Ideas on a Sauna Revamp

Suggestions and Contributions
1

yeah i know im back at it again with forum suggestion threads… sorry

so just tonight i ran sauna solo on my alt account using a prinplup and it got me thinking how i personally would like to see sauna improve

i think most people can agree sauna is a very difficult dungeon for new people, almost disproportionately difficult compared to other hm dungeons (sourroot and mineral cavern come to mind) as well as being very old, barely having been updated since 2011

i think there are a few key things that make it disproportionately hard:

  1. Wide array of status effects

i think having poison (gulpin+traps), burn (hot water and fire type pokemon), sleep (slowpoke’s yawn), and, while not as serious as the other two, confusion (zubat) is a bit too much.

i think yawn is fine to keep, but gulpin is terrifiying in this dungeon. id suggest removing gulpin entirely, and making it recruitable in boggy wastes instead, and removing poison traps too

  1. Size of the rooms

this dungeon has very tiny rooms and lots of water. this causes enemy pokemon to be able to cross water and get to the player, while the player either cannot cross it or avoids doing so so they arent burned. this leaves them very few avenues of escape from small rooms filled with lots of pokemon.

this also applies to the later sections with lava, which fire types can cross to get to you, and there are often many graveler and such stuck in very small rooms which spam AOES

i would personally make the rooms a bit larger, comparable to mt. skylifts room layouts

  1. Lack of recovery items

it feels like this dungeon has very few berries, or anything to recover you with. herbal teas are very helpful for this dungeon but don’t help recover status.

i would personally add lava cookies! they arent found very often in pmu, and considering this is a sauna with lava at lower floors, i think it would be very fitting. id also probably make rawst berries more common.

these are the main things i would change.

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here are some additonal misc suggestions as well

  • Changing the roster to reflect gen 5+ mons

id consider revamping the roster of pokemon in this dungeon entirely. zubat, graveller, and slowpoke feel very repetitive with how common they are in various dungeons. marill is an odd choice, but it is in winden forest, so its atleast thematic. snubbull is very odd and makes little sense thematically (but can be shiny hunted only here, so idk lol) . gulpin alone makes the dungeon extremely difficult for new users due to poison.

i think it would be cool to add

  • timburr, because it is also in winden dojo, and it would be a cool nod that it comes to the sauna to relax because it works in construction, and would match with machop. (it doesnt have to be recruitable, but it does have a shiny, so it could be shiny huntable this way)
  • darumaka, which is only otherwise available in sky fortress, and i believe would fit later floors well
  • roggenrola and boldore, to replace graveller. i think they would be thematic for this dungeon and are otherwise only found in tanren undercity

it isnt in the game, but an honorable mention would be rolycoly, when it comes out, maybe for depths?

  • Healing water

kirk had this idea, not me, but i think it would be cool if the earliest floors of sauna had water that healed you instead of hurting you, like a sauna actually would

then it would get progressively hotter as you descended, until it turns into lava

  • Removing lava plume on torkoal??

why does this pokemon have this ): its way too op for a low lv dungeon. thats all i have to say with this one

  • Giving depths more of a purpose

right now theres no real incentive to do sauna cavern depths as the only thing it has within is protector, and its only 7f with no recruitable pokemon

im not entirely sure what i would do here, ill have to think about it more, but i tossed around the idea with some people of making it much higher leveled with volcanion or something at the very bottom, but ehhh i dont know if its necessary. it would be cool to have something here as it was only unique in early pmu because you could get protector and metal coat here

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feel free to let me know what you guys think, i think its very important to get many peoples input on these kinds of things so id love to hear others thoughts and ideas :D

2

You forgot one factor.

  1. Weather

Cloudy/Foggy weather cause a lot of problems. Cloudy weather reduces the damage of all moves (except Normal) by half. Meanwhile, Foggy weather decreases the rate at which moves hit.

But yeah, Sauna needs a revamp.

2 Likes
3

While I was trying to plan out a walkthrough, Sauna was where I realized new players are almost certainly going to hit a wall. The enemies inside seem balanced around level 30s, but all of the factors that have already been mentioned combined with a high spawn rate cause this dungeon to punch well above its weight class.

The Cliffside rework turned out excellently, so I’d certainly love to see other important progression dungeons such as this one receive the same treatment.

4 Likes
4

The topic hit its limit so just posting that I absolutely agree with this. Now that cliffside got one it’s high time sauna did too

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5

Sorry for double posting but! now that im not on mobile and took more time to read through the thread i saw this reply, and i have to say i dont expect (and hope) weather to change just because it /is/ a sauna dungeon and saunas have steam! picking one weather and sticking to it would be beneficial, rather than both though. It definitely still needs a revamp though its incredibly difficult and painstaking to get through, even when i first joined pmu many years ago i had great difficulty with the dungeon so this has been an issue needing fixing for a long time.

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6

I would love to do this of course! However there some other place needs it more first!

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7

While it is definitely a wall dungeon in terms of new player progression you can’t just remove every unique aspect of every dungeon of the sake of balance because then you just end up with 100 similar dungeons which is boring ;P

1 Like
8

I don’t think rebalancing the dungeon and giving it an update is taking the unique aspect out of it, just making it a bit more doable and fresh! I think the unique aspect about the dungeon is the fact that it’s a hot springs/sauna dungeon with cloudy weather and water tiles that burn you, which i wouldnt want to change personally. other than that its just npcs and level range which definitely should be adjusted!

5 Likes
9

Well, no not really. The NPC levels are around where you’d expect them to be for a level 30 or so dungeon. Maybe some of the auto-assigned moves need adjusting, but the NPC levels aren’t the problem, there are just too many of them in too tight of a space a lot of the time.

That said, I do 100% agree that the thematic aspects of the dungeon shouldn’t be compromised; the foggy/cloudy weather need not disappear.

All in all, the big thing that needs to be done IMO is for rooms to be made larger and more numerous, while NPC counts are slightly adjusted downward and moves are manually assigned rather than relying on auto moves. There shouldn’t be 3-6 enemies in most rooms.

3 Likes
10

going to bump this. with the new surge of players, its more important than ever to consider the role sauna plays in gameplay progression and how high a difficulty spike it is, and its one of my most liked threads. i believe its a dungeon that REALLY, REALLY needs a rework: its not an optional dungeon by any means unlike other dungeons which were recently revamped!!

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11

Everything Sounds good, ignoring point 1-3, I mean, which HM dungeon doesn’t have that already? Difficulty has to be a thing somehow too. is about strategy and organization.

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12

I think it should be pointed out that @griefy is only proposing to remove the things that inflict poison status. You can naturally recover from confusion and sleep, and rawst berries/scarves are fairly common items you can obtain in the dungeon. However, there’s no items in the loot table that cure poison - if any team member gets poisoned, and you don’t happen to have an abundance of pechas from another dungeon, that team member is effectively gone. for this reason i think Lava cookies would be a perfect addition imo.

You have to consider that Sauna Cavern is a relatively early-game dungeon, and that rock smash is a must-have to opening up the PMU map. You could argue that it’s the player’s responsibility to “prepare” by grinding up levels (like i bet most of us did), but that’s neither fun nor easy, especially this early in the game.

2 Likes