Discussion: Sleep status

[Saric]

As far as I have seen, and with a few other avid pvp'ers, sleep is currently incredibly overpowered. 95% of the time it lasts for 2-5+ turns, and can very easily destroy an entire team. This is far too much, and either the accuracy on sleep powder and spore needs to be reduced, or set a maximum amount of turns sleep can affect you.

There is absolutely no adapting to countering sleep as it currently is not possible
So discuss. Have you had issues with sleep in battle? Do you think it should be changed?

 

[Merse]

Sleep is an issue even with NPCs and MOBs. If the opponent has sleep powder or something like that, it could take out one or more of your 99s, even if it has low level Pokes only. On the other hand, if you have a Poke with sleep powder all you have to do is use sleep powder, then a hitting attack, then sleep powder again. Your opponent is doomed.

 

[patONER]

Oh My God.... YES!

No explanation needed, go battle and you will find out. The only people who defend it either don't battle, or use OP pokes like GENGAR!!!

 

[Saric]

Also to note, in gen 3 sleep was randomly 1-6 turns which seems to be what PWO is running off of. Given the (semi) recent move updates I feel that sleep should be updated as well to either 4th gen standards at 1-4 or 5th gen standards at 1-3.

 

[RevengeOfTheWaterBottle]

Right, but some sleep move accuracies are really low. Sing is 50%, leaving it a last resort/risky sort of move. (Clefary, Lapras, Altaria, Bliss, and Jynx learn it). It's a normal move, meaning ghost types can resist it. PWO is wonky that way.

Yawn is 20% acc. so it's is basically useless unless a person gets fairly lucky. (It's on Quag, Snorlax, Slowbro, Togetic, slowking, Magcargo, Dunsparce, Kingdra, Slaking, Swalot, Camerupt, Chimeco, and Reli. You only see like 3 of those in combat often, and the 3rd is generally banned from PvP.) It's also normal and ghosts would also help here.

The pokemon that have sleep powder (75% acc) are mostly NU or UU in this game aside from a select few. (Venu, Butter, Vileplume, Venomoth, Victre, Eggs, Jumpluff, Sunflora, etc). Most of these you just never see in the metagame, and for the rest if you can't outspeed them on the next switch god save your soul. If these things kill your pokemon, they're probably switching into you and you can return the favor upon next switch. If you can't, it's near the end of the game and you have an iffy matchup anyway.

Hypnosis' accuracy is 60%. The only pokes really considered any viable threat in PvP that learn it are like...maybe Gengar, Eggs, and Garde (?). Either way, hypnosis shouldn't work on dark types, because it is a psychic type move and PWO is weird like that. Gengar and Garde aren't exactly tanks either, so a single miss could end them. And eggs is, from what I have seen, fairly simple to counter/outspeed.

So I think there are definitely ways to wall these pokes unless you just get a bad/unlucky start. The worse move is sleep powder, which you cannot type-resist. But, it also has a 1/4 chance to miss and is generally on slower pokes. Pokes like Venu/Eggs would use these if they had a bad matchup and pray they got lucky.

And then you're left with the argument that sleep powder, NOT sleep, could be overpowered if somebody got on a luck streak. You then have to explain how often these streaks happen, how they cannot be countered, and how we could balance that one move...if it's even worth the hassle to nerf it currently and then unnerf it when more updates come in.

EDIT: Forgot to research spore. Give me a minute.

EDIT2:
Spore is 100% accuracy, which is terrible an does lend one to think it is OP. Then again, only Parasect and Breloom learn it, of which only Breloom is potentially used in PvP and has the power to actually kill teams. Sooo...

 

[zorlake1]

Erm.. I could say in some ways it is. I remember fighting a poliwhirl that outsped my whole team.. It just spammed hypnosis. Non stop and i constantly had to switch and find the right pokemon to kill it. It was just pure annoyance, if your slower than the opponent using sleep powder it's basically a stall match.

 

[Rubbersock]

Another issue is that if it lands, its guaranteed to at LEAST last one turn. In the other games, there was still a chance that, right after you were put to sleep, you could immediately wake up (basically not losing any turns at all if this happens). And yes, fighting wild pokemon with sleep is the most annoying thing ever, especially when they spam it.

 

[EcoWOLFrb]

Well the most useful pokemon with this ability would be gengar, and I'd hardly call him OP. He might be faster than most pokemon, but requires luck to beat the majority of pokemon he faces, though I could see Saric's suggestion "1-4 or 5th gen standards at 1-3." being a compromise, and I doubt many would disagree to (though I think a minimum of 2 is fine, it'd be horrible to see a pokemon that's faster break on the second term and hypnosis being no use to the user). Mostly you just need a spdef tank on your side, like snorlax because of the abundance of powerful, fast spdef users (kazam, espeon, starmie, gengar, jolteon).

Grass pokemon that use sleep moves are usually lacking agility or any speed increasing move, and can be easily out sped by the majority of their natural counters who are able to one hit them.

Yawn is actually under powered in my opinion, I think 25% accuracy is too low, though I can understand why this is as it is given the powerful pokemon that learn it (kingdra, snorlax, slaking)

Personally I almost never hunt, so I can't say anything regarding wild pokemon using sleep moves.

 

[CheckeredZebra]

Another issue is that if it lands, its guaranteed to at LEAST last one turn. In the other games, there was still a chance that, right after you were put to sleep, you could immediately wake up (basically not losing any turns at all if this happens).

Bulbapedia says:

Gen 1: Sleep lasts for a randomly chosen duration of 1 to 7 turns (1 to 3 in Stadium).
Gen 2: Same, only a Pokémon can move on the turn it woke up.
Gen 3: Sleep lasts for a random duration from 1 to 6 turns
Gen 4: Sleep lasts for a random duration from 1 to 4 turns.
Gen 5: Sleep lasts for a random duration from 1 to 3 turns.

Not really. Only PWO has let the status affect be completely nulled the turn it hits. Furthermore, I find such a system redundant as the sleeping move has to hit first. And as you'll notice, the Average chance is near 50/50. =P

I also wonder if this effect would be considered OP if users could switch without worries of glitching.

 

[patONER]

Its so amusing that this poll is so close. The people that are defending it, i suggest you actually BATTLE and don't sit back and review things from a statistical point of view.

Why do you think the trade channel is FILLED with people buying gengars? Last night almost every battler was trying to buy a gengar, and the ones who weren't already ha acquired one.

Even great battlers such as Darc and Hof both use them, because they are not so blind to not take advantage of the games flaws. Darc is in the process of gathering videos and pics to show you what Sleep, particularly Gengar can do to a team, and how it is OP.

Yes, i know there is counters for him (very few decent ones, gengar even killed a few lax's last night which is laughable) but this causes everyone to be forced to build the same generic teams.

And 60 percent chance, please...

 

[Dragon16]

i definitely think all sleep moves should be he same accuracy, Hypnosis is a trolling move, especially with Gengar

 

[Bluerise]

http://forum.pokemon-world-online.net/showthread.php?tid=431

 

[Jinji]

All this discussion of whether Gengars are overpowered; or the trolling potential of sleep-inducing moves, pleases me greatly. However, I cannot say I am best pleased by the claim that more Ghosts are in the hands of Trainers because such beliefs make us more desirable...

 

[psychosamm]

For anyone who was too lazy to look at Blue's post:

25th May:
Duplicate items have been removed from all accounts. We will not be recovering duplicate items.
Sleep now lasts for up to 3/4 turns.

Hopefully that will end most of the complaining, as I believe that change is a good compromise, though i don't really think it was that huge of an issue to begin with. Everything has counters, you just need to adjust to the changing battle scene. Gengar is super fragile, use that to your advantage guys.

 

[kschris]

Needs improvement.

 

[Tecknician]

Oddly enough I thought I set a max turn amount on sleep. Something must not have been correct.

 

[Nikola]

One of the most balanced Pokemon after this update is Gengar. However, since we are guaranteed of at least one turn of sleeping something else came into my mind. Will take Sleep Powder as example. Assuming that Pokemon will sleep 1/2 turns for sure people tend to use same move again even if opposing Pokemon is sleeping. After having more then 80 battles I started to question into accuracy of that move itself and I was wondering if issue really is with accuracy. By using Sleep Powder after we attacked opposing Pokemon with damage dealing move that Pokemon can sleep many turns offering no resistance.

-Sleep Powder accuracy:

Spoiler

-Sleep Power used to bypass limit.

Spoiler

 

[CheckeredZebra]

Ahhh, so you're saying that the counter "resets" every time the move successfully hits the opponent? THAT would be an issue. In the handhelds, the game checks and doesn't allow that to happen with the message "The foe is already asleep."

This means the battle system would have to check for the status and not allow for it to be re-applied. :U

 

[EcoWOLFrb]

-Sleep Power used to bypass limit.

Spoiler

Thanks for bringing this to attention in this topic darcia, I think the bypass is the second biggest problem in this games battling system currently. I mentioned this in my topic for Teck but I guess it was overlooked as it didn't get any attention, good visual aid too. And that accuracy with sleep powder is scary, we should do the same thing with hypnosis.

 

[LanceDM]

-Sleep Power used to bypass limit.

Spoiler

Thanks for bringing this to attention in this topic darcia, I think the bypass is the second biggest problem in this games battling system currently. I mentioned this in my topic for Teck but I guess it was overlooked as it didn't get any attention, good visual aid too. And that accuracy with sleep powder is scary, we should do the same thing with hypnosis.

I agree with what u've said here (darcia/ecowolf). Im seeing many Gengars, think about it, has an amazing spd compare to other pokes and it has hypnosis plus a broken move called dream eather, players are now spamming hypnosis even if the pokemon is asleep, this means that a gengar is now able to kill an entirely team if you have no counters and/or a faster poke to KO him. This issue could be solved by adding a limit to each move (as in the handhelds), example hyper beam 5/5 , so we can use HB 5 times only, just throwing my thougts.