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.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
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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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He did like bugs yeah, the bug-catcher trainer class is likely directly inspired by him, but the reason they are heroic is tokusatsu stuff like Kamen Rider. There's a crazy amount of tokusatsu stuff in the basis of Pokemon as a series. I don't remember if he ever said specifically which Bug pokemon is his favorite but I know he apparently used Scyther in his first run of Red/Green.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but Spikes wasn't a signature move because it was available to multiple Pokémon when introduced in Gen 2.
Also I'd say Smeargle doesn't really count because its entire gimmick is having access to every move. Exception that proves the rule or whatever.
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they are going to give the paldea starters broken signature moves to something in the future and it'll be really funny
Could definitely see at least Ludicolo getting Aqua Step somewhere down the line. The other two are a lot more specialized though.
Its prob going to be like the gen 7 starters sig moves, where one is widely distributed, one is given to one or two things that make sense, and the last one is still a sig move. Aqua step I could def see widely distributed, flower trick can prob be given to a few niche grasses that have some form of magic (shiftry could be one or maybe sceptile even? idk) and torch song would stay a sig move.
honestly you could probably give torch song to hisuian typhlosion
yeah probably, speaking of decidueye they better NEVER give something good Triple Arrows, lmao
easily the most ridiculous signature move for a non legendary
also I forgot spirit shackle existed.
Bulbapedia once had Spikes listed as a signature move for Pineco and Forretress in Gen 2 which I always thought was strange since Cloyster can most definitely use the move nowadays.
double checks their pages
Oh, look at that, someone actually fixed it since I last checked. I was going to say. It’s not just those three that got it but Qwilfish too. Now, as for the Smeargle example, I understand its gimmick but I still don’t necessarily like it because the way Smeargle is optimized encourages people to run the same moves on it almost every single time. Which to me seems like the exact opposite of the point of the Pokémon in the first place.
I mean, smeargle is a cool design idea, utilising every single move conceivable in theory sounds like it could allow for a wide array of diverse strategies, at the cost of having incredibly shitty stats. In practice, you just spam the same broken moves because anything else is either incredibly gimmicky to the point of being borderline unviable, or just being unviable.
Even if it didn't have such absymal stats, why wouldn't you use it in very specific ways? Like, you might open up an offensive set but its prob going to use something like sacred fire on 90% of said physical sets because that move is broken and using other things is just trying to be different for the sake of being different.
You could ofc say that smeargle should be unable to use specific moves, mostly sig ones (like they did with dark void), but then that defeats the purpose of the mon, its meant to be able to learn evey move. So you have a crossroad of using 1 or 2 strats, or going against the mons design.
Smeargle should have stayed on the design table, its cool in theory, in practice it flops immensly.
Even if it didn't have such absymal stats, why wouldn't you use it in very specific ways? Like, you might open up an offensive set but its prob going to use something like sacred fire on 90% of said physical sets because that move is broken and using other things is just trying to be different for the sake of being different.
You could ofc say that smeargle should be unable to use specific moves, mostly sig ones (like they did with dark void), but then that defeats the purpose of the mon, its meant to be able to learn evey move. So you have a crossroad of using 1 or 2 strats, or going against the mons design.
Smeargle should have stayed on the design table, its cool in theory, in practice it flops immensly.
VGC players would agree with the first half of that sentence, but not the second half. Smeargle is a menace in VGC.
When I said "flops immensly", I didn't mean competitively, smeargle definetely succeeds competitively. But in the design area of "having endless possibilities for movesets that the player can customise", it does flop. Sorry for the confusion
Toxtricity reaching further than Decidueye's Hidden Ability for the chance at a sound based Fire Move with a free +1.
Also for Triple Arrow, I can't think of anything with Archer flavor immediately besides base Decidueye, who is moderately better at using its secondary effects with 10 more Base Speed but probably appreciates it more for Ghost/Fighting Combo than those if anything