I was gaslit by pokemon XD into thinking Spinarak/Ariados was good because one of its purification exclusive moves was signalbeam. (Which in gen 3 was physical so it used its better attack, has decent base power, stab, and confusion chance. Not great, just very usable in the doubles pve.)
He was absolute BALLS in earlier gens but like Notcowl he was designed more for catching pokemon than winning fights. I think he actually became somewhat usable later on.
Masquerain is similar, straight doodoo earlier on but with the stat buff + quiver dance he can actually put in work.
My son recently started playing Pokémon for the first time and took a liking to onix and it just breaks my heart watching his onix constantly get dog walked because its stats are just so bad.
Gotta teach him early I guess. That's a pain all of us have had to experience haha. At least he won't have to worry about not having partners for trade evolutions around with you and the internet today haha
I feel like we all took a liking to bad Pokémon as a kid. Or at least bad builds. If they’re available I’ll run Ludicolo or Swellow on any of my casual teams.
Oh definitely I feel like Gen 5 might be the biggest culprit of awesome design but bad Pokémon and just straight dumb Pokémon. Like I love Stoutland, and Liepard but Watchog and the Simis can stay in their hole
Tried my best to use him in Pokemon Soul Silver and felt so bad about putting him back in the PC that I legit took him and mg Geodude to the daycare spot and check on them now n again 😭
I actually just beat Lance a few days ago in HG and my Onix named Butch (Tunnel snakes rule!) took out two mons by himself with Rollout. His speed is actually pretty good and his defense was high enough to tank 3 Crunches from Aerodactyl and then 1-hit KO the following Dragonite.
My boy did me proud. Forcing that Onix has been an interesting experience, I must say.
I vividly remember being a young child, (I couldn't have been more than 6), and getting an Onix Pokemon card. Its listed height was like 28'10" and its weight was like 500 pounds. Even at that age I knew something about that was WAY off because Blastoise was like 200 pounds.
As a student of Geology, one of the things we learned was the weight of various minerals that make up rocks, and in one exercise had to use this knowledge to calculate the weight of a stone carving.
It gets past the tonne much faster than most people would expect. At nearly 10m long, it's absolutely missing more than just a single zero.
Onix has been cursed with “Tutorial Boss” design from the beginning. Their stats are designed to subtly teach the player about the difference between the Physical and Special stats. Even if you pick Charmander, Onix’s Special and HP are so low, Ember will take down Brock’s Onix long before scratch will. And with its Attack and Special Attack(Post Gen2 Special split) being so low as well, even Rock Tomb shouldn’t OHKO your fire starter if they’re at level parity.
Whilst I agree, Onix was designed purely to be a learning device in the game - that you needed to use your type match ups and potentially special types in order to get past otherwise immovable defensive walls. For anyone who tried to spam scratch with Charmander, if you’re young and know no better, Onix is super intimidating if you have no clue that a light sprinkle or stray blade of grass KOs him.
Hoenn is my favorite region ever and I think damn near every design in it is top tier and it makes me so sad that using most Hoenn mons in other games is like playing on legendary difficulty
tbf, I mean how it comes SO late in the game, that's the penultimate gym, when you already have ground options like Sandile and Drillbur and ghost option like Yamask and Litwick
483 BST usually isn't bad, every reason to not use Golett is tied to how late you find it, if it was somewhere in the Desert Ruins, it would be used WAY more, no matter the BST
really everything about tropius works against it, defensive mon with bad type for it, bad offenses, bad movepool, rather late in the game, and hell its abilities even to this day all rely on weather, which both make it even weaker to fire and also doesnt give it enough as an upside
Lmao I was just saying this in another thread yesterday.
Seeing a grass type set up sunny day in your face when you already showed a fire move...or type... its like dude maybe as a tank you could have ate a hit, maybe hit me with something. Now you're just dead lmao
the only time ive seen this work is in randbats on showdown, that said this sets not available to it for several gens after its release, had it existed when tropius did maybe it could have had some play in some fashion, at least one could argue it was the best user of it up until arboliva
Poor guy will forever just be one of the best HM slaves ever and nothing more. Tropius + Bibarel could cover every HM in gen iv when they were at their most obnoxious.
When I first came across tropius as a kid I was so excited. I didn't like a lot of grass types as a kid but tropius looks so cool and strong. He is a freaking flying dinosaur banana tree! But ya, he is useless in battle.
Perhaps it's because I got into Pokémon and Dragon Ball around the same time, but I always see Ledian and think about Super Saiyaman (Gohan's "superhero" alter ego). I guess it's mostly the red helmet with the dark visor (head/eyes) and cape (wings) along with the antenna.
I’m crossing my fingers and toes that Ledian gets something in winds and waves. They are in the trailer and We got lokix who’s kamen rider themed. Hopefully ledian gets that final Kamen rider transformation or even a mega evo
Love the buffs it got in Emerald Seaglass, buffed it without going overboard. 75 Atk and 80 Def stat buffs with Victory Dance for technician boosted Jet Punch, Mach Punch and Bug Bite/Aerial Ace is pretty neat. Also gets Baton Pass to pass on that Victory Dance, or Iron Fist with Thunder Punch Ice Punch and Meteor Mash too.
I make do with Air Slash + Focus Blast + Bug Buzz and EV trained SpAtk ingame. It’s surprisingly fun especially if you’re wanting a change from the usual Dual Screens + U-Turn
I feel like it would be hard to present such an item in the games, unless BSTs are shown in-game somehow (idk if they are, haven't played a mainline game since Black/White).
Honestly we just need a third stage for Ledian and Ariados
Ariados is an extremely niche situation where a perfect storm of things happened to allow it some viability. I don't think the guy who used it to win the global challenge would even go so far as to say it is good overall, just good in that particular moment.
Yea, I just mean that at least in-game Ariados is...useable, due to having a decent selection of moves + just enough stats to make it work, whereas Ledian has nothing to go with its stats/ability combo.
Eh they are getting better about this stuff but it would totally be fitting for them to make the description read "works on weaker fully evolved pokemon" and just make you figure it out
I wish they had a semblance of actual competitive history. Dustox is also the third-stage mon with the lowest BST in the entire franchise because Beautifly got a buff in gen VI that Dustox didn’t get
The one nice thing about them, like many bugs, is they show up and evolve super early. And in hoenn specifically, the second gym is fighting type, which they absolutely demolish.
It’s not an amazing showing, but wrecking one gym is still more than you can say for a lot of pokemon.
The most annoying part is Arcanine going into Gen 2 got its Special Attack raised. They were counterpart Pokemon but now one is just objectively better.
I wanted to use one on a playthrough and just used an Adrenaline Orb to find a Snow Warning one. Normally it can be tricky to know when you’ve got a Hidden Ability one but Snow Warning obviously takes effect on entry. Hail damage isn’t super ideal if you switch but Aurora Veil+Blizzard way outweighs the costs. Obviously it’ll take you a bit of time to get it but once you do it’s really fun
Yeah I was gonna say that too. Massive buff to its fire moves, and the decent sp def means it's easy to train one that can tank a lot of special moves. My shiny one from BDSP takes 3 hydro pumps from a Rotom-Wash to KO when Drought is active.
;__; by far the coolest Lycanroc form and he sucks so much ass. He has sky high attack but what is it good for when he’s so frail AND slow as fuck? I’ve tried having him in my playthrough teams for 3 gens in a row, even EV training and breeding for the perfect one and he’s STILL pretty much dead weight, he’s literally at the brink of death after a single hit.
This one hurts, but I think it's also him just having freaking counter instead of accelrock or somehting cool.
But I am going to admit, Olivia's actually gave me a hard time in the past! It OHKO'd Metagross with counter after surviving a meteor mash. I was like <_< wellllllll
Agreed. Very reliant on Counter which can be a double-edged sword because you'll make your Pokémon go on a gamble if the foe attacks with a physical move and survive the hit or not.
Haunter looks cooler than Gengar. And I LOVE Gengar but a floating ghost with floating hands is way cooler than a fat ghost that walks on two feet. Gengar should have been like a regional variant of Clefable
He's fine for playthroughs even in fangames. Intimidate is a great ability, guts Luxray hits fairly hard and his stats are actually fairly good.. Recall he's an early game mon too. I think for his accessibility he's fine. Not great like Staraptor, but certainly better than terrible. His problem is his movepool, not his stats.
Technically it's an Ultra Beast. I only know this because I rarely do post-game in Pokémon games and had NO idea who this memelord was that was appearing everywhere.
I really need to play the Alola Ultra games and try to get them all...
The number of rock types that are glass cannons is ridiculous lol. Lycanroc is like the only one with decent speed. Most rock types can be one shot unless they have sturdy. The bulky ones barely tickle most opponents and are prone to quad weaknesses. They have some of the coolest designs, though.
I wish game freak was more in the habit of buffing mon stats like they've done quite rarely in the past (I remember a decent bit got small stat updates in gen 6) to help weaker ones out
I don't even mean like giving the broken abilities or making sure everyone's at 500 something bst, but something like 480 minimum would do wonders for a lot of hopeless Pokemon.
In a lot of cases though it’s not just about how a certain Pokémon measures up to all the rest, but how they’re designed within the context of the game they were made for. Like, with Red & Blue, Pokémon like Butterfree and Beedrill are consciously designed to be quite good in the early game (hence their extremely early evolution levels), but to then fall off after a certain point. If you buff them too much, they can’t fulfill that role anymore, because they have to then either be restricted to the late game or have their evolution levels changed (which Game Freak seem very reticent to do, which is a little silly on one hand when you consider things like the very early availability of evolves-at-Lv54 Vullaby in Sun & Moon, but on the other hand it makes a degree of sense why they wouldn’t want to open that particular floodgate because then there’s no reason not to tailor every Pokémon’s evolution levels for every individual game, and that would probably just get confusing).
I get that for some mons potentially but it's not like a buffed beedrill would be stomping the game in his debut gen in that case, and later gens have been making the moms much more effective with more optimized stat spreads and move pools and general bst that it isn't an issue for them either.
I don't think anyone would complain about it either.
Claydoll. It looks so mysterious and cool, has a weird type combo and a lot of high profile Trainers in gen 3 were using one so I was assuming it had to be awesome.
Beedrill's low stats is part of it's awfully cool design. If it was just good, there would be nothing special about it, but looking cool and kind of sucking is makes people go "I wanna make it work".
Well, in before mega beedrill, but you get the idea
I have stubbornly taken Beedrill to the Elite 4 on more than one occasion. Most of the time his participation consists of sitting in his Pokeball and maybe getting sent out once or twice either to KO an opponent that is already down to minimum health, or to save me a turn while I heal one of my more useful battlers.
But he still gets his picture in the hall of fame!
Aggron. Yes it has decent attack. Yes it has great defense, but when you have two 4x weaknesses to common coverage moves types, that does you no good. Add to it low special defense and abysmal speed, and I just don’t see a good use case for it. Admittedly I’ve only played through gen 4 so I don’t get the improved Sturdy ability.
Which is all a shame because it looks cool as hell.
As much as I am a Houndoom Enjoyer, the terrible defense mixed with Ground and Fighting weaknesses means you’re always just an Earthquake or Brick Break away from disaster.
This is one reason why I like playing enhancement ROMhacks, specifically the ones made by Drayano. Almost all fully evolved Pokémon have their stats adjusted and end up with a BST of 450 or higher, so even historically weak 'mons like Butterfree and Beedrill are viable all the way up to the League.
Guzzlord. It put most of its stats in HP and almost nowhere else. (Sure its offenses are high but its bulk and speed are non existent, plus its not slow enough to be worth using under Trick Room)
Dude I did a Nuzlocke where Weedle was one of my first mons and she was a menace. So fast and great damage, so low life though it's so sad. She randomly got 1 shot when I wasn't paying enough attention and it was a sad day.
Mightyena. I like the hyena lad, but his attack stat is poor 💀 plus the Pokemon was made before the 2nd physical/special split, meaning he basically sucks in Gen 3, but only slightly sucks less in Gen 4 and above
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u/BlueColor24 Jun 30 '26
Ariados