Unfortunately according to the teraleak this was always the plan for the line, in fact it used to be worse with no sign and anything spring-like anywhere on Grumpig. Also at the very least least the final version of Grumpig doesn't look like it's from Texas Chainsaw Massacre like this monstrosity
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“That One Pokémon You Just Have Beef With”
- Thread starter bdt2002
- Start date
Bro looks like an unused Zelda enemy
Kinda reminded of the pig guy from the CD-I games.
More a mechanic than a non, though and it affects a non I kinda like quite a bit(the effect is quite, the like is moderate.)
Ever since they made exp boost to mons that can evolve through level but haven't been allowed to yet, stuff that either needs stones to Evo, or Evo to do anything, is in a bad way kinda. This is for stuff like skitty and dustox(thats the one I like, needs Evo to do much of a thing, ty wurmple and cocoons.)
Ever since they made exp boost to mons that can evolve through level but haven't been allowed to yet, stuff that either needs stones to Evo, or Evo to do anything, is in a bad way kinda. This is for stuff like skitty and dustox(thats the one I like, needs Evo to do much of a thing, ty wurmple and cocoons.)
Corviknight.
Tesco Skarmory from my least favourite generation.
Tesco Skarmory from my least favourite generation.
Rhydon, Ursaring and Bisharp are perfect examples of fully evolved 'mons, Duraludon is a perfect example of a starter-tier single-stage 'mon, which if anything could have gotten a preevo. Their evolutions feel off. Evolve stuff like Swoobat or Dewgong instead.
Don't have any idea of what to do with Maractus or Carnivine, as well.
Don't have any idea of what to do with Maractus or Carnivine, as well.
On the contrary, I love that Duraludon is on the upper tier of single-stage species and still got an evolution. Break with precedent more! Pokemon fans expect patterns and consistency and they're surprised every single time Game Freak ignores that
You guys want to see something that might bother you as much as it bothers me?
It might not look like it at first, but Kalos’s Noibat has a lot in common with Zubat. Yeah, they’re both Flying-Type bat Pokémon, and so is Woobat, but they also share a lot of their base stats in this first stage and the same base stat total, and even the same Hidden Ability in Infiltrator. Their evolutions are where these bat Pokémon differentiate themselves. Swoobat and Noivern are completely different from each other and from Golbat and Crobat, what with only Swoobat being a friendship evolution like Crobat is, and of course their primary typings are different.
Most of the time I’m against the designs of new Pokémon that feel too similar to older ones, but this is one of the few exceptions where I actually think the similarities didn’t go strong enough. Remember what I said about Noibat sharing some base stats with Zubat? As it turns out, Crobat and Noivern share a base stat total of 535 as well, on top of keeping Infiltrator, so me being the big fan of pattern recognition that I am… where’s the Golbat clone? Noibat could have been such a neat idea for a weaker, earlygame Dragon-Type, and to an extent they tried this in Ultra Sun & Moon, but similar to a lot of Unova Pokémon Noibat’s performance falls flat because the evolution just comes SO late and Noivern isn’t quite strong enough in the endgame to make up for it, having poor matchups against major late battles and an especially poor Pokémon League run with losses against several Pokémon.
It might not look like it at first, but Kalos’s Noibat has a lot in common with Zubat. Yeah, they’re both Flying-Type bat Pokémon, and so is Woobat, but they also share a lot of their base stats in this first stage and the same base stat total, and even the same Hidden Ability in Infiltrator. Their evolutions are where these bat Pokémon differentiate themselves. Swoobat and Noivern are completely different from each other and from Golbat and Crobat, what with only Swoobat being a friendship evolution like Crobat is, and of course their primary typings are different.
Most of the time I’m against the designs of new Pokémon that feel too similar to older ones, but this is one of the few exceptions where I actually think the similarities didn’t go strong enough. Remember what I said about Noibat sharing some base stats with Zubat? As it turns out, Crobat and Noivern share a base stat total of 535 as well, on top of keeping Infiltrator, so me being the big fan of pattern recognition that I am… where’s the Golbat clone? Noibat could have been such a neat idea for a weaker, earlygame Dragon-Type, and to an extent they tried this in Ultra Sun & Moon, but similar to a lot of Unova Pokémon Noibat’s performance falls flat because the evolution just comes SO late and Noivern isn’t quite strong enough in the endgame to make up for it, having poor matchups against major late battles and an especially poor Pokémon League run with losses against several Pokémon.
Patterns and consistency are good game design. It's good when players can look at something and have a general idea of what it can do or what it will be capable of. Even in the era of fan wikis, making elements of your game similar so that they're memorable is good, because while the avg player can't remember exact stats for 1000+ units(or whatever), if there's common threads then people can make inferences and be mostly right. Making things randomly slightly different is a recipe for frustration as people try to apply their general knowledge of the game and it doesn't work.
You guys want to see something that might bother you as much as it bothers me?
It might not look like it at first, but Kalos’s Noibat has a lot in common with Zubat. Yeah, they’re both Flying-Type bat Pokémon, and so is Woobat, but they also share a lot of their base stats in this first stage and the same base stat total, and even the same Hidden Ability in Infiltrator. Their evolutions are where these bat Pokémon differentiate themselves. Swoobat and Noivern are completely different from each other and from Golbat and Crobat, what with only Swoobat being a friendship evolution like Crobat is, and of course their primary typings are different.
Most of the time I’m against the designs of new Pokémon that feel too similar to older ones, but this is one of the few exceptions where I actually think the similarities didn’t go strong enough. Remember what I said about Noibat sharing some base stats with Zubat? As it turns out, Crobat and Noivern share a base stat total of 535 as well, on top of keeping Infiltrator, so me being the big fan of pattern recognition that I am… where’s the Golbat clone? Noibat could have been such a neat idea for a weaker, earlygame Dragon-Type, and to an extent they tried this in Ultra Sun & Moon, but similar to a lot of Unova Pokémon Noibat’s performance falls flat because the evolution just comes SO late and Noivern isn’t quite strong enough in the endgame to make up for it, having poor matchups against major late battles and an especially poor Pokémon League run with losses against several Pokémon.
Noibat is special attacking Zubat, Noivern is (slighty slower, slighty stronger) special attacking Crobat, Woobat and Swoobat have nothing to do stat-wise with the other bats.
Swoobat has a lower stat total than GOLbat, but Woobat is far stronger than Zubat or Noibat.
Also, what bothers me is that they SCREWED UP THE BASE STAT TOTAL BOOST back in SM. They boosted WOOBAT's HP, not Swoobat. Their Japanese names also had the "evolution has an extra character" deal, and mixing up Koromori and Kokoromori is reasonable, but still, ugh.
One more Pokémon I want to mention that's come up a few times between me and my friends back in college:
Kingdra is a Pokémon that I loathed battling for a long time to the point of actively avoiding games where it appears on major NPCs' teams like Pokémon Emerald, but I can at least respect the rivalry it turned into and the running gag in my scrapped writing concepts of me being openly terrified of this thing. As much as I hate that thing and would scream like a child if I saw one in real life, I can maybe still be convinced to like it for the cool Pokémon it admittedly is and for the fact that there's really nothing else like it, especially in Johto where a lot of the new Pokémon are either super late or super weak or some combination of the two.
And then we have the other Water-Type I don't like battling. Kingdra can be extremely aggravating, but it can be fun to use and, dare I say, even fun to battle against once in a blue moon. I can definitely not say the same for Dondozo. Provided I'm not exactly caught up on my fish biology, I don't exactly know what Dondozo is supposed to be, and as neat as the Tatsugiri synergy is, I was already having trouble with one other bulky Water-Type in the late-game of its own home region and now we're going to supplement this with what I've heard some competitive players call Physical Blissey at Dondozo's peak of viability. I'm not quite sure I would go that far, but it can certainly feel that way if Commander is active and even if it's not, Dondozo on its own is such a well-optimized physical tank that I'm genuinely surprised Game Freak thought this was a good idea. This thing's got 150 base HP, 115 Defense, a pure Water typing with four resistances and only two 2x weaknesses and no 4x weaknesses, the Unaware Ability that made Quagsire cores such a problem on stall teams in various metagames, and it's not even that passive either with 100 base Attack or the option to leverage that Defense into a Body Press that can further be assisted by the universal physical boosting of Curse, GSC style. Similar to another GSC icon and statistically bulky Pokémon, Snorlax, limiting its access to reliable recovery may have been an intentional game balance decision which is fair if that's true, but Snorlax should still get Slack Off regardless of that fact and that doesn't change the fact that Dondozo's this unreasonably strong defensively with just the 8 PP version of Rest as its best recovery option. It's not very often when we come up with derogatory nicknames for Pokémon, but there's a reason we regularly call this thing "DonBozo" and I've actually banned myself from building SV OU Dondozo teams even as a more casual player who normally prefers more balanced structures over hyper offense.
Kingdra is a Pokémon that I loathed battling for a long time to the point of actively avoiding games where it appears on major NPCs' teams like Pokémon Emerald, but I can at least respect the rivalry it turned into and the running gag in my scrapped writing concepts of me being openly terrified of this thing. As much as I hate that thing and would scream like a child if I saw one in real life, I can maybe still be convinced to like it for the cool Pokémon it admittedly is and for the fact that there's really nothing else like it, especially in Johto where a lot of the new Pokémon are either super late or super weak or some combination of the two.
And then we have the other Water-Type I don't like battling. Kingdra can be extremely aggravating, but it can be fun to use and, dare I say, even fun to battle against once in a blue moon. I can definitely not say the same for Dondozo. Provided I'm not exactly caught up on my fish biology, I don't exactly know what Dondozo is supposed to be, and as neat as the Tatsugiri synergy is, I was already having trouble with one other bulky Water-Type in the late-game of its own home region and now we're going to supplement this with what I've heard some competitive players call Physical Blissey at Dondozo's peak of viability. I'm not quite sure I would go that far, but it can certainly feel that way if Commander is active and even if it's not, Dondozo on its own is such a well-optimized physical tank that I'm genuinely surprised Game Freak thought this was a good idea. This thing's got 150 base HP, 115 Defense, a pure Water typing with four resistances and only two 2x weaknesses and no 4x weaknesses, the Unaware Ability that made Quagsire cores such a problem on stall teams in various metagames, and it's not even that passive either with 100 base Attack or the option to leverage that Defense into a Body Press that can further be assisted by the universal physical boosting of Curse, GSC style. Similar to another GSC icon and statistically bulky Pokémon, Snorlax, limiting its access to reliable recovery may have been an intentional game balance decision which is fair if that's true, but Snorlax should still get Slack Off regardless of that fact and that doesn't change the fact that Dondozo's this unreasonably strong defensively with just the 8 PP version of Rest as its best recovery option. It's not very often when we come up with derogatory nicknames for Pokémon, but there's a reason we regularly call this thing "DonBozo" and I've actually banned myself from building SV OU Dondozo teams even as a more casual player who normally prefers more balanced structures over hyper offense.
One more Pokémon I want to mention that's come up a few times between me and my friends back in college:
Kingdra is a Pokémon that I loathed battling for a long time to the point of actively avoiding games where it appears on major NPCs' teams like Pokémon Emerald, but I can at least respect the rivalry it turned into and the running gag in my scrapped writing concepts of me being openly terrified of this thing. As much as I hate that thing and would scream like a child if I saw one in real life, I can maybe still be convinced to like it for the cool Pokémon it admittedly is and for the fact that there's really nothing else like it, especially in Johto where a lot of the new Pokémon are either super late or super weak or some combination of the two.
And then we have the other Water-Type I don't like battling. Kingdra can be extremely aggravating, but it can be fun to use and, dare I say, even fun to battle against once in a blue moon. I can definitely not say the same for Dondozo. Provided I'm not exactly caught up on my fish biology, I don't exactly know what Dondozo is supposed to be, and as neat as the Tatsugiri synergy is, I was already having trouble with one other bulky Water-Type in the late-game of its own home region and now we're going to supplement this with what I've heard some competitive players call Physical Blissey at Dondozo's peak of viability. I'm not quite sure I would go that far, but it can certainly feel that way if Commander is active and even if it's not, Dondozo on its own is such a well-optimized physical tank that I'm genuinely surprised Game Freak thought this was a good idea. This thing's got 150 base HP, 115 Defense, a pure Water typing with four resistances and only two 2x weaknesses and no 4x weaknesses, the Unaware Ability that made Quagsire cores such a problem on stall teams in various metagames, and it's not even that passive either with 100 base Attack or the option to leverage that Defense into a Body Press that can further be assisted by the universal physical boosting of Curse, GSC style. Similar to another GSC icon and statistically bulky Pokémon, Snorlax, limiting its access to reliable recovery may have been an intentional game balance decision which is fair if that's true, but Snorlax should still get Slack Off regardless of that fact and that doesn't change the fact that Dondozo's this unreasonably strong defensively with just the 8 PP version of Rest as its best recovery option. It's not very often when we come up with derogatory nicknames for Pokémon, but there's a reason we regularly call this thing "DonBozo" and I've actually banned myself from building SV OU Dondozo teams even as a more casual player who normally prefers more balanced structures over hyper offense.
I like alomomola, this eclipsing that VERY largely(not fully) PRE flip turn was excruciating lol. Between everything it isn't balanced for a "normal" mon. For a legend or something like the ruins, UBs, paradox, yea sorta, but this is crazy. It isn't even starting out weak and making you grind to Evo it. Good shout out on ability, as quag probably is a joke now unless you, I guess, need toxic AND natural water. The only place is disagree is, as someone who didn't even play pre 3 and never comp until 6, this IS, at min, a physical def blissey. I'd say better, it's not super lacking on the opposite side, has meaningful offense even if not running it, and has the generally better type(with this gen that probably isn't true, but only cause mir/caly s are allowed for now.)
To a degree, yes. Pokemon as a series runs on consistency and I definitely buy into that, there are trends and archetypes that persist across the games. That said, I find myself liking it more and more when they innovate and break with established traditions. When I wrote that I was more thinking of occurences like people saying "the third version will be Grey!" or "we'll get RSE remakes in Gen V!" rather than actual game mechanics.
And Duraludon having an evolution isn't exactly the sort of twist that should frustrate players in the way you're talking about. Sure, yeah, on paper it looks like a mon you'd expect to get a pre-evolution rather than an evolution (the same's been said of Lapras for ages) but instead they defied expectations because... well, they wanted to, I suppose? I also think it's cool they added to the "600 club" with a Pokemon that's not strictly a psuedo-legendary (they didn't even do that for Volcarona, and that's the closest thing to a pseudo-legendary that exists)
I knew for sure Archaludon will be nominated in this thread, but I do agree with this aspect. If anything, this “600 club” may also get Pokémon another like Archaludon - cross-gen evo with 600 BST - in the future, possibly as either a new pattern or an occasion. As otherwise, 600 BST tend to be reserved to pseudo-legends, mythicals and Pokémon with 500 BST but can Mega Evolve regarding new lines of Pokémon. Though a new line of two-staged Pokémon where the final stage is 600 BST isn’t entirely out of the realm either.
Now, whichever old Pokémon gets a 600 BST evolution? Too early to tell, with how Archaludon was the first of it’s kind like how Dragonite line was the first pseudo-legend.