CaP26 Prevo - Part 2 - Ability Discussion

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DHR-107

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Hey all!



Time for abilities! Our Scales of Justice, Equilibra balances its potent offence with mostly defensive abilities in the forms of Levitate, Bulletproof and Justified. What abilities do you guys think work for our new bouncing baby prevo? As usual, those three abilities will automatically make the slate, and there will likely be a poll unless support is absolutely overwhelming.

Please make sure when you are discussing abilities, you make it clear which ability it will be replacing! I'd prefer to not replace any abilities, but let's see how we roll!
 

MrDollSteak

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As far as a flavour standpoint goes, the closest Pokemon in terms of its ability distribution of Levitate, secondary immunity resist and finally weak flavour Hidden Ability, to Equilibra is Bronzong, who shares all three of its abilities with Bronzor. With this in mind I would suggest that we keep these three abilities.

That being said, if there were any to be replaced, I'd put that on its Hidden Ability, as there is generally more of a precedent of seeing those change upon evolution. Some flavour suggestions from Equilibra's Hidden Ability stage were ones such as Inner Focus, Steadfast and Sturdy, which hint at its lawful nature without being a full 'judge', which is a potential direction to take flavour-wise.

As far as a completely controversial opinion goes, one direction that could be taken, particularly since Doom Desire is something that CAP26 Prevo likely won't get access to (as an evolution move), is replacing Bulletproof with another competitive ability like Steelworker. This could give it a really different feeling to Equilibra, and lead to some interesting possibilities in the stat line stage.
 
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I'd prefer not to replace any Abilities, to be honest. I don't see why we would even need to. Bronzor and Bronzong share all three of their abilities as well, so why can't Equilibra do so with its prevo?
 

Wulfanator

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I know there was talk on the discord about a gavel prevo with a physical bias. It sounded very interesting. The only 2 abilities I could see it using with its movepool is serene grace or sheer force. If it had moves like hammer arm, iron fist would be good. Especially, if we were to ever give libra double iron bash.
 

LucarioOfLegends

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I very much think that the primary and secondary should remain the same, as I see no reason to change it and it lines up with its contemporary Bronzong.

Hidden Ability is a bit trickier since we do not have any real clue on a design right now. I think justified is still a good fit due to equilibra influence alone, and the fact of growlithe getting, but even still it is hardly ever found on a prevo, primarily being found on fully evolved mons and of course the Swords of Justice, which makes me want to put it into question.

If we did want to change the HA, I support Inner Focus or Steadfast, as I think that it still upholds courtroom mentality without being specifically Justified.
 

MrPanda

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I really don't see any reason to change the current abilities as all of them holds a good fit with Equilibra flavor, so I agree for no replace them.

However, if we go to replace some ability, I believe Justified is the right way to go on. Justified is limited to a very restricted group of 9 pokémon among which 4 are the Swords of the Justice and only Growlithe is prevo. Following that line, I think Inner Focus, Steadfast, Pressure and Unnerve are great options, keeping the judge/courtroom flavour.
 
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Zetalz

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I'm in favor of retaining all current abilities, though if we were to change one I'd support changing Justified. Inner Focus & Steadfast are neat little options that retain that sense of composure and lawfulness.
 
Hear me out.

How cute would it be if we changed Justified to Prankster, and had Equilibra’s preevolution be a naughty little goofball prankster who eventually wrongs the wrong person or loses its trainer unjustly and develops an unwavering foundation of justice and equality?

I know that idea probably won’t get any traction, but the thought popped into my head and I just had to share.
 
If we wanted, replacing Levitate on a Steel type with Light Metal would be an interesting modification, showing its ascendancy towards full levitation. Bulletproof is hard to modify, maybe Forewarn? I don’t really like a prevo with Justified, so I’ll suggest Defiant.

Light Metal, Bulletproof, Defiant would be my recommenced list.
 
How cute would it be if we changed Justified to Prankster, and had Equilibra’s preevolution be a naughty little goofball prankster who eventually wrongs the wrong person or loses its trainer unjustly and develops an unwavering foundation of justice and equality?
I love this idea. There's no reason that the prevo has to be a mini duplicate of the evo. I think the evolution lines are more interesting when they demonstrate a story like this. Think of Escavalier, the butterflies, Salamence. It could even start as a Steel/Rock troublemaker that goes to Steel/Ground when their rock component gets eroded to sand.
 

Quanyails

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Every time we do pre-evos, there are always people who wants the pre-evo to deviate from the final evolution. In some cases, this makes sense, such as a metamorphosis. In this case, though, I don't see a metamorphosis-like transformation. Inanimate-object 'mons don't tend to do that. Inanimate-object 'mons (except Aegislash) keep their pre-evos' abilities.

Additionally, CAP already has a Pokemon line where the rebellious first stage evolves into a cool-headed final stage in the form of the Stratagem line. It wouldn't even be "unique" to Equilibra to do that as flavor. :P
 

Deck Knight

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I think a decent prevo ability over Justified would be Rattled, given a rattle is in many ways like what Equilibra's design is without the heavy scales. Additionally, Rattled only appears on pre-evolutions and in the case of an undeveloped scales of justice, it could very well be affected by the horrors of Bug/Ghost/Dark moves. A rattle is also an inanimate object so it fits that theme too. I think Levitate and Bulletproof are, like Bronzor's abilities, too essential to the design.
 

MrPanda

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How cute would it be if we changed Justified to Prankster, and had Equilibra’s preevolution be a naughty little goofball prankster who eventually wrongs the wrong person or loses its trainer unjustly and develops an unwavering foundation of justice and equality?
Although I like the "prankster" prevos idea, I see Equilibaby more like a curious child than a naughty one, by this standpoint I even prefer Analytic over Prankster. But anyway, this progression line (Prankster Justified) reminds me too much the Lucario evolution line and, personally, this bothers me a lot.
 

Slapperfish

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Another thing we ought to consider is that we aren't entirely confined to locking Equilibra's prevo into the same playstyle as its itself. A handful of unevolved Pokemon have a have one or two stats comparably higher than their evolutions, and sometimes even differing abilities, which often leads to them having vastly different roles in lower tiers. I know that part of the creation process is still a bit of a ways away, but I could totally see the prevo being more physically-oriented, similar to LCmons like Larvesta. As such, I believe we ought to consider abilities that could work with a differing playstyle, and I feel that Levitate could be swapped out for something else to give us a bit more freedom over the rest of the design process. Abilities like Analytic or Sheer Force could work as a more general damage-focused alternative that could open up the possibility of it being a physical or even mixed attacker. Though considering the likelihood of the prevo's design being weight-related in some way, replacing Levitate with Light Metal or Heavy Metal would also be a rather fitting option, and would have less of an impact on its stats.
 
Another thing we ought to consider is that we aren't entirely confined to locking Equilibra's prevo into the same playstyle as its itself.
One major problem with expecting the prevo to have the same playstyle and behave like a little Equilibra is the fact that Equilibra doesn't learn Doom Desire until level 64 (so presumably the prevo won't have Doom Desire before it would normally be evolved). That implies that the prevo won't be able to be played like Equilibra, and the design process for Equilibra cannot be translated to the prevo. Since Equilibra's design process was rooted in the primacy of Doom Desire, a separate design process is mandated for the prevo. There's no reason to have the same abilities.
 
I feel like whatever we choose is going to decide how the pre-evolution is going to be like. Do we want something similar to Equilibra in the form of justice (Justified) or the likes, something on the opposite side where it's naughty (Prankster), or something in the middle?

I'm not really sure, just putting this out there (that here the ability will probably be really influential in how the rest of the CAP will be decided, not that it hasn't been in a couple of cases). I'm also putting out Keen Eye as a suggestion, though, I guess. I'm fairly sure it was suggested for Equilibra as well before.
 

snake

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I don't really see much of a reason to change the abilities. Generally speaking, primary abilities and hidden abilities don't change that often when evolving, while secondary abilities change much more often. Thus, I'm going to support keeping Levitate and Justified and leaving the potential to change Bulletproof open. Now, I know there are exceptions to every rule, but having the prevo's abilities be the same doesn't somehow make it less interesting. In fact, we tend to want CAP Prevos to "break the mold" every process and have ability changes to give them additional flavor, but if we do that every process, I think we start to look a little sloppy. In fact, every prevo, aside from the CAP25 prevos, Privatyke, Snugglow, and Voodoll have ability changes. I actually don't have the time to calculate the actual percentage of Pokemon families that change abilities upon evolving, but I doubt that as high as 68% of all Pokemon families (13 / 19, the fraction of prevos that have an ability change) have an ability change (I can check this at a later point though!).

One major problem with expecting the prevo to have the same playstyle and behave like a little Equilibra is the fact that Equilibra doesn't learn Doom Desire until level 64 (so presumably the prevo won't have Doom Desire before it would normally be evolved). That implies that the prevo won't be able to be played like Equilibra, and the design process for Equilibra cannot be translated to the prevo. Since Equilibra's design process was rooted in the primacy of Doom Desire, a separate design process is mandated for the prevo. There's no reason to have the same abilities.
A small issue I have with this is that while the prevo may not have Doom Desire like Equilibra does, we also have to consider that a) this is a flavor-based process, so playstyle shouldn't be the primary focus here, and b) CAP LC is a much different metagame compared to CAP, so even if the prevo has the same typing, ability, stat bias, etc. as Equilibra, it wouldn't necessarily play in the exact same way as Equilibra anyway.
 
Equilibra has Justified because of the scales of justice. If it starts out as a different type of scale (which I would like) it would make more sense for it to start with a different ability. I would like it to start with Light Metal as weight is important to scales.
 

Dogfish44

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As with others, Justified should probably be the "at risk" ability of the trio in my mind - there is actually a decent precedence here, in that Justified is often linked to just the Fully Evolved counterpart of an evolutionary line - with Growlithe being the lone exception. I honestly think that Justified is still sound in spite of that, but a musing on other options;

Analytic is a well justified (yep I'm going there) replacement ability, and all of Anticipation, Forewarn, and Frisk could be appropriate to develop the angle of "knowing all the facts" - and I think Keen Eye is also a really interesting approach for this one. I'm actually somewhat intrigued by the idea of Soundproof - not only is it a terrible pun (What do lawyers need to present? Sound proof...), but I think it's one of the best abilities to represent the idea of a courtroom being an incredibly loud setting, where the ability to not be overwhelmed by the noise would be important.

Immunity: We need a legal joke about Immunity in this thread whilst we're at it!
 
While I personally don't see a huge reason to change the abilities set for Equilibra, I would like to add a few other possible abilities to consider. These abilities were chosen considering their usefulness to said prevo, as well as the overall idea of balance and justice already set.

Competitive, which raises the special attack by two stages upon having a stat lowered. This ability would make use of a high special attack, assuming that it kept the trend set by Equilibra's special attack stat of 113. This is my personal favorite of the four, also being the most helpful.

Steadfast, which raises its speed one stage upon flinching, possibly helping its already likely low speed stat, although flinching isn't always the most common occurrence, with the exception of moves like Fake Out, which guarantee the first hit and essentially give 2 back to back attacks for Pokémon with a higher speed stat. That being said, it also may not be a significant enough boost to truly be helpful.

Guts, which raises the attack stat, after obtaining a status condition. This would likely be the least helpful considering its such low attack may likely be unaffected to a helpful degree.

Rattled, which essentially does the same as Steadfast, although whenever hit by a dark, ghost, or bug move instead of when flinching.

Given these four, my choice would be Competitive. Of course like I said I see no huge reason to change its abilities, but if this were to be the case, Competitive would be a good choice. Personally I find it to be more helpful than Justified for both the prevo and Equilibra, but that's just from what I'm aware of.
 
I see no major purpose to change Levitate at all. If we have levitate, the design necessitates it hovers.

Bulletproof is tangential to its nature as being immune to Projectiles, stemming from its design and steel typing 'armour' as its flavour reasoning for that Immunity.

However, Justified is based on its design as a set of scales, Justifying the desired doom in a way, even if the ability doesn't directly boost DD. The two go hand in hand. If the prevo doesn't get one, should it get the other? I like the suggestion of Rattled as its replacement. There is the pun on it rattling about (and 'teen' years are often associated minor delinquency that called be called rattling about), but there is the flavour progression of how Dark (et all) go from giving it the jitters (Jap Name for rattled) to suddenly having the justification to Doom Desire.

Competitively, Rattled provides a decent opportunity for the Prevo to switch into UTurns due to Bug resist and potentially begin a sweep using its speed boost which any BabyCap Meta might need to consider. I don't know, I've not played those, sorry.
 
Analytic could be a good flavorful ability, in the sense that investigation and analysis comes before a trial. If Equilibra represents judgement (trial) then the prevo could represent the detective work required before going to court. This theme would also lead strong direction for those producing prevo art.
 
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