
- Pokemon showdown team builder best team full#
- Pokemon showdown team builder best team professional#
- Pokemon showdown team builder best team simulator#
“Let’s take a Pokémon like Guzzlord, for instance,” he said, “probably the weakest of the Ultra Beasts. Joey “Pokéaim” Sciarrone, a YouTuber who specialises in Pokémon content, told Kotaku that separating the creatures into tiers like this lets every Pokémon shine.
Pokemon showdown team builder best team full#
OU, or Over Used, is the most popular tier, as it eliminates most legendaries and “broken” mega-evolutions, but allows the full scope of the rest of the Pokédex, including most of the Ultra Beasts, a classification of legendary Pokémon introduced in Sun and Moon. Smogon tiers offer a chance for less-useful Pokémon to shine. The most powerful Pokémon reside in the Ubers tier, and they go down the rankings into OverUsed (OU), UnderUsed (UU), RarelyUsed (RU), NeverUsed (NU), and finally PU, as in pee-yew, the tier reserved for only the silliest, most useless monsters. Smogon is a community of Pokémon fans most famous for its tier system, which sorts all 807 Pokémon into one of six different tiers based on how often they are used. As such, most battles see teams of high-powered legendary Pokémon face off against each other, which many players find repetitive and boring. You can follow Battle Spot rules to simulate what battles would be like on your 3DS, or use the rules from the Pokémon Video Game Championships to practice for official tournaments.īut the options don’t stop there.You can use randomly-generated teams, develop a team of Pokémon that share a single type to battle other teams following the same team building rules, or painstakingly craft the perfect party to climb the ladder in the fan-made tier system known as the Smogon tiers.īarring organising the battle with a friend and agreeing to a set of rules beforehand, there is no way of limiting the Pokémon brought to a battle on your 3DS or Switch. For starters, Pokémon Showdown offers players countless more ways to play than official Pokémon games do. “It’s fun and easy to use,” Luo said, “and it’s a web game that doesn’t require installing anything.” If anything, Luo is underselling it. But it’s not just the cute animations that attract Pokémon fans to the browser game. Showdown gets around a million unique users per month, even more when new Pokémon are added to the database alongside their release in a new official game. “It’s gotten way bigger than I’ve ever thought it would,” Luo said. But what Showdown players were most excited about was the custom 2D sprites and battle animations, a first for an unofficial battle simulator, and the biggest way that Showdown set itself apart from its competitors. Luo’s work, which he first released in October 2011, fixed a lot of the bugs that other simulators had. It fixed a lot of known issues from previous simulators and offered the most accurate text-based battles in your browser.
Pokemon showdown team builder best team simulator#
It paved the way for other such simulators including Pokémon Online, which many considered to be the best simulator to date upon its release in 2010. Porygon’s Big Show offered players text-only battles with opponents from across the world, without the need for a 4,000-kilometre-long cable running between their Game Boys. In 2001, a group of fans from a Pokémon message board called Azure Heights created Porygon’s Big Show, which was at the time the only way to battle Pokémon remotely. But that feature didn’t make it to the overseas releases of the game. Pokémon Crystal, released in Japan in 2000, was the first game to let players battle remote users with their cell phones. Pokémon battles have always been an important part of the games, but it took a few years before they were first simulated online. Not so in Showdown: Thanks to the sheer quantity of players, the wait for an in-browser battle is rarely more than five or 10 seconds. When trying to find a battle on Battle Spot, Pokémon’s official in-game battling service, the first thing you notice is the lengthy wait before you find an opponent, which can last five to 10 minutes.

Much of Showdown’s appeal is a matter of convenience.
Pokemon showdown team builder best team professional#
Showdown is so good that professional players even use it to practice for Nintendo’s official tournaments. It’s arguably even better than using the official games to battle, since it’s faster and more customisable. Around one million players a month are throwing down in Pokémon Showdown, a fan-made, browser-based game that recreates the battles found in official Pokémon games, with accurate stats.
