Why does Onix have such a low HP?

Interesting. Onix is one of the biggest Pokemon in the Dex. It's a massive snake made of rock. It has solid defense - I can accept that. It's quite slow, which also makes sense. BUT the HP is absolutely ridiculous. Just under 300 HP at level 100.

Shouldn't he have around 400-500 HP? At least 400 seems reasonable. I know they wanted to balance it out, but instead of being overpowered, Onix is extremely underpowered. It can't survive a water gun because of it's low spc defense and double typing.

Any hints on this?

Well i'm going to guess that it's because two of the first Gym Leaders in the games (Brock in Kanto and Roark in Sinnoh) use it, and the former has it as his ace. If they gave it too much HP it might have proved to be more of a concern to take. Kinda like how Roark's Cranidos has so much Attack but weak defenses.

What he said is probably true. ^

The developers are trying to make it easy for the people playing as they assume that they're still new to the game.

I agree with all those reasons stated above. Aside from those, however, I really have no clue. Whenever looking it Onix, I'm sure many of us would instantly think it's meant to be bulky and whatnot primarily due to its size, and due to this, it's rather surprising to see the Pokémon have this low of HP.

I think the bigger question is why does Onix have such low Attack. You'd think that a giant rock snake would be able to hit harder than a butterfly or a tiny bird, but its stats say differently.

And, while you could say that Onix was meant to be an early game boss, remember that they also gave Bruno of the Elite Four not one, but two, of these things, which helped make him one of the biggest pushovers ever.

I never thought of this actually, perhaps due to the fact that the high Defense stat makes up for the lack of HP. It's also likely that an evolution was initially planned for Onix but wasn't introduced until Generation II along with the Steel-type. Steelix seems to have more of a reasonable HP stat.

[FONT=&quot]I guess Onix is quite common as well so maybe they didn't want to make it to powerful.

Also maybe its rock structure is weak and easily eroded?[/FONT]