it's a boring game. use a stat up move on your mon and spam attack on enemies on 8x speed. maybe the final rival battle and final boss battle require extra neuron activation, but that's like 1% of total game time. driven completely by gacha skinner box.
oh and transphobes suck
I made a super long thread of things that I'd change on the server before, so I might as well post it here.
Keep in mind this was written for a suggestions thread, so it has a very respectful cadence in areas where I actually have harsher opinions. I will also post stuff from a second thread I made that was based on this rework as well:
I'd like to start by saying that I love the game, and have sunk many hours into Endless Mode. But also that I think it is an extremely flawed mode, stitched together by duct-tape, that only becomes less fun the further you get into it. And yet, I also *want to keep this*, especially to keep this experience.
It is already in the roadmap that there will be Trainer Battles in Endless, and a revamp of Endless in general. I am going to propose changes to Endless Mode and also a Classic Endless Mode in this post.
## Classic Endless Mode ##
-Uses current Endless Mode mechanics, with updated Pokemon if applicable in the future.
-Still compatible with current save files.
In my opinion, any major change to Endless Mode should be accompanied with the fact that some people may have spent tens of hours on their old save file, and that just making radical changes (like I'm going to suggest) should not be taken lightly, or without compatibility.
The goal of this "Classic Endless Mode" for new players would be to keep the current dynamics that my proposed New Endless Mode will get rid of: the playstyle of keeping one major carry Pokemon, and a backup Pokemon, while hyper-leveling and stat boosting to keep up with the opposing hyper-leveling/stat boosting Pokemon. I believe that this would be a radical enough change that it would be good to preserve this playstyle as a mode.
## "New" Endless Mode ##
-Token System rework.
-Trainer Battles, and what this entails.
-EXP rework.
-Item rework.
-Reward structure.
One by one. Tokens are, in my opinion, a good idea on paper, but executed badly. I do not believe all of the tokens are a problem, but I think the status tokens (primarily Sleep and Freeze) are too far, and create major imbalances for Pokemon species and forces specific playstyles.
Slower Pokemon, even when stat boosted, will not outspeed every Pokemon which naturally means they are far more susceptible to getting instantly frozen, and that alone could be a game ender. Freeze is not just an inconvenience or passive buff to enemies that makes them more dangerous, freeze is a good chance to effectively KO a Pokemon for an entire battle. This does push for players to not put stake in one single Pokemon or two, but with how Endless works, that is not something you can rely on as a player, so it still leads to the average Endless player team being one Pokemon with several times the levels of others, while keeping none of the benefit- it leads to frustrating gameplay.
I believe that naturally progressing tokens are still a good idea, though, and feel that there should be different player nerfs instead. For instance, Curses, especially to individual Pokemon that could give players more reason to diversify. A bit of resistance to damage is fine with stackable curses, and other such ideas. But please, do not just immobilize the player without much control, especially without confronting the fact that that immediately makes many Pokemon much more unviable.
Trainer Battles are great, but in the current system it still does not solve the problem of team composition. Because trainers have bosses, these effectively just add more struggle points, but the only viable method to bypass struggle points in the game as of right now is hyper leveling to keep up. I will address this issue in the next points.
Experience Points should be altered to be more in-line with level caps from Classic Mode, while still being endless, structured around Eternatus. I also believe that Rare Candies should have a set limit beyond the current level cap (something around 10%, scaling lower as the actual number goes higher), and keeping the AI also around that level. This alone immensely discourages hyper leveling, and also makes forming parties more viable, and the dominant strategy. Items need a change as well. Currently the mode scales items as you go on, but this only leads to clusterfucks that are not intuitive to play with at all.
The amount of items individual Pokemon hold makes tracking hard, especially when a lot of them are stat boosts that are not given to the player unless they manually remember each proc.
It also leads to Boss Pokemon feeling like wars of attrition rather than interesting. A lot of them do not have good movesets, and instead rely on getting omniboosts to keep up with the player, meaning that attacking the Boss often is a detriment unless you set up first. I feel that this, too, discourages making actual team compositions, because just trying to chip down the Boss Pokemon is often unreliable otherwise.
I'd also suggest potentially making Double Battles (2v1) the standard with similar comparisons to Totem Battles, with the goal being to make team compositions that work together well. In turn, designing boss encounters more like trainers rather than solely randomly generated. To make this easier, you can still randomize early on, but at a certain point in Endless the bosses will have maybe 1-3 predetermined sets, and not every Pokemon needs one of course.
In my suggestion we limit items to around 5 per Pokemon, and we are also going to limit IV items further to 1-3 per stat, to still have some progression and reason to keep around Pokemon you worked hard for, but not enough to rely on. This goes for the enemy AI, as well.
As for Rewards, I have made a thread about different Candy reward structures. However, I feel that one major thing could just be making Endless way better for Egg farming, and have spawn rates scale better with how far you are in Endless. Giving players who reach to higher echilons better odds at legendary spawns and Hidden Abilities could go a long way in my opinion. If this is already the case, let me know (IIRC legendaries do scale a bit?), but I am not certain.
I may just not be far enough in Endless, but I find that Classic Mode is much quicker to get tickets rather than relying on drops in my Endless runs.
Moon Phase System thread:
Moon Phase System
This suggestion is intended as a replacement for Tokens in its entirety as a system to nerf the player, to keep difficulty up.
When looking at tokens I see several flaws:
• Some are very RNG dependent, and while RNG is an inherent part of the game, I feel that many of them are simply unfun — they stall the game rather than make it harder, and push players even further towards same-y builds.
• Tokens do not have ups and downs. A common part of many roguelikes (and most games in general) is that there is supposed to be a natural ebb and flow of difficulty. Relief feels all the more sweeter when you saved your run from the clutches of death, and I believe that *pressure points* are the way to go. Periods of play where the gamr is much harder, and then recovery periods.
• Tokens do not involve player choice in any way whatsoever. They simply happen and the player deals with them, but they often have uninteresting counterplay. Freeze Token? Lum Berry / outspeed and kill. Healing Token? Just hope it doesn't endure and win the war of attrition with your carry Pokemon, etc.
And here is where I believe this system solves all of these problems in a satisfactory manner. This is a system based on Shin Megami Tensei's of the same name. Essentially, by walking around the moon phase will change with an indicator, and with the Moon Phases is increased battle difficulty.
Of course, the translation to PokeRogue would be floor clear progress. As the Moon phase wanes closer to its peak, there'd be effectively more nerfs to the player similarly to Tokens, but with more randomization — ie., different difficult Moon Phases may have different effects, and some will have more interesting effects rather than just stacks, called Curse Effects. These can be things like removing the Run button, adding a *guaranteed* Endurance every encounter for a certain amount of encounters, and reducing your economy/exp.
Throughout Endless, each wane will have worse effects of course. If you've read the thread I linked, you would know I advocate for the limit of items/stacks on Pokemon to (IMO) lead to a more nuanced playstyle. So, what is the recourse?
Blessings
After the wave peak of the Moon phase being in the enemy's favor, AKA maximum difficulty, the player is given a choice of special teamwide buffs. Some examples:
• *Entire team* strength buff.
• Level cap increase.
• Shiny rate increase.
• Boss Pokemon Rate lower.
• Items you can hold and use at any time, such as a midbattle Sacred Ash (limited uses).
Really, you can go crazy with the effects! Get creative.
Possible upsides as well?
I also think it'd be interesting to have things like increased Legendary and Shiny odds at higher levels of the Moon Phase.
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Basically, I was really hoping that the game could go more in the direction of your full team mattering and the gameplay imbalance of items/levels working more like waves rather than just two lines on a graph where the player overlevels one pokemon like several thousand over the AI, or just loses.
I have some other thoughts too, like how Tera is not handled well. Not only is it rarely worth picking in of itself, but it's also awful on the AI trainer teams in Classic mode. The game randomizes if a Pokemon is Tera or not, and often this mean that Pokemon with dual types that could possibly make the player switch out are more often than not turned into a Tera monotype, thus making it easier to just keep sweeping with one Pokemon. Really bad idea.