Pokemon Unite will receive its first balance pass tomorrow, and patch notes have been released on the official website ahead of the update. The upcoming changes have generally been well received by the community, but more importantly, I think we should acknowledge how valuable this transparency is. As a free-to-play Switch and mobile-exclusive game, I wasn’t exactly expecting a lot of communication from the developers this soon after launch. While the patch notes aren’t exactly up to standard for a MOBA, we shouldn’t take these semi-detailed balance changes for granted. It’s a good sign that Pokemon Unite will continue to communicate with players in the future, and that the developers are listening to feedback.
14 of Unite’s 21 Pokemon have received some kind of adjustment or bug fix. Among these changes include nerfs to Gengar’s Hex, which is widely considered its most powerful moves, and buffs across the board to the underpowered (and underplayed) Venusaur and Wigglytuff. These are pretty cautious changes it seems, and not the sweeping kind of reworks some might hope to see for certain characters. Only a few weeks in, it’s probably best not to completely rock the boat with big changes. Gengar will likely still be unstoppable, but incremental changes are likely going to help shape the game better than smashing OP Pokemon with a nerf hammer.
While it’s great to see changes being made swiftly to help balance the game, it’s pretty disappointing how little information we’ve actually been given. On the notes for Charizard’s Flamethrower attack, it lists “Cooldown reduced” and “Effects on opposing Pokemon strengthened.” Why don’t you just tell us how much the cooldown has been reduced? What exactly is the effect that has been strengthened? Players will need to test out all of the changes themselves to figure out exactly what’s been changed, and that’s totally unnecessary. It’s nice to know what we can expect and have a general sense of who got buffed and who got nerfed, but there’s a lot more work to do in order to figure out what exactly these numbers mean, when the devs could just tell us.
To make matters worse, the Japanese version of the patch notes do seem to be a lot more detailed, so this is partly an issue of localization. For Gengar’s Hex ability, the English version of the patch notes simply says “Move Downgrade” while the Japanese version (thanks u/Skythrix for the translation) explains “Damage dealt to opposing Pokemon reduced as well as i-frames when using Hex reduced.” That’s a lot more information to work with, though it still doesn’t offer any exact values of how much the damage was reduced.
In other places, the English and Japanese notes actually contradict each other. For Eldegoss’s Cotton Spore, the English version says that it’s had its Cooldown reduced, effects on opposing Pokemon strengthened, and Defense and Sp. Def increased, while the Japanese version just says that the effects on ally and opposing Pokemon have been strengthened. So which is it? I don’t suspect that the Japanese version of the game is receiving different updates than the English version, so it’s confusing why the patch notes would be so different.
I already know people are going to moan at me for complaining about this. “It’s a game for kids,” they’ll say. “It’s meant to be casual.” I don’t think asking for accurate patch notes is too much, personally. I certainly appreciate that we got notes at all, but they’re not particularly useful without hard numbers and, at the very least, consistency between the English and Japanese notes. While I agree that the meta isn’t (and shouldn’t be) nearly as important to Pokemon Unite as it is to League and other MOBAs, the fact remains that people care a lot about balance changes, and if the devs are going to provide patch notes, they should at least have useful information.