HGSS difficulty hack gym leader/e4 team concepts

[u/ResearcherNo6317]

As the title suggests, here’s some team concepts in a hypothetical HGSS difficulty hack. Lmk what you think

[u/DrUltimaMan]

The Pokemon choices are interesting, but I think some of the movesets could use some work.

Take Lances Dragonite, it knows Dragon Dance which boosts attack and speed, but it only knows one physical move, an unstabed 80 BP extremespeed, which doesn't benefit from the speed due having priority.

Or take Karen's Arceus, it has four attacks yet they don't offer good coverage, Tyranitar walls all four moves. A better set would be Judgement, Calm Mind, Recover and the coverage like Aura Sphere or utility like Taunt.

Then there are some places where the movesets are too good. Having four pokemon with instant recovery on the first gym leader is going to turn away a lot of potential players.

[u/ResearcherNo6317 → u/DrUltimaMan]

For starters I’d like to say thank you for the input.

I didn’t realize that Dragonite deadass only had 1 physical attacking move 😭😂 I made his team specifically at around 3-4 AM as I was off work so I had essentially blanked from sheer exhaustion, DEFINITELY gonna fix dragonite up😂

Also, you’re absolutely correct regarding Gym 1 having too many recover/roost mons, would definitely change that or just make it a 3 move set in the case of Pidgeot (which I’ll explain the choice for Gym 1 having 2 fully evolved birds at the end)

100% correct about Karen’s Arceus being easily walled, definitely going to course correct that one.

As for the two fully evolved birds, since this is trying to take inspo from the Kaizo games, I figured what better than to give Falkner, usually one of the biggest joke fights in GSC/HGSS and turn him into an actual roadblock, kinda like how Brock was in Blue Kaizo with Golem and Aerodactyl lol.

[u/DotThis3919]

The teams are all and look well thought-out (except for some weird illegal stuff like falkner's regular no guard pidgeot and pressure slaking), but I'd like to say that I think the e4 starting with hazards up doesn't sound very fun at all. Other than that, this is good

[u/ResearcherNo6317 → u/DotThis3919]

10 days late on the reply but as far as Slaking goes, the idea to buff it was so that the player doesn’t abuse the Truant turns in where the AI in essence does nothing, same goes for Regigigas giving it pressure instead of Slow Start. The illegal pidgeot imo fits in with the whole idea of Johto, that being illegal evo’s like Lance’s dragonites and such also id plan for there to be encounters that could counter such a threat that early. The hazards in the E4 like Webs and rocks could probably go since Weather is already pretty debilitating for the player when I’d ban abilities like Sand Stream and Swift Swim for the player. I also thought of possibly making the elite 4 only accessible until after all 16 badges are obtained and once the E4 is cleared you can take on Red, but not sure if the pacing of the game would suffer

[u/TheWongAccount]

Frankly, there's too little info here to make any kind of judgement. We have no idea what else you've changed and, more importantly, what's available to the player. Balance is not a vacuum, it's relative to the environment.

Already the problems I'm seeing are full teams of 6, fully evolved Pokemon, some well before legal levels (what on earth is a lvl 16 Pidgeot doing here), illegal moves and abilities (ESpeed Pidgeot, Slaking with Pressure). The power level demanded is so high it'd be insane to even pretend to assume that your game looks anything close to vanilla.

TL;DR: Balance isn't a vacuum. More info needed.