Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl - Release 19th Nov 2021

Okay but who the actual heck thought Shell Smash Tapu Lele was a good idea for competitive play
Not all addition to movepools are done for competitive shenenigans (in fact very few are), usually they are just done for affinity to the pokemon, folklore reasoning, or straight puns.

Also, after seeing phisical Tapu Fini in a VGC tournament finals, I don't know what's true anymore.
 
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Pardon me if I'm destroying the videogame industry. It won't happen again, ok?
 
Okay but who the actual heck thought Shell Smash Tapu Lele was a good idea for competitive play
Not all addition to movepools are done for competitive shenenigans (in fact very few are), usually they are just done for affinity to the pokemon, folklore reasoning, or straight puns.

Also, after seeing phisical Tapu Fini in a VGC tournament finals, I don't know what's true anymore.


The original image was showing pokemon with Withdraw but not Shell Smash, not these pokemon have shell smash.
 
Does anyone know if there are more TM26 Earthquake than the one in Wayward Cave and then those that you can buy for BP in Battle Tower(?). I can't find anything about it.

I want to use Garchomp, but with this annoying return to single-use TMs, I don't want to waste the only one I get.

There are probably other TMs also that I want more of. It would be a pity to have to plan my team based on just level up moves. Or I guess, if it is supported I could transfer to SwSh and use TR there and then transfer back.
 
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Is there any efficient way to trade quickly? The SWSD system was better. Entering the room and then having to walk around and find someone to press Y to connect with just takes forever. And much more clicking.

I hope they stream line it in a patch and dump the whole room thing. What took 25 seconds in SWSD takes over 60 in this.
 
I've been watching some videos from people playing it as it released, and I've gotta say... I think this might just be the nicest looking Pokémon game since Gen 5? Not to say there hasn't been competition, and I am a little mixed on the chibi style; but they very much committed to it and made it look as nice as they could. It's not enough to sell me, but... honestly, with all that if they had Platinum's roster and an online Underground I'd find it hard to resist at this point. They were clearly limited by the direction and the time constraints but I'm nonetheless impressed with what the team were able to put out here within those limits.
 
I've been watching some videos from people playing it as it released, and I've gotta say... I think this might just be the nicest looking Pokémon game since Gen 5? Not to say there hasn't been competition, and I am a little mixed on the chibi style; but they very much committed to it and made it look as nice as they could. It's not enough to sell me, but... honestly, with all that if they had Platinum's roster and an online Underground I'd find it hard to resist at this point. They were clearly limited by the direction and the time constraints but I'm nonetheless impressed with what the team were able to put out here within those limits.
It definitey looks nice although they probably should have touched up the battle textures a little more. Some pokemon you see their eyes and they're much mroe obviously pixelated than, say, SWSH.


Also the underground is online.
 
Does anyone know if there are more TM26 Earthquake than the one in Wayward Cave and then those that you can buy for BP in Battle Tower(?). I can't find anything about it.

I want to use Garchomp, but with this annoying return to single-use TMs, I don't want to waste the only one I get.

There are probably other TMs also that I want more of. It would be a pity to have to plan my team based on just level up moves. Or I guess, if it is supported I could transfer to SwSh and use TR there and then transfer back.

I will answer myself since Serebii has updated the TM location list. Yes, they are sold randomly in the Grand Underground.
 
This sounds eerily similar to HGSS. Most of the main campaign is a sleep walk...then suddenly Lance.

I still think this game seems like top 5 material. But I don't think it can beat Platinum.
Replying in this thread to not derail the other one.

Yeah, you can see where GF/Masuda got their hands in this game for the worse.

With Shinx, Starly, and Budew having severe movepool issues and the wild encounters being DP-based, odds are you'll want to get mons from the Underground, and that's pretty late into the early game.
This is like how if you didn't get mons from Raids/Glowing Encounters in SwSh, you were pretty much wasting your time.

It's not as bad as BW1 because you do get a lot of neat options before the Under, but this is probably going to hurt replayability.

The Exp. Share, as predicted, is outrageously broken and we can 100% rule out any copium-filled possibility of "The game is balanced around Exp. Share!" because it's the exact same level curve as OG DP.

BDSP is really, really good, but right now I'm looking at how to delete the 1.1.1 update on my Switch because the "No Exp. Share and Affection" cheat didn't get updated from 1.1.0.

That kind of thing doesn't happen in other great franchises. It's insanity.
 
it's the exact same level curve as OG DP.

Is this actually true? I feel like overall I'm getting way less xp per battle just it's spread between my team members. When my level 5 Pipler beat rival's lvl 5 Turt I only got like 25% XP bar of experience. Usually winning that first battle gets you to level 6 immediately.

I don't doubt that XP share is broken and makes the game easy but I feel like the XP formula has been changed somehow.
 
Is this actually true? I feel like overall I'm getting way less xp per battle just it's spread between my team members. When my level 5 Pipler beat rival's lvl 5 Turt I only got like 25% XP bar of experience. Usually winning that first battle gets you to level 6 immediately.

I don't doubt that XP share is broken and makes the game easy but I feel like the XP formula has been changed somehow.
Strictly speaking, yes the exp system is different because it's not the original DP's but the one used in SWSH (itself likely a slightly tweaked gen 5 exp system). Someone did the math during the preview footage and I imagine that's the same now.
 
Is this actually true? I feel like overall I'm getting way less xp per battle just it's spread between my team members. When my level 5 Pipler beat rival's lvl 5 Turt I only got like 25% XP bar of experience. Usually winning that first battle gets you to level 6 immediately.

I don't doubt that XP share is broken and makes the game easy but I feel like the XP formula has been changed somehow.
Every wild and trainer mon has the exact same levels as DP. The original curve is the same.

The difference is that Experience scales like post-Gen 5, and the broken Exp. All.

So now instead of having a relatively stable curve with a game that keeps you on your toes because you're not really overleveling anyone, but it's not quite exactly challenging because the AI is idiotic, now you get...

A completely broken, lopsided curve courtesy of the Exp. Share overlevelling every mon in your team to hell and back to the point the bad level spike on the League is now just them catching up.

Oh, just one problem with that. They got optimized IV/EV spreads. :psysly:


I'll be honest. I'm trying my hardest to be less of a prick nowadays.

But man, do I feel vindicated by Exp. Share and this level curve.

GF has never, ever balanced around the Exp. Share and by forcing the faithfulness to DP to this extent in BDSP utterly dismantled any sense of progression in this game. And now I finally have proof because these absolute dimwits were adamant in sticking to DP's level curve despite the fact that they introduced a massive change in Exp. gain.

No, I'm not blaming ILCA for this. It's very clear where each company had the most influence in this game. Not that this is all negative, mind you, the excessive faithfulness brought us back some of the best map designs in the franchise and that's 100% a point for GF in this.
 
Every wild and trainer mon has the exact same levels as DP. The original curve is the same.

The difference is that Experience scales like post-Gen 5, and the broken Exp. All.

So now instead of having a relatively stable curve with a game that keeps you on your toes because you're not really overleveling anyone, but it's not quite exactly challenging because the AI is idiotic, now you get...

A completely broken, lopsided curve courtesy of the Exp. Share overlevelling every mon in your team to hell and back to the point the bad level spike on the League is now just them catching up.

Oh, just one problem with that. They got optimized IV/EV spreads. :psysly:


I'll be honest. I'm trying my hardest to be less of a prick nowadays.

But man, do I feel vindicated by Exp. Share and this level curve.

GF has never, ever balanced around the Exp. Share and by forcing the faithfulness to DP to this extent in BDSP utterly dismantled any sense of progression in this game. And now I finally have proof because these absolute dimwits were adamant in sticking to DP's level curve despite the fact that they introduced a massive change in Exp. gain.

No, I'm not blaming ILCA for this. It's very clear where each company had the most influence in this game. Not that this is all negative, mind you, the excessive faithfulness brought us back some of the best map designs in the franchise and that's 100% a point for GF in this.

Sigh... I don't want to believe the "negativity" in this post... but I'm having a hard time not believing it...

I'll have to play through it myself. But it does seem borderline impossible to evenly balance a game around mandatory Exp. All.
 
So let's talk exp gains using my good friend, a Level 12 Combee
Catching a level 9 Pachirisu gave it 193 exp
Beating a level 8 Buizel gave it 74

Now I actually have a dinky program set up to help me calcluate some of these formulas, so let's compare this to their Flat counterparts that we'd get in gen 4
Pachi would give no exp because capture exp wasnt a thing approximately 154 (i didn't fully acount for rounding so in the real game it'd probably be a little lower)
Buizel would give 85

Fun fact: gen 5 did mess with the exp gains but very inconsistently. Buizel gives less base exp (75 in gen 4, 66 in gen 5 on), Pachirisu gives significantly more (120, 142), Turtwig (though they may have updated it here to accomodate for the starly you have to kill) was unchanged. The flat numbers above are based on their old rates.
Fun fact 2: Once you get out of the early game funk, difference in levels leading to lower exp gains doesnt degrade nearly as much as you think it does. It only really becomes noticable once you're notably higher than the surroundings. For a very long time you actually earn more EXP than an equivalent base EXP (ie if Pachirisu had its 142 yield in gen 4 you'd earn 182 which is notably lower than 193 i think you & i can agree)

Anyway in conclusion some pokemon will give less exp some but many will also give more.
 
I actually like the concept of the XP share. Trying to grind up new Pokémon is boring and tbh grinding in general isn't fun. The XP share also makes raising stuff like Shuckle or Wobuffett viable instead of tedious hell. Best of all XP share is probably the easiest way Gamefreak could add a difficulty mode by simply tweaking Xp gains higher or lower. By Gamefreak I mean modders in 2 months when this game gets ripped to shreds by Rom hacks because this game is based off Unity. Salvation is coming boys.

At the moment yeah, seems like it doesn't make the game particularly good. But shared party experience is better than the alternative imo.
 
I actually like the concept of the XP share. Trying to grind up new Pokémon is boring and tbh grinding in general isn't fun. The XP share also makes raising stuff like Shuckle or Wobuffett viable instead of tedious hell. Best of all XP share is probably the easiest way Gamefreak could add a difficulty mode by simply tweaking Xp gains higher or lower. By Gamefreak I mean modders in 2 months when this game gets ripped to shreds by Rom hacks because this game is based off Unity. Salvation is coming boys.

At the moment yeah, seems like it doesn't make the game particularly good. But shared party experience is better than the alternative imo.
I mean at the end of the day this conversation wouldn't matter if it was just an optoin like it used to be. It would accommodate everyone's play styles without stepping on anyone's toes
 
Sigh... I don't want to believe the "negativity" in this post... but I'm having a hard time not believing it...

I'll have to play through it myself. But it does seem borderline impossible to evenly balance a game around mandatory Exp. All.
To put it in perspective, in Gen 4 we know that if you take like, 3 mons to Roark, there's no way you'll avoid grinding.

If you pick just Chimchar and Starly, you're all but guaranteed to need to grind for Roark because you ain't getting to 14 just off trainer Exp.

What little I played of BDSP had me have Chimchar, Budew, Starly, and Shinx hovering around 13-14 off trainer Exp. alone. That's a lot of mons this early in the game. Had I only picked 2, I'd probably be somewhere close to 16.

So let's talk exp gains using my good friend, a Level 12 Combee
Catching a level 9 Pachirisu gave it 193 exp
Beating a level 8 Buizel gave it 74

Now I actually have a dinky program set up to help me calcluate some of these formulas, so let's compare this to their Flat counterparts that we'd get in gen 4
Pachi would give no exp because capture exp wasnt a thing approximately 154 (i didn't fully acount for rounding so in the real game it'd probably be a little lower)
Buizel would give 85

Fun fact: gen 5 did mess with the exp gains but very inconsistently. Buizel gives less base exp (75 in gen 4, 66 in gen 5 on), Pachirisu gives significantly more (120, 142), Turtwig (though they may have updated it here to accomodate for the starly you have to kill) was unchanged. The flat numbers above are based on their old rates.
Fun fact 2: Once you get out of the early game funk, difference in levels leading to lower exp gains doesnt degrade nearly as much as you think it does. It only really becomes noticable once you're notably higher than the surroundings. For a very long time you actually earn more EXP than an equivalent base EXP (ie if Pachirisu had its 142 yield in gen 4 you'd earn 182 which is notably lower than 193 i think you & i can agree)

Anyway in conclusion some pokemon will give less exp some but many will also give more.
Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure the scaling is like, -10% for each overlevel and +10% for each underlevel compared to the mon you're facing.

I actually like the concept of the XP share. Trying to grind up new Pokémon is boring and tbh grinding in general isn't fun. The XP share also makes raising stuff like Shuckle or Wobuffett viable instead of tedious hell. Best of all XP share is probably the easiest way Gamefreak could add a difficulty mode by simply tweaking Xp gains higher or lower. By Gamefreak I mean modders in 2 months when this game gets ripped to shreds by Rom hacks because this game is based off Unity. Salvation is coming boys.

At the moment yeah, seems like it doesn't make the game particularly good. But shared party experience is better than the alternative imo.
Modern Exp. Share by itself is not bad. When you need to grind, especially post-game, it's amazing. Same as IoA's Exp. Charm.
But then they decided it shouldn't have an off button. :smogduck:

If anything, my one gripe with Gen 6/7 Exp. Share is that it replaced the Gen 2-5 Exp. Share which was actually important when you needed to have one mon catch up.
 
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