![]() |
#1
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
So, you may or may not have noticed this particle in the current ASB Rules section on combos:
Quote:
So, without further ado: I'd like to discuss what can be changed about the combo mechanic in order to improve its usability and enhance it as an element of ingenuity in ASB. Of course, any complaints and/or suggestions that are brought up will be seen and accounted for, but, some of the topics that have already been floating around include:
|
#2
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
I may as well try to start off some discussion then.
Quote:
Quote:
(actually, concerning Shadow Sneak and Shadow Force, thinking more about it, I would ref that as a 1% power increase and just swap Shadow Sneak's priority things for a high crit ratio for the resulting move. That makes a lot of sense flavor-wise.) Quote:
__________________
If I'm reffing your ASB battle, you can find my reffing scale in this document. Mostly it involves details on stat modifications and status conditions, as well as my interpretation of the damage formula, other clarifications regarding the specifics of certain attacks. ...
...
|
#3
|
||||
|
||||
![]() Quote:
Quote:
__________________
|
#4
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
Personally, I think the way we have combos set up makes it difficult to justify a lot of combos - most of the ones that people try and get through are like 'strong move + stronger move' or 'strong move + low-priority move' or something else just so they can hit the damage cap or sneak in an extra couple points of damage. I think this is kind of unnecessary! Pokemon generally have a few high base-power moves anyway and they're usually already balanced pretty well, so it seems off to try and combine Giga Impact and Extremespeed (or something). The strong moves have drawbacks so they're balanced, so it seems a bit counter-intuitive to try and get around that by combining it with another move. On top of that, when people do try and combine really strong moves without any indication of how they should work, it makes it a lot of work for the ref to try and figure out.
Instead, I think it would be far more interesting, creative, and maybe easier to implement if the focus was instead of making new moves from existing ones. We have a database that helpfully breaks down the components of a move for us: type, special/physical, power, energy, accuracy, priority, whether it's blocked by substitute, priority, duration, etc. - so I think it would be much more interesting when if you were combining two moves, there would be a system for what components of each move you wanted, as well as energy, base power, etc. For example - let's say you wanted to poison the target, but there's a sandstorm going on and you know that Poison Powder will blow away and be completely useless, and you're sure that'll happen if you use Toxic as well. So, you resolve to combine Power-up Punch and Poison Powder, by coating your fist in poison powder and then socking your opponent in the mouth. So from this, Power-up Punch has 40 BP, 100% accuracy, and raises attack by 1, whereas Poison Power gives no damage but has 75% accuracy and has a 100% chance to poison. The reason why you're combining those to is to make Poison Powder more accurate, so it stands to reason that you'd get a move with 100% accuracy, 100% chance to poison, 40BP, but lose the attack bonus. Or, you could also combine Poison Powder and Power-up Punch to make a 40BP poison-type punch move that gets an Iron Fist bonus but doesn't have a chance to poison, or you could have a move that has a 50% chance to poison, a 50% chance to give you an attack boost, but only 20BP. Please note that the numbers are probably a bit off - I'm not a ref - but the theory is really important here. If we split a move into its parts, and then reassemble them in a balanced way, I think forming a system from that wouldn't be too hard, plus it would be easier for battlers and refs to both understand. The other advantage to this system is that it actually encourages battles to think about what their moves should do - this isn't the games, so just saying 'combine poison powder and power-up punch' is not going to work, because you need to clarify what you're actually going to do. Are you going to spray poison powder in a cloud and then punch it? Are you going to grab the powder in your fist, punch someone, and then spray it in their eyes? These differences would change how the move actually functioned, while also taking a bit of work off refs who have to struggle to figure out how two moves would even work together. By setting a clear objective for what the player wants the move to actually do, it makes it easier for everybody, and will probably make it more apparent when you're trying to do something that's a bit overpowered. The other advantage to this idea is that it's ultimately a lot more creative and interesting than just combining moves together in the hope that you'll land more damage. You could combine moves in multiple ways to your strategic advantage - let's say you only have access to a low-BP super-effective move in your movepool, but you can add it to something with low-priority, or the arena conditions just aren't compatible with the move you want to pull off, but you can combine it with something else to make it viable. For this to work we'd have to establish the costs of benefits and disadvantages so we can have some kind of formula so this is practical, but I don't know if it would be much harder than the process of approving sig moves/attributes. tl:dr; we should be rewarding creativity and strategy rather than someone's ability to curbstomp
__________________
![]() |
#5
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
I don't have much new to say, but I do want to poke my head in to vigorously agree with ultraviolet.
My two cents: I rarely use combos, and that's because the rules on them are juuust vague enough that I have little to no idea in a particular situation whether a ref will (A) agree with the logic I use to explain the combo's execution, (B) allow the combo to go through at all ("no comboing beam attacks b/c they're executed the same way," for instance, is a tenet that can be applied very broadly or very narrowly), and (C) calculate things in a similar way to what I was expecting. For instance, in the recent battle where I commanded Slash + Frustration, I wasn't sure if Superbird would ref it as I intended (which he did), not ref it at all under the "two beams" principle (two generic beatdown attacks being too similar to combo), or ref it in some way differently to what I intended. Meanwhile, even something with as broad a movepool as Diglett doesn't have a ton of attacks that are far enough apart not to potentially trigger the "two beams" principle without being so far apart as to be implausible on the other side of the coin, like, say, Double-Edge + Charm. I definitely think, at the very least, that more specific guidelines on what can and can't be comboed and why would be very encouraging to creative combo usage, at least assuming anyone else has the same hesitancy to try combos as I do and for the same reasons. (I typed this on my phone real quickly without going back and looking at what I'd already written, so if I make no sense please ignore me)
__________________
|
#6
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
I'd like to write a useful, long post, but really what I want to say is just a few sentences, so:
I like the idea of what uv is saying in theory, but then I think it brings up the issue of like... in that example, it is not really worth the use of a combo to poison your opponent. I think that generalizes to a lot of the more interesting combo ideas: having to take a rest action to use your cool combo tends to be too much of a drawback to trying to do something fun and creative. I don't know what we'd do about that. I mean, we can't eliminate the rest action entirely, for obvious reasons (I think). Maybe if a combo meets certain criteria (like no more than one damaging move is involved, or something) there could be a lighter penalty like decreased priority the next action or something... I dunno. |
#7
|
||||||
|
||||||
![]()
Apologies for taking a long time to get back to this, it's been a hectic couple of weeks.
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
This is definitely an interesting idea, and one I could try to implement. I'm not sure we necessarily need to bind it to formulae, either; just the change of principles alone is worth considering. Quote:
|
#8
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
I was literally just talking about this like yesterday or something, but would it be a huge problem to somewhat steal from Smogon lmao because I liked this thing that I saw there and I thought maybe we could apply it to combos (or recharge moves because I think not having (re)charge actions is somewhat unbalanced, but that's a separate issue):
Quote:
__________________
|
#9
|
||||
|
||||
![]()
I've had thoughts similar to those, but I figure they'd mostly really be solutions for Hyper Beam and the like, unless they're applied to, like, an actually exhausting combo. uv's hypothetical Power-Up Punch + Poison Powder could totally fly without something like that. Although... it might just be a worthy trade-off for high power combos, if we set it up so it prevents a Pokémon who just did a powerful combo from following it up with a high-priority attack.
But, on a note less related to the above: as a preliminary measure, I've prepared a rewrite of the first paragraph in the combos section of the ASB Rules. As such, what currently reads as this: Quote:
Quote:
|
![]() |
Thread Tools | |
|
|