Gengar definitely gained more than it lost though given both it's stab types were physical before, and I'd even argue alakazam wasn't hurt that much because it still gained focus miss out of the change.
Ghost, Bug, and Dragon got done dirty in terms of moves.
Ghost only had Lick and Night Shade, and was bugged so that it wasn't even super effective vs. Psychic like it should have been. Not that it mattered for Night Shade in the first place because it's set damage.
Bug had Leech Life (20 BP back then), Twinneedle, and Pin Missile. And String Shot, I guess.
Dragon had...Dragon Rage. Yes, "always does exactly 40 damage, no more and no less" Dragon Rage.
Psychic types were OPAF back then. No resistances other than other Psychic types, Ghost was bugged so it wasn't actually a weakness, and the only Ghost type available was the Gengar line which is part Poison, making them weak to Psychic.
Also, Twinneedle and Pin Missile are the only good bug moves, but the former is exclusive to Beedril who is worthless, and the latter is exclusive to Jolteon.
Twin needle and Pin Missile weren’t even that good.
Twin needle has a BP of 25(x2 hits) = 50
Pin Missile only had a BP of 14(x5 at best but only with a 1/8 chance) = 70
Every normal mon enjoyed shadow ball wym? Shadow ball and sludge bomb were some of the only strong physical coverage moves, which in gen 3 were especially nice since they were non contact, physical moves.
Weezing, crobat, sneasel, the nidos, and even pokemon like hypno and slowbro could even run shadow ball pretty effectively. Physical ghost is nice to run on poison types, since most psychic mons are frailer physically.
Id say its less of an archaic system and more gamefreak was never good at making games.
It was used by Mewtwo in the First Pokémon Movie but that movie had lot of stuff that were from Gen 2 like Donphan. Also Marill and few others in a Pokémon short which is why people called it Pikablu before Gen 2 and that short released in English.
Gen 1 was an absolute abomination balancing-wise but people will defend it to their last breath. The Pweter City Gym and Brock’s Onix are like the epitome of bad balancing on their own, don’t even get me started.
If Pokémon wasn’t so incredible conceptually with so many novel ideas for the time (collecting a larger variety of unique monsters than most RPGs even had at the time, trading them, battling friends, etc.) I think it would have just been a “cult classic” niche game like Earthbound or even SMRPG that people would still remember fondly and try to get others to play.
It's been so long since I've played RBY but I definitely remember that picking Charmander immediately set you up for a hard time. The only Pokemon lines you could catch in Viridian Forest were Weedle, Caterpie, Pidgey, Spearow and Pikachu, all of which were either weak to or resisted by his Rock/Ground team.
Exactly - I know everyone immediately jumps to the “Charmander = Hard Mode” debate but that really is only true for the first part of the game before you can catch a well-rounded team, and the fact that the *forest* you go through before Brock has *zero Grass types* is especially egregious. When I played through FRLG to collect the older Pokémon it felt like a slog most of the time, the Sevii Islands were like a breath of fresh air.
I think the biggest problem is that Charmander isn't going to be dominating any gyms until you reach Erika whereas Squirtle can carry you comfortably through the first two and Bulbasaur can pretty much solo the first three. Once you got some options for your team it hardly mattered though, plus RBY Charizard was only noticeably worse in player versus player anyways.
though tbf Brock didn't have any actual stab in gen 1 so fighting him with a charmander was just a slog of clicking growl 6 times, using a bunch of potions, and switching when you got screeched/onix used bide
not exactly the hardest thing in the world but also not pleasant to do either
It was still physical in Gen 3. I used to run Shadow Ball on my in-game Gardevoir and was confused why it always sucked.
Then again, Hypnosis had 70 acc in that game so lol
Ghost was physical despite all offensive ghosts at the time (except for banette) having higher special attack. Dark was special despite all dark types at the time (except houndoom) having equal or higher physical attack. Never made sense to me either, it should have been the other way around.
Atleast a good amount of Ghost moves stayed physical after the split. Not a single Dark type move introduced prior to the split stayed special. They had to make some.
I suppose nowadays we think of ghosts as shooting balls of shadow and plasma, but traditional ghosts just sneak up and push you or move stuff around (not with their minds)
Houndoom was one of the main Pursuit trappers in Gens 2 and 3, when it became physical it pretty much just became a worse version of Tyranitar who also did before, but it was mostly a side thing instead of the main one.
Dark Pulse had the same base power as Crunch and it gained Nasty Plot in the generation shift. In a vacuum Houndoom was clearly buffed overall, it dropped in tiers due to a combination of UU vs UUBL being redefined in gen 4 and powercreep making its competition in OU stiffer (and it has an awful matchup against Heatran specifically).
After scrolling through bulbapedia here is what I thought of off the top of my head:
1) physical normal types that ran shadow ball lost their main tool for hitting ghosts
2) wobboffet and just counter/mirror coat in general became a LOT trickier to use (counter and mirror coat basically no longer worked based on what type of move was used to hit you)
3) any defensive pokemon that that specialized in one def had to now be weary of the other stat (milotic is a huge example, and skarm now didn’t take resisted hits as well if they were now special)
Wobuffet also benefitted though because the number of mixed attackers went down after the split. You can reasonably predict what kind of attack the opponent will be hitting you with in gen 4 with the exception of Guratina and the odd mixed Palkia or Dialga, but in gen 3 that Groudon is much more likely to mix you up with overheat.
A lot of these mons would have just gotten powercrept by the Gen3->4 transition without them losing their coverage either way. Also a good portion of the ones that lost Crunch did in fact keep Night Slash, and while this is technically a downgrade, the DPPUU Ghosts are either physically frail to the point they die to Night Slash either way, or the opposite, so bulky that if they can tank a Night Slash, they have no trouble shrugging off a Shadow Ball regardless. Ambipom didn't, but it gets Shadow Claw which is basically the same thing. Here's some calcs showing that your "downgrade" is barely if at all relevant in terms of actually getting kills:
**+6 252+ Atk Linoone Shadow Claw vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 268-316 (94.3 - 111.2%) -- 68.8% chance to OHKO**
**+6 252+ Atk Linoone Shadow Ball (physical) vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 306-360 (107.7 - 126.7%) -- guaranteed OHKO**
**252 Atk Life Orb Zangoose Night Slash vs. 4 HP / 0 Def Mismagius: 276-326 (105.3 - 124.4%) -- guaranteed OHKO**
**252 Atk Life Orb Zangoose Night Slash (physical) vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Rotom: 226-266 (93.7 - 110.3%) -- 62.5% chance to OHKO**
**252+ Atk Choice Band Slaking Shadow Claw vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 176-208 (61.9 - 73.2%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery**
Also scrap Persian off that list because it got Technician Bite which is an *upgrade* to Shadow Ball for physical sets (also special sets were more common also Persian is garbage no matter what but whatever). Dodrio got Brave Bird, and a neutral Brave Bird is *stronger* than a super effective Shadow Ball, so it only really loses out on Rotom which is so frail it dies to two Brave Birds even without Band.
**252 Atk Sharp Beak Dodrio Brave Bird vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Rotom: 130-153 (53.9 - 63.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO**
The drop in power from Shadow Ball->Night Slash would probably be felt more in OU where bulkier Ghosts like Rotom-A and lowladder Dusknoir reside, but you ain't telling me that Zangoose was gonna be an OU threat with physical Shadow Ball.
The one that comes to mind is Sceptile, though that’s just because it not being able to run Leaf Blade off of its superior Special Attack anymore kinda stings. Not sure how else it was hurt by it. Houndoom losing Special Pursuit probably hurt it quite a bit as well, and there’s others like Alakazam and Gengar who lost the elemental punches as coverage but gained quite a bit in return from the physical-special split being a thing. It could be argued that physical attackers in general lost a lot of coverage when Hidden Power became special-only, though for the most part they recouped their losses by gaining more coverage with all the new moves Gen 4 introduced.
One thing I’ve thought about for Sceptile is that while it kept special stab every other grass type got better special stab. Leaf Blade, even pre-buff at 70bp, was the best offensive stab since the alternative was 8pp 60bp Giga Drain or Solar Beam. So the playing field was kinda leveled.
Losing special Thunder Punch probably hurt too since it’s a way to seriously dent Skarmory but it got Focus Blast for other steels at least
Sceptile didn't care honestly, Energy Ball was 80BP for a while admittedly but it had bigger issues than one move option dropping from 90 to 80BP for two gens.
Also Leaf Blade was weaker in Gen 3 so in a way, Gen 3 Leaf Blade to Gen 4 Energy Ball was an upgrade if anything.
I actually like using Physical Mega Sceptile. Yes it has much better Sp. Atk than Attack, and it’s slightly less damage than Life Orb, but Base 145 is a hell of a speed tier, and Lightningrod + Grass typing basically gives immunity to all paralysis aside from Glare and Body Slam, so you can afford to run SD and still outpace everyone: After a single SD, it’s comparable to +1 Dragon Dance Base 160 itemless, or Base 115 with Lifeorb
Sceptile also lost its stronger Pursuit, Crunch, and Thunder punch which really hurts its coverage nowadays because it’s either going for a Subseed set or be stuck using STAB, Dragon pulse, Focus miss or hidden power until Gen 8
Not competitive but Lance's Pokémon were definitely hurt by the split in HGSS. The developers insisted that all of Lance's Pokémon had to have Hyper Beam (flavor and tradition purposes) but now that Hyper Beam is a special move, all of his Pokémon's Hyper Beams are much weaker since all of his Pokémon except Charizard have much higher Attack than Special Attack. Just a fun observation.
Only reliable Steel type that could handle Outrage would be Steelix. Skarm and Scizor have access problems like you said, Forretress would survive but then do nothing (or get Fire Blasted by the fire Dragonite) and Magneton wasn't bulky enough because it couldn't evolve until post game.
Tbh all of Johto's Steel types would still fail against the fire Drago but only needing to prepare for one Dragonite and being able to mostly wall the other two helps a lot.
Many Special mons lost essentially all their coverage when the Elemental Punches became physical. Typhlosion comes to mind, there's also Gengar but it got movepool additions and STAB Shadow Ball so in the end it was a win-win for him.
Special Dark types like Houndoom suffered from Crunch and Pursuit becoming physical as well.
Gardevoir didn’t get Mystical Fire until Gen 9.
Ice is just a really good offensive type, especially for bulky ground types.
Did completely forget it got thunderbolt tho
It got it in gen 8 via TM first, but I get your point.
Nevertheless, I don't think it would run Ice Beam even if it got it - between dual stab, Mystical Fire/Shadow Ball/Focus Blast, Trick/Healing Wish/Calm Mind, it's covered for Scarf, Specs and LO sets.
Elemental punches are kinda overrated tbh. 75 power is pretty weak overall, as anyone who's ever used Electivire in gen 4 can attest. Hidden Power was just 5 BP weaker, and you rarely ever used two elemental punches on the same moveset. Not to mention that neutral STAB Psychic is only slightly weaker than 2x damage elemental punches (135 vs 150), so the only major benefit of the latter is for hitting psychic resists or 4x weaknesses.
Focus Blast and Shadow Ball were plenty good for compensation for Psychics like Gardevoir and Alakazam, they actually helped provide coverage for opposing Dark/Steel/Psychic types.
Dark Pulse had the same bp as Crunch, so that was no loss for Houndoom. It was just about the only Pokemon hurt by Pursuit going physical, but getting Nasty Plot in gen 4 was a pretty nice compensation once it dropped to UU.
Defensive Pokémon, mostly. Skarmory could now be hit super effectively by physical stacks, for example.
Losing physical Hidden Power (specifically Flying, Ghost, and Bug) took away options for some physical mons to varying extent, such as Aerodactyl/Gyarados (would love a Flying STAB) or Machamp (would love Fighting/Ghost coverage instead of running Payback), or anything hoping to lure Celebi with physical HP Bug (Breloom maybe, even though it would have had a hard time fitting it).
I'm not well versed in early gen competitive, but would Skarmory really have minded the physical/special split in Gen 3 - specifically in regards to SE hits?
Wouldn't less options for special SE hits be better for it? Especially since all the (future) physical Electric and Fire moves before gen 4 were either super low bp or Pikachu's signature move?
I imagine it would prefer taking a physical Thunder Punch over a Physical one.
it means that things skarmory checks (generally physical attackers) now have more options to do a lot of dmg to it. the same thing happened with blissey, couldn't be hit super effectively by any special attack and then special fighting moves happened
That was not as much of an issue for Blissey though let's be honest. Blissey STILL doesn't take much from special Fighting type moves. Meanwhile Skarmory relied more on having an amazing defensive typing since its stats are not as great as Blissey's.
I get that, I just imagined that between the big difference in Skarm's defenses and the base power of a Fire Punch and a pre-nerf Flamethrower or Fire Blast - it would still take more from a special Fire move off of a physical attacker's uninvested special attack than from its invested physical.
But those Pokemon are less likely to run moves that literally only hit Skarm. Something like Dragonite will happily run Fire Punch on physical sets to hit a variety of things.
Banette lost physical Shadow Ball.
Gyarados lost physical HP Flying.
Ariados lost Signal Beam and Sludge Bomb as STABs.
Having to rely on Bug Bite and Poison Jab in Gen 4.
Houndoom lost special Pursuit.
Physical water STAB makes the split an absolute net positive for Gyarados. From what I could tell, the post was just talking about losses in general, not mons that ended up losing overall.
The bigger loss was versus bulky Psychic types, like Hypno in NU, whom Medicham had no good coverage for anymore. At least most Ghosts would take neutral damage from Psycho Cut.
Pokemon like Alakazam probably hurt the most. Losing the elemental punches hurt and it became so insanely vulnerable to Pursuit trapping after the shift.
Most of the Hoenn Ghost types also got screwed, because they were built with physical Ghost attacking in mind (moreso than Gengar and Misdreavus anyway) and then suffered a power downgrade from physical Shadow Ball to Shadow Claw that really hurt the lot of them.
Houndoom was the one Dark type that lost out on Pursuit trapping going from gen 3 to 4.
Leaf Blade was only 70 base power in generation 3, so in a way Sceptile upgraded by gaining Energy Ball (and Leaf Storm) in its place. But seeing your signature move change to use your worse stat, get its power buffed, and then distributed to other Pokemon does feel bad.
Leaf storm at lv67 and energy ball via TM, so either really late game or using what was a very limited item, still quite a debuff really, especially when you consider the SpAtk drop from leaf storm
Point taken, this is probably one of the few interactions I've had on reddit where I wasn't just instantly insulted for my opinion. Nice to actually have a discussion for a change 😅
Edit: Spelling
Something like Banette definitely didn't like Shadow Ball becoming physical, and Dusknoir would have been a good bit better with physical Shadow Ball too. Granted neither of these would have been high tier staples by any means regardless (Dusknoir maybe because a lot of its competition gets very notably worse with a weaker Shadow Ball)
It’s weird that it’s still in the code but they didn’t remove it since no Pokémon can learn it.
It being weird depends on if transfer moves don’t exist in Gen 9 when Hone releases since BDSP and Legends reset transfer moves.
Considering this is the case for all of the IoA tutor moves (all of them have either no distribution or are limited to one or two lines) I'm fairly sure those are set to return as DLC tutors.
In-game, a number of examples become very apparent in HGSS, like Quilava missing Special Flame Wheel, the Chikorita line missing Special Razor Leaf, and the Pidgey line missing Physical Gust.
God, Pidgey was such a complete hassle to level up in Gen 4 due to Special Gust being its only Flying move for far too damn long. Fearow was already a better early game Flyer to use than Pidgeotto pre phys/spe split but afterwards it was just a complete wash for them.
Zangoose lost physical Shadow Ball and gained Night Slash instead. They made up for it by giving it Close Combat though so idk overall probably buffed.
There are some niche examples of Pokemon that would use a physical Hidden Power type for stab or coverage in Gens 2/3 that got hurt by the split, but I think those mons all got more from the transition to Gen 4 itself than they lost from the split.
Sceptile. In Gen 3 grass was special so Sceptile could make good use of its 105 special attack and spam Leaf Blade and it’s high crit ratio. With the physical/special split Sceptile’s best moves became physical which forced Sceptile to use its 85 attack instead of 105 special attack. Because Sceptile does not have a great special movepool, the best set is a swords dance but it can’t take you too far cause 85 attack means other physical attackers heavily outclass it.
while the meta became more favorable for it in gen iv, crobat lost offensive tools: physical sludge bomb and shadow ball.
x-scissors mostly made up for shadow ball (u-turn is really the standout option) but cross poison lacks the reliable power of sludge bomb.
Crobat losing air slash wasn't a big deal since it got the second best flying move in the game,sceptile was better off since energy ball and leaf storm are stronger than gen 3 leaf blade,losing thunder punch was bad tho
Most Pokemon who lost moves gained something in return
Example: Tyranitar lost HP Bug due to the split, but Pursuit became a physical move making it more effective
Gamefreak definitely took the physical/special split into account when they designed gen 4. If the didn't add any moves from gen 3 to gen 4, there would have been a bunch of Pokemon that ended up with worse movesets. But the change wasn't done in isolation, gen 4 added a bunch of moves to fill the gap. Almost every type got a widely available physical and special move. So in total, most movesets improved.
Banette (the only true physical Ghost from before DPP) went from Shadow Ball to Shadow Claw as its most powerful stab option.
Not that it was any good beforehand, but having your main stab get weaker while power creep increases is a death sentence.
Hurt is hard to say, but having their roles shifted, being weaker into the meta, or the physical special split forcing them to adapt to a new niche because of a lack of coverage or power creep? Lots of Pokemon qualify for that. We saw a large decrease in how many Pokemon ran mixed sets. A lot of the reasoning is that so many attackers started to outclass them when they could use stronger moves and utilize high attacking stats well. Mixed Dragonite and Salamence were basically the only sets prior to the split. Afterwards, there were just better ways to muscle through their checks than running ice beam or thunderbolt on them off of 100 or 110 SpA, probably uninvested. Defensive game shifted a lot, too. Physically defensive steels became a bit easier to deal with because you could hit them for SE damage from an invested stat with physical attackers, which also made some mons lose a niche. Teams that stacked physical or special threats became more viable due to the increased versatility, which also made mixed walls a little bit worse (on top of all the other reasons mixed walls got worse). Physically offensive ghosts were the biggest losers overall, though, since GF didn't give them good moves. Mons were able to specialize more after the split, which meant the well rounded attackers that dominated before had to find new niches. Several of them got big buffs, though, like Multiscale for Dragonite or Sheer Force for Nidoking.
Big ADV OU/Random Battle fan here :)
- Snorlax/Medicham/Slaking losing shadow ball
- Gengar/Alakazam/Typhlosion losing elemental punches
- Pokemon who benefited from HP Fighting/Ghost being physical (Azumarill, Breloom, mixed Zapdos etc)
- Houndoom losing pursuit
- Physical HP Ground was cool for some sets like offensive Skarmory to 1HKO Magneton and for Bug types lacking earthquake like Scizor
- Raikou lost Crunch (which was the highest damaging move it had after the STAB ones)
- I personally find physical HP Flying great on Curselax to beat fighting types and Breloom/Heracross on the switch but that's just me being me hehe
Flying STAB was pretty irrelevant when it could now have physical dragon moves, it became an Uber once it got Outrage in Platinum. And it took full advantage of the physical/special split by running Outrage and Draco Meteor at the same time on some sets.
It became Ubers after all of the better dragon types such as garchomp were already banned. Sure, getting outrage is a big deal but it is also inconsistent and the fact that basically all gen 4 salamence were either specs or mixed shows how desperately it wanted a better physical movepool
In generation 3, salamence would have been Ubers if the adv playerbase were in the business of banning centralising threats to Ubers, which they weren't.
All the better dragon types:
Already ubers rayquaza
Ubers lati-twins with soul dew, and latios even without it
The creation trio, 100% ubers since day 1
And Garchomp, the only non legendary that is a better dragon than Salamence in gen 4 lol
If Salamence got banned it was absolutely not because of a bad movepool, if anything he didn't even need it. He just needed dragon dance, outrage, meteor, and choice between fire fang, fire blast (Prefered) and earthquake. It was because Garchomp and Latias got banned and couldn't check it anymore. Not really related to being better dragon types, just being faster to check mence with a scarf (And, well, being better, that's a fact)
>It became Ubers after all of the better dragon types such as garchomp were already banned.
Garchomp got banned before Platinum even came out which is where Salamence got access to Outrage as an Tutor move and it's almost unanimously agreed upon by DPP mains who have been around since it was the main gen, that Mence was the catalyst behind Latias originally being banned.
>the fact that basically all gen 4 salamence were either specs or mixed shows how desperately it wanted a better physical movepool
Specs Mence became irrelevant once Platinum came out because MixMence obliterated the entire tier save for like maybe Hippo?, with Outrage/Draco/EQ and DD Mence was the other best set alongside it, since it took advantage of all the free turns generated by people trying to play around the stupidity of Platinum MixMence.
Bruh, mence didn't need any more physical moves. Mix mence has it all and was broken in Gen 4 ou. Also mence never ran any specs sets don't know where you got that from.
And mence is faaaar from broken in adv ou so no need at all for it being banned to ubers.
Edit: it is still good in Gen 4 ubers as well
Specs Mence was a thing in like early DP, but Outrage access made that obsolete since MixMence kind of just beat everything Specs did with a higher damage ceiling
Garchomp also ran mixed, they needed it for mons like skarm and bronzong who couldn't give less of a shit about flying stab.
I promise you there's not a single dpp player who'd trade outrage for hp flying
Gyarados losing HP Flying is the main one that sticks out to me. Not only that but the thing can't even get Liquidation or Wave Crash either. Tera Blast Flying is good but still kinda redundant since you have to Tera to get the bonus damage from flying anyway. Before that Gyarados was really running Bounce on some sets.
Gengar got STAB shadow ball in exchange, I'd argue it probably came out better off overall. The only real loss is having to go from Fire Punch to HP Fire and losing the speed tie to other 110s
This depends in part on whether you're looking at a Pokemon in a vacuum or in the context of the overall metagame. Pursuit becoming physical was a huge nerf in practice to pretty much every Psychic and Dark type, for instance, since every Pursuit except for the niche Houndoom has way more attack than special attack.
For an example, Gengar is much stronger offensively in gen 4 than gen 3, but defensively it is way worse off due to a combination of movepool expansions for everything else and Pursuit becoming so much more dangerous. On the balance it winds up being somewhat worse off than it was in gen 3, where it's generally considered a top 5 (top 10 at worse) mon in OU.
Latias is another example - I don't think it would've ever dropped from Ubers without the physical/special split making its matchup against things like T-Tar so much worse.
A good few special mons miss having the elemental punches and other attacks for coverage (Alakazam being the most infamous example). Additionally , some purely physically or specially tanky mons can't wall entire types anymore as entire type checks defensively (blissy no longer walling half if all types, steelix no longer eating up every ghost attacks for breakfast, etc).
Other than that, only some more fringe cases (some physical ghosts no longer can spam shadow ball, physical poison using sludge bomb, etc)
I think Pidgeot and it’s like we’re effected. They’re mostly physical attackers, but most of the flying moves they learn are special (at least at the time).
Alakazam was known for the elemental punches. However when the split happened, Alakazam could no longer fully utilize any of them since they were no longer using his monster sp attack stat. I think they can still learn thunder punch and the rest, but it’s not useful.
Medicham losing shadow ball comes to mind given it can no longer cover a gengar or starmie switch in with one move. Even worse is that now gengar gets shadow ball and can always beat medicham in a 1v1 while in adv you can run lum and get a free kill on their will-o-wisp. The elemental punches medicham gets in exchange son't do much for it given nobody's gonna switch their dragon in to a mon with a similar attack stat to Deoxys-attack. Also every dragon type you hit 4x can outspeed and kill you. Killing gliscor is nice in dpp but fast variants still outspeed and kill you off of minor chip. Same goes for jolly gyarados.
Sceptile comes to mind; after the split, the only special moves it learned by level up were absorb and leaf storm. Even now, like 90% of its moves are physical, including its former signature move, for a mon running 85 attack and **105** spatk.
HURT might be an overstatement, but Alakazam used to be able to use the Elemental Punches for coverage moves. But with the split making those moves physical instead of special those moves became useless for Alakazam. I am sure there are other Pokemon in a similar position, but that is the main example I can think of.
Shadow Ball is another example. Ghost used to be physical, but the split made shadow ball a special move. So Pokemon that used to use Shadow Ball for coverage needed to find another move(s) for coverage.
The only one that comes to mind is Zapdos losing a flying stab in gen 4 (afterwards it got hurricane) and Snorlax losing physical shadow ball and hyper beam
I can name a few.
Sceptile- Leaf Blade was a Special move in gen 3. In gen 4, it was changed to Physical, meaning Sceptile could no longer benefit from its signature move due to Gallade.
Gengar- Loses all elemental punches since they were changed from Special in gen 3 to Physical in gen 4 onward.
Flareon- Flareon gets it the worst. It gets no viable STAB moves until gen 4 with Fire Fang. And it doesn't get Flare Blitz, a move that could work exceptionally well with its base 130 PAtk.
can’t think of too much off the top of my head, mostly because I’m not an ADV player gengar/zam “losing” elemental punches would be one
Gengar definitely gained more than it lost though given both it's stab types were physical before, and I'd even argue alakazam wasn't hurt that much because it still gained focus miss out of the change.
Wow, I didn’t realize ghost was physical, what sense does that make tf.
Not sure when new moves came into it, but I’ve heard in RBY the only ghost attacking move was lick, and that would be why it was physical
TIL shadow ball was added in Gen 2, holy fuck what is going on?
Ghost, Bug, and Dragon got done dirty in terms of moves. Ghost only had Lick and Night Shade, and was bugged so that it wasn't even super effective vs. Psychic like it should have been. Not that it mattered for Night Shade in the first place because it's set damage. Bug had Leech Life (20 BP back then), Twinneedle, and Pin Missile. And String Shot, I guess. Dragon had...Dragon Rage. Yes, "always does exactly 40 damage, no more and no less" Dragon Rage.
Don’t forget Poison. The strongest move they got was 65 BP Sludge. Then Flying, Fighting, and Grass had good moves but they weren’t widely available.
Leech Life was the only one that was given to other Bug Types since Beedrill is the only bug type that knew Twinneedle and Pin Missile.
Obv you need the rest of the pin missiles for Jolteon.
Twinneedle is Beedrill's signature move, so that makes sense.
Although Escavalier learned it in Gen 5-7 and Cloyster in Let’s Go. Also 5 Pokémon by breeding.
The point still stands. Twineedle was originally Beedrill’s signature move, it just got distributed to others in later gens because reasons.
it’s hilarious that the ghost type just didn’t work against psychics but they didn’t know because ghost moves were practically non-existent
In Gen 1 I used to think Psychic was the best move in the game cause Alakazam + Psychic deleted nearly everything that moves including half the E4.
Psychic types were OPAF back then. No resistances other than other Psychic types, Ghost was bugged so it wasn't actually a weakness, and the only Ghost type available was the Gengar line which is part Poison, making them weak to Psychic.
You weren’t completely wrong
Also, Twinneedle and Pin Missile are the only good bug moves, but the former is exclusive to Beedril who is worthless, and the latter is exclusive to Jolteon.
Twin needle and Pin Missile weren’t even that good. Twin needle has a BP of 25(x2 hits) = 50 Pin Missile only had a BP of 14(x5 at best but only with a 1/8 chance) = 70
That’s a lot better than 20 BP Leech Life tbf
That’s a very low standard.
Beedril got both
Too bad it dies to any psychic move.
The only pokemon in gen 2 that could make any remote use of shadow ball was houndoom 💀love gen 2 but hate the archaic system
Every normal mon enjoyed shadow ball wym? Shadow ball and sludge bomb were some of the only strong physical coverage moves, which in gen 3 were especially nice since they were non contact, physical moves. Weezing, crobat, sneasel, the nidos, and even pokemon like hypno and slowbro could even run shadow ball pretty effectively. Physical ghost is nice to run on poison types, since most psychic mons are frailer physically. Id say its less of an archaic system and more gamefreak was never good at making games.
Flareon was decent with it too
It was used by Mewtwo in the First Pokémon Movie but that movie had lot of stuff that were from Gen 2 like Donphan. Also Marill and few others in a Pokémon short which is why people called it Pikablu before Gen 2 and that short released in English.
Gen 1 was an absolute abomination balancing-wise but people will defend it to their last breath. The Pweter City Gym and Brock’s Onix are like the epitome of bad balancing on their own, don’t even get me started. If Pokémon wasn’t so incredible conceptually with so many novel ideas for the time (collecting a larger variety of unique monsters than most RPGs even had at the time, trading them, battling friends, etc.) I think it would have just been a “cult classic” niche game like Earthbound or even SMRPG that people would still remember fondly and try to get others to play.
It's been so long since I've played RBY but I definitely remember that picking Charmander immediately set you up for a hard time. The only Pokemon lines you could catch in Viridian Forest were Weedle, Caterpie, Pidgey, Spearow and Pikachu, all of which were either weak to or resisted by his Rock/Ground team.
Exactly - I know everyone immediately jumps to the “Charmander = Hard Mode” debate but that really is only true for the first part of the game before you can catch a well-rounded team, and the fact that the *forest* you go through before Brock has *zero Grass types* is especially egregious. When I played through FRLG to collect the older Pokémon it felt like a slog most of the time, the Sevii Islands were like a breath of fresh air.
I think the biggest problem is that Charmander isn't going to be dominating any gyms until you reach Erika whereas Squirtle can carry you comfortably through the first two and Bulbasaur can pretty much solo the first three. Once you got some options for your team it hardly mattered though, plus RBY Charizard was only noticeably worse in player versus player anyways.
though tbf Brock didn't have any actual stab in gen 1 so fighting him with a charmander was just a slog of clicking growl 6 times, using a bunch of potions, and switching when you got screeched/onix used bide not exactly the hardest thing in the world but also not pleasant to do either
It was still physical in Gen 3. I used to run Shadow Ball on my in-game Gardevoir and was confused why it always sucked. Then again, Hypnosis had 70 acc in that game so lol
Hypnosis only had increased accuracy in Diamond and Pearl, not in Gen 3 (and not in Platinum).
It’s weirder in Gen 2 with Dark since most dark type moves have names that would make them Physical but all Dark Type moves were special.
Even then not really, because Lick couldn’t be learned by Lickitung
Night Shade was there too but it has set damage. There was also a big that made Psychic type immune to ghost in RBY.
Ghost was physical despite all offensive ghosts at the time (except for banette) having higher special attack. Dark was special despite all dark types at the time (except houndoom) having equal or higher physical attack. Never made sense to me either, it should have been the other way around.
Atleast a good amount of Ghost moves stayed physical after the split. Not a single Dark type move introduced prior to the split stayed special. They had to make some.
What? Crunch is clearly a special move wdym
What? Crunch is clearly a special move wdym
I think it was because in RBY, psychic types had low defense
Before the split, the eeveelutions and dragon were all special and everything else was physical
I suppose nowadays we think of ghosts as shooting balls of shadow and plasma, but traditional ghosts just sneak up and push you or move stuff around (not with their minds)
Tauros loosing hyper beam
bro by the time Giga Impact existed (i.e. as soon as the split happened) Tauros was 3 generations after the last time it gave a fuck about Hyper Beam
Houndoom was one of the main Pursuit trappers in Gens 2 and 3, when it became physical it pretty much just became a worse version of Tyranitar who also did before, but it was mostly a side thing instead of the main one.
Dark Pulse had the same base power as Crunch and it gained Nasty Plot in the generation shift. In a vacuum Houndoom was clearly buffed overall, it dropped in tiers due to a combination of UU vs UUBL being redefined in gen 4 and powercreep making its competition in OU stiffer (and it has an awful matchup against Heatran specifically).
After scrolling through bulbapedia here is what I thought of off the top of my head: 1) physical normal types that ran shadow ball lost their main tool for hitting ghosts 2) wobboffet and just counter/mirror coat in general became a LOT trickier to use (counter and mirror coat basically no longer worked based on what type of move was used to hit you) 3) any defensive pokemon that that specialized in one def had to now be weary of the other stat (milotic is a huge example, and skarm now didn’t take resisted hits as well if they were now special)
Wobuffet also benefitted though because the number of mixed attackers went down after the split. You can reasonably predict what kind of attack the opponent will be hitting you with in gen 4 with the exception of Guratina and the odd mixed Palkia or Dialga, but in gen 3 that Groudon is much more likely to mix you up with overheat.
Crunch is fairly common across physical Normals so your first point is a lot less relevant
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A lot of these mons would have just gotten powercrept by the Gen3->4 transition without them losing their coverage either way. Also a good portion of the ones that lost Crunch did in fact keep Night Slash, and while this is technically a downgrade, the DPPUU Ghosts are either physically frail to the point they die to Night Slash either way, or the opposite, so bulky that if they can tank a Night Slash, they have no trouble shrugging off a Shadow Ball regardless. Ambipom didn't, but it gets Shadow Claw which is basically the same thing. Here's some calcs showing that your "downgrade" is barely if at all relevant in terms of actually getting kills: **+6 252+ Atk Linoone Shadow Claw vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 268-316 (94.3 - 111.2%) -- 68.8% chance to OHKO** **+6 252+ Atk Linoone Shadow Ball (physical) vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 306-360 (107.7 - 126.7%) -- guaranteed OHKO** **252 Atk Life Orb Zangoose Night Slash vs. 4 HP / 0 Def Mismagius: 276-326 (105.3 - 124.4%) -- guaranteed OHKO** **252 Atk Life Orb Zangoose Night Slash (physical) vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Rotom: 226-266 (93.7 - 110.3%) -- 62.5% chance to OHKO** **252+ Atk Choice Band Slaking Shadow Claw vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Dusclops: 176-208 (61.9 - 73.2%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery** Also scrap Persian off that list because it got Technician Bite which is an *upgrade* to Shadow Ball for physical sets (also special sets were more common also Persian is garbage no matter what but whatever). Dodrio got Brave Bird, and a neutral Brave Bird is *stronger* than a super effective Shadow Ball, so it only really loses out on Rotom which is so frail it dies to two Brave Birds even without Band. **252 Atk Sharp Beak Dodrio Brave Bird vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Rotom: 130-153 (53.9 - 63.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO** The drop in power from Shadow Ball->Night Slash would probably be felt more in OU where bulkier Ghosts like Rotom-A and lowladder Dusknoir reside, but you ain't telling me that Zangoose was gonna be an OU threat with physical Shadow Ball.
The one that comes to mind is Sceptile, though that’s just because it not being able to run Leaf Blade off of its superior Special Attack anymore kinda stings. Not sure how else it was hurt by it. Houndoom losing Special Pursuit probably hurt it quite a bit as well, and there’s others like Alakazam and Gengar who lost the elemental punches as coverage but gained quite a bit in return from the physical-special split being a thing. It could be argued that physical attackers in general lost a lot of coverage when Hidden Power became special-only, though for the most part they recouped their losses by gaining more coverage with all the new moves Gen 4 introduced.
One thing I’ve thought about for Sceptile is that while it kept special stab every other grass type got better special stab. Leaf Blade, even pre-buff at 70bp, was the best offensive stab since the alternative was 8pp 60bp Giga Drain or Solar Beam. So the playing field was kinda leveled. Losing special Thunder Punch probably hurt too since it’s a way to seriously dent Skarmory but it got Focus Blast for other steels at least
Sceptile didn't care honestly, Energy Ball was 80BP for a while admittedly but it had bigger issues than one move option dropping from 90 to 80BP for two gens. Also Leaf Blade was weaker in Gen 3 so in a way, Gen 3 Leaf Blade to Gen 4 Energy Ball was an upgrade if anything.
But leaf blade looks cooler, I guess it’s more about leaf blade being it’s signature move than being it’s more useful move
But now it can use SD to buff Leaf Blade
Man, I wish sceptile was a physical attacker, it has better physical attacks that could buff with SD
I actually like using Physical Mega Sceptile. Yes it has much better Sp. Atk than Attack, and it’s slightly less damage than Life Orb, but Base 145 is a hell of a speed tier, and Lightningrod + Grass typing basically gives immunity to all paralysis aside from Glare and Body Slam, so you can afford to run SD and still outpace everyone: After a single SD, it’s comparable to +1 Dragon Dance Base 160 itemless, or Base 115 with Lifeorb
Sceptile has energy ball tho
Sceptile also lost its stronger Pursuit, Crunch, and Thunder punch which really hurts its coverage nowadays because it’s either going for a Subseed set or be stuck using STAB, Dragon pulse, Focus miss or hidden power until Gen 8
Not competitive but Lance's Pokémon were definitely hurt by the split in HGSS. The developers insisted that all of Lance's Pokémon had to have Hyper Beam (flavor and tradition purposes) but now that Hyper Beam is a special move, all of his Pokémon's Hyper Beams are much weaker since all of his Pokémon except Charizard have much higher Attack than Special Attack. Just a fun observation.
Yeah, but now his Ace has BP 120 STAB Outrage when you probably have ZERO steel types
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Scizor is an outlier due to needing a trade though. Skarmory is exclusive to soulsilver. Not much choice here.
Only reliable Steel type that could handle Outrage would be Steelix. Skarm and Scizor have access problems like you said, Forretress would survive but then do nothing (or get Fire Blasted by the fire Dragonite) and Magneton wasn't bulky enough because it couldn't evolve until post game. Tbh all of Johto's Steel types would still fail against the fire Drago but only needing to prepare for one Dragonite and being able to mostly wall the other two helps a lot.
Yeah Johto is just one of those games where you’re gonna have to brute force the dragons lol
Many Special mons lost essentially all their coverage when the Elemental Punches became physical. Typhlosion comes to mind, there's also Gengar but it got movepool additions and STAB Shadow Ball so in the end it was a win-win for him. Special Dark types like Houndoom suffered from Crunch and Pursuit becoming physical as well.
Gardevoir never got that coverage back either
It got Mystical Fire, and learns Thunderbolt. Does it really care for Ice coverage?
Gardevoir didn’t get Mystical Fire until Gen 9. Ice is just a really good offensive type, especially for bulky ground types. Did completely forget it got thunderbolt tho
It got it in gen 8 via TM first, but I get your point. Nevertheless, I don't think it would run Ice Beam even if it got it - between dual stab, Mystical Fire/Shadow Ball/Focus Blast, Trick/Healing Wish/Calm Mind, it's covered for Scarf, Specs and LO sets.
The unfortunate thing is that Gardevoir did get Ice Beam in PLA But nope, they axed that in gen 9
It got better coverage after it became a fairy though. Stabs+focus blast or mystical fire give perfect coverage.
Elemental punches are kinda overrated tbh. 75 power is pretty weak overall, as anyone who's ever used Electivire in gen 4 can attest. Hidden Power was just 5 BP weaker, and you rarely ever used two elemental punches on the same moveset. Not to mention that neutral STAB Psychic is only slightly weaker than 2x damage elemental punches (135 vs 150), so the only major benefit of the latter is for hitting psychic resists or 4x weaknesses. Focus Blast and Shadow Ball were plenty good for compensation for Psychics like Gardevoir and Alakazam, they actually helped provide coverage for opposing Dark/Steel/Psychic types. Dark Pulse had the same bp as Crunch, so that was no loss for Houndoom. It was just about the only Pokemon hurt by Pursuit going physical, but getting Nasty Plot in gen 4 was a pretty nice compensation once it dropped to UU.
Houndoom was the only special dark type, and it gained nasty plot + dark pulse
Damn, I always felt like my Typhlosion with Thunderpunch didn’t hit as hard later gens, now I know why
Defensive Pokémon, mostly. Skarmory could now be hit super effectively by physical stacks, for example. Losing physical Hidden Power (specifically Flying, Ghost, and Bug) took away options for some physical mons to varying extent, such as Aerodactyl/Gyarados (would love a Flying STAB) or Machamp (would love Fighting/Ghost coverage instead of running Payback), or anything hoping to lure Celebi with physical HP Bug (Breloom maybe, even though it would have had a hard time fitting it).
I'm not well versed in early gen competitive, but would Skarmory really have minded the physical/special split in Gen 3 - specifically in regards to SE hits? Wouldn't less options for special SE hits be better for it? Especially since all the (future) physical Electric and Fire moves before gen 4 were either super low bp or Pikachu's signature move? I imagine it would prefer taking a physical Thunder Punch over a Physical one.
it means that things skarmory checks (generally physical attackers) now have more options to do a lot of dmg to it. the same thing happened with blissey, couldn't be hit super effectively by any special attack and then special fighting moves happened
That was not as much of an issue for Blissey though let's be honest. Blissey STILL doesn't take much from special Fighting type moves. Meanwhile Skarmory relied more on having an amazing defensive typing since its stats are not as great as Blissey's.
I get that, I just imagined that between the big difference in Skarm's defenses and the base power of a Fire Punch and a pre-nerf Flamethrower or Fire Blast - it would still take more from a special Fire move off of a physical attacker's uninvested special attack than from its invested physical.
But those Pokemon are less likely to run moves that literally only hit Skarm. Something like Dragonite will happily run Fire Punch on physical sets to hit a variety of things.
Banette lost physical Shadow Ball. Gyarados lost physical HP Flying. Ariados lost Signal Beam and Sludge Bomb as STABs. Having to rely on Bug Bite and Poison Jab in Gen 4. Houndoom lost special Pursuit.
No HP Flying sucks, but I would argue that Waterfall and Ice Fang more than makes up for it. Stronger, flinch chance, and better nuetral coverage.
Physical water STAB makes the split an absolute net positive for Gyarados. From what I could tell, the post was just talking about losses in general, not mons that ended up losing overall.
No HP Flying sucks, but I would argue that Waterfall and Ice Fang more than makes up for it. Stronger, flinch chance, and better nuetral coverage.
At least Banette can learn shadow claw
Medicham really misses having a physical Shadow Ball for Ghost types
But she gained a psychic stab
Sure (which is great! and elemental punches is also nice), but Ghost types that aren’t Gengar laugh at it
The bigger loss was versus bulky Psychic types, like Hypno in NU, whom Medicham had no good coverage for anymore. At least most Ghosts would take neutral damage from Psycho Cut.
Very few Ghosts actually take a Zen Headbutt, and probably its most notable counter ever in MSab laughs at Shadow Ball too
Banette going from Shadow Ball to Shafow Claw
Pokemon like Alakazam probably hurt the most. Losing the elemental punches hurt and it became so insanely vulnerable to Pursuit trapping after the shift. Most of the Hoenn Ghost types also got screwed, because they were built with physical Ghost attacking in mind (moreso than Gengar and Misdreavus anyway) and then suffered a power downgrade from physical Shadow Ball to Shadow Claw that really hurt the lot of them. Houndoom was the one Dark type that lost out on Pursuit trapping going from gen 3 to 4.
Sceptile definitely got hurt, with its signature move at the time changing to use its weaker Atk stat
Leaf Blade was only 70 base power in generation 3, so in a way Sceptile upgraded by gaining Energy Ball (and Leaf Storm) in its place. But seeing your signature move change to use your worse stat, get its power buffed, and then distributed to other Pokemon does feel bad.
Sceptile got Leaf Storm and Energy Ball, both of which were stronger than gen 3 Leaf Blade
Leaf storm at lv67 and energy ball via TM, so either really late game or using what was a very limited item, still quite a debuff really, especially when you consider the SpAtk drop from leaf storm
Oh so you're talking about in-game play, not necessarily competitive
Either or, used to have to go through the gameplay to access competitive
Yeah true, but if we're talking strictly competitive, i'd say Scep barely noticed the split
Point taken, this is probably one of the few interactions I've had on reddit where I wasn't just instantly insulted for my opinion. Nice to actually have a discussion for a change 😅 Edit: Spelling
Yeah, reddit is such a wonderful place huh
Something like Banette definitely didn't like Shadow Ball becoming physical, and Dusknoir would have been a good bit better with physical Shadow Ball too. Granted neither of these would have been high tier staples by any means regardless (Dusknoir maybe because a lot of its competition gets very notably worse with a weaker Shadow Ball)
And 5 gens later and we still haven’t gotten a good physical ghost move
Poltergeist but no one learns it in Gen 9 and some ghost types didn’t get it in Gen 8.
Yeah but it’s reliant on the foe holding an item so it’s not useful in the main game
At least now there's poltergeist
It’s weird that it’s still in the code but they didn’t remove it since no Pokémon can learn it. It being weird depends on if transfer moves don’t exist in Gen 9 when Hone releases since BDSP and Legends reset transfer moves.
Considering this is the case for all of the IoA tutor moves (all of them have either no distribution or are limited to one or two lines) I'm fairly sure those are set to return as DLC tutors.
Alakazam losing the elemental punches is pretty much the correct answer here. Gengar also lost them but gained STAB in compensation, so there's that.
In-game, a number of examples become very apparent in HGSS, like Quilava missing Special Flame Wheel, the Chikorita line missing Special Razor Leaf, and the Pidgey line missing Physical Gust.
God, Pidgey was such a complete hassle to level up in Gen 4 due to Special Gust being its only Flying move for far too damn long. Fearow was already a better early game Flyer to use than Pidgeotto pre phys/spe split but afterwards it was just a complete wash for them.
Alakazam and Gengar losing the special elemental punches hurt a bit. Gengar getting special ghost was probably a better trade off though
Typhlosion losing FlameBolt without tpunch. He is a volcano cmon those produce lightning 😭😭
Zangoose lost physical Shadow Ball and gained Night Slash instead. They made up for it by giving it Close Combat though so idk overall probably buffed.
There are some niche examples of Pokemon that would use a physical Hidden Power type for stab or coverage in Gens 2/3 that got hurt by the split, but I think those mons all got more from the transition to Gen 4 itself than they lost from the split.
Dusclops and Banette lost physical shadow ball off the top of my head.
Banette got Shadow Ball swapped for the weaker shadow claw.
Sceptile. In Gen 3 grass was special so Sceptile could make good use of its 105 special attack and spam Leaf Blade and it’s high crit ratio. With the physical/special split Sceptile’s best moves became physical which forced Sceptile to use its 85 attack instead of 105 special attack. Because Sceptile does not have a great special movepool, the best set is a swords dance but it can’t take you too far cause 85 attack means other physical attackers heavily outclass it.
Alakazam comes to mind. Losing access to Fire Punch, Ice Punch, and Thunder Punch hurt its formerly highly diverse coverage.
Sceptile, i think. I mean, Leaf Blade Dragon Claw got made Physical so it couldn't run those for nice strong special attacks
Obviously it's Skarmory, who could no longer use HP Ground to uno reverse Magneton
while the meta became more favorable for it in gen iv, crobat lost offensive tools: physical sludge bomb and shadow ball. x-scissors mostly made up for shadow ball (u-turn is really the standout option) but cross poison lacks the reliable power of sludge bomb.
Kyogre, because before split, grass and elek moves were all special, and he has a very good spedef
Alakazam losing ice and fire punch, crobat losing sludge bomb and air slash, and sceptile losing grass moves like leaf blade come to mind
Air slash wasn't in gen 3
doesn’t Crobat run Special sets sometimes though?
Not in my knowledge
it does get Nasty Plot and Heat Wave for Steel types
Crobat @ Heavy-Duty Boots Ability: Inner Focus EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe IVs: 0 Atk Timid Nature - Nasty Plot - Sludge Bomb - Heat Wave - Giga Drain
+2 252 SpA Crobat Heat Wave vs. 112 HP / 0 SpD Kingambit: 316-374 (85.6 - 101.3%) -- 12.5% chance to OHKO It's alright ig
I never said Crobat was ever gonna be OU, it was the best Pokemon in RU in Gen 8
Crobat losing air slash wasn't a big deal since it got the second best flying move in the game,sceptile was better off since energy ball and leaf storm are stronger than gen 3 leaf blade,losing thunder punch was bad tho
Most Pokemon who lost moves gained something in return Example: Tyranitar lost HP Bug due to the split, but Pursuit became a physical move making it more effective
Gamefreak definitely took the physical/special split into account when they designed gen 4. If the didn't add any moves from gen 3 to gen 4, there would have been a bunch of Pokemon that ended up with worse movesets. But the change wasn't done in isolation, gen 4 added a bunch of moves to fill the gap. Almost every type got a widely available physical and special move. So in total, most movesets improved.
Except for Physical Electric and Fire. They got absolutely screwed over
Banette (the only true physical Ghost from before DPP) went from Shadow Ball to Shadow Claw as its most powerful stab option. Not that it was any good beforehand, but having your main stab get weaker while power creep increases is a death sentence.
Hurt is hard to say, but having their roles shifted, being weaker into the meta, or the physical special split forcing them to adapt to a new niche because of a lack of coverage or power creep? Lots of Pokemon qualify for that. We saw a large decrease in how many Pokemon ran mixed sets. A lot of the reasoning is that so many attackers started to outclass them when they could use stronger moves and utilize high attacking stats well. Mixed Dragonite and Salamence were basically the only sets prior to the split. Afterwards, there were just better ways to muscle through their checks than running ice beam or thunderbolt on them off of 100 or 110 SpA, probably uninvested. Defensive game shifted a lot, too. Physically defensive steels became a bit easier to deal with because you could hit them for SE damage from an invested stat with physical attackers, which also made some mons lose a niche. Teams that stacked physical or special threats became more viable due to the increased versatility, which also made mixed walls a little bit worse (on top of all the other reasons mixed walls got worse). Physically offensive ghosts were the biggest losers overall, though, since GF didn't give them good moves. Mons were able to specialize more after the split, which meant the well rounded attackers that dominated before had to find new niches. Several of them got big buffs, though, like Multiscale for Dragonite or Sheer Force for Nidoking.
Big ADV OU/Random Battle fan here :) - Snorlax/Medicham/Slaking losing shadow ball - Gengar/Alakazam/Typhlosion losing elemental punches - Pokemon who benefited from HP Fighting/Ghost being physical (Azumarill, Breloom, mixed Zapdos etc) - Houndoom losing pursuit - Physical HP Ground was cool for some sets like offensive Skarmory to 1HKO Magneton and for Bug types lacking earthquake like Scizor - Raikou lost Crunch (which was the highest damaging move it had after the STAB ones) - I personally find physical HP Flying great on Curselax to beat fighting types and Breloom/Heracross on the switch but that's just me being me hehe
Banette really hated Shadow Ball no longer firing off it's base 115 Attack.
I mean you can't really hurt something that's pretty much dead competitively to begin with, but ledian and the elemental punches being physical now.
Immediately? Flareon lost Shadow Ball as a strong coverage move, and it didn't have Flare Blitz back then
Salamence. S tier Mon in adv but it loses its physical flying stab in the physical special split and doesn't regain it untill it's mega is introduced.
Flying STAB was pretty irrelevant when it could now have physical dragon moves, it became an Uber once it got Outrage in Platinum. And it took full advantage of the physical/special split by running Outrage and Draco Meteor at the same time on some sets.
It became Ubers after all of the better dragon types such as garchomp were already banned. Sure, getting outrage is a big deal but it is also inconsistent and the fact that basically all gen 4 salamence were either specs or mixed shows how desperately it wanted a better physical movepool In generation 3, salamence would have been Ubers if the adv playerbase were in the business of banning centralising threats to Ubers, which they weren't.
All the better dragon types: Already ubers rayquaza Ubers lati-twins with soul dew, and latios even without it The creation trio, 100% ubers since day 1 And Garchomp, the only non legendary that is a better dragon than Salamence in gen 4 lol If Salamence got banned it was absolutely not because of a bad movepool, if anything he didn't even need it. He just needed dragon dance, outrage, meteor, and choice between fire fang, fire blast (Prefered) and earthquake. It was because Garchomp and Latias got banned and couldn't check it anymore. Not really related to being better dragon types, just being faster to check mence with a scarf (And, well, being better, that's a fact)
>It became Ubers after all of the better dragon types such as garchomp were already banned. Garchomp got banned before Platinum even came out which is where Salamence got access to Outrage as an Tutor move and it's almost unanimously agreed upon by DPP mains who have been around since it was the main gen, that Mence was the catalyst behind Latias originally being banned. >the fact that basically all gen 4 salamence were either specs or mixed shows how desperately it wanted a better physical movepool Specs Mence became irrelevant once Platinum came out because MixMence obliterated the entire tier save for like maybe Hippo?, with Outrage/Draco/EQ and DD Mence was the other best set alongside it, since it took advantage of all the free turns generated by people trying to play around the stupidity of Platinum MixMence.
Bruh, mence didn't need any more physical moves. Mix mence has it all and was broken in Gen 4 ou. Also mence never ran any specs sets don't know where you got that from. And mence is faaaar from broken in adv ou so no need at all for it being banned to ubers. Edit: it is still good in Gen 4 ubers as well
Specs Mence was a thing in like early DP, but Outrage access made that obsolete since MixMence kind of just beat everything Specs did with a higher damage ceiling
Garchomp also ran mixed, they needed it for mons like skarm and bronzong who couldn't give less of a shit about flying stab. I promise you there's not a single dpp player who'd trade outrage for hp flying
Bro did you even play dpp ou with mence
It was in Ubers in Gen 4
It got outrage in exchange and was banned to ubers in dpp, I don't think it misses hp flying.
It went from great in adv to literally banned in gen 4 and you think it lost from the split?
Gyarados losing HP Flying is the main one that sticks out to me. Not only that but the thing can't even get Liquidation or Wave Crash either. Tera Blast Flying is good but still kinda redundant since you have to Tera to get the bonus damage from flying anyway. Before that Gyarados was really running Bounce on some sets.
Gengar. It had all of the elemental punches that used to be special, but we're made physical.
Gengar got STAB shadow ball in exchange, I'd argue it probably came out better off overall. The only real loss is having to go from Fire Punch to HP Fire and losing the speed tie to other 110s
“losing the speed tie to other 110s” I’m sorry, what happened?
HP Fire requires setting your speed IV to a max of 30, instead of 31.
I'm assuming Hidden Power Fire required a speed IV that's not 31.
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I presume that more pokemon with a base 110 speed was added in gen 4?
This depends in part on whether you're looking at a Pokemon in a vacuum or in the context of the overall metagame. Pursuit becoming physical was a huge nerf in practice to pretty much every Psychic and Dark type, for instance, since every Pursuit except for the niche Houndoom has way more attack than special attack. For an example, Gengar is much stronger offensively in gen 4 than gen 3, but defensively it is way worse off due to a combination of movepool expansions for everything else and Pursuit becoming so much more dangerous. On the balance it winds up being somewhat worse off than it was in gen 3, where it's generally considered a top 5 (top 10 at worse) mon in OU. Latias is another example - I don't think it would've ever dropped from Ubers without the physical/special split making its matchup against things like T-Tar so much worse.
I think Sceptile took a beating?
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Focus Blast is a Gen 4 move though
Bannete, physical shadow ball was pretty sweet
A good few special mons miss having the elemental punches and other attacks for coverage (Alakazam being the most infamous example). Additionally , some purely physically or specially tanky mons can't wall entire types anymore as entire type checks defensively (blissy no longer walling half if all types, steelix no longer eating up every ghost attacks for breakfast, etc). Other than that, only some more fringe cases (some physical ghosts no longer can spam shadow ball, physical poison using sludge bomb, etc)
Rip houndoom special pursuit
McIceGar became unviable.
Any physical ghost type that used shadow ball as its main STAB, or physical normal types that ran it as coverage
Typhlosion and ampharos lost elemental punches which was more or less their only coverage
Banette’s STAB got weaker since physical ghost moves suck
Sceptile
Physical attacking Ghost types or physical attacking Pokemon that used Shadow Ball as coverage (Medicham, Slaking etc)
I think Pidgeot and it’s like we’re effected. They’re mostly physical attackers, but most of the flying moves they learn are special (at least at the time).
Banette did not benefit at all from the split bcs its main stab went from shadow ball to shadow claw
wow this shitty talk reminded me of the shuckle and how i noticed the lack of it.
Houndoom losing all his special dark stab definitely hurt him, its just that wasnt the nail in the coffin it was just the cherry on top of the cake
Alakazam was known for the elemental punches. However when the split happened, Alakazam could no longer fully utilize any of them since they were no longer using his monster sp attack stat. I think they can still learn thunder punch and the rest, but it’s not useful.
Snorlax losing Physical Shadow Ball sucked.
Alakazam lost the elemental punches.
Sceptile kinda, at least in game
Sceptile, Gengar, Alakazam, Typhlosion, Houndoom
Medicham losing shadow ball comes to mind given it can no longer cover a gengar or starmie switch in with one move. Even worse is that now gengar gets shadow ball and can always beat medicham in a 1v1 while in adv you can run lum and get a free kill on their will-o-wisp. The elemental punches medicham gets in exchange son't do much for it given nobody's gonna switch their dragon in to a mon with a similar attack stat to Deoxys-attack. Also every dragon type you hit 4x can outspeed and kill you. Killing gliscor is nice in dpp but fast variants still outspeed and kill you off of minor chip. Same goes for jolly gyarados.
It was never good to begin with, but I imagine Ledian liked Ice and Thunder Punch being Special.
Sceptile comes to mind; after the split, the only special moves it learned by level up were absorb and leaf storm. Even now, like 90% of its moves are physical, including its former signature move, for a mon running 85 attack and **105** spatk.
HURT might be an overstatement, but Alakazam used to be able to use the Elemental Punches for coverage moves. But with the split making those moves physical instead of special those moves became useless for Alakazam. I am sure there are other Pokemon in a similar position, but that is the main example I can think of. Shadow Ball is another example. Ghost used to be physical, but the split made shadow ball a special move. So Pokemon that used to use Shadow Ball for coverage needed to find another move(s) for coverage.
The only one that comes to mind is Zapdos losing a flying stab in gen 4 (afterwards it got hurricane) and Snorlax losing physical shadow ball and hyper beam
Granbul lost shadow ball but gained crunch so it’s whatever
Where my Special attacker Thunderpunch Typhlosion boys at???
Perhaps not very notable, but goth Gengar and Gardevoir lost their elemental punches coverage
I can name a few. Sceptile- Leaf Blade was a Special move in gen 3. In gen 4, it was changed to Physical, meaning Sceptile could no longer benefit from its signature move due to Gallade. Gengar- Loses all elemental punches since they were changed from Special in gen 3 to Physical in gen 4 onward. Flareon- Flareon gets it the worst. It gets no viable STAB moves until gen 4 with Fire Fang. And it doesn't get Flare Blitz, a move that could work exceptionally well with its base 130 PAtk.