Re: Manamon 2: Impressions Thread
I know what's good because I have a crapton of experience, both with this game and with pokemon in general. And I have a fairly good idea on how stats work. I don't know the precise formulae, but don't need them.
Generally, level 50 is my go-to. Disregard HP for the moment. If at level 50, you have a stat over 100 without any training investment, it's pretty good; the higher the better. If it's below 100 and above 80, it's decent to average. Between about 60-80, the stat is on the lower side, but may still be usable in some very niche situations. If a stat is under 60, it's an absolute, no-doubt-about-it weakness.
For HP, basically I'd say anything above 145-150 at level 50 is pretty good. Anything from 120-145 is decent; anything lower is starting to be a problem.
Sometimes this is absolutely fine. Turrubble's speed is a weakness, but it's not meant to be fast. Turrubble's attack is good and its defense is amazing, plus it has an ability where hits that are weak (i.e., super-effective) automatically redirect to its magic stat. This doesn't save it entirely, but it makes an otherwise slow punching bag into something with quite a lot of survivability.
Sometimes, however, this is an awful problem. For example, Viralite has low HP (I remember having one that had like 85HP at level 50) plus it has low defenses (less than 70 on both sides). If Viralite has gotten considerably better in this version, I'll eat my words, but for now, just roll with me. Something with that few HP and such low defenses is made of spun glass, and will die as soon as you think one heavy thought too many. So any one of those weaknesses might be survivable, but all of them mean a death sentence.
To put this in a pokemon sense, I'll use Magcargo. Magcargo has a low base speed (I misremember right now exactly what it is, but it's slow). It's a fire-rock type, so it's double weak to both ground and water, two very common attacking types. Now, Magcargo's defenses aren't terrible, but its HP is only meh. Combine this with terrible speed and only average attacking stats, and the thing is utterly and completely busted. It was introduced in generation 2 and basically nobody uses it. It's a shame, too. Some people will try and tell you that this is a good reason why some creatures are allowed to suck. I disagree. If you know something sucks, nobody's gonna use it, you've basically wasted your time designing it. Gamefreak has made dozens, maybe hundreds, of pokemon that virtually nobody uses, and it pisses me off. Hell, some of the reason that their metagame gets stagnant and shows off the same 30-60 pokemon is because so many of the others suck. Ever wonder why you so rarely see things like Wailord, Wiskash, Electrode, Victrybel and whatnot in high-level competitive play? It's because new pokemon came out, eclipsed them, and old pokemon were selectively forgotten. This just makes me sad.
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