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Pokemon Sword & Shield Isle of Armour & Crown Tundra discussion
- Thread starter DHR-107
- Start date
To be fair, I think they altered Solrock's AI a bit, I've seen it use Rock Throw and Psychic relatively often now.
Still does try to buff up but also attacks at least.
Speaking of Apricorns, Serebii has been gathering data and possibly figured how the Cram-o-matic works.
TLDR is aside from guaranteed recipes, every element has a "type" and "value", and the result is determined by a combination of those.
See link for details (yes, I will agree this is needlessly complicate, not gonna lie)
https://www.serebii.net/swordshield/cram-o-matic.shtml
TLDR is aside from guaranteed recipes, every element has a "type" and "value", and the result is determined by a combination of those.
See link for details (yes, I will agree this is needlessly complicate, not gonna lie)
https://www.serebii.net/swordshield/cram-o-matic.shtml
Nah this seems like a relatively smart way to handle things. There's so many items that doing it like this instead of very specific combinations for everything seems like an easy way to (1) allow multiple valid recipes for whatever and (2) have damn near every item in the game show up as both a valid output and a valid input.
The item value "weight" and type categories also aren't too complicated, there's even some intuitiveness to it. Obviously rarer items are "worth" more and would probably indicate they are going to give you a better item. And some items do have innate connection to types.
Only iffy thing is some of these items aren't as obvious as others, I suppose, but I dunno. I kind of like how this is set up
PP Ups are at the top of every tier which makes me wonder if this is a "hey you put in too much" identifier but they didn't want a full dud so here's the PP Up
It's not that I disagree, rather, my issue is that all this is basically off trial and error (or, if someone at some point actually datamines) to find the "element" and "value" of each item when they could... like... actually be written.
The method itself is fine, just, it's stupidly obscure if you don't use external resources.
Then again, that's basically Pokemon games in a nutshell
Was gonna joke about how only Pokémon would advertise "use Apricorns to make Apricorn Balls" as a feature when the rarity and obscurity of it makes it little more than an easter egg...
... but I guess really, all this time, we should have taken "Apricorns can be used to make Poké Balls" a lot more literally.
... but I guess really, all this time, we should have taken "Apricorns can be used to make Poké Balls" a lot more literally.
CTNC
Doesn't know how to attack
I found a way for almost free Wishing Pieces. It takes six trades, but it lets you save your watts for upgrading the Dojo. You can buy Oran Berries (2 Poison Points) in the second town and trade 4 of those for Black Sludge. (10 Poison Points) Trade two Black Sludges and 2 Oran Berries for a Toxic Orb. (14 Poison Points) A Toxic Orb and three Black Sludges gets you in the 41-50 point range for a Wishing Piece.
Yeah it probably should have Hyde go "hey, you know, if you put a bunch of Bug like things in this, you get other Bug like things". Or something to that affect. He does give recipes but you'd need several of them to see the trends.
No need to go to the second town, there's a berry vendor right outside the dojo
It's a shame the favorite pocket isn't in the game, you could probably fast track this really quick by only faving Oran, Toxic Orbs and Sludge
Finally done with just about everything in the DLC. My thoughts:
I'll start with the most consistently good part, the new wild area. As soon as I finished the first Klara battle I immediately went into the water and did a loop around the entire island. The to-scale Wailord was a treat to witness, and I especially liked how it was Level 80. One aspect I really disliked about the original postgame wild area was how homogenous it felt - with everything at Level 60/65, it ruined any sense of danger that was originally there when exploring and it just felt like a Pokemon dump. This was somewhat alleviated by there being no real need to explore it at that point, though. But the Isle of Armor has no such concession if you're starting with it on a postgame file (as a lot of players are), and some things need to be done to keep the Pokemon encounters more interesting. Unfortunately, I think this Wailord is the only example of them doing so, so that was a bit disappointing.
What did not disappoint, though, was the design of the island. The biomes are far more varied than the original, and instead of being a mostly open plateau there's all sorts of nooks and hidden areas to find yourself in. Despite spending nearly an hour exploring the island when I first got there, there were still a number of little areas I didn't even notice until I went back to find Digletts. The only other problem I have with the new wild area is that the far more complex design makes it kind of inconvenient to do raids in. Honestly until the GMax event stops taking over 80% of raids (and thus, the unique raids you would find on the Isle of Armor) it's just way easier to raid in the original.
The story portion, on the other hand, is a mess. Combat-wise, I can't express my sheer dumbfoundedness at being greeted at the Isle by a Level 58 Venipede. I kind of shrugged it off as a clumsy way of showing Klara's inevitable team growth throughout the short story, but it was a bad omen. And unfortunately, these weirdly horrible teams plague most of story. I wasn't expecting this to be a hard DLC or anything, but having teams in the postgame that feel like they belong on Route 3 is absurd. And while the characters and plot are alright - not particularly deep or satisfying, but decently fun - they're desperate for air in an already short story that wastes its precious oxygen with busywork...and Kubfu.
I'll be blunt. Kubfu fucking sucks. Everything about the story turns to Kubfu once it appears, and there's really nothing interesting about it. It is a bear that punches. The game tries to sell you on this awesome journey of discovery the two of you go on, but it just doesn't work. For starters, I already have Pokemon I went on an awesome journey with - my actual team! This shoehorning of Kubfu feels like an awkward attempt to replace my Pokemon I know and love. And even if you don't have quite this existing attachment by say, doing the DLC as soon as it's available, there's just not enough time in the half of a short story they allocate for this part to get very attached to it. The Towers are particularly clumsy on a postgame file, too. You're given a Level 10 Kubfu that then has to deal with Pokemon in their 60s. Ostensibly this gives you time to raise Kubfu and bond with it, but the overwhelmingly best way to level up Pokemon is with Exp Candies, and GameFreak knows that. So there's no real bonding to do, you just shove candies down this thing's throat until it's at a passable level. And even if you don't have the candies necessary to do this, you get them by doing raids which Kubfu is far too weak to participate in, so again there's no chance to bond with it. The battles inside the Towers don't work well, either. It's just a bunch of Pokemon similar to Kubfu in stats with no real type advantage, so you just kind of...beat them up. The only fight that was at all interesting was the final one versus Mustard's Kubfu. His was faster than mine at Level 63 and 2HKOd with Aerial Ace. So I used Counter with a Rocky Helmet to negate his Focus Sash and OHKO him. Having more of these kinds of small little puzzle battles throughout the Towers would go a long way to making the Kubfu section more interesting (and in lieu of time, at least let you bond with it a bit through adversity), but alas.
Somehow, though, it's not over, because even though Kubfu has mastered fighting to become Urshifu, it is a picky fuck and needs honey with its soup. This blatant padding gets frustratingly bloated when Hop appears and takes you through a forest to find Honey instead of Honeycalm Island. The only shining beacon of hope in all this is an angry Vespiquen that somehow manages to be the most difficult fight thus far. Not hard, but it's at least something you actually need to engage in like, type advantages with. Back at the Dojo, as you can probably tell, I wasn't having a great time with the story at this point, so I entered the final Mustard fight with a pessimistic mindset. "I'll be happy if this guy has four Pokemon and leads with a fully-evolved Pokemon", I thought.
So imagine my surprise when six balls showed up and he sent out a Level 73 Mienshao!
Somehow, this DLC shifted from having the easiest fights in the game to one on par with Leon. A baffling, but welcome change. This fight was a satisfying challenge for my story team, and lifted my spirits considerably on the DLC. I was optimistic for what lay ahead, and then... "THE END". Oh. It just started getting good! To be fair though, there's a number of "postgame" DLC things. To continue on Mustard's hype, there's a secret battle with the Matron, Honey. You just need to pay the small price of one million watts to get the privilege. The other watt-dumping rewards are geared towards raising Pokemon which is in line with the raids you'll be doing to get watts, or flavor rewards that can be attached to whatever. But having a fight that's right at the story levels be locked so deep in what's basically the competitive side of things is utterly baffling to me. Ridiculous unlock condition aside, the fight is actually only at Level 60 when you first unlock it, but it at least it fleshes out Honey a bit. After waiting a day you can finally refight her at Levels like Mustard's, and while I personally found her a bit easier it was still a satisfying fight for my story team that I wish more people could experience.
While not technically a postgame aspect, I didn't really engage in Diglett hunting until then so I'll talk about it now. One very annoying thing about this is that the Diglett don't appear until you talk to the Digger. And if you recall the start of this post, the very first thing I did was explore the entire Isle by circling around the sea. So there were no Diglett at all to find on my first exploration! I know I'm not the only one who experienced this issue, either. The Diglett guy should really just automatically talk to you after your first encounter with Klara to avoid this. Anyways, once I started this proper, I mostly enjoyed finding them since the new wild area is satisfying to explore. The exception was the dreaded "There is 1 Diglett left in [this area]". The smaller areas I could find that last pesky Diglett without too much difficulty, but in the larger ones it just became tedious. The initial area had one that eluded me after several passes through the area, but honestly 1 Diglett in the Training Lowlands just became too tedious for me to deal with so I looked it up. Not a particularly obscure one (none of them are), but I just couldn't find it. I think quests like this are better if the last reward only requires ~95% completion to avoid tedious traps like this. The actual rewards (HA Alolan forms and a starter) are decent enough, though honestly not worth the effort if you don't like finding the Digletts.
The last thing I want to talk about is the Restricted Sparring mode that unlocks after Mustard. I haven't actually tried this yet, but I've been reading about it in our Battle Tower thread and it seems pretty interesting. It's like an alternate battle facility that you'd find in a Battle Frontier. You're forced into a monotype team with limited heals, basically. Beyond seeming like an inherently interesting set of rules to plan around, I also like that it might heavily restrict the length of streaks. I can't claim to be a Battle Facility superstar, but having even done a 295 streak back in ORAS, it was so goddamn tedious that I was honestly glad for it to be over. So having a modern facility where good streaks don't take ages to complete is very appealing to me.
So, that's basically everything. Overall it was a very uneven experience, one I hope GameFreak significantly refines for Crown Tundra. While it had a number of good to great aspects, it's mired in a number of confusing decisions. The storyline was obviously the biggest source of these, and in general I think they really need to bump up most of the combat design to something at least passable, and commit better to a singular story, as opposed to the Dojo/Kubfu portions of this one that felt pretty disconnected to me. I am hoping I can attribute these numerous warts to this being their first attempt at DLC, but ultimately we'll see later this year if GameFreak can learn some lessons from this and have Crown Tundra be a truly great experience (fwiw, I always thought it at least looked better than Isle of Armor).
I'll start with the most consistently good part, the new wild area. As soon as I finished the first Klara battle I immediately went into the water and did a loop around the entire island. The to-scale Wailord was a treat to witness, and I especially liked how it was Level 80. One aspect I really disliked about the original postgame wild area was how homogenous it felt - with everything at Level 60/65, it ruined any sense of danger that was originally there when exploring and it just felt like a Pokemon dump. This was somewhat alleviated by there being no real need to explore it at that point, though. But the Isle of Armor has no such concession if you're starting with it on a postgame file (as a lot of players are), and some things need to be done to keep the Pokemon encounters more interesting. Unfortunately, I think this Wailord is the only example of them doing so, so that was a bit disappointing.
What did not disappoint, though, was the design of the island. The biomes are far more varied than the original, and instead of being a mostly open plateau there's all sorts of nooks and hidden areas to find yourself in. Despite spending nearly an hour exploring the island when I first got there, there were still a number of little areas I didn't even notice until I went back to find Digletts. The only other problem I have with the new wild area is that the far more complex design makes it kind of inconvenient to do raids in. Honestly until the GMax event stops taking over 80% of raids (and thus, the unique raids you would find on the Isle of Armor) it's just way easier to raid in the original.
The story portion, on the other hand, is a mess. Combat-wise, I can't express my sheer dumbfoundedness at being greeted at the Isle by a Level 58 Venipede. I kind of shrugged it off as a clumsy way of showing Klara's inevitable team growth throughout the short story, but it was a bad omen. And unfortunately, these weirdly horrible teams plague most of story. I wasn't expecting this to be a hard DLC or anything, but having teams in the postgame that feel like they belong on Route 3 is absurd. And while the characters and plot are alright - not particularly deep or satisfying, but decently fun - they're desperate for air in an already short story that wastes its precious oxygen with busywork...and Kubfu.
I'll be blunt. Kubfu fucking sucks. Everything about the story turns to Kubfu once it appears, and there's really nothing interesting about it. It is a bear that punches. The game tries to sell you on this awesome journey of discovery the two of you go on, but it just doesn't work. For starters, I already have Pokemon I went on an awesome journey with - my actual team! This shoehorning of Kubfu feels like an awkward attempt to replace my Pokemon I know and love. And even if you don't have quite this existing attachment by say, doing the DLC as soon as it's available, there's just not enough time in the half of a short story they allocate for this part to get very attached to it. The Towers are particularly clumsy on a postgame file, too. You're given a Level 10 Kubfu that then has to deal with Pokemon in their 60s. Ostensibly this gives you time to raise Kubfu and bond with it, but the overwhelmingly best way to level up Pokemon is with Exp Candies, and GameFreak knows that. So there's no real bonding to do, you just shove candies down this thing's throat until it's at a passable level. And even if you don't have the candies necessary to do this, you get them by doing raids which Kubfu is far too weak to participate in, so again there's no chance to bond with it. The battles inside the Towers don't work well, either. It's just a bunch of Pokemon similar to Kubfu in stats with no real type advantage, so you just kind of...beat them up. The only fight that was at all interesting was the final one versus Mustard's Kubfu. His was faster than mine at Level 63 and 2HKOd with Aerial Ace. So I used Counter with a Rocky Helmet to negate his Focus Sash and OHKO him. Having more of these kinds of small little puzzle battles throughout the Towers would go a long way to making the Kubfu section more interesting (and in lieu of time, at least let you bond with it a bit through adversity), but alas.
Somehow, though, it's not over, because even though Kubfu has mastered fighting to become Urshifu, it is a picky fuck and needs honey with its soup. This blatant padding gets frustratingly bloated when Hop appears and takes you through a forest to find Honey instead of Honeycalm Island. The only shining beacon of hope in all this is an angry Vespiquen that somehow manages to be the most difficult fight thus far. Not hard, but it's at least something you actually need to engage in like, type advantages with. Back at the Dojo, as you can probably tell, I wasn't having a great time with the story at this point, so I entered the final Mustard fight with a pessimistic mindset. "I'll be happy if this guy has four Pokemon and leads with a fully-evolved Pokemon", I thought.
So imagine my surprise when six balls showed up and he sent out a Level 73 Mienshao!
Somehow, this DLC shifted from having the easiest fights in the game to one on par with Leon. A baffling, but welcome change. This fight was a satisfying challenge for my story team, and lifted my spirits considerably on the DLC. I was optimistic for what lay ahead, and then... "THE END". Oh. It just started getting good! To be fair though, there's a number of "postgame" DLC things. To continue on Mustard's hype, there's a secret battle with the Matron, Honey. You just need to pay the small price of one million watts to get the privilege. The other watt-dumping rewards are geared towards raising Pokemon which is in line with the raids you'll be doing to get watts, or flavor rewards that can be attached to whatever. But having a fight that's right at the story levels be locked so deep in what's basically the competitive side of things is utterly baffling to me. Ridiculous unlock condition aside, the fight is actually only at Level 60 when you first unlock it, but it at least it fleshes out Honey a bit. After waiting a day you can finally refight her at Levels like Mustard's, and while I personally found her a bit easier it was still a satisfying fight for my story team that I wish more people could experience.
While not technically a postgame aspect, I didn't really engage in Diglett hunting until then so I'll talk about it now. One very annoying thing about this is that the Diglett don't appear until you talk to the Digger. And if you recall the start of this post, the very first thing I did was explore the entire Isle by circling around the sea. So there were no Diglett at all to find on my first exploration! I know I'm not the only one who experienced this issue, either. The Diglett guy should really just automatically talk to you after your first encounter with Klara to avoid this. Anyways, once I started this proper, I mostly enjoyed finding them since the new wild area is satisfying to explore. The exception was the dreaded "There is 1 Diglett left in [this area]". The smaller areas I could find that last pesky Diglett without too much difficulty, but in the larger ones it just became tedious. The initial area had one that eluded me after several passes through the area, but honestly 1 Diglett in the Training Lowlands just became too tedious for me to deal with so I looked it up. Not a particularly obscure one (none of them are), but I just couldn't find it. I think quests like this are better if the last reward only requires ~95% completion to avoid tedious traps like this. The actual rewards (HA Alolan forms and a starter) are decent enough, though honestly not worth the effort if you don't like finding the Digletts.
The last thing I want to talk about is the Restricted Sparring mode that unlocks after Mustard. I haven't actually tried this yet, but I've been reading about it in our Battle Tower thread and it seems pretty interesting. It's like an alternate battle facility that you'd find in a Battle Frontier. You're forced into a monotype team with limited heals, basically. Beyond seeming like an inherently interesting set of rules to plan around, I also like that it might heavily restrict the length of streaks. I can't claim to be a Battle Facility superstar, but having even done a 295 streak back in ORAS, it was so goddamn tedious that I was honestly glad for it to be over. So having a modern facility where good streaks don't take ages to complete is very appealing to me.
So, that's basically everything. Overall it was a very uneven experience, one I hope GameFreak significantly refines for Crown Tundra. While it had a number of good to great aspects, it's mired in a number of confusing decisions. The storyline was obviously the biggest source of these, and in general I think they really need to bump up most of the combat design to something at least passable, and commit better to a singular story, as opposed to the Dojo/Kubfu portions of this one that felt pretty disconnected to me. I am hoping I can attribute these numerous warts to this being their first attempt at DLC, but ultimately we'll see later this year if GameFreak can learn some lessons from this and have Crown Tundra be a truly great experience (fwiw, I always thought it at least looked better than Isle of Armor).
While I more or less liked your post, there's one thing I'd point out.
The DLC was actually designed with the idea that you visit it right as the station unlocks. They did put this whole... "level scaling" as in, everything jumps up in levels as an attempt to make it playable in postgame but it doesnt work very well.
If you tackle this with your story team at one of those points, you would have a way cooler experience:
- As soon as you unlock the wild area and the station: enemies will actually be on level with you, and those... unevolved pokemon won't feel wrong since they'd be at the levels you would expect. Kubfu would also feel better as you'd not need to raise it to level 70 (woweeeee) to tackle the tower. In the end you'd have a neat team you can use to continue the story, which'll be slightly higher level than usual but let's be honest, you'd overlevel the main story anyway.
- Just after beating Leon: in this case, even though there's the plague of unevolved level 60+s and the tragedy that is feeding candies to Kubfu until it vomits, you also would have a team more or less on level. In fact, I did this (sorta), as I kept my story team untouched after beating Leon, and literally used that. I in fact almost lost to Avery (Quick Draw 3 turns in a row isn't fun to deal with), and Mustard proves to be an ever harder challenge than Leon with his lvl 70+ team and actually having a legendary (albeith not as broken as Hop's Zacian)
It still isn't perfect, but if you play the DLC at the two levels it's meant to, it's not as bad balance wise.
For a first attempt, I think it's okay. Knowing GameFreaks, it could have gone much worse.
To be fair for what we know it could also include a teaser or data for Tundra or upcoming raid events :P
This is all true, of course, but... this DLC -did- release 7 months after base game. They had to have known a very very large amount of players would be encountering it postgame, and of the ones that weren't in postgame they were likely much further along. Very few people all in all were going to be playing this while they'd just started the game; at least for now -- on replays and for future players it'll be great, but it's pretty obvious that for right now they should have thought ahead a bit more and at the very least made some of the trainer battles have higher evolutions and larger teams.
I'm curious if Tundra will be intended as an "early game" attraction or a "midgame". Unlike Isle of Armor I don't think we know when we get access to it. But the first thing we seem to do in the expansion is deal with the birds so it'd be pretty hilarious to just hand out 3 legendary pokemon before you're even past the first gym.
Well, that is why I said
I was honestly expectly not even trying to come up with more than one intended level.
Still, hopefully they will improve upon this with Tundra.
After all, they did manage to improve on some stuff in this DLC over the main game (notably, the Wild Area structure). So not all hope is lost.
Yeah, I can't really put things into words right now but I've gotta echo that the Isle of Armour is so, so, sooo much more fun and lovely as a Wild Area than what we got in base game. I don't think it's perfect and the desert feels like an afterthought of a prerequisite, but for the most part everything feels very well thought out and natural and suitably large. I definitely think certain parts of it should be larger and a little more fleshed out, but what is actually there is wonderful and so much nicer to look at. The music, as well, is a lot nicer to have in the background than the Wild Area's tune that felt a lot more... bombastic? It didn't suit well and Isle improves on that. Just overall really, really nice.
My favorite thing is how it interconnects. There's several twisting paths that leads to different areas so there's always multiple entrances.
And the caves are actual caves! They are more traditional caves than the actual caves we got in the base game. Forest of Focus is arguably more forest-y than Slumber Weald (part 2) & Grimwood Tangle or whatever it was called.
I still don't want Wild Area to be the focus of the series moving forward but IoA was a really pleasant experience except for the sharpedos in the water. It was such a nice surprise to like it this much.
Tundra seems like it'll be biger so I hope it keeps it up.
I mean, there's always the option of Sharpedos on ground...
My experience for the Isle of Armor is pretty much what I was thinking it could be with the (very little) information that had been disclosed, with the single exception that it was even shorter than I thought (I thought that I might beat its content in two or three afternoons, but in less than three hours I had it done).
Apart from that, there's not much to say. Pretty much the same pros (some QoL improvements) and cons (underwhelming final part of the story; focus on a Wild Area; way too few flying spots) as the base game (although adding a problem in that this new Wild Area is more confusing to navigate), so I'd say the Isle of Armor is... average.
Apart from that, there's not much to say. Pretty much the same pros (some QoL improvements) and cons (underwhelming final part of the story; focus on a Wild Area; way too few flying spots) as the base game (although adding a problem in that this new Wild Area is more confusing to navigate), so I'd say the Isle of Armor is... average.
I'd not take those raids as example.
Those raids are there for a specific event and the challenge is *beating* them as they aren't catchable.
The legendary raids in Tundra are meant to be the way to obtain gen 8 mark legendaryes for everyone (to use in the GS cup later on). They'll not be anywhere as hard, and should be on the line of your usual 5 star raid.
I still dont think mewtwo & zeraora are indicative of how the co-op dens will function but beyond that the entire focus of the DLC is legendary Pokemon. Birds, Regi, Calyrex.
We seem to start at the base of the mountain where we find the tree the birds are at. That's fairly early into the dlc by all counts. Calyrex will likely be in league with the Mustard battle: post game or post-post game (perhaps even...post-post-post game????). Regi in the mid poitn of the DLC would follow; I doubt they'd be around the 70s regardless.
So regardless the question likely still stands: when is Tundra meant to be accessed on a normal playthrough? IoA is designed around going there as soon as you get to the wild area and if Tundra is similar it'll reflect on all the content inside.
Honestly I expect it to be available after Leon. In this case they are probably going to be feeding you multiple legendary pokemon (exp if the Regis/Birds are part of the plot) and I think even GF would realize it's a bad idea to feed you level 30 legendaries halfway in the story (hello Latis).
Also, there's the fact Calyrex might have some connection with the "ancient heros" like the dogs, which would also want a plot that acts as continuation of the main one rather than "side story" like Kubfu's.