VS Whitney
Feb. 16th, 2019 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheSo, it's Saturday, which means a Bug Catching Contest is being held today! Woo!
A few days a week, you can go to National Park and participate in this contest. You get 20 Park Balls and can take only one of your Pokemon with you into the park. Only Bug-Type Pokemon appear in the grass (including a lot of ones that don't normally appear here). You get to bring one catch to the end of the contest, where it will be "judged" with points, and the highest-judged bug wins.
Basically, stronger Pokemon are worth more points. The Pokemon's stats, Max HP, current HP (so catching at higher HP is worth more), etc. all add to your point total. There's also a random factor which is super obnoxious, though generally if you catch one of the rarest bugs like Pinsir or Scyther, you will win whether or not you get any of the random points.
The opponents have set points and bugs that they will have, so the opponents' scores are not fully random. Though which opponents participate in the contest are random, but the top score will always be a little over 300 points.
We caught a Pinsir, which won the contest by about 10 points. The grand prize for winning the contest is a Sun Stone, which can only be obtained this way.
And that's critical to moving forward, because when you give a Sunkern a Sun Stone...
It evolves into Sunflora! What was the weakest Pokémon in our team suddenly just became the strongest. Even at a lower level, KOBAYASHI's Special Attack is several points higher than MAILLET's Attack, which is already pretty high!
And with that we're off to fight Whitney in Goldenrod Gym. And yeah, this was a really tough fight. I tried a couple things, dying until I finally came up with a strat that worked out.
She has a Clefairy and a Miltank, but the Clefairy is pretty inconsequential. It's all about the terrifying Miltank. She has Stomp, which can easily one- or two-shot everything in the party. There's also Rollout, which gets more powerful with each successful hit in a row, which after a few hits will one-shot anything in the party as well. It has huge defenses, making it take tons of hits to take it out, and to make that even worse, it has a move called Milk Drink that restores its HP by 50% of max. Lastly, she has Attract, which inflicts infatuation on the opponent if they're the opposite gender. Since we're going all-male this time, that means all four members are susceptible. Infatuation makes you skip your turn 50% of the time in the name of love.
The most important thing was to have MAILLET come out first against Miltank and get off as many Mud Slaps as possible. We relied completely on the lowered accuracy in this fight, especially since it helped make Rollout less likely to power up. I think the AI may have even realized this (or there was some astronomical luck with the RNG, in Whitney's favor) because after a couple Mud Slaps, she never tried Rollout again. Which is bad because Stomp was now the biggest threat, anyway.
You can at least tell the AI isn't completely random, because Miltank would always use Milk Drink once it dropped below 50% max HP, and never any other time.
After getting six Mud Slaps in (the most you can reduce the accuracy with), it was BARON's turn. The entire point of BARON was just to spam Poison Sting and hope one inflicted poison. Miltank immediately infatuated him, and basically Miltank kept missing (thanks, Mud Slap?) and BARON kept swooning and nothing got done until eventually Miltank landed a Stomp to KO BARON after like 6 failed attempts at doing Poison Sting. And by that I mean we didn't even get the attack off, not just that the poison didn't hit.
With that out of the way, we have DONNELLY and KOBAYASHI left to use. Either is a viable option at this point, but we go with DONNELLY first, in the case that if we have to switch out to KOBAYASHI quickly, we'll also have the advantage of Miltank being confused.
DONNELLY has learned Confuse Ray, which has 100% success rate compared to Supersonic's 60%, so we can easily confuse the opponent now. And despite a pretty weak attack, DONNELLY has good speed and is carrying the Quick Claw item (which allows him to attack first randomly even if he is the slower poke), so he can get Bite in at the beginning of turns. The hope here is to constnatly land the flinch on the Bite and have Miltank hurt itself in confusion enough that it falls without getting a Milk Drink in.
This didn't happen. If the poison would have landed with BARON, it would have been a higher chance of success, but in the end, Miltank just kept drinking milk and stomping on the poor little bat.
So, lastly it's KOBAYASHI's turn. This is our other KO option besides DONNELLY, and thankfully this one worked. Still pretty much untrained, KOBAYASHI just has the same three moves we caught him with -- Growl, Growth, and Mega Drain. Thanks to his massive Special Attack, the mediocre power of Mega Drain is still enough to do decent damage, and the attack heals, as well!
But the problem is Miltank's Special Defense and HP are still high enough that Mega Drain does like, maybe 1/6 of its max HP in damage at the most, maybe a little less. So all those Milk Drinks keep coming in.
Milk Drink isn't affected by the accuracy reduction of Mud Slap, so as soon as she gets to below 50% HP, she heals herself almost to full again.
So the hope here is to use Growth six times in a row while Miltank continues to miss thanks to Mud Slap or tries to Attract but happens to fail. I think Attract is also affected by the accuracy reduction, so that's nice. Basically, we just need to avoid damage enough to keep using Growth, which raises the user's Special Attack. What's great about stat buffs and debuffs in Pokemon is that they raise the stat by a percentage, so a Pokemon with a high stat gets an even bigger boost than one with a low stat. So KOBAYASHI was able to raise his Special Attack a lot.
After six Growths, Mega Drain did like 90% damage to Miltank. Even after a Milk Drink (KOBAYASHI's speed is miserably slow, but it's fine because its other stats are fantastic), Mega Drain was able to KO Miltank.
And with that, we finally defeated Whitney of Goldenrod Gym. This was probably the biggest hurdle we'll have to overcome in quite a while in the game. There's some more hard stuff later, though, if I remember correctly.
After that, we're able to get the squirt bottle from the flower lady and go spray it on Sudowoodo to open up a few paths for us. This also lets us get back to Violet City easily, which is super nice because we need to go back that way now anyway. On the way there, this guy is impressed with our ability to use a squirt bottle, and he gives us TM08, Rock Smash.
While not a Hidden Machine, Rock Smash gives us a special map ability (there are actually a few other examples of this we've seen already: Headbutt, which can knock Pokemon out of small trees, and Sweet Scent, which attracts wild Pokemon and increases the encounter rate). Where there are small boulders, we can now bust them, opening up new areas, and sometimes encountering Pokemon.
This is important, because there's a certain Pokemon we can only encounter by busting rocks, and that's the next member of our team.
We head back to Dark Cave, where we can bust through rocks and get to another exit to Route 42. At this exit, there is a smashable rock just a couple steps away from the door. About 15 minutes of running in and out and smashing the rock, we encounter who we were looking for:
RICKMAN the Shuckle! The RICKMAN namesake is basically just "design I think is cool," so I have a feeling we will be getting a lot of Bug-Type Pokemon this way. Anyway, Shuckle secretes liquid from its limbs which pierces through the rock that it lives in. This liquid also dissolves berries. Shuckle stores berries in its shell until they turn into a fermented juice, which it drinks for its sustinance. It's based on the real-life phenomena that are endoliths.
Super cool design, and to go along with our current party theme, this thing is... pathetically weak! In fact, it has the lowest Attack, Special Attack, and Speed of any final-evolution Pokemon in the entire franchise. This is made up for by having the highest defenses and peculiar learnable moves, though it really becomes more useful in later games. We're going to try our best to get use out of our solid rock little buddy, though.
A few days a week, you can go to National Park and participate in this contest. You get 20 Park Balls and can take only one of your Pokemon with you into the park. Only Bug-Type Pokemon appear in the grass (including a lot of ones that don't normally appear here). You get to bring one catch to the end of the contest, where it will be "judged" with points, and the highest-judged bug wins.
Basically, stronger Pokemon are worth more points. The Pokemon's stats, Max HP, current HP (so catching at higher HP is worth more), etc. all add to your point total. There's also a random factor which is super obnoxious, though generally if you catch one of the rarest bugs like Pinsir or Scyther, you will win whether or not you get any of the random points.
The opponents have set points and bugs that they will have, so the opponents' scores are not fully random. Though which opponents participate in the contest are random, but the top score will always be a little over 300 points.
We caught a Pinsir, which won the contest by about 10 points. The grand prize for winning the contest is a Sun Stone, which can only be obtained this way.
And that's critical to moving forward, because when you give a Sunkern a Sun Stone...
It evolves into Sunflora! What was the weakest Pokémon in our team suddenly just became the strongest. Even at a lower level, KOBAYASHI's Special Attack is several points higher than MAILLET's Attack, which is already pretty high!
And with that we're off to fight Whitney in Goldenrod Gym. And yeah, this was a really tough fight. I tried a couple things, dying until I finally came up with a strat that worked out.
She has a Clefairy and a Miltank, but the Clefairy is pretty inconsequential. It's all about the terrifying Miltank. She has Stomp, which can easily one- or two-shot everything in the party. There's also Rollout, which gets more powerful with each successful hit in a row, which after a few hits will one-shot anything in the party as well. It has huge defenses, making it take tons of hits to take it out, and to make that even worse, it has a move called Milk Drink that restores its HP by 50% of max. Lastly, she has Attract, which inflicts infatuation on the opponent if they're the opposite gender. Since we're going all-male this time, that means all four members are susceptible. Infatuation makes you skip your turn 50% of the time in the name of love.
The most important thing was to have MAILLET come out first against Miltank and get off as many Mud Slaps as possible. We relied completely on the lowered accuracy in this fight, especially since it helped make Rollout less likely to power up. I think the AI may have even realized this (or there was some astronomical luck with the RNG, in Whitney's favor) because after a couple Mud Slaps, she never tried Rollout again. Which is bad because Stomp was now the biggest threat, anyway.
You can at least tell the AI isn't completely random, because Miltank would always use Milk Drink once it dropped below 50% max HP, and never any other time.
After getting six Mud Slaps in (the most you can reduce the accuracy with), it was BARON's turn. The entire point of BARON was just to spam Poison Sting and hope one inflicted poison. Miltank immediately infatuated him, and basically Miltank kept missing (thanks, Mud Slap?) and BARON kept swooning and nothing got done until eventually Miltank landed a Stomp to KO BARON after like 6 failed attempts at doing Poison Sting. And by that I mean we didn't even get the attack off, not just that the poison didn't hit.
With that out of the way, we have DONNELLY and KOBAYASHI left to use. Either is a viable option at this point, but we go with DONNELLY first, in the case that if we have to switch out to KOBAYASHI quickly, we'll also have the advantage of Miltank being confused.
DONNELLY has learned Confuse Ray, which has 100% success rate compared to Supersonic's 60%, so we can easily confuse the opponent now. And despite a pretty weak attack, DONNELLY has good speed and is carrying the Quick Claw item (which allows him to attack first randomly even if he is the slower poke), so he can get Bite in at the beginning of turns. The hope here is to constnatly land the flinch on the Bite and have Miltank hurt itself in confusion enough that it falls without getting a Milk Drink in.
This didn't happen. If the poison would have landed with BARON, it would have been a higher chance of success, but in the end, Miltank just kept drinking milk and stomping on the poor little bat.
So, lastly it's KOBAYASHI's turn. This is our other KO option besides DONNELLY, and thankfully this one worked. Still pretty much untrained, KOBAYASHI just has the same three moves we caught him with -- Growl, Growth, and Mega Drain. Thanks to his massive Special Attack, the mediocre power of Mega Drain is still enough to do decent damage, and the attack heals, as well!
But the problem is Miltank's Special Defense and HP are still high enough that Mega Drain does like, maybe 1/6 of its max HP in damage at the most, maybe a little less. So all those Milk Drinks keep coming in.
Milk Drink isn't affected by the accuracy reduction of Mud Slap, so as soon as she gets to below 50% HP, she heals herself almost to full again.
So the hope here is to use Growth six times in a row while Miltank continues to miss thanks to Mud Slap or tries to Attract but happens to fail. I think Attract is also affected by the accuracy reduction, so that's nice. Basically, we just need to avoid damage enough to keep using Growth, which raises the user's Special Attack. What's great about stat buffs and debuffs in Pokemon is that they raise the stat by a percentage, so a Pokemon with a high stat gets an even bigger boost than one with a low stat. So KOBAYASHI was able to raise his Special Attack a lot.
After six Growths, Mega Drain did like 90% damage to Miltank. Even after a Milk Drink (KOBAYASHI's speed is miserably slow, but it's fine because its other stats are fantastic), Mega Drain was able to KO Miltank.
And with that, we finally defeated Whitney of Goldenrod Gym. This was probably the biggest hurdle we'll have to overcome in quite a while in the game. There's some more hard stuff later, though, if I remember correctly.
After that, we're able to get the squirt bottle from the flower lady and go spray it on Sudowoodo to open up a few paths for us. This also lets us get back to Violet City easily, which is super nice because we need to go back that way now anyway. On the way there, this guy is impressed with our ability to use a squirt bottle, and he gives us TM08, Rock Smash.
While not a Hidden Machine, Rock Smash gives us a special map ability (there are actually a few other examples of this we've seen already: Headbutt, which can knock Pokemon out of small trees, and Sweet Scent, which attracts wild Pokemon and increases the encounter rate). Where there are small boulders, we can now bust them, opening up new areas, and sometimes encountering Pokemon.
This is important, because there's a certain Pokemon we can only encounter by busting rocks, and that's the next member of our team.
We head back to Dark Cave, where we can bust through rocks and get to another exit to Route 42. At this exit, there is a smashable rock just a couple steps away from the door. About 15 minutes of running in and out and smashing the rock, we encounter who we were looking for:
RICKMAN the Shuckle! The RICKMAN namesake is basically just "design I think is cool," so I have a feeling we will be getting a lot of Bug-Type Pokemon this way. Anyway, Shuckle secretes liquid from its limbs which pierces through the rock that it lives in. This liquid also dissolves berries. Shuckle stores berries in its shell until they turn into a fermented juice, which it drinks for its sustinance. It's based on the real-life phenomena that are endoliths.
Super cool design, and to go along with our current party theme, this thing is... pathetically weak! In fact, it has the lowest Attack, Special Attack, and Speed of any final-evolution Pokemon in the entire franchise. This is made up for by having the highest defenses and peculiar learnable moves, though it really becomes more useful in later games. We're going to try our best to get use out of our solid rock little buddy, though.
