Types don't automatically resist whatever they're super effective on. Why would Ice resist Ground or Flying from a thematic standpoint?
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
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I think Ice should gain resistances to Water, Fairy, and maybe Dragon. Water resists Ice, presumably because water's high thermal mass makes it highly resistant to temperature changes. Do you know what other material has this property? Water, when it's frozen. I think the resistance should be made mutual. Fairy and Dragon don't need strong flavor justifications (they don't for a lot of their type matchups), but the former would be a pretty significant buff for Ice at the expense of another top 3 type and the latter is an option if the first two buffs aren't enough. I think a flavor argument could be made for a Bug resist, but Bug doesn't need the hit, or an Electric resist, but I'd only consider that if the first three didn't pan out.
Ice should resist Electric if anything. It makes for a very poor conductor irl.
some people just want to watch the world burn it seems
Have you ever run an ice cube under water? Even when it's not boiling hot it still wears it down almost instantly.*
Ice's lack of resists probably arises from the perception of ice being a substance that's brittle and easy to shatter. I do think it's odd that Ice doesn't resist Dragon, though, when it's stated that Dragons abhor cold temperatures - interestingly this is only something that started being emphasised as a trait around the time of BW, with Druddigon's dex entries noting that it absorbs sunlight and needs to be warm to be active and Iris having a weird phobia of Ice Pokemon and cold things in the anime. Ice resisting Dragon would have been an interesting alternate route to take instead of introducing Fairy, as it would have actually given the plethora of bulky Ice-types something of a niche - but it ultimately probably wouldn't have been enough to nerf Dragon completely hence the introduction of Fairy instead.
*your choice of username makes all of this feel quite ironic
My toxic trait is thinking Ice-Types shouldn’t be buffed in the type chart and that doing so would only make the rich richer, so to speak. On one hand you’ve got the super fast and strong Ice-Types like Weavile, Iron Bundle, Chien-Pao, etc. who are “balanced out” by their poor defensive profile and giving them extra resistances might have negative effects on the metagame; on the other hand you have the myriad of bulky Ice-Types who are designed as such with Ice’s poor defensive properties in mind and giving those extra resistances would make them noticeably more difficult to defeat than they were designed to while retaining Ice’s decent offensive matchups.
Such is the issue with buffing and nerfing Types nowadays. Power creep has gotten to the point where even the worst Types have multiple strong Pokémon and moves available, and the extra utility with typings often overshadows their unweighted matchups- for example, Flying seems like it would have been nerfed in Gen 2 thanks to gaining a new resist in Steel, but the benefit of being immune to Spikes almost always makes up for that, specifically pre-Stealth Rock. If those Flying-Types had the Spikes immunity and didn’t have to worry about Steel- oh, hi, Magnet Pull Magneton!- they would be even more widespread.
Such is the issue with buffing and nerfing Types nowadays. Power creep has gotten to the point where even the worst Types have multiple strong Pokémon and moves available, and the extra utility with typings often overshadows their unweighted matchups- for example, Flying seems like it would have been nerfed in Gen 2 thanks to gaining a new resist in Steel, but the benefit of being immune to Spikes almost always makes up for that, specifically pre-Stealth Rock. If those Flying-Types had the Spikes immunity and didn’t have to worry about Steel- oh, hi, Magnet Pull Magneton!- they would be even more widespread.
Only 30% of the time, though
See I'd understand this idea if they didn't continue to make big "sturdy" or fat Ice types that are supposed to LOOK bulky as much as be so in their stat line like Glalie, Regice (these things don't look fragile despite their Phys Def in practice), Walrein, Avalugg, Cloyster, and Abomasnow.
If this is their mentality, they suck at designing Pokemon for it because of the bulky ones. If this is NOT their mentality, they suck at designing for what they intend instead because the offensive ones fit that image better and are still half the Ices.
Eh, type identity =/= individual Pokemon designs. I'm fairly sure there are several Fire Pokemon who have Pokedex entries detailing how the flames on their bodies burn at a tempature hot enough that any water would evaporate well before it touched them and yet they're still weak to Water.
In the case of Ice, as Bdt mentioned, the continued "bulky glacier" archetype is one that exists likely because it's a contradiction: Ice is a crap defensive type, yet we still keep getting defensive Ice-types.
And I'm not even sure there are that many genuinely offensively-inclined Ice-types, because a truly optimised one would be staggeringly good. Generally speaking, the ones with superb offensive stats tend to be slow, like Mamoswine or Frosmoth or Crabominable or Baxcalibur. Glaceon, for instance, can't fully get away from its essential nature as an Ice-type because it has immense Special Attack AND physical Defence. Even Weavile, which is just about the most optimised non-legendary Ice-type sweeper, isn't as good as it could be due to having largely rubbish abilities (and it also doesn't learn a lot of really powerful attacks - hey, there's the downside of being part-Dark). Imagine Weavile with Sharpness or Tough Claws as its ability and a few more physical moves with over 100 base power. Or imagine Crabominable with base 110 speed.
The change I would do to Ice is not the type resisting some other type, but instead trading the weakness to Rock for Rock resisting Ice instead. This benefits both types, since Ice Mons would be able to use items that are not Heavy Duty Boots better, fully unleashing their offensive potential. Meanwhile, Rock (another weak type with 5 weaknesses) at least gain a new resistance. The sad thing about Rock types is that their most useful move, Stealth Rock, is learned by a lot of Mons that don,t have to use the bad defensive type, so if they gained another resistance, they would be more attractive.
Dramps are you trying to prove us that you actually are Professor Turo in disguise?
That logic can go both ways though, I mean have you ever put a cup of water in the freezer?
Actually as an aside i always found it odd how posion isnt strong against water, i guess you could argue "water cleans poison"* but to be honest i dont think we should be treating "does it make thematic sense" as the end-all-be-all for type effectiveness anyways.
*which doesnt really work when clean water can easily become contaiminated anyways.
In a sense, Poison is actually strong against Water, just not in the tradition super effective sense. Water-types are usually very useful defensively, but rarely have strong healing, so Toxic is particularly debilitating for them.
Ironically, the Pokemon I think of when I think of "Water-type who's deathly afraid of getting Toxiced" is Suicune, who is canonically strong against pollution.
I hate gliscor(I'm assuming this part of the post isn't unpopular opinion lol,) and have tried to find answers to it, this Gen I think I have the best defensive one at least. Obviously you can fast ko through sub with the right multi hit coverage, but it's tough otherwise. So I think I found the ultimate counter with Tera, a while ago.
Now I'm NOT suggesting this mon really, cause of the def, but its grass tera cm psychic noise florges. A grass immune to toxic that isn't eq neutral, hits hard with sound, and can even pause their heals. If there's a better defensive thing, it's for general utility, not just glis.
Now I'm NOT suggesting this mon really, cause of the def, but its grass tera cm psychic noise florges. A grass immune to toxic that isn't eq neutral, hits hard with sound, and can even pause their heals. If there's a better defensive thing, it's for general utility, not just glis.
Yeah, fair. I mean hell, ice can technically extinguish a fire in the right context.
I would also agree with this, polluting/contaminating water is a pretty straightforward idea. But DrPumpkinz's rationale is a pretty good middle ground for this.
Well, generally it's not thematic sense that determines type interactions, rather it's intuitive logic or simple concepts everyone can grasp. Fire burns grass, water puts out fire, brains beat brawn, birds eat bugs etc. Like, they've got to mostly be ideas children can easily understand.
Admittedly some are a bit more subtle, though. Most of Psychic's type interactions are a bit like this: being weak to Bug, for instance (the consensus on this one seems to be that insects are a common phobia and thus disrupt willpower or stoicism), or being supereffective against Poison (a positive mental attitude can be effective when you're ill). There are a couple of others which are a bit nebulous imo, like Ghost resisting Bug.
Water and ice are the same thing, they should either resist each other or be neutral to each other. Rock being super-effective agaisnt Ice never made geological sense, glaciers can carve enourmous valleys in the mountains.
If anything, fighting are human like and poison should beat them. Yeah Poison contaminated water, but that's just fine...for THE WATER ITSELF:) It's only NOT fine for the water drinker, but I don't drink my mons....
Edit: lmk if this makes sense. I think it does, water mons are animals not puddles, but at the same time making poison good into living things means like all but metal armored/ghosts.
2ND edit: yea re the bug res on ghost. Odd. Some bugs eat dead things so yeah. I guess they won't really eat the UNdead, but idk how that makes for resist. Well it's a weird type chart with some esoteric types like ghost.
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the only thing that gets me is that water can actually erode ice
And the fact that freeze day exists kinda makes up for the water resistance
Geologically tho (yes I looked it up) I do agree that it doesnt really make sense as the ice itself does the carving and not the meltwater
WRT Fighting and Poison, it's fairly clear to me why Poison resists Fighting (if you've ever seen that episode of the original anime where Ash's Muk fights that Bellsprout, that's how I imagine most Fighting v Poison matchups going - you can't exactly punch a deadly virus in the face) but I would think that it makes sense for Poison not to be supereffective against Fighting. Yes Fighting-types are living things, but they're full of vitality so being poisoned wouldn't slow them down as much as most other beings. Hell, loads of Fighting-types have Guts for an ability, which actually makes them more powerful when they're suffering.
I'm looking now to see if anyone's ever convincingly explained why Ghost might resist Bug, and found one quite interesting explanation: Ghosts are weak to strong spiritual power (which Psychic would be), but bugs don't have that in the same way as other beings, so aren't able to reach them.
Which is (kind of) true to life in a real-world sense: a common view of insects is that they're rather mindless and driven purely by instinct rather than intelligence. If you've ever read The Once and Future King (would recommend) the sequence with the ants is both comical and horrifying: they're portrayed as mindless drones, with no capacity for creativity or individuality or invention.
That might be way off the mark, though - Satoshi Tajiri loved bugs and they're intended as an innately good and heroic type of Pokemon which triumphs over adversity - essentially the eternal underdog (which is why Bug is supereffective against Dark). Maybe it's just that Ghosts are supposed to be big and scary to them.
I would like to present a newer opinion I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately. In most situations, I don’t think signature moves should be given to other Pokémon in later generations. Sometimes there may be some cool lore reason for it, like Entei getting Sacred Fire, or maybe it just makes way too much sense for a newer Pokémon not to learn a certain move, like Hitmonlee getting Blaze Kick. But unless otherwise specified, I think signature moves were cooler in the generations where they were stronger moves exclusive to weaker Pokémon.
Giving new moves to older Pokémon is completely fine, but signature moves are often made with their Pokémon in mind- going back to the Sacred Fire example, Ho-Oh loves Sacred Fire’s high burn rate because it has higher Special Defense than physical- this comes with the drawback of breaking the balance of the game if other Pokémon with different traits gain those moves. See Breloom, the first viable Spore user. See Smeargle committing war crimes with Dark Void. See Spikes on Cloyster and later Skarmory. You get the picture. Attack move examples are less common for this kind of thing, I’d say, but the idea that strong moves should be made available for weaker Pokémon still exists, because there is no reason that many Pokémon should be able to learn Close Combat even if it never was a signature move.
Edit: Bulbapedia has it fixed now, but Spikes was never a signature move for Pineco and Forretress. I thought it might have been on Day 1 of GSC but multiple Pokémon got it on level-up.
Giving new moves to older Pokémon is completely fine, but signature moves are often made with their Pokémon in mind- going back to the Sacred Fire example, Ho-Oh loves Sacred Fire’s high burn rate because it has higher Special Defense than physical- this comes with the drawback of breaking the balance of the game if other Pokémon with different traits gain those moves. See Breloom, the first viable Spore user. See Smeargle committing war crimes with Dark Void. See Spikes on Cloyster and later Skarmory. You get the picture. Attack move examples are less common for this kind of thing, I’d say, but the idea that strong moves should be made available for weaker Pokémon still exists, because there is no reason that many Pokémon should be able to learn Close Combat even if it never was a signature move.
Edit: Bulbapedia has it fixed now, but Spikes was never a signature move for Pineco and Forretress. I thought it might have been on Day 1 of GSC but multiple Pokémon got it on level-up.
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