Does Anyone Else Hate S.O.S Battles?

Pros:

Chances of getting Hidden Abilities.
The EVs you could get from this.
The potential to get new Pok?mon.
Great way to get EXP.
Better use of Timer Balls.

Cons:
Not being able to catch a Pok?mon until one of them faints, which can be a hassle if it's your first time trying to catch one of them.
Is it seriously the only way for the three first pros to happen?
Being even harder than Horde Battles.

Honestly they could have done them a lot better. Like, make the chance it calls for help lower but make the Adrenaline Orb increase the chance more. On top of that make the Adrenaline Orb only work on the Pokemon that are on the field while you use it so you won't get annoying calls for help later when you decide to catch one in your chain. Or let us throw Pokeballs in the first place, makes no sense we can't.

masterxy said:

Honestly they could have done them a lot better. Like, make the chance it calls for help lower but make the Adrenaline Orb increase the chance more. On top of that make the Adrenaline Orb only work on the Pokemon that are on the field while you use it so you won't get annoying calls for help later when you decide to catch one in your chain. Or let us throw Pokeballs in the first place, makes no sense we can't.

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I completely agree, they're definitely a great concept, but I feel like replacing one of the most standard things in Pokemon with a high chance of an endless (or long) S.O.S battle is ridiculous. I just wanna train a Pokemon but almost every battle it either faints or gets painfully low on health.

I wouldn't say I dislike it, though it can be tedious at times when you just want to catch a certain pokemon. They could have at least made another item like the adrenaline orb, that would stop all S.O.S Calls.

I'm not done with the game yet, but so far, I'm not a big fan of SOS battles. I really wish I could activate them by choice (e.g., with Adrenaline Orbs) and avoid them otherwise. My HM users may be gone, but now I feel obligated to always keep a status-inducing Pokemon, preferably with multiple types of high-accuracy status moves (e.g., sleep + paralysis in case a Pokemon isn't susceptible to one of those) in my party instead.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind these nearly as much if we catch Pokemon when more than one is on the battlefield. If we could aim, like in Colosseum and XD, I would probably be ok with it. But for now, the feature really makes catching Pokemon a pain.

The idea of S.O.S. battles wasn't that bad, but the execution was. The thing is, wild Pokemon tend to call for help even if they're in near-perfect condition. Therefore, the term S.O.S. has pretty much lost its meaning.

After having some frustrating SOS-Battles today I'm gonna expand on my previous post.

As of now SOS-Battles are frustrating for both sides - people that want to avoid it and people that use it to chain Pokemon:

1. For people that want to avoid it, there's no counterpart to the Adrenaline Orb that prevents the wild Pokemon from calling for help. Sure you can use a sleep-inducing move but not everyone carries those around plus it's a lot more hassle and there's still a chance the wild Pokemon will cal for help before using the move or after waking up. This could have also be made better by lowering the chance to call for help especially while still in the higher HP range.
2. For people that want to chain Pokemon, the SOS mechanic is too unreliable, even with the Adrenaline Orb. Using the Adrenaline Orb should guarantee a call for help on at least the Pokemon with the highest call rates. The difference in call rates for different Pokemon should be lower, Pokemon with low call rates almost never call for help and when they do they don't get any most of the time. Which leads me to the next part: There's two things that can go wrong with the call for help: Either the pokemon doesn't call for help, or help doesn't arrive. Both combined makes it really frustrating on Pokemon with low call rates. In my opinion one of those things should be guaranteed.

Unfortunately for us, Game Freak is not the company that will change mechanics of a game after the game has already been released so we can only dream of the SOS-Battles being better.