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Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?
I don't understand the arguments for making burn, poison, and toxic poison more powerful generally. Why do we want to do this? I also really don't understand the advantage of making damage dealt be calculated per action rather than per round. What is confusing about the current numbers?
Attract should already fade on damage dealt, same as confusion. It is an obnoxious status (as is confusion, but since attract is much more widely distributed, you see it more often). I can see it actively making the game more unfun for some people in some battles. I'm not sure that's necessarily a reason to change the way it works globally rather than letting people who don't want to play with it ban it. Establishing more concrete guidelines about how fast and under what conditions they fade sounds reasonable, though.
Paralysis I could go either way on. I think it fades too slowly the way I do it now, which means that it causes too many action failures. I like the flavor behind it not affecting attacks that don't require movement, and that's something that's been seen in the anime. As Dragon pointed out, though, it might be difficult to decide which those are in practice.
Okay, so it's been a while. We've come up with a general scale and guidelines on statuses for discussion; once we make a decision, this will be posted in the Damage and Energy guide and people will be expected to ref statuses in accordance with these guidelines. This is to stop statuses from varying too much between refs and so that players won't have to wade through pages of a ref's own scale to figure out what's going on in their battle.
First off, the general guidelines on how statuses should be reffed (put under a hide tag, since you can't quote a quote):
Paralysis: Severe paralysis must start at a 25% failure chance. There should be an average of around 4-5% natural recovery per round. As for moves not requiring movement, that's up to the ref, but it is recommended that they not be entirely exempt from failure.
Poison: Regular poison should be doing at most 4%/round, unless aggravated in some way. Toxic poison should be sticking with the official ruling it has now.
Burn: Severe burns should be doing 3%/round, unless aggravated in some way. The Attack drop should be around 3% from final damage for severe burns.
Sleep: Sleep should be lasting 3-4 actions if the foe is attacking as normal. Taking a lot of damage should reduce the severity of sleep.
Freeze: Honestly, it's pretty hard to put guidelines on freezing. We may want to leave this one open.
Confusion: Severe confusion must start at a 50% failure chance. It should be lasting 3-5 actions if the foe is attacking normally, with an average of one or two failures. Taking a lot of damage should reduce the severity of confusion.
Attraction: Severe infatuation must start at a 50% failure chance. It should be lasting 3-5 actions if the foe is attacking normal, with an average of one or two failures. Taking damage, especially from the object of attraction, should reduce the severity of infatuation.
And here's the actual scale we'll be including as an example:
[spoiler="Official" Scale]Major Status Conditions
Paralysis: Severe starts at 25% failure chance, which reduces by 2% each action that the Pokémon successfully passes its paralysis roll. Every action is subject to a paralysis roll, though actions not requiring movement may still succeed (with situational damage/energy penalties) if the roll is not too bad. The Pokémon's base speed is reduced to one-quarter of its original value. The paralysis drops to moderate (one-third base speed) at 18% failure chance, mild (one-half base speed) at 12% failure chance, and light (two-thirds base speed) at 6% failure chance. Moves that inflict paralysis as a side effect with less than a 30% chance start off at moderate (15% failure chance) instead of severe.
Poison: Starts off at 1% damage/action, regardless of the cause. Multiple uses of poison-causing moves (with successful poison rolls) could increase the severity up to, at the very most, 2%/action.
Toxic Poison: Starts at 1%/round, increasing by 1% each round (i.e. the regular scale). Severity cannot be increased.
Burn: Severe burns inflict 1% damage/action, with a damage penalty of 3% on applicable moves. Burns caused by attacks with less than a 30% burn chance are inflicted as moderate, inflicting 2% damage/round and with a damage penalty of 2%. Burn severity does not decrease on its own, and it can be increased/decreased by whatever situational factors.
Sleep: Sleep starts at a 100% chance of staying asleep each action (i.e. the Pokémon is basically guaranteed to sleep for a full action), with that chance decreasing by 5% each action. Damage taken impacts this chance as follows: 6%-10%: -10%, 11%-15%: -15%, 16%+: -20%. Severity cannot be increased.
Freeze: Again, we may want to leave this one open.
Minor Status Conditions
Confusion: Severe confusion starts at a 50% failure chance, which decreases by 5% each action (whether the Pokémon hits itself or not). Damage taken impacts this chance as follows: 6%-10%: -10%, 11%-15%: -15%, 16%+: -20%. Confusion inflicted as the side effect of a move with less than a 30% effect chance starts off as moderate, 25% failure chance.
Attraction: Starts at a 50% failure chance, always. Failure chance decreases by 5% each action the Pokémon does not fail the attraction roll. Damage taken impacts this chance as follows: 6%-10%: -10%, 11%-15%: -15%, 16%+: -20%. (in a double battle, this happens for damage of any source; however, the Pokémon has the same chance of attract-failing regardless of who it's attacking).[/spoiler]
Note that nobody will be required to follow the "official" scale, but it will be there as a reference for people who aren't sure how to ref statuses or want an example for their own scale, so that nobody is forced to come up with this stuff on their own. Also note that this is, of course, not official yet. This is your chance to give your opinion on the guidelines presented so we can come up with rules that people will be okay with applying. (In particular I expect the subject of making poison more powerful to come up again; we'll address it once it does, because I'm tired of typing.)
I find it weird how severe paralysis decreases speed to a quarter of its value, like in the game, and burns only moderately affects damage output in the end.
I find it weird how severe paralysis decreases speed to a quarter of its value, like in the game, and burns only moderately affects damage output in the end.
3% damage from severe burns is effectively 2-3 stages of Attack Drop, which is fitting, because in-game Burn halves your attack, which is equivalent to a 2-stage drop. I don't ref a flat power loss at all - I just treat the burn as an extra few stages of attack drop - 3 for severe, 2 for moderate, and 1 for mild, which is fair and doesn't deviate very far from the established rules.
True. I think my main qualm would be when you put it in comparison with Reflect or Light Screen (as well as the Marvel Scale ability) which drastically reduce damage output for little extra energy... and for a limited time, too. Then again, it's a lot easier to get rid of a burn than a Reflect, and Reflect affects an entire team, so I see a large gap between two moves that are essentially equal in the games, as far as damage output goes. I guess it should be in another thread, but I'll just throw it out there and share my thoughts. It's just that everything's scaled down in ASB but the screens...
note to self: reply to things about burns when I have time, probably Friday.
I've noticed people actually changing their poison scales from 2%/action to 4%/round, so I'm guessing we may not end up having to have a discussion about poison? If that is the case, I am pleased we've come up with a nice middle ground. :O
edit: Also: thoughts on starting Toxic damage at 2%/round? I imagine no one would have much of a problem with that, and this would start it at half the regular poison damage. I believe the main reason for keeping it starting at 1%/round before was to make it not too close to regular poison starting off.
True. I think my main qualm would be when you put it in comparison with Reflect or Light Screen (as well as the Marvel Scale ability) which drastically reduce damage output for little extra energy... and for a limited time, too. Then again, it's a lot easier to get rid of a burn than a Reflect, and Reflect affects an entire team, so I see a large gap between two moves that are essentially equal in the games, as far as damage output goes. I guess it should be in another thread, but I'll just throw it out there and share my thoughts. It's just that everything's scaled down in ASB but the screens...
No, I think this does belong in this thread. I was thinking about this a bit before I posted the scale, and I agree. A lot is just because I really hate additive boosts/reductions, for reasons I'm sure have been repeated several times in other places. I don't really know why burn is a flat 3% penalty besides "well, that's what it's always been"; I'm not so sure of the potential impacts of going straight to cutting physical damage in half, either. Maybe we could start off by reducing it to two-thirds (for severe), and we can see how it goes and make adjustments from there? Any arguments in favour of the flat 3%?
I think in the end it's only a question of consistency... In the games, a -2 attack is also half the damage. I think it's time for the league to settle to either additive or multiplicative, and not try to do both on randomly different occasions. This should, imo, also apply to items, abilities, etc., since for now it's all over the place.
Hm, it's kind of a problem for stat boosts because they're much easier to get in ASB, so the multiplicative boosts would have to be very small. For items and abilities it's never bothered me that much because they're not supposed to have a very big impact, but I dunno.
Since nobody seems to have a problem with the burn thing, we'll try out reducing the damage to two-thirds for severe burns. And since nobody seems to have a problem with the guidelines, I'm going to make them actually official. I'll clean them up and post them in the Damage and Energy guide at some point today, hopefully.
To be clear: from now on, all referees will be required to adhere to the official guidelines. I see some people have already changed up their scales to reflect them, which is great. Now that we actually have somewhere to go from, we'll be coming down harder on people whose status scales seem imbalanced.
Battles that started before today should continue to use whatever scale the referee was using at the time they started, unless both battlers agree otherwise.
edit: And it's done. Feel free to correct me if I've screwed something up.
I never run into problems with additive for stat boosts and multiplicative for abilities, and items are all easy enough to find the effects of in the DB (so are abilities but they don't seem to be so spread between the two). I think making everything multiplicative would just cause more headache, at least insofar as stat boosts are concerned
I never run into problems with additive for stat boosts and multiplicative for abilities, and items are all easy enough to find the effects of in the DB (so are abilities but they don't seem to be so spread between the two). I think making everything multiplicative would just cause more headache, at least insofar as stat boosts are concerned
I agree. It's so much easier logistically for something meant to have a small effect to consistently be +1; if we did it multiplicatively, it'd have to either be so small that it would round down to not having an effect on low-BP moves, or it would give an outrageously large boost to things like Hyper Beam.
Another thing to consider is that doubled Attack at just a +2 would be outrageously OP in ASB. A typical (i.e. no stats boosted) matchup in the games can be expected to lead to a KO in what, something like 3 or 4 turns? Whereas in ASB, it's more like at least 3 or 4 rounds (=9 or 12 actions/"turns") if not more.
Swords Dance takes up a turn to use, so in the games, using Swords Dance to double your Attack effectively means you take 1 turn for stat boosts + (half of 3 or 4) = 2.5 to 3 turns. So the KO takes only about one turn fewer.
In ASB, if Swords Dance could double attack, then (damage caps aside) the average KO could be cut down to almost half the number of actions — for example, a 12-action matchup could be cut down to 1 action for stat boosts + (half of 12) = 7 actions.
That puts Pokemon without access to moves that boost the corresponding defensive stat at basically an unsurmountable disadvantage, which is not at all in the spirit of ASB. The only way to repair this would be to make damage caps pitifully small, which totally prevents the kind of high-risk high-reward playing that makes some battles so fun.
I agree that a +2 attack having double the power is indeed absurd. Then why should Reflect halve the damage? My thoughts about that would be to cut down the +1 boost to 1.25x the power and +2 to 1.5x and so on so it's more in line with the STAB / super-effective boost, and make Reflect / Light Screen a 0.67 multiplicative, maybe?
Something like that. Halving the in-game effect in general seems like a good way to go. I'd try it, at least.
EDIT: Thinking about it, JackPK's argument makes sense. It's too easy to boost like a madman, since you have a lot of time to do it. But then again, it would only make battles more fast-paced, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Aaaand boosts can be stolen / Hazed away / Psyched Up easily in ASB, whereas they can't really be in the game (well they can but it's not a common strategy).
Like, boosting for a whole round is not really that useful in the end because 1) damage caps exist 2) all those turns can be wasted with a well-timed Haze / Clear Smog 3) It gives lots of free room for your opponent to set an even better strategy.
...Why bother making Reflect multiplicative at all? Its effect in the games is the same as conferring +2 Defense on the protected, right? So why not just pretend to add +2 defense to any protected pokémon, on top of its existing defense stat? We already occasionally have arenas (and iirc abilities too) that allow pokémon to break the ±6 barrier in some way; why not just let this work the same way? Or a similar way, at least. Maybe adding more than +2.
...Why bother making Reflect multiplicative at all? Its effect in the games is the same as conferring +2 Defense on the protected, right? So why not just pretend to add +2 defense to any protected pokémon, on top of its existing defense stat? We already occasionally have arenas (and iirc abilities too) that allow pokémon to break the ±6 barrier in some way; why not just let this work the same way? Or a similar way, at least. Maybe adding more than +2.
Hmmm, do you think that'd weaken Reflect and Light Screen too much? If you've got to invest 1% energy in them per turn, the 3% damage difference on a super-effective move might be too poor a trade-off. Maybe +4...? That'd have a very large effect on weaker moves, though.
Hmmm, do you think that'd weaken Reflect and Light Screen too much? If you've got to invest 1% energy in them per turn, the 3% damage difference on a super-effective move might be too poor a trade-off. Maybe +4...? That'd have a very large effect on weaker moves, though.
That's kind of the issue with additive stat stages, I guess...although we could do something like "+4 Defense, but if that would make an attack deal less than half of the damage it would otherwise do, it would do half"? Is that too confusing, though?
That's kind of the issue with additive stat stages, I guess...although we could do something like "+4 Defense, but if that would make an attack deal less than half of the damage it would otherwise do, it would do half"? Is that too confusing, though?
