Recent content by Darvin

Any fully-evolved Pokemon can solo the game if you're willing to grind it high enough. Most don't even need to be that high, just look at jrose11's excellent Youtube series of solo run challenges. Many of his Pokemon are entering the Elite 4 under level 60 and only take a couple tries to get a...

A big part of what makes Gengar and Haunter so good is that they're amazing both offensively and defensively. Ghost/Poison renders them completely immune to most physical attacks, and their massive special stat means they can be tank special attacks with ease. Their excellent movepool...

Lapras is incredibly under-leveled for how late in the game you get it. If you got it at a higher level it would be incredible, but as it stands it's arriving at level 15 near the end of the game, and it's in the slow experience group. It just needs a huge amount of grinding to thrive, and I...

Yeah, if you're only running two Pokemon for such a long stretch of the game then you're going to become very over-leveled. That's about 10 levels higher than when I'm typically reaching the Champion. In my run with Perisan, it just got one-shot by everything in the Elite 4 and literally...

What are you doing with it? I found it was just a pain the whole way through. Meowth is under-leveled when you get it and really struggles to do anything, and ends up needing to be switch-trained to keep up with the team until it evolves at... level 28. That's just such a late evolution for an...

Generation 1 Tauros :Tauros: is such a huge disappointment for an in-game playthrough. With its competitive reputation, solid stats, and broad movepool you'd expect great results. But it was really bad. I've played through Red and Blue using every fully-evolved Pokemon, and Tauros is pretty near...

Here's a link to the post where we announced our ban of Hoopa-U. Free-For-All is a slower metagame where most Pokemon do not run speed investment. Hoopa-U's 80 base speed is fast enough to outspeed the vast majority of the metagame without even running full investment, and offensively it can...

This is an accurate overview of the council's position. Toxic and Toxic Spikes were already in the discussion for a potential ban in generation 8, but the vote never happened due to council turnover and the end of generation. In generation 9 due to dexited moves we went ahead with the vote and...

You will need to use a filler account and then have that filler account forfeit the match on turn 1.

One potentially big effect on viability is how many other Pokemon you are using on the same team. A bigger team means less experience to go around, and lower levels overall, and this can really affect the viability of Pokemon. For instance, I recently did a gen 1 run with a Kadabra as part of a...

After a period of observation and discussion, the Free-For-All council has voted on three problematic moves. In a unanimous vote, all three moves on the slate were banned: Fling is banned in Generation 9 Free-For-All Skill Swap is banned in Generation 9 Free-For-All Heart Swap is banned in...

I've got two things to share today! First, we've been tinkering on a set compendium for common Free-For-All sets. This is still a work in progress with different contributors, but I've made sure everything for S and A ranked Pokemon is in a good state, but a lot of the B rank and especially C...

With respect to ganging up on people, this is a discussion I have had with the moderation team. The problem is there's a lot of subjectivity in determining what constitutes teaming. Often times players will end up coordinating with each other for legitimate reasons; because the target player is...

https://pokemonshowdown.com/rules One or more of the moderators decided that your behavior was unacceptable and banned you. You have to take it up with the moderation team by filing an appeal. This has nothing to do with us or what we do and don't ban in the format, and everything to do with...

Thank you for bringing this oversight to my attention. It is now fixed.