You shouldn't forget its accuracy issues and the very late final evolution. Gurdurr is never completely reliable with the hit rates it gets.
I've never used Machamp. Certainly on paper it would appear to be greatly superior to Conkeldurr, except in terms of ease of obtaining - why should I go out of my way to link Machop up to Machoke when there's a perfectly good Gurdurr who is available immediately, superior to Machoke, and as such far easier to train up? I don't disagree that Machamp is better, objectively, than Conkeldurr, but Gurdurr is much easier to obtain, much easier to train up, and Gurdurr is slightly superior to Machoke, the form that will be used most during the campaign.
The only reason I'd put it as top tier is for high availability and immediate usefulness as a Gurdurr. That's enough, I feel, and you evidently disagree. As these lists are subjective, I feel we must agree to disagree.
Leafeon requires Eevee to have a defence stat of 94. Glaceon demands an attack of 91 and Nixtorm conquered. By postponing Eevee's evolution (i.e. not choosing to one of the three stones given to you or giving your protagonist an entirely different Pokemon), you are making him deadweight for a substantial portion of the game, therefore neither Glaceon nor Leafeon make an efficient choice. Pokemon like Magikarp or Abra can skip their period of having no combat to offer by being caught/recruited when they can evolve immediately; you have only one Eevee (whom you can't even delegate to train on auto-pilot), therefore no option to circumvent the period of very poor combat mid-to-endgame.
I should probably address the Eeveelution concerns in one place. I have only ever used Glaceon. Frankly I thought it was a decent decision, because to be honest you can steamroll nearly all other nations bar Dragnor with a single other Pokemon. The only nation I couldn't simply overwhelm was Dragnor, so I simply waited and OHKOed the lot of them (bar that dratted Zekrom) with Icy Wind. Easy peasy. That's my reasoning for Glaceon, anyway. Flareon, Leafeon, Vaporeon, and Jolteon, the only ones that you are likely to get any earlier, are absolute dead weight against Dragnor. The big reason why I've put them all a lot higher than some of them deserve to be (and yes, I will freely admit that) is because they are, well, Eevee's evolutions. They are starters, so about as easy to get as is possible, and all of them, bar the ones I put in High, have some absurd advantage to them. To be perfectly honest, Glaceon is the only Eevee that there is no reasonable replacement for in-game (or that comes earlier). By the time you can evolve your Eevees, you could have Gyarados/Empoleon in place of Vaporeon, Darmanitan in place of Flareon, Luxray/Raichu in place of Jolteon, Carnivine for Leafeon.
Pichu evolves into Pikachu at Link 50. Granted, you can always skip its capturing until endgame, but that means no meaningful contribution throughout the game.
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These two demand Eevee's Link to be 70 to evolve. Try to remember how high your Link was when you beat the game. You're simply not ever seeing either of these two, period. You also mention Espeon being inferior to Pokemon whom you have a tier below (which he indeed is as he simply doesn't exist in an efficient maingame run; just pointing to the lack of consistence).
Dunno about you but my main team was at 50% before Terrera and around 80% by the end of the whole thing
Granted I play most Pokemon games the same way, by preparing a preposterous amount for even the most moderate challenges.
Just wanted to say that the Abra you get if you conquer Illusio has a high enough attack stat to evolve upon the first errand you send it to.
Yeah actually pretty much any Abra you get after Illusio will evolve immediately
The mention of investing money in a bank is kinda irrelevant when we're talking about the maingame/tutorial, wouldn't you agree? However, you might have missed the Scyther trainer which starts appear in random places after you're in command of Terrera/Illusio. You can also skip some months (why not; nobody's attacking in this storyline) and get the Metal Coat to evolve it straight away.
That was my mistake; I thought I had given Yoshimoto a Scizor in the first episode, but I must have given it to him in one of the post-game episodes, I guess. My luck with the Travelling Merchant is a little shaky.
I greatly dislike any Pokemon that you can only get through a Warrior who can't even link with it past 40% (I never once found a Scyther warrior who had anywhere near a sufficient max link to make it usable, and believe me, I looked).
You put Carnivine into the highest tier for early game contributions, so why are the early contributions of Charmander and Rufflet disregarded when opting a tier position for them? Rufflet in particular exceeds Staravia (an evolved form of Starly who is simply terrible compared to Rufflet) in offensive potential, in spite of lacking Intimidate and having a bad (you're spot-on there) evolution. I'd say Rufflet is even better than Carnivine (better attack and move).
Charmander can barely hurt anything. Charmeleon can barely hurt anything. Charizard takes ages to even get close to the battle. Charmander's early-game prowess is average at best, the only notable feature of it is that it happens to exist at that stage. Darumaka also happens to exist.
You simply cannot get a decent Rufflet before Avia. Yes, there is that Hisahide chap who occasionally turns up in Violight with his Rufflet, but iirc his max link is only 42%. Yes, Rufflet is useful against Pugilis and Chrysalia, but I would much rather solo both of those with Staravia and invest further in its growth up to its Staraptor stage. Yes, Rufflet was good for the brief period in which I used it, but that period simply does not last.
It OHKOs things without even hitting super-effectively and is given to you absolutely free with Shingen. You needn't spend time training it. It's not even that slow during midgame because you're dealing with mostly unevolved Pokemon (they're there even in Nobunaga's army). Rhyperior can reliably grab at least one kill per map without slowing the party down, how much more do you want? If your party of six scores one kill each, you can be sure you're playing well and everybody is doing something. There are also maps where you can get somebody in Rhyperior's range by waiting just during the first turn (you're definitely not winning by the second anyway), and maps where waiting is tactically beneficial, like in Nixtorm where you make it so much easier for yourself by letting the opposition come to you instead of travelling to the other part of the map yourself. Rhyperior waits with the rest and then uses Rock Wrecker. Yeah, the range of 2 is a shame, but this thing is perfectly usable and you needn't train or even catch anything to get it.
Everything in this whole game is perfectly usable. Nearly all Pokemon have something desirable that can give it an edge. Having said that, Rhyperior is definitely less than stellar. Even in areas in which its typing is advantageous, it will still only get about one kill per battle - and generally in these battles, I have often cleaned up the entirety of the opposing team before Rhyperior could get a look in. Rhyperior certainly didn't OHKO everything, like I thought it would - in fact, it was barely doing half to quite a few neutral targets (I didn't train it, which might explain it). If Rhyperior could get one kill per battle, that would be great. But I got sick and tired of waiting for it to lug itself over to where the rest of my team had already cleaned up the opposition (you are definitely capable of beating the opponent in three turns after the punch is thrown, or even two, provided you are using an optimum team).
As far as different campaigns go, post-Terrera:
Cragspur: Too many narrow passages, takes forever to get out of the initial area, boulders can stop you from getting into position very easily, and what's more you can't OHKO anything there except Kai's Pansear and maybe the Roggenrola
Yaksha: Hard to get into position. Sandile, Pawniard, Scraggy, and Scrafty all resist Rock Wrecker, Zoroark can take a hit (and honestly who cares about the Zubat).
Viperia: Granted, Rhyperior is very good here. It can hit flag-holders from outside their range and can bypass its poor range with the Secret Passages. It also beats Nene's Golbat and pretty much everything save Hanzo's Spiritomb.
Avia: Assuming you manage to make it to the battle (Avia takes ages to navigate), you will end up being killed by Magoichi's Carnivine. You also can't actually OHKO Masamune's Braviary without prior training iirc
Valora: Can't hit anything, takes ages to get anywhere, can't get past the Cameras, and can't even touch any of the Steel-types, or Ina's Quagsire.
Spectra: Takes ages to get to the battle, and can't outrun the Will-O-Wisps. Sure it can hurt the things weak to it, but by the time it gets there you should have polished them off anyway.
Nixtorm: Interesting that you mentioned this one, because lol 1 movement range - Rhyperior isn't going anywhere, and even if it could, it gets slaughtered pretty quickly, even if it does manage to hit one of the Ice-types. Woe betide you if you have to try to chase Gracia's Musharna with this thing.
Dragnor: Can only move in a 1-2-1-2-1-2 movement pattern because of the nodes. Can't hurt any of the dragons. Only redeeming quality is that it is immune to Bolt Strike, but if you happen to be trapped in that endgame scenario, you are likely to run out of turns before you can beat Nobunaga's Zekrom.
Yes, Rhyperior is easy to get, but unlike the Eevees or indeed anything else that can be easily obtained, it is far inferior to anything else you may choose to name in practice. As in, it's not even good at what it does. If Luxray and Ampharos had 2 movement range I would say the same thing. You don't really need a Rock-type post-Terrera, so the fact that it is the most easily obtainable Rock-type is not particularly relevant.
Also, a movement range of 2 is far worse than you are making it out to be. There are very few maps which you can navigate wholly in straight lines - Rhyperior does take forever to get to the battlefield, and even if it does get there, you are only really going to get one shot before you win. I say "before you win" because generally, if you have even two or three moderately decent Pokemon of a favourable type against the nation you're battling, you should be winning easily. Rhyperior does not help here - it is decidedly average against everything. This may be a plus for some people, but I don't really see it that way.
Should this be counted as an alternative to Scizor? Because Scyther is clearly inferior to its evolved form in this game, and there are a lot of other Pokemon who indeed do get worse upon evolution, perhaps making it more logical to cover their unevolved forms separately (Pineco and Luxio being notable examples of this).
I'd agree with you on Pineco and Luxio being better than their respective evolved counterparts, but at the time I didn't have the time or the patience to go into unevolved forms, so I left them as a "complete package". For example, "Conkeldurr" refers to "Gurdurr -> Conkeldurr" and "Luxray" refers to "Shinx -> Luxio -> Luxray", even if I didn't necessarily go into details about any of them beyond "they're good, I guess". Scyther happens to be notably different from Scizor, hence why I listed them separately.
If you insist that Rhyperior sees no combat with its move, then surely the map should be over after one or two Leaf Storms with such play speed. And once again, evolving areas is out of the question in the maingame so I don't think you can get a Snivy in the first story at all without Wi-Fi.
Leaf Storm is pathetically weak. And yes, see above about leveling up areas - that was a mistake on my part. Although, when I used Motonari through the episode, his Snivy was pretty poor, for posterity.
Great job on this overall, very thorough when outlining pros and cons, though I feel it is somewhat inconsistent at times (e.g. you talk about some Pokemon having the wrong typing for certain castles but avoid the subject in other cases, for example not mentioning how Darumaka is useless in the Fontaine and how he fails to attack anything in Violight with the enemies conveniently standing on electrical tiles, or how Magikarp isn't a drawback to Gyarados but Abra is one for its evolved forms even though it's given to your automatically in the storyline since it never attacks and you can't go wrong with its recruitment).
Thanks. Although, I did say that Darumaka is weaker against Fontaine (although it can actually OHKO quite a few of them, oddly) and that Magikarp is an annoyance for Gyarados (although I was only mentioning that as a "you don't get them immediately so it's more than standard effort to obtain their useful form" sort of thing, not a complete disadvantage).
I also find it kinda dubious that it's okay waiting forever to evolve Eevee into something that isn't Flareon/Vaporeon/Jolteon, but waiting for a 2-move Pokemon to get closer to the enemy is not possible at all, and places the poor immobile pokes into the lowest tier (okay, above Jigglypuff). You do have plenty of ways to make low mobility units useful; say, by using Bustle abilities or having them wait in specific places for specific enemies. Some maps take so long that have 1 less move than average isn't that dramatic. Just some ideas.
Eevee is at least decent if you're abusing Celebrate and Jigglypuff I just tend to ignore if I can. Warrior abilities are entirely irrelevant. Waiting somewhere in the hope that they will eventually turn up is dull when you could hypothetically be getting up to them in half the time. Long maps are even worse for low-movement Pokemon.
It's also not right to say Darumaka's evolving earlier than Charmeleon. Darumaka needs 110 attack to evolve, while Charmeleon needs only 83. Darumaka also has a slightly higher attack base, but Charmeleon is getting there sooner. You're lucky to have an evolved Darumaka by Valora. The difference is so slight that it hardly deserves a special mention though.
Charmeleon has a lower Attack than Darumaka and you can easily get Darmanitan as early as Chrysalia.
I do agree that Darmanitan is better than Charizard taking the whole game into account (Charizard doesn't just stay there with two move though; flight still takes it to places and Flamethrower has respectable range), but it's not top tier vs. low tier difference.
Some maps are impossibly hard to navigate skilfully and anything with a movement range of 2 is automatically worse for the first episode, regardless of Flying-type or otherwise. Charizard is a poor choice purely because any Pokemon with a movement range of 3 can get there and start attacking before Charizard can make itself useful, particularly on the larger maps.
I want to say it's not nearly as efficient as you claim it to be to rush the enemy with high-move Pokemon. Let's say you have your Staraptor get ahead of the rest of your team and start assaulting the opposition with Brave Bird. It starts suffering defence and range penalties, getting hit hard during the enemy's turn and not being able to position itself for another attack due to being restrained to one move next turn. Moving one square less often makes the difference of being attacked (if you travel too far) and not being attacked (if you count squares and take attack ranges into account). Not being attacked also means avoiding annoying flinching, freezing, etc. It's frequently not only safe but also efficient time-wise to take it slowly.
The AI tend to bunch together, which makes Staraptor able to a) hit more than one target on the first pass and b) easily able to attack another enemy on the second turn. There are very few enemies with long-range moves (Mitsuhide being perhaps the most notable exception) since Staraptor also needs to travel one square further when it attacks. It is very, VERY easy to break the opponent's team with Staraptor.
Rhyperior is also far from the immobile tortoise you're painting him to be. Attacking from 3 squares away is the same range as Ampharos and Luxray's Thunder, none of whom are given to you for free like Shingen's Rhyperior is. I used Rhyperior liberally during my first run of the game and he got kills consistently in every map he took part in, and the gap between his potential damage and that of the rest of your team is very big when he first joins. Stronger Pokemon than Rhyperior? If we talk raw strength, then there's no equal midgame, and he's still the strongest (or tied for the strongest) at its very end, just suffering from lower than average hit rates.
Ampharos and Luxray both also have bad attacks. 3-squares-away is a very poor attack radius where nearly everything will run up to you, surround you and hit you if able, but at least those two happen to have 3 movement range. Don't assume that a long move range makes it any easier to hit a target - if anything, it makes it a lot harder, because there will inevitably be obstacles, walls, other Pokemon, and the like that get in your way.
Honestly though, while it's true that Rhyperior can't fight back when surrounded and that he takes time to get to distant places with 2 move, these two problems are mutually exclusive. If Rhyperior is too close to the enemy, then you positioned him poorly on your previous turn. I know, it's too easy to just move your broken Staraptor as far as possible and Brave Bird the hell out of everything mindlessly, and such effortless potential is counted when we determine what's good and what isn't, but Rhyperior CAN be used effectively -without slowing the team down-. Its speed is a problem indeed, but so is Conkeldurr's speed. Recharging is definitely not fun, but it can still move around when it can't attack, which is something Dig users can't do. And if we argue that an offensive playstyle is effective, then killing a mon or two with Rock Wrecker is still better than killing nothing at all (again, if you have a team of six, how many kills on average does each of them get per battle?).
They aren't mutually exclusive. It's bad before it gets to the enemy and bad after it get to the enemy. It will only ever get a kill if the rest of your team is solely comprised of things that can't kill in one hit - and by the time you get Rhyperior, you have access to a heck of a lot of these - or if the entirety of your team has 2 movement range.
I won't deny that Rhyperior is strong. But you can do far more damage in those two turns with almost any other Pokemon - and it's not the OHKO machine you make it out to be. It can OHKO frail stuff, sure, but then so can most other powerful Pokemon in the game, of which there are a good many.
We do use Draco Meteor a lot in OU however... You use it once for one big brutal nuke, then disappear. The same principle applies here.
Draco Meteor usually has extremely powerful users with big attacking stats, and more importantly, only one type in the game resists it. A grand total of seven types resist Grass, and Sceptile and Serperior have attacking stats of 3 and 2, respectively.
I know what he implied. I'm referring to speed as in the swiftness of your playstyle. The main argument against 2-move mons is that you need to slow down to make them part of the battle; not entirely true when 2-move with 3-range attack is arguably better than 3-move with 1-range attack. If we're really rushing forward with our 4-move mons, then the battle should be over before the self-inflicted attack cuts have too serious of an effect on our further damage output.
No, that's not the argument against them at all. I couldn't give a stuff whether or not Rhyperior or Charizard is part of the main party. The problem with them is that
you can actually very easily finish the battle before they arrive. This is why they are subpar, not because you are forced to make them part of the battle. They don't even get to be a part of the battle at all.
I don't know what you mean by "2 attack" in case of Leaf Storm. It has great range (you're not too unlikely to be able to get three or more enemies into its range at once) and is a 5-power move. Even if the damage isn't fatal, it's very high still and hurts a lot of enemies.
Serperior's attacking stat is 2. It does not hurt very much, and hurts even less after one use. You can skip a turn and reset it to normal, obviously, but then you run into the same problem as Rhyperior. Hence, Lapras can actually beat Serperior quite comfortably.
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I might make some changes to my earlier post at some point, but I'm tired now. Cheerio.
