u/Po2i

Fury of the Mountain makes you feel like the ground owes you money

Actual thing that happened:

"Oh a shiny legendary! But it's on a XXX0 wave... Okay won't be lazy, i'll actually catch it!"

"Let's get my bosskiller in there! Okay, leech seed, salt cure, oh cool it deals double damage because steel ! Now curse..."

"Ok it's dead, perfect! time to throw the masterball!"

"Did I... did I just catch the porygon? and kill the Celesteela?"

...

...

"I'm so stupid"

I found this youtube channel with somewhat clear diction and fun stuff about etymology, but the low view count has me worried: is it AI? Is it low quality? I struggled to confirm some sources, and wikitionary was sometimes not agreeing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJz9ECRFbD8

There is quite a lot of debate around endless, so I'm here to give my 2 cents.

Endless seem to have been created in the main pokerogue philosophy: Throw some stuff at the wall, see what sticks, be impressed at how much is actually holding up and genuinly good, build on that. The 5850 crash, and the current end wave message really shows that it was an experimentation.

That created a game mode that can be super fun, and has emerging gameplay due to how the token work. This gameplay is mostly solved though, and it create 2 ways of playing endless:

You can play it the "good" way, with a carry that gets you through the early waves and then what's basically a 4850 waves safari park: catch what you want run away otherwise, sometimes kill a boss.

or you can do it the "bad" way which is treating it like classic, pick a team and try to make it work, and probably wrap it up before wave 3000, using up twice the time a good run would have taken you.

This is very fun for some people, but also very unfun for others.

We see with the berry change that the pokerogue team is willing to experiment and modify things over time.

And they definitelly can totally shake up the endless meta: Maybe make a token that reduce DoT damage, but remove the blanket damage reduction, and create a token that greatly reduce resisted damage to force you to have at least some type coverage? Maybe a token that prevent running, maybe a token that will randomly faint one or multiple pokemon from your team at the start of a boss fight... Or other actually good idea and not just the random bullshit i'm spewing :p

I'm convinced there is tools to make endless a bit closer to "Classic that goes on forever" and a bit further from "there is a single solved way to do this"

But like always, there is a cost: changing endless would effectively remove the current version, which has it's own community and a lot of enjoyers.

Making two separate gamemodes, current endless and another different mode for people who are looking for more of a "Long form classic" feel, would split the community further, create the hassle of maintaining multiple modes, all of this has a cost.

The whole community knows there is a "problem" with endless (mostly solved, somewhat strict meta, a single guide boosting your win chances from around 0% to around 100%)

But there is no clear way to solve that.

My advice for the community: Don't play endless !

If you don't enjoy the theorycrafting and the current somewhat closed meta, don't sink hours into it, you're missing out on the cool interesting challenges of the daily runs, on the flavorful challenge runs with all their specificities and their mystery events. There is diversity, don't play endless just to suffer.

My advice for the devs: good luck with that x)

More seriously, I think this game needs a "timmy mode" for people who enjoy their growing monster that one-shot everything. Those people go to Endless, thinking they'll pick their most busted pokemon and win, and get disappointed when they learn that's not how it works.

Something as simple as a "endless lite" with less rewards and less tokens where Zacian can actually carry the whole run

Or maybe i'm just overthinking this and it's just the classic tale of gamers refusing to git gud, calling people elitist, forever unaware of the beatiful sky above the clouds.

There's a lot of talk about the difficulty in this game, people asking which of their legendaries they should take in a run to finally beat it, so I wanted to check back on how much I struggled back then.

Obviously it's too long ago for run history, but I can check the achievements:

There's not achievement for "Start the game for the first time" but I took max friendship instead, I felt it was close enough.

You can see the date on it,

See the date on my first legendary catch,

and see the date on my first classic clear :D

The MVP here is probably my friend who, when he told me about this great game, said "you can enable retries".

Going blind into the 195 Mega Rayquaza and the 200 boss felt like "Edge of Tommorow", probably at least 30 retries each, and I had to take note and create a full tree of possibilities to even succeed.

But I can proudly say my last Challenge run (Monodark-Mono Gen3) was with 0 retries on neither 195 nor 200! (but a few on 165 and 190, i'm not there yet :p)

Anyway, just my casual not-so-humble brag :D feel free to share your achievement or proud moments in the game!

PS: This game is actually hard though, this is not meant to be mean or dismissive on anyone who's struggling with it!