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Did the dragon type need balancing?
From what I understand, the Fairy type was introduced to balance out the disproportionately powerful dragon type. But did it really need balancing? I thought the introduction of steel and dark type was a great decision because the psychic type was seriously out of balance in Gen I. But the dragon type...I don't know. The dragon type is really really powerful, but I think it was already balanced by the fact that dragon types are really rare, and they all level up and evolve really slowly, so they're difficult to train. So when you took the effort to raise a dragon type, it was well worth it, because it's such an effective type with lots of resistances and few weaknesses. Now...it seems like they've been severely demoted. But now, what good is it busting your butt to bring a Dratini to level 55 to get a Dragonite, only for it to get it's butt whipped by a fairy O_O?
What do you think? Did the dragon type need balancing? Do you feel that the introduction of the fairy type added any necessary balance? Discuss! |
i think it wasnt necessarily an advance towards dragons but rather, a revolution for the weaker types and pokemon. From what I've seen, steel types took a harder blow by having some resistances removed - reducing their ability to tank so effectiely. Dragons, on the other hand, while being weak to a new type could still potentially sweep those pokemon before they get swept by them. Heck, they could even take a full hit without fainting. Dragons are still as powerful as they were; and what we are only seeing here is a new bunch of pokemon taking a stand against them.
Competitively speaking, I just hope anyone doesn't have a full team of dragons. Even gods fall, as they say. |
Dragons are not that rare, they really haven't been for a long time. Consider the moves for the types though, fairy types are more effect moves, few damage moves, and thus add more strategy to the battles again, something that was starting to fade. So fairy balances out dragon in more ways than just damage.
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Most types generally have three to four weaknesses. Ground is super-effective against water, grass, and ice; ice-types are weak against fire, fighting, rock, and steel; and steel has weaknesses against fighting-, fire-, and ground-types. Dragon-type Pokémon, on the other hand, only had two weaknesses. It was super-effective against ice and dragon itself. To make dragon a little less overpowered, one of the best ways was to make it weak against another type. To be honest, I'm happy with their decision. Dragon Pokémon may be slightly uncommon compared to the rest, but that definitely isn't a good reason to make them stronger (even a bit). d:
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Well, yeah. Like the previous have stated, Dragon types aren't rare nowadays, so a Fairy type was necessary. Pretty much many dragon types have or been in three stages or are legendaries. Fairy type pretty much balanced the Steel, Dragon, Poison, and Dark types. Dragon and Steel became to offensive and defensive respectively. Steel actually had two of it's resistances taken out (dark and ghost) and replaced with Fairy. Dark and Poison became kind of stayed the same because Steel is no longer resistant to it, but it is weak to Fairy. In order to make Fairy the nest Dragon, they made it so Steel was super effective on it. What makes this new type more interesting is that pokemon that were rarely used now stand a chance to people who carry these Dragons.
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Fairy Type was a horrible addition that only brings 1 positive to the competitive field and that's an increase to Poison type's powers. Though this added strength means absolutely nothing as the Pokemon are still pathetically weak. Dark and Fighting didn't need more weaknesses. Bug didn't need to be resisted by another type, and Dragon certainly didn't need another weakness or immunity against them. Steel should still resist Ghost and Dark since it still plays with the mythos that Fairy Types carry since Steel/Iron/Metal has always been a sign of holy weapon against creatures of magic and shadow. All Gamefreak needed to do was give better move coverage to older Pokemon, changed the stats as they did do in X and Y but to a higher level to make the weaker ones that were in need of a competitive boost a viable power against the Pokemon that were on the top. That brings in to the overall complaint. People keep *****ing about how stale and drab the battles were, but then they'd use all the same tactics that everyone else used, wouldn't even try to come up with more counters to try and change the teams, or do anything worth merit other than open their mouths and complain about why they can't win because everyone used the same things, no one had an original thought, or they were just to lazy to do any work to try and change the battle scene. They could have weakened the power of Dragon attacks, given Ice a defensive boost and given them resistance to Dragon, as well as redistribute the high end Dragon's stats to give them less effective damage, though that seems a bit out of the way as they are supposed to be powerful. Though even on official tournaments, the high placing players barely even used dragon types on their teams with an exception to 3 pokemon in general as all I usually saw repeating was Garchomp and the Lati-twins. You'd have occasional dragons show up, same reoccuring ones, over and over in the lower ranks, but the higher teams had more team strategy than simply relying on a Dragon type to push them through. Fairies are pretty much on the same level as Poison and Ice stat wise. They aren't much better than the two, are both just as brittle and easy to take out, even with resisted defenses, unless they are Carbink and Klefki who both seem to be illegitimate children of Shuckle with better HP. Best attackers (Non-Legend) seem to be Togekiss and Azumarill. Gardevoir is nice but needs her Mega for some battles otherwise she's about as frail as she was in the past with a common weakness to Steel, a comical weakness to a type she's been strong against for 4 generations, and keeps her Ghost Weakness, while now taking neutral damage from Bug and Dark, but can still take severe damage from a Dark type attack. They were an unneeded change to the game, but not an unwanted one. They could have done so much more without the need to add another weakness, though that still is not going to stop Dragon Types since they can just swipe a lot of fairies to the side with altered moveset to include Steel and or Poison attacks. Some can do just as much damage with Earthquake alone and wouldn't even need Steel/Poison attacks. Dragon's weren't overpowered, just overused. Their prowess is grossly exaggerated otherwise Lance and Drake would have been impossible to beat even in game without the use of Dragon Types yourself. /rant |
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I think that Game Freak was overestimating Dragons when they said that Fairy type was introduced to deal with them. Dragons aren't that hard to kill; I should know, they're my favorite type. Look at some of the most commonly used Dragons(ignoring the new ones and the uber ones): Dragonite, Salamence, Garchomp, Hydreigon, Haxorus. The first 3 can easily be killed with an Ice attack. That's half the reason why I have a Mamoswine with Ice Shard, to quickly dispatch those 3. Hydreigon is weak to common Fighting attacks, and Haxorus is frail. I don't mind Fairy being supereffective against Dragon, but why the hell does it have to be IMMUNE to Dragon attacks? They should've just made it resist Dragon moves.
Fortunately, Fairy isn't OP like I feared it would be. So I will still put a Dragon on each of my teams. In regards to the type chart changes, I don't understand why they said Dragon was OP, but then didn't give Electric (the only type with one weakness) another weakness, and why they took away Steel's resistance to Ghost, which makes it so only 1 type resists Ghost: Dark (creating a similar situation to how only Steel used to resist Dragon). Ok, Normal's immune to Ghost, but how many Normal types are used in competitive play? |
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I think Fairy type hurt Dark and Fighting types more than it did Dragon types.
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Fairy is not about balancing out just dragon types, as I said, based on the move sets and abilities, it's more to balance out everything and draw players into more strategic play. Also, Clefairy demanded there needed to be a fairy type, and no one wants her to get her bigger brother, now do you? |
I don't think Dragons needed balancing. Many of them already have 4x weakness to ice, and in my oponion Dragons should be pretty OP since... well, they're dragons! It just doesn't make sense to me that a flower would be able to one-shot a Hydreigon.
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My point was, if they were only packed with a type resistance against dragons, a fairy-type pokemon in your team will not help against -literally- anything at all (given it's type advantages and disadvantages). Their existence will just be thrown right off the window. Having that immunity hardly affected the meta's flow, but it did give the inferior new-types a favor - if one free switch/turn in the battle means anything at all, that is. The sense behind that so-called "balancing" is there. It's not about the dragons, it's about the fairies being severely vulnerable. |
In my opinion, yes. They were one of the best offensive AND defensive typings in the series, and not to mention they always had very high stats. I'm glad that we have the Fairy-type to neutralize them.
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So, as a result, Dragon became the modern-day Psychic-type. As one knows, Psychic was heavily overpowered in 1st Gen because there was very little that could counter them, so that led to Dark and Steel-types coming in. The competitive metagame became so overcentralized on Dragons, Game Freak had to find a way to nerf them and hence Fairy-type was born, which has a complete immunity to Dragon attacks meaning there will finally be less Outrage spam. Most Fairy-type Pokemon and moves may be more built for support but there's a fair share of strong ones like Gardevoir, Azumarill, Togekiss, Sylveon and Xerneas. And not to mention how awesome Mawile became by now having one of the best defensive type combinations possible, which it shares with newcomer Klefki. So, my conclusion is that, despite Fairy-types mostly having average base stats, the Dragon-types getting balanced by the Fairy-types was definitely a good move by Game Freak. |
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I always thought it was awesome that dragon types were only weak against each other. It's like they are so awesome, only a dragon can beat another dragon. Like only a ninja can sneak up on another ninja.
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I don't think they needed to introduce the Fairy Type to balance out Dragons, as they weren't to much of a threat to begin with (In game). Being you got used to taking them out against Lance in the First Gen. His phrase of "virtually indestructible" still makes me laugh. Yet I do like the concept of a new type simply to add more to the game, especially now that certain Pokemon like Gardevoir and Mawile are now better yet.
I've been playing Pokemon since the original release of the first Gen, as they were my first gameboy games, and I'm just now starting to be able to battle real people, and therefore am learning, just how bad I am at the games. I am yet to win against a RL trainer, haha. |
The new fairy type was a much needed addition when you really think about it. Dragons needed something other than themselves and Ice that was super effective against them. And the flip side Steel needed something else it was useful against as well. Also Fairy kinda fills in the 'light' type people always used for fakemon, Japanese Fairies have a more Angelic feel than western fairies normally do. So logically it counteracts the dark 'evil' type.
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I agree with this, I really liked that idea in the older games. I haven't played XY yet but I feel like fairy is a cool addition but electric types need nerfing more than dragons do. The only thing that gets electric types is ground. Which means you have something like Eelektross with levitate and voila - a pokemon with no weaknesses. The only thing that really catches Electric types out is their (mostly) crappy defenses. But then to make matters worse, the majority of them have Static. Seriously, there's nothing more annoying. Dragons are, for the most part, brute strength. what kills it is that Dragons and ice types are pretty rare to find, which makes it brilliant to come up against one! Ok, so the fairy type has added a new "balance" to the table, but As far as I'm concerned types shouldn't be balanced to the same extent. We need types that are stables as crappy ones, dammit! |
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Dragons felt indestructible in the first gen because of how scarce Pokemon that carried their weakness was. I struggled a lot on Lance and would frequently get frustrated after having tried so hard to beat the rest of the Elite Four only to lose on him. Even though Fairies are portrayed as these ultimate dragon slayers, the fact of the matter is they balance things for other types too (Fighting/Dark types having another weakness, giving Steel/Poison another type to actually be effective against, and so on). I like 'em. |
Staying on topic: No... Dragons were actually very easy to kill if you hit them fast and hard. Ice Beam was generally my staple move to elinimate any dragons I ran into up to Gen IV, but I kept Ice Punch and Dragon Pulse users on-hand in Gen V, especially in BW2's PWT. However, the Fairy-type offers some greater options aside from being immune to Dragon-type attacks. For instance, Gardevoir is suddenly usable again since its new Fairy-type attributes nullify a lot of Dark-type and Bug-type attacks that would've otherwise instantly KO'ed it in the previous gens (it may not have practical use in competitive battling, but this is a blessing for in-game battles).
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I'm more of the mindset that dragons got to big and too powerful.
Let me put it this way - Outrage. In previous gens, it seemed like thats all a dragon needed to do to win. All Moxie Mence needs to do is kill a guy, and it's pretty much over. There's moves like Outrage though.. Petal Dance, Thrash etc.. but those have hard counters. You got ghosts and poison/flying types there to resist that stuff.. sure, you have steel types that can sort of stand up to a dragon's onslaught.. but thats all they do. A good majority of them don't even have the means to dish out damage, so it's really more a matter of time before a dragon overpowers it. You got an Ice type to kill a dragon? Good luck with that. You want to bring your dragon on another dragon's outrage? Not going to get far. Thats what I like about Fairy type. I would LOVE to just Petal Dance my opponents to death with my Venusaur, but I can't. Dragon's shouldn't have the ability to do it either because then the game becomes broken. That being said, I don't see the Fairy type as a nuetering of the once mighty dragons.. it just means the people who rely on nothing but outrage to carry them need to be a bit more careful about what they do.. because it's not going to work as well anymore. Simular thing happened to Pyschic type back in the day. |
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On the note about dragons (not directed to anyone), they sure are a "superior" species, given their unwavering overall base stats and offensive moves, i'll give them that... but they still are (and should be) as vulnerable as any type. I don't think gamefreak has to make an exception. They used to be -and still quite are- the "brutes" of the game. Very little strategy was needed to actually "make them work". Perhaps a single type can change that - and I would find that pulling me back to OUs and battling with/against them once again. Got too bored of the cliched OU battles in the past years, to be honest =/ Once again, not going pro or anti-dragons/fairies. Just think that everything's still pretty balanced so far, no big deal. |
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Non-legend Dragons are sort off unbalanced in that, statwise, they equal or compete most legendaries. Half of the pseudo legends(w/ BST 600) are dragon types so it adds to my point. Fairy-type shouldn't have been announced to counter them, but if not, what can? Sure there is Ice to fight them and Steel to resist them, but most dragons are able to carry Flamethrower and Steel-types are mostly Specially weak. Both Ice and Steel are slow, and so is Fairy, but it can take a Flamethrower, or two. |
Dragon-Types were originally meant to be super powerful, and even when they added the new types into Gen II the only weaknesses that Dragon-Types have are Ice and Dragon. Now, seriously that's a little overpowered. Don't forget that many Dragon-Types are legendaries, and lots are psuedo. Now, the stats would be immense. I'd understand if Dragon was meant for legendaries only; but quite a lot of Pokémon have the typing, so it was kinda strong.
But with the addition of the Fairy-Type in X/Y, Dragon-Types have been nerfed. Personally, I think they needed this. Now many people are saying Fairy is OP, but seriously it's not. If a Dragon-Type is carefully EV trained, it could stand out most Fairy attacks. Also mentioning that there is only a few strong Fairy-Type moves, such as Moonblast. |
Dragons did need to be balanced as they could just use fore/fight/ground moves to get pass their steel resistant.
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The fact that they could hit everything except Steel-types for neutral damage with 120/140 base power moves in the form of Outrage and Draco Meteor (before the DM nerf), combined with Earthquake and Fire Blast for perfect coverage on everything, was ridiculous. No other type matched the offensive prowess of the Dragon-type, aside from maybe Water and Fire in their respective weathers (but there were Pokemon that were immune to them). Switching into powerful dragons like Salamence, Garchomp, Latios, Hydreigon, etc. was (and probably still is) a guessing game when battling against a good player. There were no reliable methods of switching in for a good chunk of them. Does this mean the Dragon-type should be nerfed? Maybe, but competitive Pokemon in general is so unbalanced nowadays that even a new type won't come close to fixing all of its problems. The Fairy-type is better than nothing, though.
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Creating weaker Dragon types would be loathsome due to its main archetype as lightning bruisers, so giving them another weakness was their only choice to balance them. Archetypes are an important factor for game balance, which is why Electric's status as fragile speedsters allowed them to have only one weakness.
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Dragons needed to be heavily nerfed because of their advantage over almost every type in the game. You know about the insanely diverse movepools, fantastic base stats rivaled by no other type and only one resistance to Dragon type moves, Steel. Besides Metagross and a few others, Steel types weren't used much because of their common weaknesses.
GF aimed to make their metagame a little more strategic than battles with 13 year olds and their Outrage Garchomps. I'll admit I've used at least one Dragon in nearly every team I made, so of course Fairy type was necessary. The Fairy type is obviously a work in progress, there are only a few Fairies that are regularly used. Look at Pokemon like Azumarill with that Belly Drum/Aqua Jet set, and the annoying Sylveon stall sets. To use these correctly, players now need to use more strategy, the goal of GF's metagame. TLDR: Fairy type was needed, Dragons were so overpowered in the previous gens. I don't like the new Fairy pokemon but I'm in favor of their Dragon-nerfing purpose. |
Generally speaking, I like the idea of a new type that counters the Dragon type but I'm not totally satisfied with how it was done.
When the people of Game Freak noted how OP the Dragon type was, they seemed to overlook just how weak the Ice type is defensively..... I think that in setting up the Fairy type the way they did, they made the Steel type even more OP than before, even with the resistances to Ghost and Dark cleared. Not only are Steel attacks super effective against Fairy types, Steel is the unique type that resists both of the Fairy type's weaknesses, and with the Ice type being weak to Steel and not getting any additional resistances, and the Fairy type providing competition with Ice types to serve as Dragon counters, this change served to further marginalize Ice type Pokémon ._. I mean, why didn't they make Ice resist Water at least? I think that a better way would be to clear the Steel type's resistances to Dragon and Psychic attacks in addition to Ghost and Dark and make Ice types resist Dragon, Water and possibly Ground attacks so that Ice types would have some defensive utility and they could better serve to counter Dragon types and the Steel type wouldn't be so OP ;) |
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Revising the type chart is one solution (which I'm still desperately looking forward to for grass-types) to this problem; and, as mentioned above, creating (competitively) better pokemon under those types is another. I'd have to admit, the former can cause more harm than good, but both have already worked well in the past. I'll just wait for Gamefreak to make their move... hopefully. |
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