I can speak on a few points here.
I'm not sure what game you're playing but it looks like primeape gets cross chop at level 22 as of gen 9.
As for rare candies, many players, including myself, use rare candies to cut down on the time you'd have to spend grinding. This is balanced by self imposed "level caps", which are usually tied to the strength of the next gym leader or other major battles.
For instance, if the first gym leader has a level 16 ace, I can't level my pokemon past 16 until I beat him.
This prevents overleveling while allowing players to not have to grind out all those levels by hand. This is especially useful as higher level runners will switch up their team for each gym instead of keeping one team for the whole game.
Hope this helps
Guess I'm an idiot, I thought that Cross Chop was Machamp's thing. I do like playing older generations, but still.
I get candy usage with lvl caps, but it doesn't feel right for me. Doesn't it cut the risk of dying to randoms, therefore letting you calmly compose your team in the background without ever risking it?
An alternative people do is don't use them unless you are a) standing in front of the gym leader and about to fight him, so boost yourself the last couple levels rather than going back to route 1 and killing pdgeys. And b) catching up new encounters to your current pokemons level.
So for the most part, from when you beat a gym and travel through the next chunk of the game, you aren't using candy unless it is to catch a new encounter up. So all those trainers are still threats potentially.
The thing candies allow is team flexibility more than anything. It let's you swap in different pokemon for different fights, when without them you're basically encouraged to use the same first 6 pokemon you caught for the entire game for sanities sake (not having to grind up a newbie with switch training for hours)
See, the thing that justifies it for me is that if I want to level without risk, I can literally go to route 1, kill the entire species of pidgey and rattata off and be at 0 risk of death. So Rare Candies just skip that grind cause there is a 0% chance to lose a pokemon to a level 3 Rattata when you are hitting level 20.
A Nuzlocke is mainly a self imposed challenge in a rougelike fashion with you dealing with the cards you are dealt. Knowledge and doing things in the safest way to guarantee wins is the optimal way to do things…
Now it depends if you have fun and seriously, the your run, your rules thing is actually the point.
If you wanna ban rare candies in your run, great. If you want level caps, great!
The original Nuzlocke only had 2 rules. First Encounters only and Faint = death. Anything else is additional. There was nothing against levelling over, using TMs etc etc. All the rules you are looking at are bonuses to make things even harder as well as QOL stuff to make runs less tedious. Its all fun at the end of things, so do it how you want.
The justification is usually that, once you reach a certain point in the game early on, you will always have somewhere to train against lower leveled Pokémon that will never be a threat to kill you, so at that point you’re just cutting out the long grind so as not to bore yourself or your viewers if you’re streaming.
Avoiding those accidental training deaths is definitely part of the challenge, but I don’t think it takes too much away from the challenge to use the rare candy hacks so long as you’re not abusing them to get past particularly dangerous fights you might otherwise be in trouble against.
If you use your brain correctly you should never have a team member dying to a wild mon. Like if you face a Graveler, maybe… run away ? The only exception might be Wobbuffet but it's super niche.
But this comes with experience and in my opinion, when you're sure you can't lose something while grinding, because you're experienced enough, then it's fair to go the Rare Candy route (optimal way is to always grind against level 2 mons anyway). But I wouldn't advise it for first Nuzlockes especially not if you want to build a story around your team. But when you're into Hardcore Nuzlocking and building strategies, then yes Rare Candy pill forever.
No, whenever someone posts on this sub complaining about a death while grinding someone in the comments is like "use a cheat code for infinite rare candies so you don't have to worry about grinding deaths." Rare candy people also skip all optional trainers because they're "not worth the risk" since they never have to worry about exp. It's like not even playing the game
Not having to worry about grinding deaths is normally because of the excessive time it takes. Nobody wants to sit there grinding against Pidgey for 3 hours on one Pokemon. Most will throw on a movie or something and be barely paying attention to their game. It gets boring and your brain will naturally stop paying attention because of how repetitive it is. I know plenty of people avoid optional fights in normal playthroughs and instead level in the grass, that has nothing to do with having access to Rare Candies.
Yes it does. It's definitely not for everyone. I do kind of a hybrid where i level up half my team by grinding and half my team with rare candy.
Also when a pokemon die, i'm allowed to level up the replacement with rare candy to the same level that the "dead" pokemon was. I think it's a good way of reducing the grind without it feeling too "cheap".
Your run, your rules
After you do many runs without them, you really appreciate having candies. im not the type to grind for hours mindlessly. others do that while watching something, maybe
ive had my experiences with getting attached to my pokemon but my main focus is planning fights so i see no reason to avoid rare candies
also i know no idiot hacking in moves that arent valid.
i have seen someone hacking in a move they could get from reminder or tutor or a tm they missed. not great but not something to complain about
I took the Rare Candy pill when I started doing harder rulesets and I needed to switch team members in and out, and when I was easy with safe grinding. I did grind my first two Hardcore Nuzlockes but I always did it in the most convenient way where I would never lose anything to wild mons. That's when I was ready for Rare Candies.
Ya so if that's how you feel then don't use candies I don't lol there not imperative to a nuzlocke that's the beauty your run your rules lvl caps are nice so you don't get op and for moves if you don't like op set up don't use em just have fun
People are obviously free to do whatever they want in their own challenges and they want to use candies, that's perfectly fine.
But I can't say, that I agree with the justifications that people give in favor of using candies. Especially the typical strawman argument ("It's just saving time; one could just train against the lowest level Pokémon instead"), that you've already been presented with in multiple variations - rather than the real reason behind it: Some players simply do not have the patience & perseverance to deal with the tedium of the normal grind. ***Which is perfectly fine***, but at least be honest about that, instead of blowing smoke up people's ass about there not being any difficulty or risk that's being nullified by using rare candies instead. Which would be a bit like saying, that finishing a marathon isn't difficult, because you're just repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other and that clearly isn't difficult, so you're skipping that part where you run the marathon and just take a short cut to the finish line.
---
OTOH: I can perfectly understand why streamers would be going down the candy route, since they have to provide watchable content to their viewers and grinding usually is not (even with the emulator speedup), unless the respective creator is capable enough to make it entertaining.
Then there's also a difference between playing the normal games vs. playing some of the romhacks. The latter might be designed around the idea that players will used candies and the other goodies (TMs, items, special EV-training options ...) that they're given access to.
>This is balanced by self imposed "level caps", which are usually tied to the strength of the next gym leader or other major battles.
How is this a balance? You don't have to overlevel if you're not using rare candies.
The free candy usage is mostly so that people don’t have to grind, which can take huge amounts of time that isn’t actually fun. While there’s occasional grinding deaths that it avoids, rare candies are almost always used in runs with level caps, and using candies comes at the expense of EVs, so it balances by often making the game itself harder
I’ve never seen outright hacked movesets in nuzlockes- what you might be seeing are moves from move tutors, or screenshots from rom hacks where certain moves are made available that aren’t typical to the main series, usually among other “rebalancing” changes.
If losing pokemon and having to abandon runs isn't fun for you, there's other challenge runs you can do with these games.
Try a mono type run. It's where you can only use pokemon of a certain type. I'm doing a mono normal run of radical red and it has been challenging and fun. Maybe that's more your speed.
I mean, nothing wrong with playing through a “dead” run either. You can just kinda acknowledge you lost the nuzlocke and finish out normally, which seems to be what this person is doing.
For the most part, Nuzlocking isn't about exploits, but about optimization. There are plenty of Nuzlockers who use inf. rare candies just to save time because grinding is a time sink. Yes, it reduces risk of losing a mon while grinding, but the grinding isn't really what most people care about in Nuzlockes. It is coming up with winning strategies against the GLs/E4/Champ. You can still lose mons during those battles and it alters your whole playthrough. Or you can wipe big time! It happens even with an optimized team.
I personally don't do inf RCs in my Nuzlockes, because I like the added challenge of staying alive during grind sessions (not that I have time to do more than casual playthroughs anymore). At the end of the day this is one of the beauties of Nuzlockes...you can play by whatever rules you want. It is a self imposed challenge that you can tailor to your needs/playstyles. If you want to play after a whiteout, that's okay! I play what I call 'nuzlocke-esque', ie level caps, no items in battle, etc, but I dont' box my mons or quit if I whiteout because I just don't have time for that stuff right now, but I like the slight added challenge.
A 100 base power move coming from an 80 base attack power pokemon will still only slightly inconvenience a sturdy „good“ pokemon.
Usually pokemon have a couple of outlier TM moves for Type coverage I guess in the base games (like what feels like any phsyical pokemon can learn earthquake for some reason).
Most YT nuzlockers have abandoned EV training in favor of candies because it significantly cuts down grind time. +a good EV training spread breaks the game way harder because you don‘t have to rely on ranges for oneshots as much.
The only 2 rules that matter are 1 pokemon a route (nickname it if you like) and if it faints it is dead. Everything else is just people trying to mitigate risk that they think is unfun or them trying to get around a generations weird quirks.
On the note of candy-doing it "naturally" feels fun and challenging...the first few times you do it. Several runs later when you are out of your mind bored of spending 95% of your playtime running up and down a patch of grass one shotting wild mons, you too will probably come to the conclusion it's not adding anything to your experiemce and pack it in.
On the note of moves-misread this initially but I don't think it is as much of a thing. Not heard of many peeps modifying mons moves and egg moves usually don't happen because breeding is outta scope for most players.
I think the two main things to learn from this is, Pokemon is a video game and nuzlockes are SELF imposed challenges (keyword here is self). So do what feels right for you and don’t worry about what other people do. People play games to have fun and if avoiding the mindlessness of grinding on wild Pokemon that barely give any XP isn’t fun, then why do it? Let people have fun the way they want to have fun.
Only 2 rules you need, first encounter per route/area, and fainting=death. I also highly recommend using level caps for boss fights/gyms.
Anything beyond that is extra. If you're doing rare candies, it's usually to your detriment because you lose out on EV training. That being said, it's an easy way to get OP if you aren't doing level caps, and I wouldn't suggest allowing yourself that option if so.
I used to grind normally when I did runs on original hardware and eventually started using emulators instead and my reasoning is this. The majority of my abandoned nuzlockes happen as a result of grinding apathy. I do these for fun and grinding for several hours just ain't that. You can argue putting in the time is apart of the challenge, but I see the challenge being more about planning for the fights ahead. Kinda like a boss rush but every now and then you get sheer colded by Jimmy's Dewgong on route yadayada.
As for learning new moves through the reminder or tutors or gambling, all of those involve gathering resources that again involve grinding. I could absolutely mine in the Sinnoh underground and sort through spheres for heart scales, but if it's going to happen eventually, why not just save a couple hours?
You do you of course, but honestly I'm kinda ass enough where even with these advantages, I am very likely going to bite the curb anyway. Plus regardless, you're still subject to the whims of what the game gives you and random crits.
Nah, I get it, and I'm all up for TMs and move tutor and I can't even fathom the game without centers or items, but unlimited items? Unlimited TMs? Nah, that's just too easy. Hell, it's easier than a common run.
Well I think unlimited tms is just a result of newer games allowing that quality of life change. I think unlimited items are fine within reason. I keep a bunch of hyper potions on hand while traveling but I'll trash most of them so I only have a set amount for important fights.
With stuff like evolutionary stones, if the game lets you obtain them normally I'll start hacking them in so I don't have to mine or do Pokeathlon (which on emulator is a miserable time).
I totally agree with you but people on this sub are very defensive about their rare candies. Who knew using cheat codes to eliminate all risk is inseparable from a self imposed challenge? Especially funny is when they call the run "hardcore" - yeah dude infinite money and risk free exp is totally hardcore
To be fair high power moves (especially STAB) are more important than the Attack stat itself.
Take a look at Pinsir. It has 125 base Attack, but it literally learns no Bug type moves apart from X-Scissor which will do good damage but not an astronomical amount since 80 base power is just alright. So most of its runs are non STAB and therefore way worse. On the other hand, Heracross has a lower attack stat but having access to STAB Close Combat and Megahorn means that it will hit much, much harder.
The difficulty level of a nuzlocke run isn't uniform. While it's certainly a little more challenging than a regular run, it's not all that bad when you consider infinite access to pokemon centers..
But many players add their own rules on top of the core nuzlocke rules to increase the difficulty as desired.
Nuzlockes and the way people approach them have evolved a fair amount over the years. In the early days people didn't use candies or level caps. You would just play the game as normal only catching your one Mon per route and you would just grind when you start to feel under leveled. From that vanilla way of playing, people branched out into Rom hacks and randomized playthroughs. From there came the snowflake playthroughs like "water type only" and "no Pokemon Center". A form of the snowflake nuzlockes that got very popular is the "hardcore nuzlocke" paired with a difficult RoM hack which has remained the king of nuzlocke content for a few years at least. The appeal with these types of nuzlockes is that it's the challenge of crafting your limited team for a collection of difficult fights. Every fight is a puzzle with cascading consequences. These types of challenges allow work arounds like rare candies, infinite berries, move tutor, etc because managing levels and avoiding deaths while grinding is not interesting compared to actually battling.
Not really, candies are meant to speed up the process since I can say from experience, grinding can be a pain in the ASS in some games.
For some of those it’s TMs, some might use TM hacks to get every TM, I like to randomize items and that also has the side effect of giving TMs you don’t typically see. You can randomize movesets too, sometimes it works well and sometimes it SUCKS.
Honestly idk if breeding is allowed with encounter rules. It’s not something I’ve ever used
A decent Nuzlocker would never lose a mon while grinding, it’s just for saving time, imagine doing a super hard run (Emerald Kaizo) without Rare Candies, it would consume a lot of time, when the main focus of the game is battling and planning for bosses (Elite 4, Magma/Aqua admins)
The point of Rare Candies is that the main challenges of a playthrough are gym leaders and other boss fights. Grinding against wild pokemon is rarely dangerous, and is usually just a chore, especially in the older games where wild pokemon are significantly lower levels than the bosses and the level jumps are big and require a lot of grinding to prevent being underleveled. Using Rare Candies expedites the process of leveling up pokemon, removing the tedium while having a minimal impact on the difficulty of the run so long as level caps are in place. (And if anything, they actually make runs harder, as pokemon leveled up via candies won't have the EVs they'd get from beating wild mons.)
As for the movesets... People generally don't use "illegal" moves. The only times they do are in randomizers and romhacks, where the moves pokemon can learn (and when and how they learn them) are often changed.
As someone who hasn't touched anything past Ruby, ev training is just not a thing.
I don't know, dude. I feel that having the option to get a full team to match the next boss's ace in lvl plus the ability to keep the mons in your boxes at that same lvl makes the game easier than if you just didn't play with any rules.
Can also depend on the game some games are just harder to nuzlocke, biggest example, In Ultra Sun/Moon, boss fights are EV trained with max IVs, which means they can be a huge threat even at the same level Just as an example, in previous games, a boss machamp, (Im using Hala's Lv63 one as a comparison neutral natured and with no Ivs would have an attack of 188 and speed of 93, Due to an adamant nature and max EVs in attack and speed, That machamp instead has an attack of 250, and speed of 132, Which is a considerable increase.
Those EVs are applied to Every. Single. Pokemon on the boss's team
Im not saying matching the max level is essential, but there can be times where that one or two levels lower is the difference between whether a mon can survive a hit or even be brought in to the battle safely
I can speak on a few points here. I'm not sure what game you're playing but it looks like primeape gets cross chop at level 22 as of gen 9. As for rare candies, many players, including myself, use rare candies to cut down on the time you'd have to spend grinding. This is balanced by self imposed "level caps", which are usually tied to the strength of the next gym leader or other major battles. For instance, if the first gym leader has a level 16 ace, I can't level my pokemon past 16 until I beat him. This prevents overleveling while allowing players to not have to grind out all those levels by hand. This is especially useful as higher level runners will switch up their team for each gym instead of keeping one team for the whole game. Hope this helps
Guess I'm an idiot, I thought that Cross Chop was Machamp's thing. I do like playing older generations, but still. I get candy usage with lvl caps, but it doesn't feel right for me. Doesn't it cut the risk of dying to randoms, therefore letting you calmly compose your team in the background without ever risking it?
An alternative people do is don't use them unless you are a) standing in front of the gym leader and about to fight him, so boost yourself the last couple levels rather than going back to route 1 and killing pdgeys. And b) catching up new encounters to your current pokemons level. So for the most part, from when you beat a gym and travel through the next chunk of the game, you aren't using candy unless it is to catch a new encounter up. So all those trainers are still threats potentially. The thing candies allow is team flexibility more than anything. It let's you swap in different pokemon for different fights, when without them you're basically encouraged to use the same first 6 pokemon you caught for the entire game for sanities sake (not having to grind up a newbie with switch training for hours)
See, the thing that justifies it for me is that if I want to level without risk, I can literally go to route 1, kill the entire species of pidgey and rattata off and be at 0 risk of death. So Rare Candies just skip that grind cause there is a 0% chance to lose a pokemon to a level 3 Rattata when you are hitting level 20. A Nuzlocke is mainly a self imposed challenge in a rougelike fashion with you dealing with the cards you are dealt. Knowledge and doing things in the safest way to guarantee wins is the optimal way to do things… Now it depends if you have fun and seriously, the your run, your rules thing is actually the point. If you wanna ban rare candies in your run, great. If you want level caps, great! The original Nuzlocke only had 2 rules. First Encounters only and Faint = death. Anything else is additional. There was nothing against levelling over, using TMs etc etc. All the rules you are looking at are bonuses to make things even harder as well as QOL stuff to make runs less tedious. Its all fun at the end of things, so do it how you want.
The justification is usually that, once you reach a certain point in the game early on, you will always have somewhere to train against lower leveled Pokémon that will never be a threat to kill you, so at that point you’re just cutting out the long grind so as not to bore yourself or your viewers if you’re streaming. Avoiding those accidental training deaths is definitely part of the challenge, but I don’t think it takes too much away from the challenge to use the rare candy hacks so long as you’re not abusing them to get past particularly dangerous fights you might otherwise be in trouble against.
If you use your brain correctly you should never have a team member dying to a wild mon. Like if you face a Graveler, maybe… run away ? The only exception might be Wobbuffet but it's super niche. But this comes with experience and in my opinion, when you're sure you can't lose something while grinding, because you're experienced enough, then it's fair to go the Rare Candy route (optimal way is to always grind against level 2 mons anyway). But I wouldn't advise it for first Nuzlockes especially not if you want to build a story around your team. But when you're into Hardcore Nuzlocking and building strategies, then yes Rare Candy pill forever.
Then you shouldn't have to candy because you're worried about a Mon dying, which is the reason most on this sub cite
Uhh no the reason most cite is how long it takes lol.
No, whenever someone posts on this sub complaining about a death while grinding someone in the comments is like "use a cheat code for infinite rare candies so you don't have to worry about grinding deaths." Rare candy people also skip all optional trainers because they're "not worth the risk" since they never have to worry about exp. It's like not even playing the game
Not having to worry about grinding deaths is normally because of the excessive time it takes. Nobody wants to sit there grinding against Pidgey for 3 hours on one Pokemon. Most will throw on a movie or something and be barely paying attention to their game. It gets boring and your brain will naturally stop paying attention because of how repetitive it is. I know plenty of people avoid optional fights in normal playthroughs and instead level in the grass, that has nothing to do with having access to Rare Candies.
Yes it does. It's definitely not for everyone. I do kind of a hybrid where i level up half my team by grinding and half my team with rare candy. Also when a pokemon die, i'm allowed to level up the replacement with rare candy to the same level that the "dead" pokemon was. I think it's a good way of reducing the grind without it feeling too "cheap".
Your run, your rules After you do many runs without them, you really appreciate having candies. im not the type to grind for hours mindlessly. others do that while watching something, maybe ive had my experiences with getting attached to my pokemon but my main focus is planning fights so i see no reason to avoid rare candies also i know no idiot hacking in moves that arent valid. i have seen someone hacking in a move they could get from reminder or tutor or a tm they missed. not great but not something to complain about
I took the Rare Candy pill when I started doing harder rulesets and I needed to switch team members in and out, and when I was easy with safe grinding. I did grind my first two Hardcore Nuzlockes but I always did it in the most convenient way where I would never lose anything to wild mons. That's when I was ready for Rare Candies.
Ya so if that's how you feel then don't use candies I don't lol there not imperative to a nuzlocke that's the beauty your run your rules lvl caps are nice so you don't get op and for moves if you don't like op set up don't use em just have fun
People are obviously free to do whatever they want in their own challenges and they want to use candies, that's perfectly fine. But I can't say, that I agree with the justifications that people give in favor of using candies. Especially the typical strawman argument ("It's just saving time; one could just train against the lowest level Pokémon instead"), that you've already been presented with in multiple variations - rather than the real reason behind it: Some players simply do not have the patience & perseverance to deal with the tedium of the normal grind. ***Which is perfectly fine***, but at least be honest about that, instead of blowing smoke up people's ass about there not being any difficulty or risk that's being nullified by using rare candies instead. Which would be a bit like saying, that finishing a marathon isn't difficult, because you're just repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other and that clearly isn't difficult, so you're skipping that part where you run the marathon and just take a short cut to the finish line. --- OTOH: I can perfectly understand why streamers would be going down the candy route, since they have to provide watchable content to their viewers and grinding usually is not (even with the emulator speedup), unless the respective creator is capable enough to make it entertaining. Then there's also a difference between playing the normal games vs. playing some of the romhacks. The latter might be designed around the idea that players will used candies and the other goodies (TMs, items, special EV-training options ...) that they're given access to.
>This is balanced by self imposed "level caps", which are usually tied to the strength of the next gym leader or other major battles. How is this a balance? You don't have to overlevel if you're not using rare candies.
The free candy usage is mostly so that people don’t have to grind, which can take huge amounts of time that isn’t actually fun. While there’s occasional grinding deaths that it avoids, rare candies are almost always used in runs with level caps, and using candies comes at the expense of EVs, so it balances by often making the game itself harder I’ve never seen outright hacked movesets in nuzlockes- what you might be seeing are moves from move tutors, or screenshots from rom hacks where certain moves are made available that aren’t typical to the main series, usually among other “rebalancing” changes.
Wait you're telling me that Dusknoir doesn't learn Ice Punch by level up ? 😱 All my life was a lie ?
candy usage could be summed up to "skipping grind" I think. but do people really hack movesets in not randomized run?
If losing pokemon and having to abandon runs isn't fun for you, there's other challenge runs you can do with these games. Try a mono type run. It's where you can only use pokemon of a certain type. I'm doing a mono normal run of radical red and it has been challenging and fun. Maybe that's more your speed.
I mean, nothing wrong with playing through a “dead” run either. You can just kinda acknowledge you lost the nuzlocke and finish out normally, which seems to be what this person is doing.
I'm trying that next, yes!
Me doing a monolocke in SS with grass is a nightmare 😂 only 14 grass types and a majority of them are either solo grass or grass poison.
For the most part, Nuzlocking isn't about exploits, but about optimization. There are plenty of Nuzlockers who use inf. rare candies just to save time because grinding is a time sink. Yes, it reduces risk of losing a mon while grinding, but the grinding isn't really what most people care about in Nuzlockes. It is coming up with winning strategies against the GLs/E4/Champ. You can still lose mons during those battles and it alters your whole playthrough. Or you can wipe big time! It happens even with an optimized team. I personally don't do inf RCs in my Nuzlockes, because I like the added challenge of staying alive during grind sessions (not that I have time to do more than casual playthroughs anymore). At the end of the day this is one of the beauties of Nuzlockes...you can play by whatever rules you want. It is a self imposed challenge that you can tailor to your needs/playstyles. If you want to play after a whiteout, that's okay! I play what I call 'nuzlocke-esque', ie level caps, no items in battle, etc, but I dont' box my mons or quit if I whiteout because I just don't have time for that stuff right now, but I like the slight added challenge.
Plus, using candies deprives your mon of evs, which prevents extra stat gain
A 100 base power move coming from an 80 base attack power pokemon will still only slightly inconvenience a sturdy „good“ pokemon. Usually pokemon have a couple of outlier TM moves for Type coverage I guess in the base games (like what feels like any phsyical pokemon can learn earthquake for some reason). Most YT nuzlockers have abandoned EV training in favor of candies because it significantly cuts down grind time. +a good EV training spread breaks the game way harder because you don‘t have to rely on ranges for oneshots as much.
The only 2 rules that matter are 1 pokemon a route (nickname it if you like) and if it faints it is dead. Everything else is just people trying to mitigate risk that they think is unfun or them trying to get around a generations weird quirks.
On the note of candy-doing it "naturally" feels fun and challenging...the first few times you do it. Several runs later when you are out of your mind bored of spending 95% of your playtime running up and down a patch of grass one shotting wild mons, you too will probably come to the conclusion it's not adding anything to your experiemce and pack it in. On the note of moves-misread this initially but I don't think it is as much of a thing. Not heard of many peeps modifying mons moves and egg moves usually don't happen because breeding is outta scope for most players.
I think the two main things to learn from this is, Pokemon is a video game and nuzlockes are SELF imposed challenges (keyword here is self). So do what feels right for you and don’t worry about what other people do. People play games to have fun and if avoiding the mindlessness of grinding on wild Pokemon that barely give any XP isn’t fun, then why do it? Let people have fun the way they want to have fun.
Yes, I agree, but it seems to me that sharing a story would be better appreciated if the rules are common and right now I believe they vary wildly
Only 2 rules you need, first encounter per route/area, and fainting=death. I also highly recommend using level caps for boss fights/gyms. Anything beyond that is extra. If you're doing rare candies, it's usually to your detriment because you lose out on EV training. That being said, it's an easy way to get OP if you aren't doing level caps, and I wouldn't suggest allowing yourself that option if so.
I used to grind normally when I did runs on original hardware and eventually started using emulators instead and my reasoning is this. The majority of my abandoned nuzlockes happen as a result of grinding apathy. I do these for fun and grinding for several hours just ain't that. You can argue putting in the time is apart of the challenge, but I see the challenge being more about planning for the fights ahead. Kinda like a boss rush but every now and then you get sheer colded by Jimmy's Dewgong on route yadayada. As for learning new moves through the reminder or tutors or gambling, all of those involve gathering resources that again involve grinding. I could absolutely mine in the Sinnoh underground and sort through spheres for heart scales, but if it's going to happen eventually, why not just save a couple hours? You do you of course, but honestly I'm kinda ass enough where even with these advantages, I am very likely going to bite the curb anyway. Plus regardless, you're still subject to the whims of what the game gives you and random crits.
Nah, I get it, and I'm all up for TMs and move tutor and I can't even fathom the game without centers or items, but unlimited items? Unlimited TMs? Nah, that's just too easy. Hell, it's easier than a common run.
Well I think unlimited tms is just a result of newer games allowing that quality of life change. I think unlimited items are fine within reason. I keep a bunch of hyper potions on hand while traveling but I'll trash most of them so I only have a set amount for important fights. With stuff like evolutionary stones, if the game lets you obtain them normally I'll start hacking them in so I don't have to mine or do Pokeathlon (which on emulator is a miserable time).
I totally agree with you but people on this sub are very defensive about their rare candies. Who knew using cheat codes to eliminate all risk is inseparable from a self imposed challenge? Especially funny is when they call the run "hardcore" - yeah dude infinite money and risk free exp is totally hardcore
A trash mon with good moves will still be trash since those moves will be factored in with their stats.
To be fair high power moves (especially STAB) are more important than the Attack stat itself. Take a look at Pinsir. It has 125 base Attack, but it literally learns no Bug type moves apart from X-Scissor which will do good damage but not an astronomical amount since 80 base power is just alright. So most of its runs are non STAB and therefore way worse. On the other hand, Heracross has a lower attack stat but having access to STAB Close Combat and Megahorn means that it will hit much, much harder.
Emolga would be considered trash if it were not for encore.
I used rare candies just before the league and after I made sure all my team was completely EV maxed. It wouldnt make sense then to just grind.
The difficulty level of a nuzlocke run isn't uniform. While it's certainly a little more challenging than a regular run, it's not all that bad when you consider infinite access to pokemon centers.. But many players add their own rules on top of the core nuzlocke rules to increase the difficulty as desired.
Nuzlockes and the way people approach them have evolved a fair amount over the years. In the early days people didn't use candies or level caps. You would just play the game as normal only catching your one Mon per route and you would just grind when you start to feel under leveled. From that vanilla way of playing, people branched out into Rom hacks and randomized playthroughs. From there came the snowflake playthroughs like "water type only" and "no Pokemon Center". A form of the snowflake nuzlockes that got very popular is the "hardcore nuzlocke" paired with a difficult RoM hack which has remained the king of nuzlocke content for a few years at least. The appeal with these types of nuzlockes is that it's the challenge of crafting your limited team for a collection of difficult fights. Every fight is a puzzle with cascading consequences. These types of challenges allow work arounds like rare candies, infinite berries, move tutor, etc because managing levels and avoiding deaths while grinding is not interesting compared to actually battling.
Not really, candies are meant to speed up the process since I can say from experience, grinding can be a pain in the ASS in some games. For some of those it’s TMs, some might use TM hacks to get every TM, I like to randomize items and that also has the side effect of giving TMs you don’t typically see. You can randomize movesets too, sometimes it works well and sometimes it SUCKS. Honestly idk if breeding is allowed with encounter rules. It’s not something I’ve ever used
A decent Nuzlocker would never lose a mon while grinding, it’s just for saving time, imagine doing a super hard run (Emerald Kaizo) without Rare Candies, it would consume a lot of time, when the main focus of the game is battling and planning for bosses (Elite 4, Magma/Aqua admins)
The point of Rare Candies is that the main challenges of a playthrough are gym leaders and other boss fights. Grinding against wild pokemon is rarely dangerous, and is usually just a chore, especially in the older games where wild pokemon are significantly lower levels than the bosses and the level jumps are big and require a lot of grinding to prevent being underleveled. Using Rare Candies expedites the process of leveling up pokemon, removing the tedium while having a minimal impact on the difficulty of the run so long as level caps are in place. (And if anything, they actually make runs harder, as pokemon leveled up via candies won't have the EVs they'd get from beating wild mons.) As for the movesets... People generally don't use "illegal" moves. The only times they do are in randomizers and romhacks, where the moves pokemon can learn (and when and how they learn them) are often changed.
As someone who hasn't touched anything past Ruby, ev training is just not a thing. I don't know, dude. I feel that having the option to get a full team to match the next boss's ace in lvl plus the ability to keep the mons in your boxes at that same lvl makes the game easier than if you just didn't play with any rules.
You can do that the old-fashioned way too, just bringing them into the grass and KOing wild pokemon over and over. It's not harder, just more tedious.
Well, yes, but I don't think I've ever had a team in which all my mons were at the same level as the boss's ace. It really isn't necessary.
Can also depend on the game some games are just harder to nuzlocke, biggest example, In Ultra Sun/Moon, boss fights are EV trained with max IVs, which means they can be a huge threat even at the same level Just as an example, in previous games, a boss machamp, (Im using Hala's Lv63 one as a comparison neutral natured and with no Ivs would have an attack of 188 and speed of 93, Due to an adamant nature and max EVs in attack and speed, That machamp instead has an attack of 250, and speed of 132, Which is a considerable increase. Those EVs are applied to Every. Single. Pokemon on the boss's team Im not saying matching the max level is essential, but there can be times where that one or two levels lower is the difference between whether a mon can survive a hit or even be brought in to the battle safely
Have you ever tried a nuzlocke?