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On Statuses

Mai

Banned
So I don't really like how most statuses are handled in ASB. For reference, this is what the current DEG has to say about them:

Burn: The pokémon is inflicted with a second-degree burn that constantly stings and throbs, dealing it 3% damage per round if it is not further aggravated. Burned pokémon are particularly susceptible to attacks that happen to strike their burn and see reduced effectiveness in the attacks they use that require movement, as swift movement is one thing that will aggravate their burn and cause them further pain. They therefore take such attacks much slower than usual, making them less powerful. As a result, physical attacks and others that require considerably movement have their power reduced by 3% after all other modifiers are applied. Burns do not fade without treatment.

Freeze: The freeze status is usually less dire in ASB than it is in the games. It is rare that the pokémon will be entirely encased in ice and unable to move at all. Usually, a couple of its limbs will be immobilized at most, unless the opponent specifically concentrates on freezing it all the way. Freeze will naturally fade after several actions as the pokémon thaws, but there are a multitude of ways to speed up the process, and being struck by a fire attack will outright eliminate the condition.

Poison: A pokémon steadily loses health as poison slowly degrades the functioning of its body from the inside out. Poisoned pokémon usually take around 3% damage per round as a result of the condition. Poisoning does not fade unless treated.

Severe Poison: Like normal poison, this status causes persistent damage. Unlike regular poison, however, the afflicted pokémon's condition worsens with time and the damage it takes as a result of the status increases with each passing round. Usually, a pokémon will begin by taking 1% in round in which they were poisoned, and the amount of damage dealt by the status increases by 1% per round, to a maximum of 10%. Severe poison will not fade without treatment.

Sleep: The pokémon is sent into a deep and unnatural slumber, which typically lasts for several actions, during which there are very few commands the sleeping pokémon can effectively execute. Loud noises or, especially, damage from attacks will likely bring a sleeping pokémon back to wakefulness earlier than normal. Pokémon will also awaken immediately if their lives are in danger--for example, if the area where they have fallen asleep is flooded and they start to drown. Sleep usually lasts between three and five actions on average, with the duration being shorter if it takes significant damage while slumbering.

Paralysis: The pokémon's muscles are uncomfortably locked up, either from chemical or electrical disruption or from cramping. This makes it difficult for a paralyzed pokémon to control its limbs and move. Not only is the speed of a paralyzed pokémon reduced to a quarter of its original value, but there is a chance that paralysis may grip it so severely that it will be "fully paralyzed" for an action, completely unable to move or perform attacks; for severely paralyzed pokémon, the chance of this happening is 25%, and it decreases as the condition fades. Status moves always inflict severe paralysis outside of extraordinary circumstances. Attacks that don't require movement may be less affected by paralysis, but full paralysis can be distressing and distracting enough to disrupt these attacks. Paralysis fades and eventually vanishes, but does so very slowly.

Minor status effects are eliminated if the pokémon suffering from them are recalled and later returned to battle. The minor status effects are as follows:

Attraction: This status is directly caused by the attack "attract" and indirectly by a variety of other attacks and abilities. The afflicted pokémon is put in a lovesick daze by a pokémon of the opposite gender, such that it will be much more gentler when attacking that pokémon or its allies, or may refuse to attack that pokémon or its allies altogether. Attraction ends when the attracted pokémon realizes that the opponent actually isn't interested in it, at which point it becomes enraged at the deception. Attraction almost always starts at severe, but for this reason attraction by the same subject grows less and less likely to be effective with each successive use. Severe attraction is equivalent to a 50% chance of failing to attack, and it decreases with time, fading more quickly if the object of attraction attacks the attracted pokémon or otherwise appears uninterested in it. An attracted pokémon may be more likely to obey commands rather than daydream if it can be convinced that what it's being asked to do will improve its image in the eyes of the pokémon it's attracted to.

Confusion: A confused pokémon has its perceptions of the world distorted and usually has difficulty coordinating its movements. It becomes a danger to itself, there being the chance, on any given action, that it will end up hurting itself in its attempt to complete an attack against the opponent, for example by tripping and falling while running at the foe. Severe confusion is associated with a 50% chance of damaging oneself, and this chance decreases as the severity of the condition fades over time. Status moves always cause severe confusion outside of extraordinary circumstances. It fades more quickly if the confused pokémon takes significant damage from an opponents' attack.

Burn and poison are ... mostly useless. They only deal 3% a round/1% an action, so takes three rounds deal 9% damage. Most pokemon get a 90 base power neutrally effective STAB move at least, which ends up dealing 11% damage at default, and they can often pull upwards of 12% an action with higher base power, items, super-effective moves... etc. In the four rounds it takes for burn or poison to do 12% damage, making the move worth the action, the pokemon could easily KO their opponent: for 12% damage an action (a STAB dazzling gleam, seed bomb, sludge bomb, or shadow ball would all do 12% with normal stats and a boosting item, and a STAB psychic, ice beam, flamethrower, thunderbolt, bug buzz ... etc. would all do 13%), that would only take nine actions. So three rounds.

Poison, also, is just blatantly a worse burn: burns get to cripple the opponent's attack stat, which does have a use if they're a physical attacker, but poison doesn't do this for special attack or anything. (I realize this is how it works in-game, but.)

Toxic poison is even worse than regular poison. It takes five rounds for toxic poison's damage to even catch up with regular poison. Battles can be easily finished by that point! Most artificially shortened/cut-off battles cap at three or five rounds. The larger cap for the damage sounds appealing, but when you think about about, one-on-one battles just do not last long enough for that cap to hit and be effective. If a battle lasts ten rounds, healing was probably used; and if healing was used and a pokemon is toxic poisoned, they'd want to rest. It just doesn't make sense for a status to stick around that long: if a pokemon survives long enough for it to be a problem, it would be healed off somehow.

I don't have any problems with freeze as written--it's not much of a big deal in ASB, and considering its rareness in-game, I'm fine with that.

Sleep seems fine to me, but I'd like to clarify the necessary amount of damage dealt that decreases sleep severity. I do 10% in an action, but anywhere in the 10%-15% range would be good (or lower, if the ref desires)--it would be a guideline.

Paralysis is majorly broken. It is easily the most powerful status in ASB. Speed is the only base stat that really matters in most battles, and it can determine the outcome of a close match. And in the two most prevalent guides/scales, Negrek's and Kratos's, it will never fade.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but ... it isn't much of one. Starting from severe paralysis at Kratos's scale, it takes nine rounds for paralysis to fade (two from severe to moderate, two from moderate to mild, two from mild to light, and three from light to nonexistent). For those nine rounds, the afflicted pokemon has to suffer from lowered speed /and/ parahax.

From an old Negrek ruling, paralysis "starts at 25% chance of failure (severe) and reduces by 1% per action that the afflicted pokémon is *not* fully paralyzed." Assuming no actions spend being fully paralyzed, that takes about eight rounds.

Attract is one of the most obnoxious moves in the game. It's one of the staple banned moves, along with OHKOs; that should probably say something about how well-liked it is. Severe attraction has a 50% chance to cause a failed action; that, uh, should be enough cause to change the recommended treatment of it somehow. It shouldn't be lasting that long, at the very least.

Confusion is mostly fine, but it should have a short duration, and I think 10% damage in an action should be recommended as dropping the severity.

Also, curse isn't listed here, but it is... kind of a mess, in that (from what I can tell) very few people understand it. I like the fact that it works off current health rather than total, but not everyone knows that, and it is nearly impossible for it to actually be an effective move. The main reason it would be would be if there's a large health differential between the user and the opponent (the opponent having much more health); otherwise, it's near-impossible to recover the amount of health spent. For some numbers, let's look: if both pokemon started at 100% health and one of them immediately cursed, it would take seven rounds for the cursed pokemon to drop to 47.8% health. And that's assuming the curser didn't attack at all in that time! If they did, they would decrease the amount of health lost by the target (because curse takes off 10% of the opponent's current health at the end of each round).

Some proposals:

Burn effectively lowers attack by one stage for each stage in burn, past light. This puts a lot of possible variance in burn damage (I ref attack stat changes as 1.5% applied before type effectiveness), but on the light/mild/moderate/severe/extreme scale, that would make a severe burn at -4.5% physical damage at neutral effectiveness. This would make its primary use be crippling physical attackers.

Poison needs more damage. I'd go as far as saying 6% a round/2% an action.

Toxic could start at 3% a round and increase by 2% each round. It would then match normal poison in the fourth round, and go past it after. It could still be capped at 10%/round (though that'd make for an odd progression - 3%, 5%, 7%, 9%, 10%?), as it is already... it could also be capped at 12%, nicer because then it evenly splits into 4% damage/action, or not be capped at all because damage caps exist. It would be... interesting to see a battle stalled long enough that toxic damage is enough to hit the cap by itself. (Though, again, any reasonable person would just have their pokemon rest off or otherwise heal the status by then.)

Sleep is mostly fine; I'd just like to see 10% damage/action as decreasing sleep severity. That, and Negrek's old rule of sound-based moves with a base power greater than 90.

Paralysis definitely needs a nerf. It should have a 10% chance of failure per stage of paralysis (with light/mild/moderate/severe/extreme, this puts severe at a 40% chance of failure--higher than Negrek's and Kratos's starting points, but it fades more consistently that way) fade at one stage per three actions; that gives severe paralysis a shelf life of four rounds, which is still quite significant. (For example, as long as you have the status, you're going to have to second-guess all your plans other than action-by-action smash heads and implement "push this back and try again if you get paralyzed" conditionals.)

Attract should decrease in severity every other action. At only eight actions, that's pretty short, but ... attract is quite possibly the most hated move in ASB, so. For chances of failure, I'd go with 20% a stage. Severe attraction would be intense, with an 80% chance of failure, but stages could be knocked down if the pokemon of infatuation attacks the attracted pokemon and failure chance could be halved if the trainer makes a good enough effort to make their commands sound like a decent attempt to woo the pokemon of infatuation.

Confusion would be like attract: 20% chance of failure per stage, with the stage dropping every other action. Confusion duration would be shortened if a pokemon takes more than 10% damage or so in an action; shocking a pokemon to its senses, so to speak.

Curse could either only chop off a third or a quarter of the user's current health (breaks even after three rounds, ideally) or make the cursed pokemon lose a tenth of their health each action (hella intense, but the effectiveness of that would decrease rapidly). Per-action curse sounds kind of ... fun and interesting in a way I have no real reason for? But it appeals to me.
 
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Curse contradicts itself in its descriptions and I'm not sure which one its trying to mean.

In the brief description, it says 10% damage which suggests 10% health is lost at the end of each round. But the longer description uses the term 1/10th which suggests a 0.9 multiplier to the affected Pokémon's health at the end of each round. The latter would obviously make Curse useable.
 
I'm a proponent of Burn and Poison damage being action-based, rather than round-based. In the case of Burn, I'm also a proponent of severity levels (though less than for paralysis and confusion) - perhaps a mild, moderate, and severe burn dealing 1, 2, 3% and lowering attack by one stage for mild-moderate and two stages for severe. For poison, it could be set at a flat 2% per action, and toxic could be unique by starting at 1% per action and increasing in damage per action by 1% per round. Making these statuses action-based instead of round-based would also have the pleasant side-effect of making statuses apply only for the rest of the round when they're inflicted (currently, you can inflict burn/poison on A3 and it deals the same damage as if you did it on A1).

As for sleep, I like the system where staying-asleep chance starts at 100% and decreases each action. In particular, I think it should decrease by 15% for each action the pokémon stays asleep, and decrease further by twice the damage of any attack it's hit with per action (with sound moves doing even more damage and perhaps some improvisation with sound-based status moves). This would make it very unlikely for a pokémon to stay asleep more than five actions.

I ref paralysis as starting at Extreme (which I label as severe, but that's a me quirk), at which point it has a 25% chance of full paralysis and a .25x speed modifier, with each level decreasing the full paralysis chance by 5% and increasing the speed modifier by .15 (so severe paralysis would be a 20% chance of inaction and a .4x speed cut, moderate would be 15%/.55x, mild would be 10%/.7x, and light would be 5%/.85x), with the severity decreasing every three actions (one round, adjusted for the action on which it was inflicted). I feel like this makes it fair by being less of a burden as time goes on, making it fade completely after five rounds (still making it the longest status but not making it overpoweringly strong), and besides, paralysis can be reinforced anyway. i'm a terrible ref and i break too many rules

I also feel like Attraction and Confusion are reasonably well-balanced. They both cap at a 50% chance of not attacking the opponent, and they both fade per action (with more balance in the fact that attacking a confused pokémon decreases its ratio less than does attacking an attracted pokémon). Also, Attract provides the limitation of having to play around with flavor in order to make it keep working, which is a fun challenge, and neither of them ever really stick around for more than two rounds except in really strange circumstances.
 
Curse contradicts itself in its descriptions and I'm not sure which one its trying to mean.

In the brief description, it says 10% damage which suggests 10% health is lost at the end of each round. But the longer description uses the term 1/10th which suggests a 0.9 multiplier to the affected Pokémon's health at the end of each round. The latter would obviously make Curse useable.

Curse works off current health rather than total, so it's a .9 multiplier applied at the end of each round. This does not make curse usable on its own (pain split does, but curse and pain split do make a very good combo); again, taking the situation of both pokemon starting at 100% and the curser using the move immediately and not damaging the target since, it takes seven rounds for the cursed pokemon to drop to 47.8% health. Seven rounds to break even is not a usable move; most single-action moves give you around double whatever you put in (damage for energy, health healed for energy, etc.), so you would expect to at least break even with your health lost fairly quickly. You also have to make up for however much damage you could've done that action by just attacking with one of your best moves.
 
I'd rather paralysis not fade too quickly because it should be differentiated from volatile status conditions. Rather, I'd decrease how powerful it is. The way paralysis works is that it locks up your muscles - so special attacks should have a high rate of success. Things like psychic which are entirely mental would rarely fail, but beams could be harder to aim or whatever. Probably that's what I used to do, but idr now. If it's reinterpreted so that only the major muscles involved with bodily movement (so limbs, but not breathing) occasionally lock up or are just too hard to control, that can widen the pool of moves that aren't usually interfered by paralysis. For non-animal-based pokemon... well, things like poison don't make much sense either, so it just generally restricts voluntary movement when in effect. It also nicely differentiates it from confusion/attract, which affect the mental state of pokemon.

Burn only affects physical attacks requiring a lot of movement anyway, so generally physical contact attacks. Assuming default burn is moderate for everyone as it is for me, that calibrates to about the same, I guess, for neutral moves - but going 4.5% drop before effectiveness is a bit much even for a severe status.

If poison is increased to 6%/round, toxic should definitely be improved too. I'd say that if it starts out at 3%/round, and increases by 3%/round every round until a cap (either 9% or 12%), then it matches up pretty well. Ingame toxic starts out a little weaker than poison, but only for one turn, and it catches up in total damage dealt after three turns.

I think it might be more interesting to make poison stackable though. Toxic already gives us a thing where poison damage can get worse, so why not run with it? Poison starts at 3%/round but you can add to that by worsening the poison in the opponent. The logic behind toxic is that it's auto-stacking, in that case. That also makes it more different than "more damaging burn, minus attack drop".

Sleep should have a maximum duration (possibly randomised beforehand like ingame, or just a flat maximum of 5-7 actions) in addition to the random chance stuff, otherwise I'm fine with it as is or as in your proposal. In addition to decreasing sleep severity I like having a chance for every attack that hits to instantly wake up the pokemon, but that's hard to standardise, I guess.

Attract and confusion are pretty similar, but should be a little different from each other. Confusion's failure chance should be more or less flat across all moves, while attract would allow stuff like self-buff moves and setup more easily, plus a creative trainer should be able to increase their chances of success substantially by putting effort into their command prose.

Eight actions isn't that short for attract, since it's almost three rounds, which can easily be half of a 1v1. Ideally, attract lasts longer than confusion by default but falls off incredibly rapidly in response to things like being attacked. Since I have severe as the third stage, I'd drop the attraction level by a full stage every time the attracted mon is attacked, for example, in addition to the drop over time. Attack three times and you're done, and when a pokemon falls out of love it's unlikely to be attracted again (success rate might be halved each time, or just drop to zero immediately). But 80% chance of failure is too high to start out with, and I really don't think the chances for action failure for a single status should be more than 50%.

The thing with attract is that it's not just obnoxious to have suddenly chance of move failure. It's also ubiquitous in movepools, and when you're attracted the standard response is pretty much always going to be to use attract back, which makes the next few rounds really annoying. So that's a major part of the banning even when confusion more or less does the same thing other than damage.

Confusion lowering due to damage in general is fine with me, but I particularly like attract failing quickly due to reacting to the opponent's actions...

For curse, a tenth of current health per action is a bit much, I think. If it drops off rapidly it's because the current health has been cut rapidly too... damaging with 0.1x current health is better than 10%/unit time of course.

I also feel like Attraction and Confusion are reasonably well-balanced. They both cap at a 50% chance of not attacking the opponent, and they both fade per action (with more balance in the fact that attacking a confused pokémon decreases its ratio less than does attacking an attracted pokémon). Also, Attract provides the limitation of having to play around with flavor in order to make it keep working, which is a fun challenge, and neither of them ever really stick around for more than two rounds except in really strange circumstances.

points to my tournament battle

The way it's done there is two rounds per severity level, a slow drop rate when attacked, and only a minor improvement to success rate if you try to work the flavour. I'm definitely for standardising an improvement on that.
 
Holy wall of text, batman!

Firstly, I think you accidentally a math:

It should have a 10% chance of failure per stage of paralysis (light/mild/moderate/severe/extreme, this puts severe at a 30% chance of failure)

light/mild/moderate/severe/extreme = 10%/20%/30%/40%/50%? So severe has a 40% chance of failure.

With that said, I'm feeling kinda iffy about the 5 stages of severity progression. Look at Attraction, for example. Statuses usually start at severe, so the progression is:

80% 80% 60% - 60% 40% 40% - 20% 20% end

That's a 38% chance of not being able to attack at all in round 1! Compared to the old scale (50% 50% 50%) that's a 12.5% chance of not being able to attack at all in round 1.

Also, 40% failure rate for Severe Paralysis is kinda overpowered as well, especially since there's a speed-drop, too.

Proposal:
Keep this, but use a 4-severity scale (light/moderate/severe/extreme).

Attract would then be: 60% 60% 40% - 40% 20% 20% - end

So you have a 14.4% chance of not being able to attack at all in round 1, and that chance rapidly decreases from here. This seems a lot more reasonable.
 
9_9 too much to read

Honestly I disagree with most of this. Most of these things are the way they are because they're either meant to be bad, or meant to hax you. (Regular) poison, for example, is never meant to be good. You never see someone in-game carrying poison powder for one exact reason: it sucks. No one is gonna want their enemy poisoned. Burn, also, is not there for steady damage, but for haxing purposes. The damage is nice, sure, but it's meant to stop physical attacks. If you really want to increase damage, I definitely think 6% is too much; status isn't meant to win you the game (let alone poison...), it's just meant to give you a small edge.

Paralysis, now... I disagree that it /never fades/. The thing is - it starts at only 25%. And it fades from there. It does hax your speed, because it's meant to. That's what para does. If you take that away it's just weak confusion.

And again, I disagree re: confusion. It starts as 50% in-game and that's where it should stay, because it has plenty of detractors. For example, hitting the pokemon weakens it; repeated use (of confusion-causing attacks) weakens it; and it otherwise fades much faster than para. It also has a much lower penalty; it doesn't hax your speed, though you do lose the action.

I'm fine with nerfing attract, if only cause it's an ass to ref.

But toxic should not start at 3%; it starts in-game as weaker and it should do so here. But it can increase faster, like 1 - 3 - 5 etc., or doubling, like 1 - 3 - 6 etc. (Though this'd be weird cause it caps at 10.)

My largest proponent to change is making status damage go over caps. >| They should do so already.
 
I'm a proponent of Burn and Poison damage being action-based, rather than round-based. In the case of Burn, I'm also a proponent of severity levels (though less than for paralysis and confusion) - perhaps a mild, moderate, and severe burn dealing 1, 2, 3% and lowering attack by one stage for mild-moderate and two stages for severe. For poison, it could be set at a flat 2% per action, and toxic could be unique by starting at 1% per action and increasing in damage per action by 1% per round. Making these statuses action-based instead of round-based would also have the pleasant side-effect of making statuses apply only for the rest of the round when they're inflicted (currently, you can inflict burn/poison on A3 and it deals the same damage as if you did it on A1).

I already work those statuses action-based instead of round-based, and indeed, I think most more experienced refs do too; this would probably benefit from being written in to the status descriptions. I would definitely cut the damage by a third if a status was only applied on the third action.

A 3%/6%/9% toxic would work for me.

I'd rather not do too much rolling for sleep as in your proposal, but I don't see anything wrong with it per se, especially if it has a capped duration like allie suggested.

I ref paralysis as starting at Extreme (which I label as severe, but that's a me quirk), at which point it has a 25% chance of full paralysis and a .25x speed modifier, with each level decreasing the full paralysis chance by 5% and increasing the speed modifier by .15 (so severe paralysis would be a 20% chance of inaction and a .4x speed cut, moderate would be 15%/.55x, mild would be 10%/.7x, and light would be 5%/.85x), with the severity decreasing every three actions (one round, adjusted for the action on which it was inflicted). I feel like this makes it fair by being less of a burden as time goes on, making it fade completely after five rounds (still making it the longest status but not making it overpoweringly strong), and besides, paralysis can be reinforced anyway. i'm a terrible ref and i break too many rules

Your interpretation of paralysis sounds good. I would also be interested in allie's nerf for allowing little-action attacks; it might require some working out to not make it basically "paralysis doesn't matter for special attackers at all," though, especially since burn already nerfs attack. Those poor physical attackers...

The best refs break a lot of rules! They follow their own (internally and logically consistent) ones.

I also feel like Attraction and Confusion are reasonably well-balanced. They both cap at a 50% chance of not attacking the opponent, and they both fade per action (with more balance in the fact that attacking a confused pokémon decreases its ratio less than does attacking an attracted pokémon). Also, Attract provides the limitation of having to play around with flavor in order to make it keep working, which is a fun challenge, and neither of them ever really stick around for more than two rounds except in really strange circumstances.

I do think that fun challenge should be kept! I like rewarding playing around with flavor: that's why rewording your commands would provide such a large benefit. Rewarding creativity should be a large part of attract.

The way it's done there is two rounds per severity level, a slow drop rate when attacked, and only a minor improvement to success rate if you try to work the flavour. I'm definitely for standardising an improvement on that.

That. I think I like your version of attract a bit better...

On stackable poison, though, I don't think that's too much better than the current status. I assume that would only happen by repeatedly spamming moves with a chance of poison as a secondary effect; I wouldn't really appreciate relying on chance for that.

Proposal:
Keep this, but use a 4-severity scale (light/moderate/severe/extreme).

Attract would then be: 60% 60% 40% - 40% 20% 20% - end

So you have a 14.4% chance of not being able to attack at all in round 1, and that chance rapidly decreases from here. This seems a lot more reasonable.

I did accidentally that math, whoops

... You're right, that was probably a bad idea. A four severity scale sounds fine.
 
9_9 too much to read

Honestly I disagree with most of this. Most of these things are the way they are because they're either meant to be bad, or meant to hax you. (Regular) poison, for example, is never meant to be good. You never see someone in-game carrying poison powder for one exact reason: it sucks. No one is gonna want their enemy poisoned.

stopping you right there because I WANT MY ENEMY POISONED :( I like status (and yes, especially poison)! Status, when done well, is fun. That is a boring and unfun attitude. :(

Burn, also, is not there for steady damage, but for haxing purposes. The damage is nice, sure, but it's meant to stop physical attacks. If you really want to increase damage, I definitely think 6% is too much; status isn't meant to win you the game (let alone poison...), it's just meant to give you a small edge.

I intentionally did not propose making burn's damage bigger; I did that for poison, so it has a niche outside of weaker burn.

It doesn't give you an edge as it is, though? Taking an action to burn or poison an opponent is a waste of time. It makes you less likely to win the game if you're using an action to inflict it.

Paralysis, now... I disagree that it /never fades/. The thing is - it starts at only 25%. And it fades from there. It does hax your speed, because it's meant to. That's what para does. If you take that away it's just weak confusion.

And again, I disagree re: confusion. It starts as 50% in-game and that's where it should stay, because it has plenty of detractors. For example, hitting the pokemon weakens it; repeated use (of confusion-causing attacks) weakens it; and it otherwise fades much faster than para. It also has a much lower penalty; it doesn't hax your speed, though you do lose the action.

25% chance of not doing anything is a significant chance! Especially when it. Lingers. For eight or so rounds. Paralysis haxing speed is fine, because yes, that's what it's meant to do, but it shouldn't do everything forever/for eight rounds. Paralysis is the status that can win you the game.

Confusion, on a light/moderate/severe/extreme scale, would start at 60%. This would be balanced by the detractors you mentioned, and it would drop very quickly (every other action). The reason it wouldn't start at 50% would be for symmetry with the other statuses and with itself for the way it drops: 20% per stage is nice and consistent.

But toxic should not start at 3%; it starts in-game as weaker and it should do so here. But it can increase faster, like 1 - 3 - 5 etc., or doubling, like 1 - 3 - 6 etc. (Though this'd be weird cause it caps at 10.)

My largest proponent to change is making status damage go over caps. >| They should do so already.

It would start as weaker, though. Than 6% poison.

When we adjust statuses, we can adjust the cap to make more sense. It'd be nice if we had a cap that evened out into damage per action properly; 9%, 12%, or 15% would be good.

Status should definitely not go over caps; that makes them a lot more difficult to assess. It's already curse's niche that everything it does bypasses the cap, anyway.
 
While I disagree with pathos that poison should be made to keep sucking because it sucks ingame, I think you should consider how poison is actually "meant" to be used - it's an investment that pays off over time, so it shouldn't make up for how much damage you're going to cause immediately.

Not everyone plays by using their strongest attacks at every opportunity, so the game shouldn't be changed as though that's the only valid way to play. Poison should be something that there's a point to using in the right circumstances, but it doesn't have to rapidly make up for not having attacked that action or whatever. If a player's style is one that ends the battle quickly, it's only natural for poison to not be worth an action. So, I'm fine with 6%/round poison, and it's more consistent with the games in not introducing a new mechanic, but that just makes it a less interesting burn. Anyway, since everything gets toxic, wouldn't you expect everything about normal poison to only occur as a side-effect? Toxic is the standard poisoning move, just as thunder wave is standard for paralysis. We don't want poison to universally be a total waste of time but it's true that you don't expect poisonpowder to be used too often. By the time a pokemon has been poisoned long enough for the poisoning to be worth the action used to inflict it, toxic would probably have been better anyway. So toxic should be the focus when talking about making poison worth an action.

Statuses should definitely be affected by the cap. That's what caps are for, to cap how much (non-self-inflicted) damage you take in a round. It's a good way to ensure the statuses are balanced no matter what you do with them, in any case, so it further allows us to work on statuses to make them viable while not overpowered.


It's not generally considered a status condition, but with regards to torment, it doesn't fade ingame but it's a short-duration attack here implying it fades in 5 actions max, and the description just has a generic fading over time thing. That could use some standardising too.
 
It doesn't give you an edge as it is, though? Taking an action to burn or poison an opponent is a waste of time. It makes you less likely to win the game if you're using an action to inflict it.

That's... not true... o_o I use burn and it hasn't ruined my battles... You just gotta choose when to do it ??? You sound like you've calculated this numerically somehow but burn status doesn't just inflict damage it /lessens/ damage like having a permanent reflect up so. It is definitely worth it?

25% chance of not doing anything is a significant chance! Especially when it. Lingers. For eight or so rounds. Paralysis haxing speed is fine, because yes, that's what it's meant to do, but it shouldn't do everything forever/for eight rounds. Paralysis is the status that can win you the game.

Who actually refs para as lasting severe for 8 rounds though ??

It would start as weaker, though. Than 6% poison.

6% is too much though!! Just because you want to use regular poison doesn't mean it should inflict that much damage! That's A LOT of damage to take, seriously, that's 12% every two rounds, that's just too much. I think you're being very subjective on this matter. One person wanting to use regular poison does not mean it should become so strong when it's /meant/ to be weak.

Status should definitely not go over caps; that makes them a lot more difficult to assess. It's already curse's niche that everything it does bypasses the cap, anyway.

I think status definitely should go over caps ?_? So what if it's curse's 'niche'? It makes more sense and it'd solve this whole issue of status not being good enough.
 
I think 25% fail chance, fading 1% each action, but more restricted in the moves that it can cause to fail, is just fine for paralysis. The problem with fail chances is that you lose the whole action, which makes them pretty powerful and so they need to be short-lived... but that's not so much the case when your actions aren't always total failure. The speed thing is the main point of the status so being able to do things is also contributing to that.

I don't really consider 6%/round that much, all things considered. Comparatively, if you use swords dance, every two physical attacks you have done 6% more damage than otherwise with neutral type effectiveness. That's still usually not enough to make stat boosts worth it outside of an "if you can't attack" type conditional. It might be a bit much for something we expect primarily to occur as the side effect of poison jab or sludge bomb though - which stacking neatly evades.
 
Yeah, it's more the fact that it's meant to be a /minor/ status. It's not meant to do massive damage. The fact that you are comparing it at all to swords dance damage is kinda telling in itself.
 
I don't think it should be regarded as "minor" - it's one of the main five status conditions. It should be on a similar tier as burn, paralysis, sleep, and freezing. If it's so pointless that it can be waved off as minor, that's a sign that it could use improvement.
 
Superbird said:
I also feel like Attraction and Confusion are reasonably well-balanced. They both cap at a 50% chance of not attacking the opponent, and they both fade per action (with more balance in the fact that attacking a confused pokémon decreases its ratio less than does attacking an attracted pokémon). Also, Attract provides the limitation of having to play around with flavor in order to make it keep working, which is a fun challenge, and neither of them ever really stick around for more than two rounds except in really strange circumstances.

I personally feel like they're not really balanced in terms of how you can actually work around them. Confusion has a precedent where there's a few moves you could use to weaken it a little bit - calm mind, chill, focus energy, meditate, possibly roost or withdraw - moves that let the pokemon kinda sit and chill out for a bit. Generally with attract, though, your options are stuff like:

  1. stat-up and look cool for your lover
  2. use attract back and get ready for stall of the century
  3. use substitute
  4. commands like "use water gun but in a ... sexy way, I guess".
and normally this would be fine, but there are loads of pokemon that just don't get that many non-offensive stat-up moves, plus there's no set precedent for how flavour actually works with attract. Sure, you can convince your pokemon to try and use a damaging move in an attractive way - I've done so on a few occasions - but it rarely works, and in the end it really does seem like it's still just based on a dice roll. In addition, the first three moves are probably likely to increase attraction, which is kind of not what you want.


Like i'm all for being creative with moves so you can counter your opponent's strategy with flavour, but I feel like the movesets of most pokemon don't really account for it, and it's not really clear at all whether it actually affects anything. My experience is that when you're attracted, the nature of the battle really changes and you spend more time dealing with how to work around/with attract, rather than trying to get the one-up on your opponent.


personally i think the fact that attract is a favourite of many people and that lots of other people seem to have trouble with it is an indication that something about it should change. in my experience when my pokemon are attracted it's kinda not fun anymore because there's often nothing you can do about it other than waste energy and watch your pokemon do nothing 50% of the time. :|
 
Ok, I wanna bump this up because some of these things really do needa be fixed.

I'd like to make it a rule that moves that don't require movement can still be used when paralyzed; if anyone has objections to that, please comment?

I'd also like to alter toxic poison so it goes 1% - 3% - 5% etc. capping at 10%, I'd like other opinions...

I don't really have a nice way of fixing attract other than banning it in challenge rules. :v
 
Ok, I wanna bump this up because some of these things really do needa be fixed.

I'd like to make it a rule that moves that don't require movement can still be used when paralyzed; if anyone has objections to that, please comment?

I'd also like to alter toxic poison so it goes 1% - 3% - 5% etc. capping at 10%, I'd like other opinions...

I don't really have a nice way of fixing attract other than banning it in challenge rules. :v

Just wanna bump this, cause I don't wanna make changes without any word of approval from anyone ._.
 
Sorry! I'll make a more in-depth post later, but for Attract, it would at least help if like... refs didn't ref it to be so overpowered. Failure chance should go down when taking damage (even if not from the attractor, because it's like, snapping the target out of its trance), down even more if the damage is from the one who used Attract in the first place. I also think refs should really take into account flavour people put into their posts to try to make their attracted Pokémon attack (but like, some are ridiculous. you can't justify everything). Negrek said something once like "convince your ref that your attack should succeed" and I think that's what we should be going for.

Poke me later or something to remind me to say more!
 
I'd like to make it a rule that moves that don't require movement can still be used when paralyzed; if anyone has objections to that, please comment?

I'd also like to alter toxic poison so it goes 1% - 3% - 5% etc. capping at 10%, I'd like other opinions...

wrt paralysis, yeah, I think it should be fine to use moves that require no movement at all like Psychic or Dream Eater or something.

I think some special moves like Shadow Ball and Flamethrower tend to be reffed with some gesturing or motions though, so maybe they could take a bit of an accuracy drop with severe paralysis? Like there's nothing preventing a paralyzed Pokemon from blasting a Flamethrower, but it'd be easier to dodge if they can't sweep it around and such.
 
If a Pokémon is fully paralyzed for the action, I figure it shouldn't be able to use any moves, period.

As far as Attract goes -- I assume a lot of referees do already lower the chances of full attraction under the right circumstances, but we could definitely lay down some official situations that would lead to a drop, with an exact specified amount of lower percentage for each. No one will be forced to follow this any more than anyone's forced to follow official the official damage and energy scale; I just think it's better to have a clear guideline that anyone can fall back onto, and then the ones who don't want that clear guideline can just stick to their own, and either way it becomes such that everyone has a guideline.

Also, I was thinking likewise wrt the duration of conditions. Paralysis, confusion, and attraction are all entirely expected to fade away as time goes, but there's no clear average on how long, and no general sense of how much is too little or too much. I'd also be favourable towards establishing an official, non-enforced guideline in that regard.

Lastly, let's bring back up the issue of steady damage caused by poison, severe poison, and burn. The current numbers for those are not only not to everyone's liking, but more to the point, they're confusing as hell. I was trying to think of some exact numbers, but there's a big problem in that it's pretty hard to keep things at a reasonable per-round rate while also keeping them as multiples of 3 so they can function per-action.
 
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