RNGezeus
commented
2 weeks ago Berries are pretty annoying in a number of ways:
Agreed
The only good way to stock up on berries is Pickup, which makes Pickup feel mandatory
Mostly true for classic, you can also use magician. Yesterday my Gmax buttefree kept up basically permanent berry supply from E4 and stole multiple eggs, leftovers, focusband and dmg+ items. In endless its true up to the point you get max grips and berry pouch, think I usually achieve that by floor 600-900 or so but it was a while now.
It's easy to just lose them randomly while fighting wild pokemon that don't really threaten you, possibly without even noticing, making the above worse
Absolutely, I have to transfer berries to some random bank mon. On monotype runs I catch whatever i find at early route as a pure baggage carrier so I don't accidentally use berries.
Each pokemon may only hold one berry. This berry is NOT permanently consumed on use or when removed by an effect like Incinerate, but can only activate once per battle (barring an effect like Harvest or Recycle)
to jump a head a bit, Reviver seed is kinda insane with this since its basically giving anything a improved bonus sturdy since it doesn't need to activate from full hp, and to IIRC it also stops multi-hit moves on activation. While multi-lens is the benefit of parental bond (double secondary effect) it does penalize the damage to do so.
How about 2-3 berries but give them a usage limit per berry until its consumed (we still keep that 1 activation per berry per battle). This would probably want support in form of a berry pouch that stores excess "mint condition" berries though since otherwise we just come back to the original issue of annoying micromanagement.
And how does this interact with black hole and pickup? Can it steal berries if we already got one? I currently micromanage some fights to make them use all their berries so i get 100% pickup chance of their type-dmg boost items.
Terrorforge
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Berries are pretty annoying in a number of ways:
Describe the Feature
My suggestion is to rework the way berries work:
This would reduce clutter and remove the need to constantly fiddle with your berry stocks while making the choice of which berry to use more interesting, particularly for pokemon with moves and abilities that interact with berries. You'd easily be able to see what berry the opponent has and play around it. Berries would be less powerful overall, but they would feel better due to being more consistent; no more being immune to status until whoops the random encounter confused you twice and now you don't have any for the rival fight.
This system could be extended to all consumable items, which would give us a clear path to implementing items like White Herb and Focus Sash, which are currently a bit of a question mark. The same goes for abilities like Unburden.
Additional context
If this change were adopted, I would also recommend the following additional changes:
Make Knock Off interact only with consumables Knock Off is another thing that's pretty annoying regardless of which side of the field it's on. When the player uses it, it will often just remove an inconsequential stat berry so its utility function is limited, but when used against you it has a chance to remove rare, important items like Leftovers and Multi Lens, which feels really bad. By making it act on consumables only, the move becomes much more consistent. It has a practical utility function, and its less annoying when used against you because it can't permanently mangle your pokemon. It would also restore the vanilla dynamic where you can only get the bonus damage once against each opposing pokemon and only if it hasn't used its item yet, giving it something that at least resembles a downside. Consider doing the same for moves like Thief and Trick, but those are a little more challenging.
Make Reviver Seed a Master-tier consumable Reviver Seeds have many of the same problems as berries. They're super frustrating when they appear on enemy pokemon, but they're also super frustrating to have on your own pokemon because you can easily lose them to the smallest of blunders. They're also hard to notice and keep track of on both sides of the field because of the cluttered item lists, making it easy to get caught off guard. By making it a consumable under the proposed system, the Reviver Seed is now a super cool item to find as loot because it's not gone forever if you make a single oopsie, but it's also easier to deal with in opponents. It would be much easier to see if the opponent has one so it's less of a surprise. You would be able to interact directly with it through moves like Knock Off, and the opportunity cost of not having a Lum or Sitrus berry would make the pokemon easier to manage outside of the resurrection effect.
Introduce a combination anti-weakness berry Introducing all the "halves damage taken from a super effective [blank]-type move" berries would clutter the rewards really badly and make it unlikely to get one you can actually use, so do for these what was done for the Lum berry and just combine all of them into one berry that halves the damage of the first super effective move you get hit with in a battle, period. This is obviously powerful, but again it would be balanced by the existence of counterplay and the opportunity cost of not having another powerful tool like a Lum berry.