SphealTeamSix

Sometimes I can't tell if posts like this are sarcastic trolling efforts or actual beliefs...

A couple hundred more lures and you'll have my sympathies.

Got a link? All I've ever known or heard of was GEC.

Ok well...I popped Expert Lures all day during work trying to find Suicune before reset to no avail... But within my first 3 Expert Lures since coming home, quite literally 66 encounters (even less since some were 5x hordes or 2x encounters) and I get my Raikou. I mean I'm thankful that I get to actually enjoy my month now but like...I went somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 encounters without Suicune, and I found this guy within double digits... What is the rate man...

Spent a few more Expert Lures trying to find Suicune, but was unsuccessful. Statistically, I would have hit something around 12,000 encounters, which is a high estimate since I'm basing this off of total encounters including hordes and duos per lure. This month I'm going to track how many encounters it takes me to find my monthly legendary. I will be using Expert Lures almost exclusively and striving for 1,000 encounters per day in the interest of maximizing my time. Let's see how ridiculous this gets... I would assume the staff have seen this post, does anybody care to weigh in on the actual rate, or at least specify why it can't be publicly disclosed? @Rache perhaps? EDIT: Using Gilan's Encounter Counter

This is my main issue. I don't know about the rest of the community but I have a full-time job, go to the gym, and have a life outside of the game. Most of what I do on a daily basis revolves around a gym rerun, catching alphas, and shiny checking rare swarms. I don't want to spend all my free time going left and right on routes in a specific region to essentially single encounter shiny hunt something that only appears 4 times a year.

Alright, clearly I won't find Suicune before the end of the month. This was miserable. 450 Expert Lures and 25 Legendary Lures later I still haven't had my encounter. This is incredibly un-fun...I'm basically single encounter shunting while hoping to find something with a rate SOMEWHERE between 0.10% and 0.0125% found in only one region... Worst part is I did some research and found that the mainline encounter rate is somewhere between 1/4096 and 1/8192, and seeing as they significantly REDUCED the shiny rate compared to mainline I think it's safe to assume that if they tweak this rate that it will be in a similar direction. That being said, there are a few solutions that I think could make sense: Have Legendary Lures SIGNIFICANTLY increase encounter rate: I would not be opposed to paying much more for these lures if they came with a lot more steps or increased encounter rate by multiple times what it is now. A 30% increase in encounter rate in the best-case scenario becomes 0.14% for 1/700 or 0.0178% in the worst-case scenario at 1/5600. Let's use my figure of 24 encounters per Legendary Lure, rounded up to 28 encounters since you get 50 more steps...at the 0.14%*28 encounters you'd have a 3.92% chance of encountering your legendary, or roughly 60 Legendary Lures to bring the probability to over 90%...at the 0.0178%*28 encounters you'd have 0.4984% of encountering your legendary, or roughly 470 Legendary Lures to bring the probability to over 90%...come on now...this is an item that costs 70,000 each...and I know RNG is RNG, but hitting odds using these "specially-designed" lures will cost you 42,000,000 PokeYen at the LOW END. Note that this 28 encounter figure is likely much lower since that is based on how many mons my encounter counter listed during the lure duration - including duos and hordes. Enable the Legendaries to be found outside of Johto: I know this kind of defeats the purpose in a way, but I don't WANT to spend all my time in Johto hunting these things every month...I WANT to farm Nincadas in Hoenn to shiny hunt since that's the only region they're in. If I could encounter them doing the things I want to do on a regular basis it would become much less of a grind and more of a pleasant surprise. Allow for Boosted Odds like in the mainline games: To illustrate this point better, I'll attach a snippet I found online. If this was implemented, the hunts would become much more of a concentrated effort than a left-right simulator and could serve a similar purpose as swarm notifications.

I'm just really curious why the encounter rate is such a mystery when most other things are explicitly stated, such as shiny rate.

I know it's been mentioned before that the rate is somewhere between 1/1000 and 1/7000 or something along those lines. I've been going left, and right on Route 45 for a couple of days now. I've gone through 400 Expert Lures and mathed out that I get an average of 24 encounters per lure, which can be rounded down a bit since it includes 5x horde encounters and double encounters, but for the sake of argument, let's use that 24/lure. 24x400 lures equals out to 9600 encounters, so I'd estimate I'm somewhere near the higher end of that encounter range statistic. Now, maybe I'm unlucky, but this method of hunting isn't particularly fun...If I'm focused on doing these as fast as possible, I can probably get 1000 encounters in somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. So I've spent probably around 9 or 10 hours exclusively holding down 2 arrow keys and occasionally clicking "Run" in search of Suicune before it resets and becomes Raikou next month. Obviously, I'm in the majority that thinks this encounter rate needs to be tweaked, whatever it is. However, I also think it's important to know for the sake of attaching value to Legendary Lures; 3 of which are worth more than 150 Expert Lures - and it's important to know that encounter rate to understand how much of an improvement 30% actually is. I think that helps players both understand and temper their expectations for purchasing something so expensive. Hope to get some clarification here. Edit because I realized the 30% increase is stated in the Legendary Lure.

If you spam Z to skip through this for the run away warning, just want confirmation, it auto highlights NO rather than YES, correct?

You can't disclose the encounter rate? The shiny rate is disclosed so why is this a mystery?

Hey I sent you a friend request on Discord (BPH1994) but it seems like my Gilan's Encounter Counter isn't working after I installed this.

Do you know roughly how much you're profiting by doing this yourself vs just buying the seeds and selling the Leppas? I calculated out current prices, assuming a 936 yield (avg 6/plant) and factoring the listing fee would result in a net of only about 78k. Trying to figure out if this is worth it considering the amount of multitasking and juggling.

So an ideal alpha-catching team would involve Murkrow, Skuntank (assuming 4x31 natured), Spinda, Swoobat, Breloom, and Smeargle and it would STILL boil down to RNG right? God that's annoying...

Is there much of a point in bringing Murk and Skun to 100? Couldn't they do what they do at level 1 with like a Focus Sash?

Building out an Alpha catching team. So far I've got the Contrary Spinda, the Soak Smeargle, and I'll build the Substitute Breloom. But as far as preventing healing via moves like Rest, can you still give Alphas the Assault Gear to prevent stuff like this? Additionally, if anybody has recommendations for how to round the team please let me know. I've heard Prankster Murkrow with Haze is useful, but don't know much about it or how often I would realistically need to reset all stats.

Do you find Heracross better than Dugtrio for single encounter increase? I was considering Dugtrio since Arena Trap both increases single encounters and prevents escape via Teleport, with the only downside being it doesn't have False Swipe. What's your opinion?

Let's say I have 1000 Nincada that I level and evolve to produce a Shedinja...if I don't get a shiny out of any of those am I able to breed the Ninjasks back down to Nincada to try again with those same mons or would they have "already rolled for it" and be locked out of producing a potential shiny Shedinja since they already technically rolled for it? I imagine this is a case that very few people will be familiar with, so if I could get dev confirmation that'd ultimately be the best answer. @Juaske

Shiny Sealeo & Spheal:

OT #1 didn't get any through regular gameplay so I thought I should catch my namesake. 33,639 encounters.

Yeah I bred and leveled a Krookodile, Hydreigon, and Weezing for this fight. I had to buy a Krookodile because mine didn't have enough 31s, my Hydreigon was Timid when this strat required Modest, and I didn't use Weezing at all...that was a rather expensive waste of time and resources...

"this boy"? "This generation wants everything easy"? I mentioned I completed the fight and I thought you were trolling with your initial comment, but ok, let's address this... I work a full time job. I go to the gym 5 times a week. It took me a single attempt to beat Pumpking Easy, it took me almost 3 hours and probably ~2million Pokeyen to clear it once on Hard. There were not publicly available "consistent" strats to clear this fight until maybe 1/3 of the way through the event. And even when that did happen, Pumpking was nerfed, which was welcome, but also required rewrites of those strats to work with the new fight. You clearly missed my comment about "people who aren't content creators or millionaires will have the time and resources to participate in this event" since you mentioned having played this game for at least 3 years and fall into that category with your avatar showing off your vanities and shiny Metagross...not all of us can sit in front of the computer for hours on end to figure out a fight that goes away in 2 weeks. There are plenty of players like you, but I'd wager there are more like me. Hell, I'd even place myself further along than most players with my gametime seeing as I've completed the OT dex and have a 350k gym rerun team. The point is you're attacking "player skill" in a fight that's heavily RNG-based to make it difficult, likely owing to the fact that players WILL come up with very smart strats to eliminate variables, requiring the devs to introduce even MORE variables so Hard Mode remains Hard. The analogy I like to use is that it's like studying for a test that's different every time you take it - and I think the time and money required to experiment and figure out what to do in X situation likely alienates a lot of players that would otherwise have participated...especially when you consider that the upcoming Christmas event with the Elfbots literally GIVES YOU everything you need to participate and ONLY requires time investment... But yes, go ahead, attack my player skill and apparent laziness for having a life outside of this game.

I'm sure I'll get plenty of "skill issue" or "it's supposed to be hard" comments here, and I initially wanted to write out a lengthy post about why I think this content is ridiculous, but I think I can make a much more condensed version... Creating difficulty by adding multiple layers of RNG to a difficult, time-limited encounter is not fun, and doesn't feel like good game design. For the record, I completed it. And as soon as I did, I sold my pokes, cookies, and items to try and recoup some of the massive losses I sustained trying to build the specific teams required to clear this (and I still almost lost because I Li'l Pump spawned TWICE for me, though luckily the second time he spawned on the side where he couldn't hit my only remaining damage dealer). I did not have fun, and would hope that in the future the devs introduce difficulty in a way that people who aren't content creators or millionaires will have the time and resources to participate in this event by playing smart and developing a strategy, rather than by getting shafted by some unlucky RNG.

After several failed attempts emulating working strats I've both lost my patience and a significant amount of Pokeyen. Is there something I can read that tells you what to do IF certain things happen during this fight? The numerous layers of RNG have made this the least fun thing I've done in the game so far...it's hard to learn from constant failure if each encounter is completely different than the last. Some turns 1 mon get slept, some turns 2 get slept, some turns multiple mons get burnt or poisoned, some turns nothing happens and Pumpking just takes an item... It's just so not fun...I wanted to get to the point where I can farm this content, but I think I'll clear it once, sell the mons, and do things that don't infuriate me instead.