Pokémon Unite Is Getting A Game Update, Here Are The Full Patch Notes

The formatting on these balance changes is weird, I don’t quite understand it well.

Edit: thanks for making it easier to read

I love how over half of this list is "damage increased" (only Cinderace got an actual nerf?). Oh no, they noticed only one build of Venusaur is viable!

well, they definitely had to do something about Gengar/Hex. And ya it was kinda sad that Charizard was the weakest of the starting options since he's def the most popular

Glad the game is getting balance support like this. A lot of players seemed worried it wouldn't get maintenance

This game is gross. Nintendo should be ashamed and so should Nintendolife for writing anything about it that isn't focused on how this game preys on children and susceptible people. I expected more.

It’s so weird we don’t get to see actual numbers or percentages… not even in the main game.

Damage increase? By how much…?

@Old-Red Nintendo be ashamed of what? Nintendo has NOTHING to do with this game its made by Pokemon Company and Nintendo only gets 30% of money

@Victor1235 Well, maybe they can donate some of that 30% to help kids who develop an unhealthy addiction at a young age through one of their closely associated IPs.

@Old-Red Or maybe parents should actually spend some time looking into what games their kids are playing, especially when it comes to online games so that their kid doesn't risk developing an unhealthy addiction in the first place.

Well mates, it was a good run, Gengar mains, it was pretty gea- what Zeo didn't get nerfed?

@Old-Red At the end of the day, Nintendo nor anyone else in the company, Tencen't or Game freak, couldn't care less, Money talks.

@Old-Red Gross? Have you even played this game?

Honestly, I didn't expect much from this game at all, but it's actually okay. I have no experience with mobas and haven't lost a single game yet despite having not spent anything on the game.

How long I'll enjoy this game for, I don't know, nor do I know if suddenly there will be a difficulty spike with those I'm competing against, but for now all I can say is that I don't feel these kinds of jabs at the game are really warranted.

@Friendly I agree, I need states.

@JamieF1 Played this game for a week, I spent money but I spent no money on items, Not a cent on items and, oh whats this, I have level 20 items, yet here I i'm still have yet to pay for an item.

Now I will say that the way they try to get you to pay is pretty sneaky as they wont actually tell you if you are paying with crystals or not.

@Old-Red spot on!

The electric cat boi didn't get a nerf? What the heck! Glad gengar/hex and cinderace got a nerf though, I hate seeing them just sweep. Though why is pyroball not nerfed, it was wayyy too strong, when I play her, she crushes people under paw with that thing.

@Old-Red
I love it when people clearly have no clue about what they’re talking about. It’s honestly laughable.

You’re acting like this is the first game of it’s kind to get the spotlight and it’s outright bad just because you don’t agree with the practices in place.

Heaven forbid you look at the appstore on smartphones and see all the micro-transactions in the games there.

@MajinSoul
Amen.

@MajinSoul
Gengar, Zeraora, Eldegoss, Cinderace, Machamp and Cramorant all got nerfs in some form.

@LadyGwen
Zeraora did get nerfed. It’s Unite move does less damage now.

Still pay-to-win? No thanks then.

@BreathingMiit
It never was pay-to-win to begin with.

Absolutely nothing in the game stops you from being just as good as someone who drops money on it.

Hold items can be upgraded without any use of paid currency at all. There are players out there already who are f2p and have lv20 hold items. All upgrading with paid currency does is save impatient people wasting their time and effort.

Not to mention the battle-pass is entirely an optional purchase that just grants clothing items and coins/tickets.

People complaining that it’s pay-to-win clearly haven’t done enough research.

@BreathingMiit Forgot money= skill.

At this point anyone complaining about the Pay to win is probably a troll.

It's been explained countless time, by many people who actually play the game, that is not Pay to win at all in every single comment section of every news about the game.

@GoldenSunRM

Jim sterling extremely disagrees with your "opinion" 🙄

https://youtu.be/ws0DlMvGEbA

@EliteXeos A: I never said it's the first of its kind. B: This is also on the switch.

This kind of nonsense is starting to creep into the conventional platforms and should be called out for predatory practices.

@huyi
So if a journalist says a lie it become the truth?

@GoldenSunRM I forgot people can't think for them self's.

@Old-Red
What does it matter that it’s on the Switch? It’s not the first of it’s kind to be on the console either.

Sounds like to me you just have a negative bias for games such as this in general. “Predatory practices”…? Really?

Glad to see Gengar got the nerf I (and some others) were hoping for. I'm surprised to see that some have been given buffs where they didn't need it and others haven't.

Also they should not have buffed Zeraora. Oh my god, that's not a good idea. The few times I play with him, he's already capable of 100-0ing with that combo. Now they made it probable that he'll be able to take the tanks down too What are they thinking?

Edit: Also glad Eldegoss' healing is getting nerfed. That was a huge problem too.

Gengar got nerfed? This reads like two of his skills got buffed, one got nerfed?

@TechaNinja
Hex got nerfed, which is the very attack that made Gengar so broken in the first place.

Technically retail game are also pay to win because you have to buy the game to win.

@Old-Red I've put in like 20+hours so far. It's actually a pretty decent pick-up-and-drop moba. You don't have to pay for anything and I sure as heck haven't, but found some fun out of it. People complain about the pay to win aspect, but I haven't got to a stage where I saw that yet, and I'm quite decently level. Just found that some of the pokemon needed some balancing (like that dang Gengar).

I don't think it has much staying power right now, since it's lacking in content, pokemon and mechanics. Given time, I think it has quite a bit of potential. I played dota since it's WC3 days and boyyyyyy has that game come a long way with years of support.

It's pretty amusing to see the same defence of your typical P2W tactics that have been around for at least a decade just because the game does not offer a literal "I win" button to paying players.
But hey, if you want to die on a hill defending a Tencent game to please your Chinese overlords, no one can stop you.

@nagapls stop ruining the narrative! You gotta spend money to win in this game!!!!!

In all seriousness, some decent nerfs and buffs, hex needed to be nerfed. Nothing for Ninetails though, I can’t see anything that needed to be changed. Assuming Snow Warning will just be more consistent

@Preposterous wouldn’t my Chinese overlords be upset at me for not giving them money though?😶😔

Oh right, I forgot about this game. I should probably download it and try it out while it's still vanilla.

I love this game so much, and haven't spent a dime on it yet. There are countless videos on YouTube explaining how this is more of a "pay to skip levels" game than a "pay to win" game and I agree with that analysis. If you do the math, it's spot on. There is absolutely no need to spend money on this game, and not doing so will not cause you to miss out on anything.

Is it shady to try to get people to spend money on it in general? I guess the specific tactic is just as slimy as any other "free to play" title, but they don't get in your face about it. I haven't had stacks of 10 splash screens come up before every session trying to get me to buy things or tell me about "deals" on gems or anything like that. I haven't had any spam about the game other than Nintendo telling me to download it. It's pretty harmless as far as the pay mechanics. Case in point: My 11 year old hasn't bugged me one time to buy him anything from this game, and he plays it CONSTANTLY.

"Pay to win" still definitely applies to this game. From a Kotaku article...

Upgrading an item all the way to level 30 requires 2,587 Item Enhancers. You can earn those via playtime, the battle pass (which costs money) or just purchasing the gems outright. if you spend money, it costs 2,587 Aeos Gems (stick with me). That’s about $40 per fully upgraded item, should you go that route. Each Pokémon can equip three items, so to max out your Gengar or Machamp that’s roughly $120 if you want to create a top-tier Pokémon Unite build right away. As in just about all free-to-play games you can of course wait and slowly grind for other in-game currencies to buy the items and upgrade them. That’s no small feat, however. While getting an item from level 1 to level 10 only requires 82 Item Enhancers, getting from level 10 to level 20 requires 485 item enhancers. The last ten levels require five times that amount.

The author played about 10 hours and was able to get enough to upgrade one item to level 15 and two others to level 10. So barely a dent in the amount of item enhancers needed for a fully upgraded set of three as the amount you need per upgrade increases with each level. The article goes into further detail on what specific advantages these items get you, but they're huge.

"Pay to win" has never meant that if you pay money you'll win every time. But paying does give you a big advantage, and that sucks.

@Bret I read that trash to.

@ThatNyteDaez What? why? they better get us another Healer ASAP.

aww they nerfed my eldegross but yay they buffed my talonflame.

Nice, Charizard buff. Looks like most are buffs, but eldegoss has some nerfs, & cinderance, too (i just got through practicing w him the last couple days, i should have used him before the nerf 😥).

@Noelemahc edelgoss has increased cooldown, & 1 more nerf i think

@spiderman0616 pay to win means spend money for an advantage. That's always what it has meant.

@twztid13 I get it—and you are right. I’m just saying this game is probably the least predatory MOBA (or free-to-play in general) I’ve ever played, which does greatly contribute to my enjoyment of it. I spent years playing VainGlory and spent actual money on it often enough that I’d expect something ultra rare to eventually come up in a loot box, and it was always the same useless stuff and skins I’d already gotten before. I got bored with LoL Wild Rift pretty quickly but it was shaping up to be the same way.
Unite doesn’t feel like that at all.

The turn-off in Unite’s system for me is how valueless it is. The ease of leveling up, at least through lvl 20, makes “gems” pretty useless, yet of course they’re offering to sell you gems anyway.

At one point though, I will throw some money into this game. It’s fun to play and more or less ad free, so why not throw them a couple of bucks for their effort? I never mind doing that for free games that are actually good. But I’m not a kid with zero self control either, and that’s who they’re really after.

@spiderman0616 Don't forget smite, I have like ten different characters in that game just from playing it, and not that much mind you.

@spiderman0616 Have a read of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/oopfvl/please_be_very_mindful_of_the_predatory/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

@Snatcher Eldegoss' healing was way too good! You just couldn't kill it or whomever its partnered with at all. Like, early game against an Eldegoss makes it so that the partner doesn't need to worry about consequences at all. Also almost healing their partner some 50%+ in a second or two is too much.

how is it not p2w if you can pay to upgrade an item that gives you in game advantage? I played the game for a few hours and I liked what I saw, didn't get far enough to see anything out of the ordinary for a moba

@Snatcher So because you disagree with it, it's "trash"? The part I quoted isn't opinion. It's fact. It costs a ton of money to fully upgrade items quickly. 2,587 item enhancers to max out an item. It costs about $40 to buy enough tickets for that many enhancers. Or you can play for whatever dozens or maybe even hundreds of hours it takes to get that many enhancers for three items.

@edgedino Talonflame main here as well, honestly surprised to see my bird boi was considered so bad that it needed these buffs. I'll take 'em though!

So I've already got a few 100 games in, and hand over heart, not tying to be dramatic or trash talk, these changes seem completely random. Some powers most people would say are insanely OP got buffed. Their were odd tweaks and nerfs to the Pokémon no one is playing while the highest picked hero got a buff ... to a skill tree you never go because the other one is that level of OP that is OP even against other things that are OP. But all in all, it's just ... everything is better. That breaks one of the core rules of game design; never escalate, big numbers are harder to balance (dose not apply to disgaea).

Tencent need to learn that MOBA patches are a big freaking deal and your core player base (which I am absolutely not a part of) has no problem dropping you like a bad habit is they don't show some kind of vision for the overall balance level. Endless escalation is not a good look for that vision.

@OldMcGroin I'm sure this is all accurate. I guess my point was that I'm almost level 12, have been having a blast with the game, and have felt no need to spend any real money yet. In my last ranked round I think I got 15 kills with Ninetails, and I think my highest item level is something like 13. I realize after a couple more months I won't be able to score a single point in any matches, and that's probably when I'll delete the game.

I still stand by my original thought though--so far this game does not seem nearly as pushy about spending money as a lot of other MOBAs I've played.

@Bret And I do agree with that, the part I was saying was trash was the part were I'm sure, they didn't really try to say how realistic it was, I'm telling you sure those items have good states, but did he use any of the thousands of tickets they give you? for free, the thousands they give you from leveling up, daily missions, quest, gacha, and so forth? I have 4,000.

Plus I don't even have fully maxed items, level ten is enough. so wen I was saying it was trash, I wasn't saying what they were saying wasn't true, they did the math, But I will say that I don't agree with the article which is probably what I should have said, So I think I should go edit that.

@ThatNyteDaez Played a game yesterday, I agree with you.

@Bret Look, I also really Hope I didn't come off as rude, I Should have just said I disagree with the article, not what you quoted, so I'm sorry, if I offended you in any sort of way, And if my poor attitude to the article spilled out on you, I'm really sorry.

@spiderman0616 Only level 12? see your living proof that its not pay to win.

@Old-Red Preying on children? Haha this has to be a poor troll attempt.

Anyway this seems like they just made a bunch of people stringer?? Doesn't really seem like that's going to help, especially making wiggly even buffer.

@EliteXeos that's the least of my issues with him

Cool, to bad it doesn't explain anything, the P2W wasn't taken out, the coin and energy cap is still there and the grind is still absolute dog water.
EDIT: @Victor1235 "Nintendo be ashamed of what? Nintendo has NOTHING to do with this game its made by Pokemon Company and Nintendo only gets 30% of money"
Nintendo has everything to do with this game, yeah, they don't fully own Pokemon, but they own enough of it that they can do whatever they want. I mean, if Nintendo had no say in the matter, why continue to keep Pokemon exclusively on Nintendo platforms? (save for spin-offs being on mobile).
@MajinSoul "Or maybe parents should actually spend some time looking into what games their kids are playing, especially when it comes to online games so that their kid doesn't risk developing an unhealthy addiction in the first place."
While I agree that parents should be more vigilant, I would venture a guess and assume they think their kids are playing "safe" games with Nintendo, since Nintendo is known to be a "kid friendly company" and since the game is Pokemon, which is not only directed for kids, but most adults most likely played it when they were younger and or at least knew about it and the little they knew about it was nothing bad or malicious, so they assume this game is similar to the ones they grew up with. /EDIT