You’re approaching this from the premise that such strategies are unfair which justifies you not preparing to counter them which makes them unfair. Sometimes you have to sacrifice powerful move slots for this, or run stuff like taunt or accuracy increasing moves. Not doing so has an opportunity cost: you are vulnerable to evasion boosting strategies. And if you’re fine with that cost, then the strategies themselves aren’t too bad.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
You state already that there is an opportunity cost to not running these moves to mitigate evasion boosting strategies, but I would say that the opportunity cost for actually running them is even bigger. Sure, you could run shock wave, but the majority of the time you would much prefer thunderbolts higher power as that comes up in a large majority of scenarios. Sure, you could run sweet scent, but that is literally just for wanting more encounters (which besides the attribute that they cause horde battles in ORAS, you never really want that attribute since you can just walk around) and stopping evasion strategies. The issue has never been that there isn't options, there has always been options, but that using these options are so constraining because you don't really want them in any other scenario. So if you do counter it, you are making yourself a lot worse against literally everything else.
The only moves that I would consider splashable that counter evasion are:
Taunt
Body slam (only works on minimize though)
Stomp (also only works on minimize)
Smart Strike (only a few pokemon want to run it since they don't have iron head though)
Defog (only useful in Sinnoh and competitive games after Gen 6)
Z-Moves (which is for one gen and do you really want to waste your z-move? Also you might not even have the right z-move for the battle, so you might be only dealing 40% damage)
So its really only one move that is splashable that can beat evasion with a lot of others with asterisks. And that one move doesn't have any astreisks you have to immediately switch in that pokemon to counter it. And unless you put taunt on most of your pokemon, then you could be screwed by something having it that none of your taunters want to take on.
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In fairness, at least in terms of STAB, Shock Wave isn't competing with Thunderbolt. It's competing with whatever mix of non-STAB coverage and utility moves you're putting in the other three slots. And good non-STAB coverage is both harder to come by and less important in single player. The only time you'd run a move like Shock Wave as your only STAB of a given type is if you already have another STAB move of a different type, or if you don't have a better STAB (Dragon Dance Aerial Ace Salamence is pretty nice in the Battle Frontier).
Having a weaker move available is also nice for catching wild Pokemon, so the movee have utility outside of hitting evasive targets. Shock Wave especially since Thunder Wave is also really nice for catching Pokemon. Also when it comes to using Shock Wave in battle facilities where you will run into Double Team spammers and rematches aren't an option, Electric-types generally have shallow movepools so like what else are you gonna run?
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That's a pretty terrible argument lol.
Even In-Game, it's better to slap something you wanna catch with a status move and damage it with moves that they resist. And the argument itself is focused on competitive play, which most certainly means people aren't running around with tomfoolery like False Swipe.
In competitive, Shock Wave is an objectively terrible option that more often than not means your mon has an awful movepool, as even with Technician, you'd still value TBolt more because of its paralysis chance.
There are ways to counter evasion strategies, but most of them aren't even remotely viable outside of just countering evasion nonsense, which can also blow up in the user's face as people can roll the dice and eventually get something to hit.
Spamming Double Team is not just obnoxious, it's inconsistent and a really weak gameplan that more often frustrates everyone involved than actually produces results. It's so bad and skillless that it's barely a step above Specs Gyarados in terms of sheer incompetence at playing the game.
...no the argument is focused on in-game. if you follow the chain of quotes this all started with someone complaining about Juan's Kingdra.
You’re saying strategy A is annoying, I’m telling you that the game gives you several solutions to it, and you’re saying that those solutions aren’t worth implementing because they don’t help against strategy B and strategy C. Which seems to imply strategy A isn’t worth dedicating resources to, which implies it’s not a big problem. You don’t need that many non-STAB moves, and can usually fit some utility and tm moves on someone on your team.
Yeah, I’m not talking about PvP or in postgame Battle competitions, those are different beasts altogether. I can’t comment on the battle facilities because I’ve never played Gen 3’s, I don’t own Emerald and don’t like the games enough to play through them on my PC just for the postgame lol
Speaking personally, as someone who doesn't particularly plan out things when I play these games, moves like Shock Wave and Aerial Ace aren't worth it because Evasion strategies aren't particularly commonly used.
Despite this, every single time i encounter one my exact reaction is something along the lines of "here we go again" and I set aside about half an hour because I, frankly, expect to miss that much in the end. This doesn't make sure hit moves any more appealing to me because there are so few situations where I would see myself using them, and I like to keep my movesets as consistent as possible for playthroughs, so teaching a move like Aerial Ace just for the sake of maybe making a single fight easier isn't something I'm inclined to do at all, and I doubt i'm the only person who works that way
In the end, it's a massive annoyance that doesn't happen often enough to incentivise using worse moves to counter it, while also being pretty much a 50/50 on being either completely irrelevant or a massive annoyance when i do see it
I think the problem with evasion in-game is that it's not satisfying, either to use or go up against. Frustration isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in order to be worthwhile you need to have some catharsis, and beating evasion doesn't really give you that - because there's really not much skill involved in beating it. Either you finally got some mileage out of that crappy 60 BP move you've been carrying around the entire game, or you just clicked a button until you finally hit through all the RNG - neither feels especially satisfying to me.
I think the big problem evasion has design-wise is that it operates using the same stat stage system as every other stat, which is insane considering that missing is effectively 100% damage reduction, which is significantly higher than either Defense or Sp. Def. I think if evasion modifiers were halved, with evasion moves granting some other perk in addition to the stat itself to compensate - Double Team, for example, could give +1 Spd - they'd be a lot less frustrating to deal with.
I think the big problem evasion has design-wise is that it operates using the same stat stage system as every other stat, which is insane considering that missing is effectively 100% damage reduction, which is significantly higher than either Defense or Sp. Def. I think if evasion modifiers were halved, with evasion moves granting some other perk in addition to the stat itself to compensate - Double Team, for example, could give +1 Spd - they'd be a lot less frustrating to deal with.
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My bad
And that's why my previous point still stands. It's just a pedestrian form of pseudo-stall that I couldn't possibly care less.
Remember, especially in-game, these mons are not actually getting any kind of passive damage in, and you're going to inevitably roll through them once you get a hit in.
Passive bonuses are fine, but when something actively clicks Double Team I'm like
It's a mild inconvenience. That's it. Even Juan's Kingdra is hardly worth mentioning because of how passive it is with all the turns you get off his DT spam. In fact, you can hilariously use X Accuracies just to mess with him lol.
Because evasion is such a niche strategy that you don't know when it will appear. Why the hell should I have to dedicate a moveslot to something that won't be used 90% of the time? At least with the utility moves or tm moves, they will be used quite a bit. Some tm moves are honestly quite useless, like defog in gen 4 for those like 2 routes. But here's the thing, I can then delete it and now not have to worry about it, as if I for some reason come across a foggy route, I can put it back on my pokemon no problemo. I can't do that with evasion. Unless I've played the game before, I don't know if X trainer has evasion, and if they do, then I literally need to carry around it for the entirety of my playthrough. It isn't a big problem, but its one which if I see will grind my gears
In this case the issue is that Strategy A is not worth dedicating resources to because the resource demand is excessive compared to how often it will return a benefit over its alternatives. Despite this, Strategy A will show up 1/100 battles, and in said battle, not dedicating the resources doesn't make you less likely to win so much as take much longer to win completely independent of skill. If the skill and strategy angle is what we're observing, one aspect of this is to make the most out of a limited amount of resources, be it your items, TMs, Team Slots, or just time spent grinding. Anti-Evasion tools are so seldom used and so inferior outside of their specific niche that it is decidedly less useful (and thus a worse skill expression) to run them unless you know you're going up against Evasion spam specifically.
It brings to mind the "This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman" trope, in which a situation is essentially tailored to favor a skillset/resource/character who would be horribly specific or inefficient anywhere else. And in this case I'd also add that in many cases, the anti-Evasions strategies still stink at fighting them. Shock Wave or Aerial Ace (especially if non-STAB) are such low power attacks that they might take about as long hitting-consistently to Faint an opponent as just blind-firing a regular move with higher BP that only has to land 2-3 times.
To make a comparison, Pokemon Go has some niche corebreakers in its PvP mode such as Chesnaught, who don't have the most effective neutral play into the Meta at large, whether due to heavily polarized match ups or just trends they take a lot of support to deal with; that said, if you run them into the Core they are advantages against (for example, certain Rollout + Ground users like Dunsparce), they can put you in a very advantageous position compared to what good play with "standard" useful options would achieve, so in exchange for struggling a bit more with other opponents, they perform SIGNIFICANTLY better against what you use them for, as opposed to "consistent but mediocre" into their counter.
In the case of Evasion strats, better examples would be something like Meowscarada's Flower Trick, since Meow is a competent Pokemon and Flower Trick a move it would reasonably run even if you never encountered a single opponent where its niche added benefits (No-Miss and Auto-Crit to ignore boosts) came up, regardless of if you might have stronger options like the Flamethrower vs Fire Blast decision. As a disclaimer, I know Meowscarada in practice doesn't have a stronger Grass move, but Flower Trick is still one of the few examples of a "can't miss" move that isn't strictly inferior to another strong move in its type such that you might still pick it over Power Whip. Aura Sphere vs Focus Blast also comes to mind, but the former is so low in distribution that most Pokemon don't have the option to even weigh.
Also the way evasion spam is done in Pokemon is entirely uninteresting, and the ai in my experience tends to just spam it without actually using it to setup or deal damage or anything other than waste my time. People have pointed it out well enough that the tools they give you to even deal with evasion spammers aren't fun or adequate most of the time so I won't repeat those too much.
Yes the point of evasion boosts in rpgs is to force you to employ a different strategy and have the necessary tools to combat it, but when you compare how Pokemon does it to how it is done in SMT or Metaphor it is just lame. Not only is the AI geared to take advantage of it, but they build the encounters specifically to abuse it, and the turn system is built to further incentivize both you and the enemy to abuse it, since you can lose your entire team's turns or multiple actions if you miss, or if the enemy misses you can gain A LOT more than you ever could in Pokemon. In a lot of older rpgs, a particular one that Pokemon takes inspiration from like the early Dragon Quests, they just used evasion boosting as a way to make you waste resources, which also isn't really something that comes up very frequently if at all in Pokemon outside of specific challenge hacks.
When I run into the double team spammer set in Pokemon I just groan. When I run into something like Matador in SMT 3 Nocturne or the Fishy Fandango spammer in Metaphor I'm filled with excitement and dread.
Yes the point of evasion boosts in rpgs is to force you to employ a different strategy and have the necessary tools to combat it, but when you compare how Pokemon does it to how it is done in SMT or Metaphor it is just lame. Not only is the AI geared to take advantage of it, but they build the encounters specifically to abuse it, and the turn system is built to further incentivize both you and the enemy to abuse it, since you can lose your entire team's turns or multiple actions if you miss, or if the enemy misses you can gain A LOT more than you ever could in Pokemon. In a lot of older rpgs, a particular one that Pokemon takes inspiration from like the early Dragon Quests, they just used evasion boosting as a way to make you waste resources, which also isn't really something that comes up very frequently if at all in Pokemon outside of specific challenge hacks.
When I run into the double team spammer set in Pokemon I just groan. When I run into something like Matador in SMT 3 Nocturne or the Fishy Fandango spammer in Metaphor I'm filled with excitement and dread.
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I’m curious what do you mean by how evasion boosts in other RPGs forcing the player to employ a different strategy, and how Matador or fishy Fandango spammers are reliably dealt with.
Back to Pokémon’s evasion, it certainly isn’t an exciting stat to use in the slightest, and one of the bigger issues it has is that it is inconsistent. It’s a miracle that evasion spam haven’t caught up in VGC partially due to inconsistency, but nonetheless, evasion spam can also teach the player a bad (or at least boring and unfun) strategy that don’t amount much except trolling.
And having more chances for the move to miss entirely can add up to “skip your turn” statuses like Flinch, Paralysis, Sleep and Freeze, so if an NPC trainer has Evasion + either of the three former statuses, this can get ugly real fast.
Once Evasion became legitimately threatening in VGC and the countermeasures not catching up is when VGC become a true RNG fest that the games themselves get - sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly - accused off.
up to the point in Metaphor where the enemy with the move Fishy Fandango appears, you can get by from just spamming high damage moves and focusing on weaknesses. Fishy Fandango increases this enemy's hit rate and evasion, making it so you will miss hitting them and they won't miss hitting you. This enemy exists to teach the player to have ways to dispel enemy buffs or die. This is essentially what the evasion boosting pokemon defenders were saying about forcing people to have Shock Wave or Aerial Ace or whatever at all times, but increasing your own accuracy or lowering the enemy's doesn't have that much general usage in Pokemon. Removing enemy buffs or removing ally debuffs is basically always useful in Metaphor and SMT tho.
Yeah I find this play pattern by npcs in pokemon to be a lot more interesting, that and the ai and the systems themselves are more built for it. Even in Let's Go, a game that is much easier than most pokemon games, you will run into a trainer with Magnemite that does Thunder Wave into Supersonic into damage move.
I hope that day never comes, as one of the most rng moves in competitive history is already rather controversial in VGC from what I can tell, and that move is Dire Claw. People are starting to use Sneasler and Dire Claw more and a lot of people are justifiably pissed lmao.
unpopular opinion, I prefer sneasler to urshifu in terms of gameplay.
(This is from someone who doesn’t even protect much)
(This is from someone who doesn’t even protect much)
My brother in christ, that's like picking between satan and lucifer. They both are evil.
(Idk if lucifer is actually evil but what I'm trying to say is that they are both the devil)
This probably isn't a only a Pokemon-thing, since Disney is also guilty of it as well, but am I the only one who dislike how Pokemon hunters are portrayed as evil and illegal- along with hunting as a frowned upon sport as well as people who portray it. Hunting can actually be a good way to manage animal populations that have gone overboard like deer in which natural predators like cougars and wolves have been drawn to near extinction. Not to mention there are laws protecting animals, one cannot shoot legally without a license- and there are many restrictions to hunting: For example, one cannot shoot mothers with young, or juveniles that not have fully grown. Also one of my friends is a hunter and he is one of nicest people I met, so I don't like how popular culture portrays hunting as evil.
Yeah. I see this as a combination of like, hunters / poachers are very easy to frame as negative in media - they make good villains - and broader issues with Western values. In general, while Western attitudes towards animals, have improved in recent decades, they've often improved in flawed, self-contradictory, and hypocritical ways. E.g. dogs often being categorized as "pets" and pigs often being categorized as "livestock", despite their similar intelligence levels, making one often taboo to kill and the other unquestioned to kill, even though reversing the arrangement is certainly plausible. I see current hunting attitudes and portrayals as similar.
i think it also depends on so many things. hunters of different countries and different groups that hunt different animals are. different lmfao. sometimes hunters are anti wolf and kill coyotes and sometimes theyre their hardest defenders. sometimes hunters approve of whaling and shark poaching and sometimes they want to hunt local invasive species like lionfish. some hunters are native people and others are there for prestige. etc
its much easier to just... get a group that practices specific harmful hunting than to criticize the vague concept of hunting. like if you had idk whale poachers as a concept in pokemon. then again the games flipflop on whaling and seem to be vaguely pro whaling (in the same way that people who arent super tuned in the news and saw some vague new info are)
its much easier to just... get a group that practices specific harmful hunting than to criticize the vague concept of hunting. like if you had idk whale poachers as a concept in pokemon. then again the games flipflop on whaling and seem to be vaguely pro whaling (in the same way that people who arent super tuned in the news and saw some vague new info are)
To be fair my interpretation of hunters/poachers in Pokémon has always had the assumption of “they’re trophy hunters”. Probably because they are portrayed as evil or evil-lite and trophy hunters are the versions of hunters that are evil in their intent. It probably also comes down to how the term trophy hunter is used, we tend to only say it pejoratively either in regards to them killing protected species illegally, or at least in killing animals we respect or think shouldn’t be killed. Their portrayal in mons is “they shouldn’t be hunting mons” so they fit at least one of the two categories.
Like I know what you mean, not all hunters are bad, but population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik so these hunters obviously aren’t doing it for that reason. Idk why your mental journey would be “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the good hunters unfairly” instead of the more natural “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the bad ones”. (I know the terms good and bad here are reductive, they do the job).
I don’t think little Timmy is ready for the conversation about how we need to shoot the cute lil Deerling because they eat too many leaves anyway.
Like I know what you mean, not all hunters are bad, but population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik so these hunters obviously aren’t doing it for that reason. Idk why your mental journey would be “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the good hunters unfairly” instead of the more natural “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the bad ones”. (I know the terms good and bad here are reductive, they do the job).
I don’t think little Timmy is ready for the conversation about how we need to shoot the cute lil Deerling because they eat too many leaves anyway.
That would be the opposite of a situation where hunting could help.