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How difficult have these games been for you?

How difficult has SwSh been for you so far?

  • It's REALLY hard; I'm having lots of trouble.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • It's giving me a pretty good workout!

    Votes: 7 9.1%
  • It's meh, I suppose. Not too easy, but not too hard, either.

    Votes: 14 18.2%
  • It's pretty easy most of the time, but there's SOME difficulty here and there.

    Votes: 33 42.9%
  • It's SUPER easy; I'm not feeling challenged at all.

    Votes: 23 29.9%

  • Total voters
    77

TheWanderingMist

Paladin of the Snow Queen
I tried to fight as many Trainers as I could, and never run from wild battles, and I still managed to only keep pace with the opponent's levels throughout the game, so having the EXP Share permanently on didn't hinder the experience or anything. It just reduced the amount of boring grinding I would have had to do otherwise. I'd like to think I had a well-balanced team. The latter four gym leaders gave me some difficulty with their Gigantimax Pokemon (I only survived Allister because of the 3 turn clause), especially if they managed to knock out my Dynamax Pokemon in one hit before I even had a chance to make a move. Raihan gave me a lot of difficulty, but that had a lot to do with me not knowing it was going to be all double battles all the way through, assuming he would have all dragons, leading off with some wrong type choices because of it, and it being very late at night. All in all, it reminded me a lot of the Totem Pokemon battles; surprisingly hard for a Pokemon game if you don't happen to coincidentally have the perfect counter in your team (I annihilated Nessa's Drednaw with Dynamax Thwacky and Kabu's Centiskorch with Dynamax Carkol). The Battle Tower is it's usual unforgiving self.

I think another factor to consider is that it seemed like my Pokemon couldn't learn any TMs, especially not the good ones, even the TRs. My most powerful fire move was Incinerate, right up to the final boss fight. When your whole team's movesets are weaker than previous games, that's going to make the game seem harder than it really is. Luck will determine whether you get Flamethrower, Earthquake, Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Psychic, Energy Ball, Shadow Ball, etc. early, if at all.
I just used Tar Shot + Heat Crash. Coalossal is heavy enough to make that a good combo.
 
I've got the eight gym badges. I was at or just below the level of each gym leader and had some, but little, difficulty unless I lacked something that was super effective. I was about 5 levels up on the eight gym and that seemed harder. Probably down to just one super effective Pokémon.

The difficult bit was over leveled Pokémon in the open world part.

The really difficult bit are level 5 raids.

I haven't found the Exp share to do anything except prevent other team members from dropping too far behind the one's I'm using and I haven't used the exp boost items to buff the team. I've used them to level up a new Pokémon that I want to add to the team.
 

DannyDark

Well-Known Member
I noticed this too. Why is Coalossal’s best special Fire type move Incinerate of all things (level up movepool-wise)? I still kept it in my team throughout but yeah the movepools kinda sucked this time.

Do you not rate Burn Up? Admittedly it's a late level move, but since it's an even split Attack/Special, I just ran Heat Crash and, once it learned it, Burn Up on mine which was more than enough.
 

Miar

Wigglytuff Guild recruit
I wander and backtrack all the time. Even cycling over a dozen Pokemon to keep their levels low (and to get evolutions) it's a bit easy...Mostly. Sometimes doing this means I haven't got the right matchups and struggle through some battles, but I always win.
 

TheWanderingMist

Paladin of the Snow Queen
OK, to be fair, I did get Leon down to regular Charizard on my first go. I just miscalculated in that I thought Max Rockfall was based on a physical move. And then his Charizard proceeded to get the Ancient Power boosts the next turn...
 

Dragalge

"Orange" Magical Girl
Do you not rate Burn Up? Admittedly it's a late level move, but since it's an even split Attack/Special, I just ran Heat Crash and, once it learned it, Burn Up on mine which was more than enough.
Burn Up only works once and Coalossal is slow as molasses while only having five PP. Bad move!
 

Deckx_Gamer

New Member
I sometimes feel quite annoyed with the levelling issue in my first playthrough of Shield. I do this in a hard Wedlocke-form (Nuzlocke rules but you work in three pairs of two Pokémon) and I got to the point where I'm happy a Pokémon finally died in the seventh Gym.
The beginning was fine: I caught some Pokémon, did some raids, NEVER used the exp candies. I lost three Pokémon in stupid situations and it was fun.
Somewhere between the fourth and fifth gym things got ridiculous! By Gym 7 my entire team was at level 49-50 against the Gym's highest level of 47. I barely got to use half my team because of the Exp Share; my Arcanine (Flamette) levels quite slowly, while my Wishiwashi (Wash) does so very fast. Meaning, although I constantly used Arcanine, I NEVER got close to catching up with the Wishiwashi. It was ridiculous.

Now that I've lost a few Pokés I can start over, but I feel myself constantly altering my own rules just to keep it sorta fair.

Does anyone else use this format of gameplay? How did you keep things fair and fresh?
 

Bus

Well-Known Member
I sometimes feel quite annoyed with the levelling issue in my first playthrough of Shield. I do this in a hard Wedlocke-form (Nuzlocke rules but you work in three pairs of two Pokémon) and I got to the point where I'm happy a Pokémon finally died in the seventh Gym.
The beginning was fine: I caught some Pokémon, did some raids, NEVER used the exp candies. I lost three Pokémon in stupid situations and it was fun.
Somewhere between the fourth and fifth gym things got ridiculous! By Gym 7 my entire team was at level 49-50 against the Gym's highest level of 47. I barely got to use half my team because of the Exp Share; my Arcanine (Flamette) levels quite slowly, while my Wishiwashi (Wash) does so very fast. Meaning, although I constantly used Arcanine, I NEVER got close to catching up with the Wishiwashi. It was ridiculous.

Now that I've lost a few Pokés I can start over, but I feel myself constantly altering my own rules just to keep it sorta fair.

Does anyone else use this format of gameplay? How did you keep things fair and fresh?
I found the games more on the easy side. Probably due to exploring so much. Even without using the EXP candies, it's pretty easy to outpace the game.

That said, the easiest way to handicap yourself on a Nuzlocke run (or variant of one) is probably just to cap the number of pokemon you can use to 3 or 4 and maybe just have them on constant rotation. They may grow a bit more than normal, but the AI this time around isn't as stupid and won't spam things like Foresight over and over if its got a good attacking move to use against you. Unless they're your AI partner in raids. Then they're dumb as bricks and just spam Cosmic Power all day (looking at you, Solrock trainer!)

You can treat the run almost like how Ash went to each region by completely replacing your team at certain points.

Raise a team for the first two gyms, then switch them out for 3 or 4 new pokemon to use for the third and fourth gym, rise & repeat. Since leveling is fairly easy, and you do have access to EXP candy if you want (plus an almost unlimited about of TMs/TRs) its not difficult to switch teams completely every couple of gyms. Then for the Elite 4, you can use whatever combination of 4 you want and have plenty of areas to train and get them all up to speed (or, again, use the candies to bring the pokemon you boxed back up to current level).

Alternatively, you could set a level cap for yourself at different points in the game.
 

Mr.Munchlax

Great Ball Rank Trainer
I played the game using my own rules based on the anime & adventures manga:
  • Only catch 6-12 pokémon (rotating them when team members get too strong)
  • For gym battles, use the same number of pokémon as the gym leaders
  • Your team can't be any higher than the boss's strongest pokémon
I had a bit of a challenge in Sword & Shield, especially ones like Kabu, Bea, & Opal, but they were still easier than some of my playthroughs like OR/AS or US/UM. The hardest thing for me was limiting myself to just 12 pokémon since I loved a lot of the Gen 8 designs. Plus, the gym leaders started to get easier after l I unlocked EV training in the Pokéjobs. Once I was able to boost my team's stats, a lot of the latter gym leaders like Gordie & Piers started to become a cake walk that I forced myself to hold back just to make the battles more challenging. Raihan was the only late gym leader that was tough because of the double battle & his sandstorm strategy.

If anything, the bigger challenges were in the DLC because of stuff like the Dynamax raids, & trying to find my way through places like the Forest of Focus or the Path to the Peak.
 
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Ignition

We are so back Zygardebros
I've found it to be very easy. The baked in EXP doesn't seem balanced properly. Granted I just beat the first gym with 2 evolved Pokémon with type advantages so maybe my opinion/experiences will change (hopefully).
I know this is a really long time to respond to this but I don’t think much changed in my experiences. Nessa was admittedly kind of hard because my only Pokémon with a type advantage was Toxel. Allister’s GMax Gengar surprised me for a bit before I OHKOd it with my Drednaw. Leon’s Charizard was tough since I have a weird thing with letting my starter KO the Champion’s ace and his Charizard has Anicent Power (I always pick the Fire starter). Hop’s Zacian in the post game caught me off guard as well but managed to beat it with my Cinderace. Everything else was too easy.

The DLC didn’t change much besides Mustard being the toughest battle in the game since I severely underestimated him and he was the first NPC to knock out one of my Pokémon. Doesn’t help that I wanted to let my Dark Type Urshifu knock out his. Crown Tundra only has Peony which was a Cinderace sweep like with Rose.

Also tried a Nuzlocke but didn’t even come close to losing.

So overall I think these were arguably the easiest games yet. They took a huge step backwards with giving Trainers incomplete movesets and odd move choices (Slam Rillaboom? Tearful Look Inteleon? Feint Cinderace?) when USUM fixed a lot of that with giving them EVs and decent movesets. To me this was the most disappointing part of these games (even more than Dexit, the graphics, or the linearity) since I was hoping USUM was the future of the franchise in terms of difficulty. Still enjoyed watching my team sweep the entire Galar region
 

Rahus

ㅤㅤㅤㅤ
For me, difficulty is basically non existent. I can choose Scorbunny in the beginning and just have filler from the pre wild area and just fly through the region.

The real challenge is having to play through the game again. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's more like I don't want to play through it again.
 

Baggie_Saiyan

Well-Known Member
Self imposed rules kinda make the base difficulty not an issue for me, when playing a new game setting the battle style to set makes a huge differences because you don't know anything about the new Mons! Stuff like don't heal between routes or in boss battles. I don't wanna nuzlocke a first play through so stuff like that adds a layer of difficulty without being limited to what Mons you can have.
 

Teravolt

cilan lives forever in my heart
Sword and Shield were extremely easy. I actually beat Shield in a day. A long, eye-straining day, but a day nonetheless. At least there’s shiny hunting. And fanfiction.
 

Syther

Y not?
This game was a cake walk, and the lack of pokemon and anything else to do actually gave me little reason to pick up the game again even with the dlc.

Speaking of, Ultra Sun and Ultra moon still give me more to do than SWSH does.
 

Jeppo

Well-Known Member
To be fair, pretty much every game after gen 1 and 2 has been easy.

Still, you can set your own challenges to keep it fun.
 

Captain Jigglypuff

Leader of Jigglypuff Army
The only trainer I lost to was bea, so I’d say pretty easy.
Melony can be challenging because of her Darmanitan’s Zen Mode. First time I faced her, didn’t know Darmanitan even had Zen Mode and my team was mostly Steel and Fire types with maybe one Fighting type and was completely shocked as soon as it transformed and gained the Fire type.
 

janejane6178

Kaleido Star FOREVER in my heart <3
This game was a cake walk, and the lack of pokemon and anything else to do actually gave me little reason to pick up the game again even with the dlc.

Speaking of, Ultra Sun and Ultra moon still give me more to do than SWSH does.
The sm games werent easy, I will give them that
 

Nyter

Island Challenger
So I usually buy both versions of a Pokemon game. The first one I play through, I do so to just get to know the game and transfer my Pokemon from previous games to it. Grinding is SUPER easy, not saying it isn't long, but I can easily level a Pokemon team all the way to 100, EV Train them, and if needed, gain bottle caps to hyper train em in a matter of an hour. And I know Masuda said that he chose to make the game easy to obtain Pokemon and level them up faster be a use nowadays, app games are taking over and make things easily obtainable for the player to feel a sense of achievement and get more compelled. It is sucky for those of us who want a challenge but hey... thats why we do things like Nuzlocke challenges to challenge ourselves.

I originally play Pokemon Shield and was able to get through it super easily (including DLC) but I had help from transferring Pokemon from other games to it.

I am about to start playing Pokemon Sword and I want to play it with only Pokemon caught from that game + save file. I want to play it as if I was actually in a journey myself without any outside source help. I think this will help me determine if in fact the game was dumbed down for us or not.

Also, I do not like the exp. Share forced on us because on top of exp. All party Pokemon share EV training if in the party even if it didn't participate in battle. It makes EV training much more complicated.
 
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