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Published on November 1st, 2013 | by Scott

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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

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!



39 Responses to Looking Ahead to Pokémon X & Y: Mechanics Changes / Move Updates

  1. BlakDragon says:

    Wooow, Quick Guard blocks attacks boosted by Prankster now. I reeeeeeally like that.

  2. The Last Sheikah says:

    I’ve heard that some people have found Gems by smashing rocks, but they’re exceptionally rare. Can anyone confirm or somehow disprove this?

  3. I’ve heard that some people have found Gems by smashing rocks, but they’re exceptionally rare. Can anyone confirm or somehow disprove this?

    It has not been confirmed, and while it cannot be completely disproven until the game’s code can be inspected, I would say the answer lies in the fact that no player has been seen with a gem other than Normal Gem in their inventory, in battle, on wifi, etc.

  4. Tmac says:

    One (rather small) change I’d personally like to see is to have “Frozen” removed as a status effect. Instead, all attacks that would normally freeze a Pokemon would instead have a chance to lower their speed instead of completely disabling them for a period of time. It makes more sense to me from a logical perspective, and such a truly random status that is PURELY luck-based and has practically no strategic value wouldn’t hurt from being changed/removed like that.
     
    I’m a little bitter about losing 3 games on Battle Spot to luck just now, but I definitely have agreed for awhile that Paralysis should either have the “full paralysis” chance changed or removed altogether. Removing it completely would be an interesting way to deal with/buff Trick Room, allowing you to bring your own pokemon to warp-speed with a Thunder Wave.

  5. FroZen85 says:

    Round is OP this gen! Puts dragon gem draco to shame! 
     
    Check this out: NBSW-WWWW-WWW2-FV93
     
    Soooo Broken!

  6. Sabaku says:

    It has not been confirmed, and while it cannot be completely disproven until the game’s code can be inspected, I would say the answer lies in the fact that no player has been seen with a gem other than Normal Gem in their inventory, in battle, on wifi, etc.

     
    I don’t think they’ll be that useful now anyway. From what I’ve heard, the Normal Gem only boosted the power of Normal attack by 30%, so if that’s the case for all the other Gems, I can see more people clinging to the Life Orb now.

  7. NintenZero says:

    ” 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.” We now realize how wrong this is. With aromatisse being the slowest trick room set-uper and klefki being a decent prankster mon

  8. Carbonific says:

    ” 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.” We now realize how wrong this is. With aromatisse being the slowest trick room set-uper and klefki being a decent prankster mon

     
    Because it was worth bumping a nearly 2 month old thread to say that? This thread served a good purpose at the time and doesn’t need post-critique.

  9. Scott says:

    Shame about that guy who deleted his post above this one because he was definitely right…
     
     
    Incidentally, other than Sylveon being garbage because of the Kalos native rule we didn’t have at that point, I’m pretty sure exactly what I wrote was right, so maybe you should work on your reading comprehension or something since what I wrote was that those Pokemon are competitively useful and you are arguing that they are competitively useful. They also have lower BSTs than the best Pokemon of other types, which was obviously right at the time and not going to change because it is a factual statement of an objective quality. If you’re going to bump a two month old thread to try to nitpick, you should try and at least actually disagree with what I wrote.

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