how to grind IQ fast in PMD EoS
alternative title: why combee is fucking cracked
combee. yes. combee. is one of the most useful pokemon in explorers of sky and i’m not kidding. if you’ve ever wanted to grind up to max IQ on your pokemon, especially a lot of pokemon, Combee Is The Answer. unfortunately this does not work in time and darkness nearly as well because they don’t have one of the items that makes combee so good but you can still do it. much slower. this whole thing requires some setup but once you have it set up you can do it forever!!
so. combee has this funny little ability called honey gather which gives a pretty large chance of finding nectar in treasure boxes from pokemon it KOs.
why is this important? Well. nectar is one the best consumable IQ boosting item in the game. straight up gives your pokemon +10 IQ instead of gummis which give a varied amount from +1-5 based on type matchups (usually on the lower end). wonder gummis give +15 IQ so they’re technically better but there’s no good way to grind for those quickly.
so yeah honey gather is already cool enough because you can KO pokemon, hoard treasure boxes, and then open them for a ton of nectar, but that shit is slow going all things considered and that’s where sky’s exclusive items come in
the nectar bow, combee’s exclusive item, raises the chance of treasure boxes dropping while its in the bag. i can confirm from doing this myself that an absolute fuckton of boxes can be obtained this way.
you can see the method here. you get a combee, get the nectar bow, and then go to town on some pokemon and open all those boxes for more nectar than you’ve ever seen in your life before. here’s how:
1. recruit a combee and keep it as a combee. vespiquen won’t work because it loses honey gather upon evolution. you can find combee in apple woods on floors 6-12. apparently in darkness you have to complete a mission to unlock combee there first but i’m assuming most people reading this are playing sky anyways
2. this step is optional but recommended. level the combee up just a little bit, i personally did this by bringing it as a partner into postgame dungeons (i personally used spatial rift) and murdering shit with my overleveled hero/partner and letting the combee soak up all the experience. it will make life easier for you because combee straight up only has two attacking moves, gust and bug bite at levels 1 and 13 respectively, which are weak as hell. doesn’t learn anything through TM either. you want to KO shit fast and you know. not die while farming boxes
3. assuming you’re playing sky, get the nectar bow. you can find it in croagunk’s swap shop in wigglytuff’s guild’s basement. the items in the shop change every new in-game day, but there seems to be a higher chance of items appearing for the pokemon you JUST used in a dungeon, so if it isn’t there, go into a dungeon like beach cave or whatever with combee as your lead and either escape orb or speedrun through real quick and then check croagunk again. you’ll need 5 other random exclusive items to trade in for it which you can get from random treasure boxes and 150 poke.
4. go into any dungeon with combee lead and the nectar bow in the bag and start beating shit up, preferably with a lot of pokemon weak to combee’s moves. i have some superstition about later dungeons dropping more boxes so i go to mystifying forest with a nearly level 50 combee but that’s probably overkill. bring minimal items so you can pick up a bajillion boxes
5. leave the dungeon. open boxes at xatu’s. profit
also by the way. this isn’t required at all but i highly recommend using your first nectar grind to get combee’s IQ up to 850 (just under 9 stars) for the IQ skill Pierce Hurler, since it lets you use nectar on three pokemon at once instead of just one. yes this requires 85 nectar but it’s WORTH IT I PROMISE!!
this is my combee. you can see it has pierce hurler which lets the items it throws impact all the pokemon the item hits along its path. when using my nectar or other useful items such as vitamins or joy seeds, i lead with combee, go to beach cave because it’s completely harmless, and hand combee the lockon specs which ensures it doesn’t miss at all. your partner pokemon that you’re using the items on also need to have item master enabled in their IQ so they actually use the items thrown at them and item catcher disabled so that they don’t catch the items. i line them up in a row by setting their tactics to “wait there”. this lets you essentially multiply all your items by three like this (the recording i had on hand was with iron but nectar works too):
and that’s how to make IQ grinding easy asf for the rest of your explorers playthrough. i use this a ton so i can experiment with different pokemon in the postgame for funsies. also good for grinding certain pokemon up to fast friend for recruiting kecleon :) hope this helpsdsofkfds
(oh and side note, you can get one nectar per sentry duty by going as fast as possible but purposefully giving the wrong answer on just one footprint so that you get the highest score without getting a perfect for making no mistakes, but this is wayyy slower and i wouldn’t do that for an extended period of time!!)
