Held Items

[frutescens]

It would be nice to have around 25-30 held items available to the player during the first iteration of the game. In my opinion, I think that it would be better to have less items that have quality implementations and balancing than more items, so I'm OK with starting off with a limited pool of items and adding more as we have capacity to do so.

1. Should some items be single-use?
2. If we choose not to have items be single-use, should they charge over a certain # of waves?

Held Items present in the game now:

• Wide Lens
• Multi Lens
• Type Boosting Items (Charcoal, Mystic Water, etc.)
• Leek
• Light Ball
• Evolite
• Thick Bone/Club
• Golden Punch
• Sitrus Berry
• Oran Berry
• Enigma Berry
• Lum Berry
• Leppa Berry
• Low HP-Stat boost berries
• Reviver Seed
• Soothe Bell
• Toxic/Flame Orb
• Quick Claw
• Focus Band
• Grip Claw
• Baton
• Soul Dew
• King's Rock
• Metal/Quick Powder
• Scope Lens
• Leftovers
• Mini Black Hole
• Shell Bell

[Tempo-anon]

1. Single use items should be common unimportant items like berries or potions or things that players expect to be consumed and used up
2. I'm not particularly a fan of cooldown/charge items because waiting for cooldowns is one of the more common player complaints (see Mario & Luigi brothership plug system)

My review of held items

• Wide Lens
  Great item. A flat boost to accuracy makes a lot of moves much more usable and allows a player to "upgrade" their endgame moves like flamethrower to fire blast by patching up the less than 100 accuracy.
• Multi Lens
  I'm fine with scrapping this just because of its history, but I see the idea of this. It's a trade off between raw damage with other benefits like allowing multiple hits and triggering move effects more times. In a way it's like a sidegrade of serene grace.
• Type Boosting Items (Charcoal, Mystic Water, etc.)
  These are a bit overtuned. 20% is pretty huge in the context of the games (it eats up one's single item slot in the mainline games) and the fact that there's no cap on these makes them one of the highest impact items
• Leek
  zzzzz species specific item. Won't save Farfetch'd
• Light Ball
  zzzzz species specific item
• Evolite
  Eviolite is a cool item that lets a player have an easier time in the early-ish game but I don't like the fact that it's an unlockable and thus changes runs before and after unlocking it
• Thick Bone/Club
  zzzzzz see light ball
• Golden Punch
  Pretty insane for guaranteeing passive money generation. Haven't looked into the exact math of how much one is worth, but I think it's safe to say it's a lot
• Sitrus Berry
• Oran Berry
• Enigma Berry
  Oran/Sitrus/Enigma are all health boosters and don't make too much of an impact but they all further exacerbate the issue of the game encouraging one shots because if you one shot an opponent then it basically renders their healing berries and potential extra HP irrelevant. What's more surprising though, is you failed to mention the stat boosting berries which I think is a very big negative to the game. In player hands, they are mostly irrelevant but most enemies come with an entire army of berries in the late game. That means the game heavily punishes not one shotting an opponent because if you miss the KO it just means the enemy will heal up and then gain a bunch of stats boosts which usually results in a sweep agsint the player
• Lum Berry
  A little helpful in player hands, appears way too often in enemy hands to the point that status ailments become useless later.
• Soothe Bell
  An item to help friendship evolution but is primarily used as a form of meta progression
• Toxic/Flame Orb
  These are good to enable abilities like guts, poison heal, and toxic boost
• Quick Claw
• Focus Band
• Grip Claw
  More rng but these are fine
• Baton
  This is actually pretty interesting from a game design perspective since it essentially is an item that acts as a niche move (baton pass). I do like how it offers up a lot more strategy by letting any Pokemon baton pass.
• Soul Dew
  It just increases the nature affect but I'm not sure how that fits thematically
• Scope Lens
  This fits in the same group as quick claw and focus band for just adding more variation
• Leftovers
  Brings passive healing, is good
• Mini Black Hole
  Is this really needed? There's a lot of history attached to this so I think we can nix it
• Shell Bell
  Basically leftovers

You also forgot the reviver seed. We removed that from spawning on opponents because it was such a huge variance because of its power level

[innerthunder]

Another thing to consider: Should a Pokemon be able to hold multiple of the same held item?

I would say probably not since that conflicts with the idea of restricted held item slots, but nixing stacking means a lot of the existing held items would have to be rebalanced or redesigned.

[frutescens]

I personally think no. I really don't like the berry spam of the current game and I feel like it leads to teams being 'berry' dependent (hee hee) on a single Pokemon stacked with items. Ditto to type boosting items, etc.

[TheSharkbug]

I think it can actually work as long as stacked items take up an additional item slot. Like if we have, say, six slots per mon, then using three of those for the same berry is a far bigger investment than it currently is.

Though if it's one item per pokemon then yeah, no stacking.

[frutescens]

Additional Berries

[DayKev]

Are we still planning on making held items like mainline (one per pokemon)?

[frutescens]

I think so since badges will make up for the difference/

[TheSharkbug]

I think we should start with one and then see what we really want to do from there. How other effects shape the battles, if one item is enough to allow for unique builds on some of the worse mons, etc

[Snailman11]

Do we have a doc for held item ideas?

[DayKev]

I don't remember there being one.

[Snailman11]

I made a spreadsheet for ideas
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oj7V-ESvLgCS_XxcToyw8nM-cZmzMuymdUIO354wgKI/edit?usp=drivesdk