Monday, July 7, 2014

♪ I wanna hold your haaaaaaand... ♪

You'd think that now that events can be distributed through Wi-Fi they'd use the hell out of that feature, but nope. Nine months into gen 6, and the second such distribution has been announced. And it's a Vivillon. Oh joy. I guess it could really interest those who actively collect these things, though, since it has the event-only Fancy pattern, and also the event-only move Hold Hands. What it does is rather ambiguous for the time being - according to the in-game move description, it makes the user's teammate this was used on "very happy". Could this increase happiness, or is it just flavor text and nothing else? The former could potentially be interesting as a way to raise happiness, always welcome for Return users, primarily Mega Pinsir and Mega Kangaskhan. More on this as it comes.

10 comments:

  1. Remember that the official term for happiness is friendship, so I'm not terribly sure if the raising happiness explanation would cut it. I'm hoping it'll have some sort of utility in doubles/triples maybe though.

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  2. The move seems utterly useless fur Single Battles. I've had a look at the description and it seems to be a Double Battle move only

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  3. Slow, you know that most people on Smogon are recommending that things who would normally use Return instead use max powered Frustration, right? Because any rogue Ditto out there is bound to be Max Friendship, and Frustration will be useless in their hands.

    Now, part of this is for online play via Showdown, but still.

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    1. 1. Getting the lowest happiness value is way more trouble than it's worth in-game.
      2. Now that this is a thing, even Frustration started to be a gamble, as some players started generating their Ditto with minimum happiness to counter that.
      So all in all, not worth it.

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    2. Yeah, I'm strictly talking cartridge play here. It is indeed much harder to keep Frustration up than Return there.

      And:

      Return 71.450%
      Frustration 24.815%

      I'd say running max happiness on Ditto is still the best option, thus Frustration on Pinsir as well. The gap is even larger for Kangaskhan in ubers, a metagame where Ditto is much more common.

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    3. If using Fail Blast is considered a gamble, then even those odds still count like one. But what I mean is that it's the fact that it IS currently the best option that will slowly make it less viable with time. I'm sure it'll become a 50-50 bet eventually looking at how things are going now.

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    4. Yes, it is a gamble. But you lose nothing if you're wrong.

      So if people run min-happiness Ditto? You get the same thing as if nothing happened, so it's neutral. If they run max happiness? You win.

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  4. Even if Hold Hands make raising happiness faster enough to make it worth it, the only place where you can relatively safely use it is in a Lumiose Restaurant. I guess the 1 Star one would work and not be too expensive...

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  5. It might be interesting if it does something like increase happiness past the limit temporarily? But other wise it'd be useless,probably

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    1. Any variable with a limit of 255 specifically can't be broken.

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