Thank you! Yeah I was just as pleasently surprised as you are about Hitmonlee vs Sabrina being better than "lol every psychic type Ohkos you". As for Shellder, I caught it as soon as I got the super rod post giovanni 1 so during the training session for Koga. It was above level 22 (I remember it knew aurora beam) and didn't take very long to catch. Time grinding is a bit hard to estimate but considering that I fought most trainers from routes 13-15 with Cloyster (or at least switch training it) to get to level 38 it took quite a while. If I had to put a number to it I maybe would've saved 20ish minutes by not training Cloyster and just sticking with the team of 3. Magneton was not as bad, caught at level 31 and there's a bunch of trainers in Silph co that are basically free exp since most of them can't hurt it. I probably fought about half of my fights in Silph with Magneton, and considering most of these are optional that's not a great grind but shouldn't count too much against it. I usually make sure my entire team is on par, even new members in their first fights, so in a less even, casual run Magneton might be 2-3 levels lower and Cloyster maybe 5 levels lower.Awesome work as usual! Don't feel bad about a late log submission; this thread's pretty slow going for the moment anyhow and you saw how I was haha. Some really fun stuff here -- Fearow and Hitmonlee managing a sweep on Sabrina is the biggest standout, Dig/Fly with Leftovers is something really good that I hadn't considered, and Fearow winning against something with Blackglasses Pursuit is one of the funniest things I've ever heard all week! One thing I do wanna ask though: what level did you get Shellder and Magnemite, and how long did you spend grinding them? Because they were instantly on par with your team in their first logs.
I expected Hitmonlee to basically just be budget Machamp, but thanks to high jump kick and mega kick it's effectively just as strong and faster than the 4 armed beast. This is probably helped by the fact that mine is +attack but oh well. I am wondering about Elite 4 considering it's rock slide is weaker and probably not strong enough to KO ghost/flying types without eating hits, but we'll see how it goes.About Hitmonlee - yeah, I think it's is going to be way better than Machamp just because of speed. I mentioned that Machamp's bulk saves a lot of its matchups, but a big reason for that is that it's making up for its very very low speed. It doesn't outspeed really anything notable and hence it just can't sweep unless the matchup is really good, hence why I opted for Revenge over something technically more reliable. Hitmonlee doesn't have this issue as 87 in this game is at worst respectable and only really loses out against Alakazam and Aerodactyl, so I can see it pulling off sweeps that Machamp wasn't capable of -- the aforementioned Sabrina is an incredible example of this. I'll be curious to see if further logs can prove it's worthy of A.
Sounds good, I wasn't really considering the grind which does push it closer to C in my eyes, but I'm expecting a very solid late game run from Cloyster which will maybe push it to B. Time will tell as obviously I'm not there yet. Also minor nitpick, it's post Giovanni, not post surf since you just need the super rod to get Shellder and can buy water stones.About C seeming too harsh for Shellder: I'm not disagreeing on that (it seems good so far!), but I don't see C as a bad tier myself. The way I see the tiers - broadly - is S being The Best, A being amazing, B being good, C being meh, D being mostly bad and E being nigh-unusable. I just wanted to quickly clear that up in case that's why C sounded harsh; I see it as closer to middle-of-the-road than outright negative. Also, one of the reasons I put Shellder there is that it's relatively late-game; needing Surf to be encountered.
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