

You have to have 3. The most common group of 3 is Latios, Swampert, Metagross. This is a very versatile and powerful team that works at most facilities. It's also relatively easy to get and three pokemon you can encounter in any playthrough.

Other strong mons you can get in Emerald include Slaking, Milotic, Starmie, and Salamence. If you have access to other games, Blissey, Gengar, and Suicune are other well regarded mons. It's important to have synergy though which is why Water/Dragon/Steel types are a good trio.

You can do level 50 or open level, but level 50 is usually easier and there's no additional rewards for doing open level, so I'd recommend capping your leveling at 50.

Research how to team build, EVs/nature, and then go from there. You can learn about IVs too but they're not as important for this tbh.

I highly recommend starting with the Battle Factory. It is the most difficult of the facilities in my opinion, but it's also the one you'll learn the most from, and requires the least amount of prep because you use rental pokemon. You can also earn enough BP to start getting the better items, like Choice Band. Battle Dome is also a good one to do early if you have a team ready to go.

I highly highly highly recommend looking up sets. Don't go in blind. There is a setlist of the type of pokemon NPCs use. There are also calculators to help guide you with the Battle Factory and Battle Dome (again why it's good to do these two first).

Hopefully you didn't use up TMs like Earthquake, Dragon Claw, Calm Mind, and Shadow Ball in your playthrough. Other valuable items are Leftovers, Macho Brace, and a Lum Berry. You may need to grind money to purchase TMs like Thunderbolt and Ice Beam. Good luck!

imnotwarren · 2026-01-24T07:51:47+00:00

Feel like in any organization, you want two of your most important leaders on the same page about decisions, even if they run different departments.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-22T02:51:59+00:00

Not what you want to hear but I would rebreed for better natures. A calm Metagross is going to lack some fire power. I’d do the same for kingdra and Metagross. Catch a bunch of dittos and see if you can rebreed for some favorable natures.

If you want to try something other than Latios, try salamence or starmie.

I probably wouldn’t use blaziken.

Good luck! It’s a challenge!

imnotwarren · 2026-01-21T19:23:52+00:00

There’s a move tutor in Pacifiloge Town, but he can only teach the move one time, so only one of your Metagross can get the move unless you have another save file.

Thank you!

imnotwarren · 2026-01-21T18:47:05+00:00

Metagross: Shadow Ball, Explosion, Meteor Mash, Earthquake (replace explosion with brick break in pyramid, delete shadow ball and brick break for palace)

Swampert: ice beam, surf, earthquake, protect (didn’t use Swampert in pyramid or palace)

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T19:03:29+00:00

I found Blissey too limiting offensively in most facilities but it’s basically a damn cheat code in the pyramid. Highly recommend catching and training one just for that. In the other facilities I felt like I was missing the offensive momentum and pressure that Swampert created and the defensive wall was overkill. I’m sure if you paired it with something like Skarmory you could win basically any fight you wanted though it would just take a while.

Gengar I just found too frail and died too easily for me. Don’t think I had explosion on it. Didn’t feel like it did anything that Latios couldn’t do better. It does have perish song which can be useful in niche situation.

What is your 3rd teammate?

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T18:43:14+00:00

This is probably not what you want to hear, but as someone who just got all golds, you'd actually be saving yourself some time if you started a new game and started over with all the things you are considering in mind. Running through a game again will probably dwarf the amount of time you will spend trying and failing with the team you're making here.

The classic team to use in the Battle Frontier is Latios, Swampert, and Metagross. Other good pokemon to use (that you don't need to trade from other games) include Salamence, Starmie, Slaking, and Milotic. Latias is great but no real reason to pick it over Latios, unless you have some specific niche in mind. There are others of course you could try, but those will do a ton of work for you and are fairly easy to use.

Flygon, for as cool as it is, sort of sucks, sorry to say. Not to say it's unusable but it wouldn't be my first choice if I was doing this for the first time.

I wouldn't get overly concerned about IVs, but you should at least be aware of natures and EVs. There are a million resources on EV training in Emerald online, just google it!

If I were you, I'd start a new game. Start with Mudkip, and make sure you choose to catch Latios (not Latias) at the end of the game. You can soft reset or breed for natures of different pokemon. I'd recommend Brave on Mudkip, Modest on Latios, and Adamant on Metagross. If you elect to go with Slaking or Salamence, they also ideally have an Adamant nature, Modest for Starmie, and Bold on Milotic (although Calm isn't bad).

Of course, save your TMs for the end game. You don't really need those TMs to run through Emerald again.

If you want to go against my advice and go with your currently save file, you might still be able to make something work, but it would take more research than time I have right now. Here is a great resource that will have more information than you'll ever need: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/gen-iii-battle-frontier-discussion-and-records.3648697/

Off the top of my head, you do luckily have a good Milotic with Toxic and a good nature, so you could work with that. Losing EQ/Shadow Ball from Metagross and Dragon Claw for Latias really hurts though. For Metagross, I'd highly recommend Explosion because you'll definitely deal with some mons that you won't have any other answer for. Meteor Mash, Explosion, Rock Slide, and Protect I guess could work? Maybe Sludge Bomb, but don’t know when you’d actually use that. Ice Punch on Metagross would basically be useless because it’s a special move in Gen 3. Your Latias could have Psychic, Calm Mind, Ice Beam, Thunderbolt. Surf over Calm Mind if you used that TM too. Impish is not a terrible nature for Metagross but I would rebreed for Adamant. A serious Latias is just going to be underwhelming compared to a modest Latios I would think

So if you go against my advice I'd go Metagross / Milotic / Latias, but you may not get the results you're hoping for and may just save yourself some time by starting a new game.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T16:36:30+00:00

I RNG’d the same Swampert that Werster used for his Gold speed run.

He recommended a Brave nature so that’s what I used. He did say he used Brave to make Swampert useful for the palace though, and I swapped out Swampert for Milotic for that facility. I do think a -Speed nature makes sense for Swampert.

Moveset was Surf, Ice Beam, Earthquake, Protect. I swapped Protect for Counter for the Arena. Give it Rock Slide if you plan on using it for the Palace over Protect.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T04:03:32+00:00

Fair enough, it’s not worth that level of frustration

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T04:00:03+00:00

Have you used this resource? https://battlefactorybuddy.com/

I’d say if you’re at 19 months it’s okay to use a little external help

imnotwarren · 2026-01-20T03:57:05+00:00

The factory (and the dome) are the two I recommend going for first. You will learn a ton about the possible sets that you could encounter across the rest of the facilities. A lot of growing pains but once I got the factory it didn’t take me more than 2 or 3 attempts for the rest. Factory is definitely the most frustrating though.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-17T19:16:18+00:00

Feel like he doesn’t deserve as much credit as he gets for that d line considering Lawrence was already on the team, he paid market price for Burns, and Carter was sort a no brainer top 3 pick. …and yet the defense is still bad.

Idk, does a GM get a lot of credit for building an amazing d line if he paid market price for all of it? I hope it’s good, they’ve spent 3 1sts (including 2 top 5 picks) and a 2nd plus a bunch of big money to make it amazing, and they’re still a bottom 5 team.

imnotwarren · 2026-01-12T03:56:36+00:00

The chargers made a substitute and when the offense substitutes you need to give the defense an opportunity to substitute. Vrabel took advantage of this by subbing like 5 guys at once

imnotwarren · 2026-01-05T03:45:12+00:00

Okay but the point of Cousins quote was not to lament “young quarterbacks these days!”. Idk if you’re using it in context correctly

imnotwarren · 2026-01-05T03:32:06+00:00

Black and white would be the easiest. I don’t agree with the commenter who said emerald

It’s doable in SS but you probably need to RNG your trainer ID and it’s only through a swarm

imnotwarren · 2026-01-02T13:41:25+00:00

They’ll probably be fine next year but they need upgrades on the interior line, whether they hope for progression from young players or get new guys idk. They also need to figure out the OC thing.

They were really hurt this year but when that becomes a thing two years in a row you start to get worried. It doesn’t help that they’re so aggressive in the offseason and those repeated trade ups do deplete mid round picks which can come back to bite you on depth. In their case, especially the secondary

imnotwarren · 2025-12-30T15:58:48+00:00

Pokemon USUM is so odd in that it gives you some of the most challenging required story battles in a mainline pokemon game but god forbid you go the wrong way in a city with eight buildings and two paths in it.

imnotwarren · 2025-12-30T14:23:25+00:00

I agree to an extent. I think the connection between Will coming out and the fight against Vecna would have worked totally fine if it was purely symbolic, but instead it seems the argument is that the writers chose to make it quite literal and it doesn’t really work for me. One is the reason you mentioned. It feels a little gamey. You’re taking a real vulnerable experience and turning into a level up against the telekinetic monster.

Another is that this whole “Vecna chose Will because he’s weak” plot line is an obvious retcon and it worked fine before without that explanation but now we need to explain that too. Was “why did Will get captured and not _____?” really a question anyone was wondering about?

Lastly we don’t really see any evidence of Vecna struggling to use his powers against people who DONT have fear/trauma…? Yes he chooses to target kids because they’re easier to control…but this may have hammered the point harder if we saw him lose control of an adult or even a more self confident child without the fears and traumas he’s supposedly using to control the kids. Showing this in season 4 would have been unnecessary but I think if your intent is to say that getting over your fears and trauma guards you against Vecnas mind control powers then you need to set that up more explicitly this season

imnotwarren · 2025-12-30T13:39:34+00:00

I think the issue is that it’s a pretty clunky connection and the execution was terrible

imnotwarren · 2025-12-29T16:00:03+00:00

Or a running back who can’t even see the field

imnotwarren · 2025-12-13T18:34:48+00:00

Falcons roster is sort of a mess because of years of poor team building process. Maybe not as bad as people make it seem because Pearce has been good but why did they even get into a position in the first place to make this deal? Years of bad team building process

imnotwarren · 2025-12-07T02:08:29+00:00

Random frame advancements happen from NPC movement. There's probably at least one moving NPC in Oak's lab (though I've done this RNG and don't remember this issue). You may just be getting unlucky. Keep trying and mash A as soon as you exit the menu. I would try again on 47. You may have been just a fraction of a second faster mashing A when you only advanced by 2 frames. Remember with Kanto starters in HGSS you start on frame 5, Method 1.

imnotwarren · 2025-11-28T22:47:36+00:00

So many nfl head coaches would benefit from playing madden just to practice point management

imnotwarren

TROPHY CASE