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Pokemon Masters

I think Gloria and Zacian was more worth it
It depends, Gloria&Zacian is way older than Snorlax & Dialga so it doesn't have many advantages in itself compared to the others.
You can fit Snorlax in almost any team and abuse the sync move accel & Potion and get one more charge of trainer moves while using G-Max Replenish.
If you have none of these 3 I think Snorlax is the priority to pick while Dialga is just a huge pick in Dragon spam teams. (that's a good thing for the Champion Stadium)
The reason why I don't use Zacian is that it needs too much support to work well if you don't have it at least 3/5 because it is very old, but if in the future we have a rework of it's sync grid it could be broken yes, so there's no really wrong pick between these 3, just pick the one you want.
(It's a flex to say you have zacian too haha)
 
Gloria gets you access to Lodge Gloria (once you slog through the veiled dating simulator bs raising the friendship to 100), netting you two units instead of one.

However, I had read that Gloria is really only useful at 5/5, so I picked Lucas and Dialga to get a unit with dragon zone, since I skipped Nate and Haxorus (who I think can set it up, but maybe I'm misremembering).
 
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i am in actual agony
 
Oof, that's rough. Hope you got a bunch of other limited pairs.

I used Google credit from google surveys to buy some gems to pull on the mix scout, but quickly decided it wasn't worth it, especially after they rolled out some select scouts for only 5000 paid gems. I figured I might as well hoard paid gems until one of those comes around again.

I got a few, but not a ton, and very little i'm actually making use of

SS Hau was a nice pickup, I've been using Special Costume Lyra a surprising amount, and I picked up Paulo from pity who I absolutely love the kit of, but everything else is kinda just sitting, collecting dust

I also haven't gotten a 5* in the last 11k gems I've used on the banner, excluding the pity pull. That's fun.
 
Thinking of getting back into the game if I have enough time once college ends, if only to save gems once Kieran releases. Stopped playing around the time the two Greninja champions were released, did they make any significant changes?

Also did the story advance in any way? The Nemona event seemed to be building up a champion tournament iirc
 
Thinking of getting back into the game if I have enough time once college ends, if only to save gems once Kieran releases. Stopped playing around the time the two Greninja champions were released, did they make any significant changes?

Also did the story advance in any way? The Nemona event seemed to be building up a champion tournament iirc

There's a new chapter of the story, focusing on mysterious stone items that started showing up from the trainer lodge around when Nemona released and Hisuian Trainers, for the most part

In terms of gameplay, not a ton has changed. They've released new, harder fights that are permanently available, reward 300 gems per fight, and are entirely optional in their base state. There is a function to give characters a second effect to their sync move now, and two new roles for extra effects for those.

There's a new mode called the Battle Rally, which functions kinda like a Rogue-Lite. You go through 10 fights, can choose a difficulty for each of them (normal. hard or very hard), each getting progressively higher stat multipliers and ending off with one of the hard fights i just mentioned, with reduced stats if you go for the easier options. You get tickets to buy items that can boost your team's stats, activate field effects or give your team some quality that they wouldn't normally have like permanently reduced damage taken, massively accelerated sync cooldown, or even just a massive stat boost. Once done, you get any tickets you didn't use to buy items with
 
June datamine hit and it's another skip month for me -- not interested in Tornadus or Virizion, and while I like Centiskorch and Larry it's not enough for me to pull them. (I am lacking a good flying type pair but I'd rather hold out for corviknight).

However, I am stoked that Marshadow and Korrina are getting a rerun that comes with a 5/5 grid expansion and support EX role. I would have expected sprint, but I guess support is fine, since I usually like to sync with Marshadow and this way I'll get support buffs.

People were speculating that Marshadow 5/5 expansion would come out in July ahead of the ghost/dark high score event, possibly in a double banner with Cyrus and Darkrai. Hopefully Darkrai still comes next month along with another ghost or dark unit I don't already have a 5/5.
 
with SS Korrina rerunning this month and assuming they aren't going to rerun her again for the HSE banner, our options for a dark/ghost HSE banner are uh

SS Cyrus and Akari.

at a massive stretch you could maybe say they rerun Lear so the banner has access to his 4*s that are also considered Pokefairs, but at this point, either they do what they did for the Electric HSE and it's solo Cyrus, or it's Cyrus and Akari



Anyway, on a different tangent, we're finally almost done with 5/5 Grid Expansions for pokefairs, the last two left without one are SS Cyrus, and Lear. I'm still not particularly fond of their addition, but I'm glad that we're almost back on a level playing field in that regard. EX Role distribution has already seemed to have taken over the role they were playing in terms of character reruns, so that shouldn't have too much of an impact, but I wonder if we might see the 5/5 grid expansions going to other rarity characters. God knows some old seasonals could use a boost like that
 
I would be happy with a double Cyrus/Akari banner as I have neither and my dark roster is not great.

I wouldn't mind an out-of-season Halloween banner either, since I am missing the pre-2023 units, as long as the rates were better than the standard seasonal rerun rates. Of course I don't expect that to actually happen. The only time I pulled on a high score event banner I got a lot of 3* power ups and nearly went to pity to get the featured units.
 
I was planning to wait until I was done with college before going back to the game and save gems for Kieran...but these Cheren and Bianca make me want to play right now. I don't even like Tornadus or Virizion and the Unovan fanboy in me didn't care for the previous Neo Champion from the region or my dear N's alts...but for some reason I need them. They look so good, I wish I could show them to my teen self and try to pretend it's from a new Unova game.

Anyways, what is the most effective way I could farm gema? I already used most of the story ones back when Penny and Nemona released (wanted the whole Área Zero group, mostly because having all Paldeans is a bit too much). And Larry is also there!!! With DUDUNSPARCE? Give me a break. I haven't played in so long.
 
Not really possible to outright farm gems, if you've exhausted the story, missions and Legendary Arena stages, you just gotta complete stuff as it comes once all that's done
 
This month's pairs seemed designed to specifically drain my gems before the 5th anniversary: two new ghost units and a rerun of Darkrai+Cyrus (plus H-Samurott+Akari on the same banner). Thankfully I managed to get all of them in relatively few pulls, maybe 1 pity or so across 3 banners, so I still have a little over 2 pities worth of free gems at the moment, can probably make it up to 3 before the anniversary pairs leave.

This set me up well for the Ghost/Dark high score event. I wasn't able to crack Master ball tier for any of the previous events, but I managed to get top 3000 so far, will need to improve at least a couple of runs to try and improve or at least stay where I am.
 
Arven releasing close to the new Nemona must be a joke directed towards me. I need to save for Kieran...

but it's a Paradox sync pair and is Nemona without the uniform! I NEED it. She is the one character that was screaming (no pun intended) to get an usual Pokemon outfit.

Also Volo hype? I like him a lot more than Giovanni as a villain so it would be great to see him- and his interactions with Ghetchis and Cyrus.
 
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Well, the 5 year trailer has revealed info on the new units, and along with the dev letter, several new features to the game and, well, to say the least

It is not going over well

the increase to 500 scout points to pity the new style of pair is incredibly unpopular to probably nobody's surprise, but apparently the customer support feedback form has actually gone down, most likely due to the volume of people using it to tell them that this decision is not one they enjoy. I personally got mine in before that, but it's still pretty major


The new pairs themselves are also not going over particularly well, for that reason as well as others that I won't go over at the moment but should be fairly obvious
 
Well, the 5 year trailer has revealed info on the new units, and along with the dev letter, several new features to the game and, well, to say the least

It is not going over well

the increase to 500 scout points to pity the new style of pair is incredibly unpopular to probably nobody's surprise, but apparently the customer support feedback form has actually gone down, most likely due to the volume of people using it to tell them that this decision is not one they enjoy. I personally got mine in before that, but it's still pretty major


The new pairs themselves are also not going over particularly well, for that reason as well as others that I won't go over at the moment but should be fairly obvious
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here's how dena can still win
 
Well, the 5 year trailer has revealed info on the new units, and along with the dev letter, several new features to the game and, well, to say the least

It is not going over well

the increase to 500 scout points to pity the new style of pair is incredibly unpopular to probably nobody's surprise, but apparently the customer support feedback form has actually gone down, most likely due to the volume of people using it to tell them that this decision is not one they enjoy. I personally got mine in before that, but it's still pretty major


The new pairs themselves are also not going over particularly well, for that reason as well as others that I won't go over at the moment but should be fairly obvious

Haven't played masters since I got N to max friendship in the hangout place? Idk but I lost my account and the fact that the pity system has increased, yeah I definetly won't be going back to masters anytime soon.
 
The fact that if only for a brief moment I actually considered reporting the 5th anniversary trailer for scam misinformation

In all seriousness, while I’m not going to have a childish, immature response like that, I am going to come up front and say that this game has honestly been on a downhill trajectory ever since 2023. There’s been enough evidence for me to at least imply that August 2023 would have been this game’s original ending date as far as content updates are concerned (incidentally, this would have been around the same life cycle as another Nintendo mobile game, that being Mario Kart Tour) should the game have not been “successful enough” to continue beyond that point. To me, at least, this lines up with how after the PML Arc, Legendary Adventures, and the Villain Arc in the main story, any form of an overarching storyline this game had had kind of just been on autopilot ever since, with no real rhyme or reason for what’s going on aside from “it’s convenient for us, the developers”.

The ultimate problem I see with this 5th anniversary update is that the gameplay has caught up with the story’s lack of direction. Gacha game mechanics are already controversial to many as is, but the way these new units are being handled reeks of “that one time people hated Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon because they were just rereleases of the same two versions”, if that comparison makes sense. I don’t mean for this post to suddenly turn into a USUM diss track, but even those games made a genuine effort to make changes to its base counterpart in such ways that these monthly additions to Pokémon Masters sorely lack and struggle to keep returning fans from coming back to the game, even if many people would have preferred a definitive, single-version Alola game instead.

It’s not every day that I get this disappointed in a Pokémon content update, because at the end of the day, more content for someone’s favorite game should always be a good thing, right? But when Year #5 of Masters fell off as hard as it did compared to this game’s heyday and major criticisms about the game have yet to actually be addressed, this is a rare occurrence where, for the sake of the playerbase, I hope this game crashes and burns for the sake of the playerbase not having to deal with DeNA’s decisions anymore. Refunding players somehow after this would be especially helpful, but you all know darn well that a greedy mobile game company isn’t going to do that.

Edit: I will end this post off by reiterating something I remember telling someone in a reply to a YouTube comment last night. Situations like these make me wish we could still the dislikes on a YouTube video without the need for some kind of browser extension.
 
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Not loving the news and currently feel inclined to skip the arc units, but I will wait to see what the banners actually look like before casting final judgment.

The reason is that the reaction so far reminds me of the reaction to mixed scouts (paid only scout with exclusive and hence paywalled sync pair): immediate outrage that essentially evaporated once it turned out that the banner had every previous Pokefair (and special costume?) unit in it. That is the one thing I could see potentially turning this reaction around: availability of every previous non-Master fair in the banner, which might make the increased pity limit more palatable. (Whereas for mixed scout they decreased the pity that is presumably on account of the restriction to paid gems).

Increased pity limit aside, these units are just uninspiring for an anniversary. Costumes look like they are essentially recolors, which ex outfits already were, and reusing their original Pokemon makes it feel like the original units are completely redundant now, except for unlocking lodge pairs apparently. Like.... they could have at least given the Pokemon the Legends Arceus boss aura or something?

I am entertained by people on reddit justifying these choices by saying "well in the story they talk about getting stronger with garchomp/metagross/dragonite, so it wouldn't have made sense to give them different Pokemon," as though the featured pairs are determined by the story instead of the other way around.
 
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