The pressure's on!

A handful of legendary Pokemon have 'Pressure' as their first and default ability. I personally think they should have gotten signature abilities. Their hidden abilities sound like they should be their default or at least second set ability.
What do you trainers think? Are you happy with them exerting pressure, or would you rather them having a different ability in battle?

O07_eleven said:

I wouldn't mind Entei, Raikou, Suicune and maybe the birds getting Flash Fire, Volt Absorb and Water Absorb respectively.

Click to expand...

Raikou, Entei and Suicune have Volt Absorb, Water Absorb and Flash Fire as their 'Hidden' abilities (Dreamworld), these abilities are examples of a more suited default ability instead of Pressure. Why they have been set as hidden abilities instead of default, I'm not sure...

To prevent overpowering a legendary Pokemon with a signature ability, much thought would be put into the ability, or it could be just the same as another ability with a different name. An example of this is Mold Breaker and Teravolt.

Some, but not all. Pressure's fine as it is for others *cough*mewtwo*cough*, as they already have the stats to make Pressure a reasonable ability for them.

I myself would think that an ability like Intimidate or something similar is good enough as replacement to the common pressure.

It is, generally, useless; so yes, something actually relevant to each species would be nicer, but I don't know if it would be better. I expect that Pressure is meant to be generally useless in order to offset high stats. If battles routinely lasted longer, Pressure's increase in usefulness would be proportionate to the increase in battle length. I'd personally rather go with that, ie. changing the situation to match the ability, instead of vice versa, since I feel battles in Pokemon are too short anyway.

I think that they should have different abilities. It is just sooooo boring. ANd not even useful in-game. Hoenn legendaries were a step in the right direction. Drizzle, Drought and Air Lock were so cool. I loved having little personalised abilities that reflected the Pokemon's power. Then suddenly, Gen IV...

Palkia, Dialga AND Giratina??? Are you joking Game Freak. You should have given them cool abilities. Like let Dialga time-travel back one move or something. And let Palkia switch out without losing a turn (like some sort of spacial teleport thing). THAT would have been cool.

Given how intimidating these guys are, I definitely think Pressure is a cool ability. Would have been nice if we had more varieties with legendary abilities though, since they could have been a lot more unique with 'em. Would've been cool if they had legend-only abilities specific to that Pokemon.

Like Cirno said, most of the legendaries on the list that don't have alternate DW abilities are generally quite intimidating for anything to go up against! Imagine sending out a caterpie against that big bad giratina and it feeling not even a bit scared haha. It's not a bad one too, since watching your opponent waste precious PP (especially concerning the use of Extremespeed in ubers) trying to take your overbearing legendary can be helpful in some situations, and Zapdos/Ho-oh have had very successful sets in the past abusing this. But dressing up the name a bit to reflect the personality of the pokemon a bit, much like the teravolt vs mold breaker example used earlier. And on some of them (Deoxys hi, Birds hi, Dogs hi) it just doesn't fit at all xD

Cassino said:

It is, generally, useless; so yes, something actually relevant to each species would be nicer, but I don't know if it would be better. I expect that Pressure is meant to be generally useless in order to offset high stats. If battles routinely lasted longer, Pressure's increase in usefulness would be proportionate to the increase in battle length. I'd personally rather go with that, ie. changing the situation to match the ability, instead of vice versa, since I feel battles in Pokemon are too short anyway.

Click to expand...

I don't think Pressure is all that useless. Lugia and Giratina are good users of this ability; given their high defensive stats, they can easily PP stall most attackers.

Anyway, I think that Pressure suits each of the legendaries quite nicely, though the legendary beasts are better off with their DW abilities as their default abilities, IMO.

Pressure is quite a fitting ability for many of them, and while it's not a amazing ability in the main games, Mystery Dungeon on the other hand...

PP Stalling is a pretty lame strategy. I don't like how Pressure is spammed on lots of legendaries.

But then again, you'll notice that a lot of abilities get spammed like this. Notice how many grass types get Chlorophyll, regardless of whether they'd make a good sun sweeper. Or rock types with Sturdy. Or starters with "in a pinch" abilities. So for me, it's not the fact that legendaries all get boring ol' pressure that specifically bothers me, but the fact that nearly all pokemon get generic abilities based on their categories.

I wish they'd gradually introduce more special abilities to the extent that they're exclusive to a few number of pokemon. A good example would be what they did with Clefable: in gen3, she was one of the many pink-normals who got Cute Charm ability, yet in gen4, she got an exclusive ability all to herself, Magic Guard. Not only did this really fit her, but it gave her a reason to be used. Same thing goes for things like Machamp... like many fighting types, he was spammed with Guts ability, yet gen4 gave him the exclusive ability No Guard, giving him a strategy unique to himself. (These abilities were late branched out to a few other pokemon, but that's perfectly fine, so long as it isn't just a long list of similar pokemon with the same abilities.)

Trainer_Altair brought up how some legendaries have cloned abilities with a prettified name, such as Teravolt just being a special-name for Mold Breaker. Even if Gamefreak can't think of so many abilities for different pokemon, I would much rather see this.