Looking Ahead to Pokémon X & Y: Mechanics Changes / Move Updates
While I’d normally be writing a Regionals retrospective right about now, I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of value in going over the last set of Regionals given that they were the last events of their format. So while I’d like to congratulate JiveTime, Wesley Morioka, and BadIntent on their success last weekend, I figured it’d be more interesting to start moving forward instead. I imagine we still have plenty of changes between Pokémon Black 2 & White 2 and Pokémon X & Y left to discover since Game Freak doesn’t exactly release patch notes between generations, but with Black 2 and White 2 having metaphorically been stomped into a million pieces under our feet, it’s time to evaluate some of the new changes in Pokémon X & Y. While we don’t have an official ruleset for 2014 yet — which hasn’t stopped us from having super fun internet arguments about the rumored rules — the additions and changes to the game have a universal impact regardless of metagame for the most part, so I’ll be running through what we know and the impact it’s likely to have on the Video Game Championships (VGC) and competitive Pokémon in general. There’s a lot of new content in X & Y, so I’m going to break this down into three articles: mechanics changes and move updates, the impact of totally new content like new Pokémon and Mega Evolutions, and the impact of the new breeding techniques, 6th generation EV training, and the current lack of RNG on competitive play.
Mechanics Updates / Move Updates
I can almost guarantee everything that changed in X&Y isn’t here, but here’s the list of what we know right now. For the most part, these changes are pretty minor, but I will try to include all of the VGC-relevant changes.
First up are a bunch of balance changes to moves:
- Meteor Mash changed from 100 base power, 85% accuracy to 90 base power, 90% accuracy.
- Pin Missile base power increased to 25 power per missile from 14 per missile.
- Water Pledge, Fire Pledge, and Grass Pledge base power increased from 50 to 80.
- Energy Ball base power increased from 80 to 90.
- Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, and Ice Beam base power lowered from 95 to 90.
- Fire Blast, Thunder, Blizzard, and Hydro Pump base power lowered from 120 to 110.
- Overheat, Draco Meteor, and Leaf Storm base power lowered from 140 to 130.
- Dragon Pulse base power decreased from 90 to 85.
- Muddy Water and Surf base power lowered from 95 to 90.
- Heat Wave base power lowered from 100 to 95.
- Aura Sphere base power reduced from 90 to 80.
- Power Gem base power increased from 70 to 80.
- Hidden Power base power reduced from 70 to 60.
The general impact here is that the base power of Special attacks were reduced across the board, with a few other minor changes that mostly only impact one or two Pokémon.
To get the simple changes out of the way first, Meteor Mash was nerfed a little bit, likely to help bring down eternal high-end VGC option Metagross a little. Metagross also received some other nerfs this generation as the Steel-type change gave it new weaknesses to Dark and Ghost (more on that later). It definitely wasn’t overpowered before, but it certainly was one of the best three or four Pokémon in 2012 and 2013, so it getting toned down some is probably a good thing.
The Pin Missle buff seems to have been done basically exclusively to allow Mega Heracross to use it with Skill Link and have it actually be better than Megahorn. Shallow impact, but Mega Heracross has the potential to be really good.
The pledges are only available to starter Pokémon, who typically aren’t very good in competitive play to begin with, but the increased base power of the pledges means that they’re actually reasonably competitive single target damage options for all of them. Trying to run a pledge team is still probably not something that has “future Regional winner” written all over it, but it would be much more consistent and viable than it would have been in generation five. I’ll probably at least try it out for fun now, which is a big step up from where it was before…
Other than the pledges and Energy Ball, which was brought up to be equivalent with the Flamethrower series (which it probably always should have been part of anyway…), basically every other viable Fire-, Water-, Electric-, Ice-, Dragon-, and Grass-type special attack saw a base power reduction. I’m not completely sure I see the reasoning on this one: other than Gem-boosted moves from the Draco Meteor series (which were metagame-defining and needed to be toned down), there weren’t any attacks that were overly devastating from the special end of the spectrum. While the reduction in damage is pretty minor, I imagine the nerf was intended to counterbalance the lack of a special Intimidate a little bit given how prevalent Intimidate tends to be as a check to physical attackers, as well as perhaps to reduce the damage of non-STAB attacks a little bit given how often most of the nerfed attacks are used as coverage moves.
The impact of that blanket coverage reduction is most seen in Hidden Power, the lowest base power move on the list, losing 10 power and falling down to a pretty sketchy 60. Given that using Hidden Power to begin with almost requires RNG or hacking I’d kind of hoped Hidden Power would just get removed, but the damage reduction causes it not to be very useful unless you’re using it to hit a Pokémon with a double weaknesses to a type, since even at double damage 120 BP isn’t much higher than what most Pokémon can accomplish with a neutral-but-STAB-boosted attack. The biggest hit here might be to Pokémon like Zapdos who frequently used Hidden Power to make up for a lack of a viable STAB attack, since 90 BP after STAB is still pretty pathetic even compared to the mediocre 105 STAB Hidden Power was at previously.
The changes here are minor enough that I don’t think anything is likely to be too important, with the Draco Meteor series and Hidden Power being the main exceptions. If the Gems are reintroduced at some point(more on this next week), the base power reduction on Draco Meteor and its clones will reduce the amount of special defensive EV investment basically everything in the metagame that isn’t a frail sweeper needs, which is a pretty major change. Similarly, the Hidden Power nerf means that other than the Scizors and Heatrans of the Pokémon world, most Pokémon are pretty safe from it now and Hidden Power’s usage will likely decrease some during generation six. A minor reduction in overall damage does slow the game down just a bit, which usually helps the strategic element of the game.
- Damage from critical hits reduced from x2 damage to x1.5 damage.
I think if you were to look at generation five and have to come up with one change that would improve the competitive game the most, reducing the damage of critical hits would be just about the best thing you could have picked. Especially because of the other qualities critical hits have in addition to the damage boost in that they ignore the defender’s Defense/Special Defense boosts and Attack/Special Attack reductions on the attacking Pokémon, there were no shortage of ridiculous critical hits through Intimidate Attack or Draco Meteor Special Attack reductions that won the wrong player games in 2013 and in every other iteration of competitive Pokémon that has ever existed.
Is reducing the damage of critical hits by 25% going to change that? Probably not, but it definitely makes critical hits much more manageable, and in many cases a boost of damage by x1.5 instead of double is something that can be feasibly EVed against. I’ve already played plenty of games on Battle Spot in XY where my opponent or I got a timely critical hit that would have stolen us the game in a generation five match, but we wound up with the right player winning after all because the damage bonus wasn’t enough to knock out the target. I’m a little confused why Game Freak didn’t take this a step farther and reduce the self-hit chance of confusion and odds of a losing a turn to paralysis, but this was a huge step toward letting the players decide the matches instead of dice. Hopefully, they continue patching in that direction…
- Will-o-Wisp’s accuracy increased from 75% to 85%
This is a big enough change that it deserves to be isolated. While most of us heavily involved with VGC had to think back to the amazing Will-o-Wisp accuracy Cybertron’s Rotom-W had in the 2013 World Semifinals when we heard about this change, Will-o-Wisp was an incredibly strong move even in generation five. With the accuracy boost, I would expect it to be a move that dominates generation six formats if physical Pokémon are as prevalent relative to special attackers as they were in generation five (and so far on battle spot, they’ve actually been even more common). It’s always been a little odd to me that there is a status effect that permanently halves a Pokémon’s physical damage output but not a special equivalent in a similar way that there isn’t a special equivalent to the damage reduction from the ability Intimidate, but hey, at least there were those move power reductions…
- Steel-type Pokémon are no longer resistant to Ghost- or Dark-type attacks.
- Fairy-type Pokémon have been introduced. Fairy-type Pokémon are weak to Steel- and Poison-type attacks and resistant to Fighting-, Dark-, and Bug-type attacks. They are completely immune to Dragon-type attacks.
- Fairy-type attacks are supereffective against Fighting-, Dark-, and Dragon-type Pokémon, but are not very effective against Poison-, Steel-, and Fire-type Pokémon.
- Among a few others, Azumarill, Togekiss, and Mawile are now part Fairy-type.
After not introducing a new type since Gold and Silver, Game Freak pulled out Fairy for X&Y. While it was maybe not the most welcome thematic choice for some of the older players, the addition of the Fairy type was a pretty obvious attempt to help balance the game. In addition to helping counter the powerful Dragon type, which dominated singles with Outrage and was at least metagame-shaping in doubles with Dragon Gem Draco Meteor, it is also supereffective against Dark and Fighting, which makes it supereffective against what feels like everything popular in VGC ’13 that wasn’t a Steel-type, a Rain Pokémon, or a support Pokémon.
I was not particularly excited when I heard that Fairy-type was being created because I felt like at least in doubles, the impact of Dragons were vastly exaggerated by most players. So many Pokémon needing to invest to survive Dragon Gem Draco Meteor was annoying, but that investment served other purposes, so it isn’t like it only there to deal with Dragons. Fairy was also announced around the time of US Nationals, a tournament that featured zero Dragon-type Pokémon in the Masters finals. My worry at the time was that I felt with the amount of switching that occurs in high level play, and the importance of not being threatened excessively by two targets instead of one, that Steel was actually the best type in VGC to begin with anyway, and that making it even stronger by introducing a new type it was good against was probably not going to be a good game balance decision. I didn’t realize at the time Steel was going to lose two of its key resistances, obviously, but I think it still winds up being a better type in generation six than Dragon, especially now that Steel might be better than mediocre offensively.
Fairy, for its part, probably winds up being the best type in the metagame. Like I wrote before, tons of Pokémon who were good in VGC ’13 are weak to Fairy now. Tyranitar, Conkeldurr, Hitmontop, Hydreigon, Kingdra, Latios, Scrafty, Breloom, Garchomp, Heracross, Salamence, and Terrakion stand out, which is about half of the top Pokémon from last year. While typing is part of what made most of these Pokémon good and that strength will be diminished with the introduction of Fairy, most of those Pokémon are good because of their stat totals, stat distribution, movepools, and/or abilities as much or more than because they had favorable typing. Since those other qualities didn’t change, I’d expect basically all of the Pokemon I listed to stay good in generation 6, which is a great sign for the new type. Somewhat ironically, while the type itself is strong, most of the Pokémon that have it are not, which is probably not surprising given that it was added to a bunch of Pokémon that were awful in generation five and that most of the new Pokémon with it aren’t amazing. Togekiss is the only new Fairy that was good before, but since it can’t really use Fairy-type moves offensively it doesn’t get much of the benefit. Mawile is definitely the big winner, going from one of the worst Pokémon in the game to perhaps the single best. Azumarill, Gardevoir, and the new Pokémon Klefki, Sylveon, and Aromatisse probably round out the group of competitively useful Fairy-types, which is a group with very low stats compared to most types’ top dogs.
As intended, Dragon sure looks a lot worse. Between Draco Meteor getting nerfed, Dragon Gem being MIA, and Fairy-types existing to clobber them, Dragon is the weakest it’s been since Generation 3. In the end, though, Dragon Pokémon have the highest average stat total in the game, above average defensive typing, and great movepools, so I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of Latios or Hydreigon. For a fun twist, Garchomp will probably actually be better in 2014 than it was in 2013 if it does wind up being Kalosdex-only thanks to its Mega Evolution and the removal of some predators like Landorus-T and Cressselia.
- Drizzle, Drought, Sandstream, and Snow Warning only last five turns instead of until the end of time. Like their move equivalents, their duration can’t be reset until the original effect ends.
Other than the critical hit change, this is the best mechanic change in X&Y. I can only think of two or three teams I used in VGC ’12 or ’13 that didn’t have Politoed or Tyranitar on them because of how powerful auto-weather was, and while I’m confident my usage stats aren’t representative of the playerbase as a whole on this one, I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were a little too powerful in generation five. Those two Pokémon, along with Abomasnow and new Drought user Mega Charizard Y, are doing just fine on Battle Spot doubles in spite of the weather duration reduction right now, which is probably proof enough of where those abilities were before.
Drizzle’s duration reduction in particular is really good for the game. Rain has always been something that is a lot stronger against newer players than more experienced ones, but I can’t imagine a less desirable way for a new player to get introduced to tournament play than to show up to their first event and get facerolled by some guy mindlessly tapping various combinations of Muddy Water, Surf, and Helping Hand. No other brainless strategy is nearly as strong against an unprepared team in VGC as hard Rain is, and while Rain will continue to be plenty playable (probably still too much so), having the extra win condition of knocking Politoed out and stalling out the remaining turns of rain should help bring the archetype’s power down a bit. I actually find weather wars have been more fun in X&Y because of this change, since in addition to the usual situations where players are trying to keep their weather up against other weather users, you also get situations now where both sides know there’s only a turn or two left in a weather’s duration and Tyranitar/Politoed/Abomasnow/Charizard needs to switch in and out to reset it, which leads to some fun predictions. Great change.
- Assist can no longer call two turn moves like Shadow Force and Dive.
Rest in pieces, Divecats! For anyone who wasn’t aware of it, there was a cheese strategy in generation five that involved using Prankster Liepard and Purrloin holding Lagging Tail and Full Incense. The cats used Assist and their teammates only had two turn moves and moves Assist can’t call, so they’d get to use Prankster Assist for Priority Dive/Shadow Force and then hit last the turn they did damage because of their items, making them invulnerable to most non-priority damage. While this wasn’t a strategy that worked against most competitive teams and was incredibly all-in, it definitely wasn’t a desirable or skill-oriented gameplay mechanic, so I’m glad to see it was removed. I know at least a couple cases in Juniors where Shadowcats did really well last year and I really don’t think they should be subjected to that sort of garbage, so good work on this one too, Game Freak.
- Sleep returns to its pre-generation 5 behavior and the counter for Sleep turns no longer resets when a Pokémon is switched out.
Another hugely important change. While Swagger inexplicably made it past the watchful eye of Game Freak, apparently Mean’s Spore spam did not, and switching out no longer resets the sleep counter. Sleep moves put Pokémon to sleep for 1-3 turns, which for some reason during generation five reset every time you switched, so you couldn’t, say, take one turn off your sleep counter the turn you were Spored and then switch out and have that turn count against the timer later like you could in every generation from one to four. This was probably the single dumbest change I can remember the Pokémon franchise ever making, but at least it was finally reverted. Interestingly, part of the intended balance of that change was that sleep was at its shortest maximum duration ever in generation five at only 1-3 turns after having a maximum length of anywhere from four to seven in the past depending on generation, and that reduction seems to have carried over to generation six. I guess angry YouTube commenters will have to go back to complaining about shinies and legendaries now… another needed change.
Other notes:
- Dark Void isn’t banned on battle spot right now. This would not be something I think most players would like to see reintroduced into the Video Game Championships and not something that adds a desirable strategic element.
- Quick Guard blocks Prankster moves now! Prankster is probably the biggest mistake Game Freak ever made, but at least there’s a new way to counter it. Unfortunately, most of the Pokémon with Quick Guard aren’t in the Kalosdex…
- Follow Me/Rage Powder’s priority seems to have been reduced by one, notably placing it in the same priority bracket as Extreme Speed and one below Fake Out. Minor nerf to one of the game’s best moves.
- Several old Pokémon received minor increases in their base stats. Unfortunately, the changes are to such bad Pokémon and are so minor that they’re all pretty much irrelevant, but you can check them out on Bulbapedia or Serebii or something. The most relevant is probably Ampharos gaining 10 defense, since it also just gained a Mega Evolution.
- Oblivious now blocks Taunt. This makes Oblivious playable on a couple of Pokémon, though Aroma Veil existing outclasses it.
- Grass-types and Pokémon with Overcoat or Safety Goggles are immune to Powder moves including the redirecting effects of Rage Powder, Electric Pokémon are immune to paralysis, Ghost Pokémon are immune to trapping effects, and Toxic from Poison-type Pokémon hits with perfect accuracy, even through Fly and Dig, and Infiltrator and sound-based moves bypass Substitute. These are all interesting changes, but it’s hard to write much about potential metagame impact of them since many of them are either irrelevant or hurt and help the same Pokémon.
As is probably pretty obvious, I think almost all of these changes were really helpful. Some of the move base power changes were a little odd, but all of the mechanical changes were huge improvements and should help contribute to a more skill-oriented game in Generation six. I felt like we had a pretty good format the past couple of years, but things are looking up on the gameplay side this year, so I’m pretty excited to see what XY tournaments end up looking like. Expect write-ups on the new content and the impact of the breeding changes soon! If there’s anything I missed here that you think is important enough I should have included it, feel free and mention it in the comments and maybe I’ll include it in the next article.
About the Author
Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!
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Whenever, Follow Me’s reduction in priority comes up, I always see Extreme Speed cited as now being able to outrun it. However, I think people should also keep in mind that there’s another +2 Priority move, Feint. While not very strong, it can be used to pick off something that survived with a Focus Sash and is trying to hide behind Follow Me.
I can definitely get behind lowering the full paralysis rate, but I think any reduction to the self-hit chance of confusion needs to be weighed against the danger of unbalancing Swagger. With Swagger’s incredible distribution which includes all the Prankster pokemon, a +2 (priority?) atk boost that can be given to a partner would become a really powerful offensive option. A low (~0-20%) self-hit rate would make the move perhaps a little too good, but even if it were slightly higher (~30-40%), I could see people still playing it more in the style of Blizzard without hail etc. The end result might be a lower amount of randomness being introduced into a larger amount of battles to create a net overall increase in randomness in the game.
I’m not sure what the correct solution to this would be. The straightforward solution would be to nerf Swagger alongside the self-hit rate, maybe change the boost to +1 atk or make its accuracy poor, but then again that would hurt the Swagger-berry/safeguard strategies which I personally thought were fine and OK for the health of the game.
Nice article, I agree with pretty much everything written. One question – how do you don’t Dark Void isn’t banned/how do you actually get the move? Darkrai is the only thing that naturally learns it and as far as I know, it isn’t released.
Near the end of December when Pokebank is released, you can transfer over a Smeargle that knows it, or even a Darkrai itself
Going on other people’s info on that part — apparently there’s a list somewhere? Either way, confident based on something else I’ve heard that information is correct… sorry I don’t have a link to use as proof here, though.
I definitely agree balancing Swagger is delicate, but I think something has to be done there because it’s a pretty big knock on the format right now. I don’t know that this is something there’s be a definitive right answer to, but I think Swagger is pretty clearly broken and most changes would lead to a better situation the current one, even if some of them would be less than ideal.
Personally, I really like the Swagger/Berry combinations existing. I think the investment you have to make — one Pokemon’s item, another Pokemon’s moveslot and move use, which often involves a switch unless you want to make what you’re doing completely obvious, and losing the boost for the game if you get forced to switch out — is balanced pretty well and is usually fun to play. I used teams that had Swagger combos at 2012 US Nationals and 2012 Worlds and I thought they were more fun to play and involved a better skill element than, say, my 2013 Nationals team which was pretty much just cheesing people by stacking multipliers from Gems and Helping Hand. I would prefer to keep Swagger useful as a support move (especially because so few ally-targeted moves are good as it is), so I would personally not prefer a solution that reduces the Attack boost or removes the move completely or whatever. I think reducing the probability of self-hit to 30 or 35% would be fine, though, even though I agree it would open up people to use it on their own Pokemon more. If, people want to gamble, great, they’re playing with an awful lot of fire there and I’d rather people take chances with their own Pokemon than mine, especially since there are many more options for disabling my opponent’s Pokemon than finding ways to make sure mine can attack. I think the biggest issue right now is just that Swagger’s disable chance is way too high coming off of Prankster Pokemon especially: 45% to stop something from moving from any position that doesn’t involve the other side having a redirection move or something that stops confusion like Lum Berry or Safeguard or Own Tempo or something is a pretty hefty probability to get bailed out of a losing situation.
I think if you’re willing to ruin the combo, something like deleting the move altogether, reducing the Attack drop in addition to vastly reducing the probability of self-hit, or just taking the move off of all the Prankster Pokemon(where it is definitely most broken) also helps a lot. I’d prefer not to see that sort of solution, but I’d rather Swagger was unusable than used the way it is now.
Didn’t even notice Aura Sphere and Dragon Pulse had nerfs, kinda lame…Sleep is looking pretty rough now, guess Paralysis is the way to go. At least once something is paralyzed, it stays slow.
Two possible things that could be done regarding Prankster and Swagger are:
-Hustle style accuracy reduction on non damaging attacks when used by a Prankster Pokemon.
-Reduce Swagger’s accuracy and single target attacks that target your ally are given 100% accuracy. So finally your ally will stay put and stop dodging. Maybe even Swift style never miss accuracy should be applied but I haven’t fully thought through the implications of being able to go through your ally’s Fly style invulnerability.
Swagger not being given priority by Prankster would solve the whole problem imo. However, it can also be argued that Thunder Wave should be nerfed in the same way for similar reasons seeing as it is pretty overpowed right now with a 1 in 4 chance of preventing the opponent’s pokemon from doing anything on each given turn for the remainder of the game on top of reducing the targets speed by 75% for the entirity of the game.
Although banning things only makes the ruleset that much more complicated, I do not think a Swagger ban would be out of line, because you are not just losing a turn half the time, but to add injury to insult you are also dealing damage to yourself (and much more damage at that considering the +2 Attack boost).
A way to nerf Swagger could be to provide the +2 Attack Boost as normal but only confuses ally Pokemon. You keep the Swagger/Berry combination (using confusion to help nerf it in Doubles) with removing any impetus to use it on opponents (except for Contrary shenanigans I guess). This also forces Prankster Pokemon to rely solely on Confuse Ray for confusion infliction, a combination of circumstances which constitutes a much smaller pool of Pokemon.
More on topic, the article was very interesting! I feel like the Electric type’s immunity to Thunder Wave is going to huge, given that it makes Thundurus and Rotom that much better (although I guess a nerfed Hidden Power and possible not inclusion in the next format kind of nullifies that boost).
Very much hope that they ban Dark Void again this generation. After seeing the rather ridiculous lengths people went to counter DV Smeargle in 2010, I wouldn’t wanna see something like that happen again.
I don’t think anyone is arguing to ban Swagger. I wouldn’t be happy with that personally. I think most are just thinking of ways it could be modified in future games. One idea I remember someone floating was giving Swagger a damage component — like maybe a 20 base Normal attack. That way it wouldn’t receive a boost from Prankster.
Something I’d also like is making the confusion have the Pokemon randomly choose a target on both sides of the field if it is about to hit itself in confusion. It never made sense to me that a Pokemon was so confused it hit itself…
Rushan i can understand not understanding why a pokemon hits itself in confusion, but (sadly) the majority of pokemon players play singles and will be very confused when their pokemon fails to hit itself. a possible solution would be to have the pokemon randomly select one of ANY pokemon that were on the field(itself included) which would keep mechanics the same for singles and change the mechanics for doubles
but there are also the mechanics for double and triple target moves and i dont think it will really be feasible.
I actually like the nerf to many of the special moves. I’ve just gotten back from a teambuilding and damage calcing marathon and noticed something: the small drop in power of special moves has made certain obscure mons more viable now since now they have more options:
1) invest more in offense to actually deal meaningful damage without getting obliterated by stuff they wouldn’t have stood a chance against in 5th gen
or 2) invest more in bulk to be decent tanks.
Maybe they nerfed a ton of moves so that we can see some more variety in Pokemon species in competitive play.
Ironically the buff to poison is largelly cancelled out as 2 out of the 6 probable main fairies are immune to it. Big shame.
The same two pokes, Mawile and Klefki, are also not hurt SE by Steel, which is interesting.
All in all, I think the new meta is fun so far, can’t wait for confirmation on the rules so team building can start for real!
Actually, mega heracross’s skill link pin missile is just weaker than ormal heracross’s gemmed mega horn, though you get better accuracy. Also, serebii confirmed chesnaught to get quick guard via egg move. Plus, thanks for this. My friend and I use in game/ competitive is teams in battles, and his klefki gets annoying. Now for quick guard…
Bug Gem does not exist in X&Y.
Competitively speaking, these are almost all great changes and are healthy for improving the skill reliance of the game. The only potentially bad one is the sleep nerf, which I’m slightly nervous about, but hoping something Amoonguss-tier is discovered for beating down on borderline gimmick strategies just as hard.
@Ezrael- 50% chance of random move selection would fix that problem while still keeping a hilariously interesting mechanic.
Fairy type is make hard on Tyranitar, Scrafty, Heracross and etc. Most Fairy pokemon wouldn’t OHKO Tyranitar unless Mawile/Azumarill, I am expect them to be popular for TR. Nerfed special moves without gem exist is huge one because we can more invest on defense, attack/special attack or speed. That will be interest to see the new metagame with change.
I think decreasing its accuracy further would serve to sufficiently nerf it without having to alter the self-hit chance.
Interestingly, roserade will now get technician boost on hidden power.
It could’ve obtained the boost in previous generations also, if you arranged the IVs to get it to 60 BP, technically.
Great article! These are all things that need to be considered when team building and playing the game, itself. The chances of missing with WoW four times in a row is now 0.05%, as opposed to to 0.39%.
I was really hoping for new freeze mechanics that would make it less devastating than it is right now.
Wow, this is so stupid. 1st there lower dragons power with fairy, then take away there best item then weaken them even more by lowering there best move to 130: wow there really hatin on dragons.Thing that i do like is that they are making harder to OHKO pokemon and making more stratigic(i cant spell it). Its funner than just relying on just power, you have to plan ahead.
Ok i miss informed you on my feelings, its not stupid but it was agravating at first but now its actually really cool. Nintendo did a really good job on changing it up a bit.
i don’t really see why dragon trainers are complaining about nerfs, dragon trainers have almost always been shafted one way or another, be it typing, movepool (besides dragonite), or the lack of dragon moves compared to the other types, i think, the only thing left for game freak to do in their quest to make dragons the worst type is to make a type that has immunity to dragon moves…..
OH HELLO FAIRY!!!
Implying that the Fairy type has stellar distribution and moves.
fairy only has 1 move less than dragon in their premiere gen, they have multiple fairys that resist their weaknesses, yeah i think they’re doing alright.
I bet I’m still gonna manage to pull this off
One “mechanic change” that may have some effect this year is that the Gravity/Sky Drop glitch has been fixed. I would guess this means that Sky Drop would be unbanned. I am not entirely sure exactly how the move works (I’ve heard it doesn’t work if the opponent is too heavy?), but as long as it wasn’t extremely nerfed, sky drop is definitely a move that could have some use in the doubles format. So far on GBU I have been using only using teams that are trying to act my my BW2 teams, but when I breed enough stuff/have inspiration to be more creative, I may test this out.
Another mechanic change that wasn’t mentioned in the article is that both quick guard and wide guard can be used in successive turns without an increase chance of failure.