This was already discussed a fair bit on Discord, but here’s the rundown for those of you who missed it:
Currently, nearly all of the non-volatile status conditions and a few volatile ones here and there are way too strong, and I suspect the prevalence of status immunity as well as moves like Refresh have served as a bit of a band-aid most of the time, keeping the problem from being too visible. But simply because a mechanic happens to have a near-perfect counter doesn’t mean it’s in a healthy state–on the contrary, the current PMU “meta” suggests that status is extremely polarizing and has to be completely negated unless the player wants to be on super hard mode.
So I am going to go over all of the status conditions I think could do with tweaking, and how I think they could be adjusted to move them away from the “status immunity or die” camp.
Non-volatile status:
Overall
These are the reason Refresh and its clones are mandatory on every team without reliable status immunity, and still recommended even then just in case you forget to apply it or your gem’s weather ever goes down. Most of these could use some minor rebalancing, but more importantly there’s a blanket change I think is long overdue for all of them.
Suggested change for non-volatile status as a whole:
-Now wear off on changing floors
Poison/Toxic Poison:
Previously, I’d felt these dealt a bit too much damage. However, I was looking at them through the lens of someone who doesn’t switch at all after being poisoned, which is perfectly reasonable counterplay if it and other non-volatile status conditions are changed to wear off on floor change. It shouldn’t need further tweaking beyond some QoL visual distinction between the types of poison, so long as it and its non-volatiles cousins receive the blanket change.
Suggested change:
-Normal poison now uses the white skull rather than toxic’s purple one
Previous suggestion
Currently, these kill a little too quickly. Ideally, their focus should be to force the player to get off the floor by disabling their regeneration and slowly chipping away at their health, not killing them outright before they can reasonably manage it.
Suggested changes:
-Damage rate halved
-Normal poison now uses the white skull rather than toxic’s purple one
Paralysis:
In terms of it hampering the ability of afflicted pokemon to fight, the 30% chance of full paralysis does its job fine already. However, the movement speed drop is so severe, and despite not actually being all that dangerous, is extremely unfun to deal with. This is a problem with movement speed drops as a whole, and I’ll be getting to them down below under volatile status.
Suggested change:
-Affected by suggestion below regarding travel speed drops–run speed reduced rather than running being rendered impossible
EDIT: An alternative to the above could be to completely remove the movement speed decrease and/or the full paralysis chance, and instead impose an attack speed reduction. (though slower attack speed with a 30% chance to fail may be too strong)
Freeze:
While rare, freeze is a full stun with an exceptionally high duration; something that is a lot more dangerous in a one vs. many scenario compared to 2v2 or 1v1. I think a thematically appropriate change to solve this could be frozen pokemon taking reduced damage until it wears off.
Suggested change:
-Frozen pokemon take only 66% (34% less) damage from attacks.
Burn:
Burn is entirely fine as-is after being made to wear off on floor change.
Suggested changes:
-None!
Sleep:
EDIT: As of a recent change, sleep sources well higher than they should be have been adjusted to a more reasonable 4 turns tops. Thank you Kirk!
Old suggestion for sleep changes
Sleep’s problems are more from specific sources having arbitrarily high sleep turns built into them. (And it’s the rare case of one source, the slumber orb, it’s actually overpowered in the player’s hands rather than when used against them)
Suggested change:
Perish Song (Done!):
This was previously a bit ridiculous, but it was changed to knock the victim to 1HP. Now it’s highly dangerous, but can actually be played around.
Old suggestion
This essentially locks you to 2 moves for the entire rest of the floor, regardless if you clear the entire room containing the user before it goes off. It’s also map-wide. This is easily the most blatant “block or die” status condition in the game. Rather than simply neuter it, however, my suggestion is a full rework to keep it dangerous–even to pokemon of higher level–without being impossible to play around, as well as to prevent the AI from wiping all of its allies out in the crossfire.
Suggested changes:
-Range reduced to 8 or so tile AoE
-Final tick knocks HP to 1 instead of instantly killing the target
-The move can hit regardless of level
-Accuracy changed to automatic hit
Infatuation:
As of the latest edit, Infatuation no longer prevents movement, now only preventing attacking!
If possible, one or both of only having a 50% chance to prevent attacking and/or only lasting until the inflicting pokemon is KOed would be nice, but it’s in a much better state now than it was before already.
Old suggestion
For some bizarre reason, PMD decided this needed to be a full stun, and consequently that was inherited by PMU. As I’ve already touched on, full stuns are ludicrously powerful in a one vs. many scenario, and so I’d suggest adjusting this to make it work more like it does in the main series.
Suggested changes:
-If possible on the technical side of things, change duration to as long as the user remains alive (leech seed does something like this currently, I believe)
-Change full immobilization and inability to attack to a 50% chance to fail to attack
Curse (Ghost Type):
While slightly more bearable than Perish Song, especially considering its limited range, it’s still extremely damaging and to heal off the damage it does between fights takes a lot of time, especially if not running a healing move. While I think it should definitely be able to kill a reckless player, a duration of until the next floor is perhaps a bit too long. On the flipside, its range is so short that it doesn’t actually land all that often, despite being way too strong when it does.
Suggested changes:
-Wears off after 5 ticks of the current 25% of max hp each tick, totaling to 125% of max hp–more than enough to kill a player (or AI) who just continues to spam attacks without moving much after being inflicted.
-Range increased to single-target 3-tile spray
Sealed/Disabled
Disable simply blocks a move from being used for the entire floor, which depending on what it hits can completely cripple the affected pokemon with a duration identical to what I have proposed non-volatile status has. On top of that, it can stack on multiple moves at once.
Suggested changes:
-Now wears off after several attacks are made
-Can only be applied to a single move at a time
The following are not affected by status immunity, but I believe are still worth talking about regardless.
Follow Me/Rage Powder:
This is strong just on paper in a one vs. many scenario, but not unreasonably so. However, the big issue is that it doesn’t wear off after KOing the user, essentially functioning as a drop to 0 accuracy on everyone except for the user for several turns, rather than drawing attacks as I would assume is intended.
Suggested change:
-Wears off after the user is knocked out.
Wrap:
Unlike Fire Spin and friends, this is a full stun on both the user and the target. Probably an oversight, so I won’t go too far into why I think this is a problem as I’ve already talked about full stuns plenty.
I believe I underestimated how limiting the 1-tile range is. This is dangerous, but easy enough to play around; don’t hug the enemy tangrowth.
Suggested change:
-Full stun changed to movement lock with attacking still possible
-None!
Travel Speed Down:
This is more frustrating than it is actually dangerous nine times out of ten, though when it’s applied mid-fight it can actually be challenging to work around. I believe the fix is a simple one.
Suggested changes:
-Reduced travel speed applies a modifier to running speed depending on severity, rather than disabling running
-Sources of reduced travel speed that don’t currently wear off now wear off after a while (Slow trap, for example)
-Moves that drop the speed stat instead drop travel speed for a few steps
I probably missed a few of the more troublesome ones, so feel free to chime in with any others.
It’s my hope that, if we can get status ailments into a healthier place, we can finally start tackling the problem that is full status immunity–and how it is negating a core game mechanic with little to no opportunity cost.
the move itself is balanced in the sense that it also kills everything else in the room (possibly) so just swapping pokemon and stalling/or just taking a hit or 2 would leave you with a free floor.
