The Smogon Discord is looking at
the Battle Tower set list, and man this is gonna be rough:
-47 Bright Power users.
-32 Focus Band users.
-21 Lax Incense users.
-30 Quick Claw users.
-47 Double Team users.
-6 Minimize users.
-13 Sheer Cold users.
-11 Fissure users.
-74 Focus Sash users.
-49 Flash users.
-19 Sand Attack users.
This Tower is overflowing with bullshit.
This is an incredibly misleading post. For one, it includes all the NFE Pokemon and other various dross you'll fight before the first Palmer fight, so the numbers are somewhat inflated (e.g. Bellossom 2 has Bright Powder, but you'll basically never face it after Palmer 1). This is important because Focus Band, for example, is very skewed towards the early sets; there are only 17 Pokemon in later sets that have it, out of the 32 quoted.
More importantly, though, it doesn't provide any context as to how this compares to other facilities; for example, the Gen IV Tower has 40 BrightPowders and 35 Lax Incenses, a greater total than the BDSP Tower. This Tower has been dealt with rather successfully, as you can see by its
records thread, and I personally expect the BDSP Tower to not cause too much additional aggravation on the luck front.
Here's a full comparison with the Gen IV Tower, since I imagine that will be a reasonable point of comparison, using all the Pokemon. The list is formatted as (new amount) vs (old amount):
- Bright Powder: 47 vs 40
- Focus Band: 32 vs 30
- Lax Incense: 21 vs 35
- Quick Claw: 30 vs 36
- Double Team: 47 vs 39
- Minimize: 6 vs 3
- Sheer Cold: 13 vs 6
- Fissure: 11 vs 10
- Focus Sash is not a bullshit item?
- Flash: 5 vs 3 (you were counting Flash Fire and Flash Cannon as well lol)
- Sand Attack: 19 vs 8
Here it is again, without the Pokemon before Venusaur-1:
- Bright Powder: 39 vs 32
- Focus Band: 17 vs 13
- Lax Incense: 4 vs 25
- Quick Claw: 25 vs 28
- Double Team: 37 vs 31
- Minimize: 2 vs 1
- Sheer Cold: 13 vs 6
- Fissure: 10 vs 10
- Flash: 2 vs 1
- Sand Attack: 4 vs 1
Essentially, the point I'm trying to make is that the new Tower is not significantly more liable to spawn bad luck than the Tower it's based on, and the facilities community is also constantly refining strategies to fight against these factors. The actual factors that we're looking at that seem to make this harder than the previous Tower are generally more competitive sets which demand appropriate counterplay, potentially improved AI, and the weakening of common strategies due to the Pokedex cut (e.g. Trick Room loses many setters, including Eviolite Dusclops + Porygon2).
Apologies if this post seems like I'm tryharding, I just don't enjoy one of my favorite activities within the game being constantly demonized. If you're interested in learning more about the Tower and/or getting your ribbons more easily, the
Battle Tower Discord is full of experienced veterans, mostly much nicer than I am, who would be happy to teach willing learners the ropes.
Some other thoughts, based on replies to this post:
My issue isn't even that it's difficult, I take issue with the inordinate amount of RNG hax present in almost every Battle Facility. My experience slogging up to a 50-streak in the Battle Tree in Moon pretty much turned me off from Battle Facilities for life. (I played around with the Tower in Shield some, but only because there were no streaks there.) Even with a team of comp-viable pseudo-legends (and a Tapu for good measure), it still took me a solid month of grinding attempts before I beat Red in Super Singles just due to how often plain rotten luck would end a run. Not nice
The actual reason the Battle Tower appears to be so "hax"-inducing is because you have to win 49 battles in a row to complete it. Even if you give yourself a generous 99% chance of beating any battle you encounter, that's only a 61.1% chance to get through the whole thing, barely better than landing a blind hypnosis. It's a lot worse if you keep streaking further. The pseudo-legends and Tapu team sounds great on paper, but I imagine there were definitely significant threats in the Tree it failed to account for. It's similar to how you can't expect to bring a singles OU team into DOU and win matches: battle facilities are also a different kind of format that must be built specifically for. One interesting example is how Salamence on modern high-level Tree teams is almost always
mono-attacking with Return, whereas it might run EQ in general competitive formats.