Improve-a-Pokémon (Suggest stat spreads for Fire/Fighting Arcanine now!)

[wolf]

Improve-a-Pok?mon (Suggest stat spreads for Fire/Fighting Arcanine now!)

Improve-a-Pok?mon

Well hello there everybody! Welcome to Improve-a-Pok?mon, presented by Archy and wolf. The idea behind this event is to improve a Pok?mon and add a new version of it to the battle server for everyone to try. The Pok?mon's ability, moves, stats, and overall strategy are going to be enhanced to make it more viable for competitive play. To conserve time we will have to start with a poll using the nominations from this thread. We also have to drop the possibility of type changes due to time constraints. This event will run until the end of GT14 (11:59 PM ET on July 22nd). Note that we may have this event run longer than the GT if we encounter too many issues.

Event Schedule

- Event starts, Pok?mon poll starts
- Poll ends after 2 days, ability & movepool discussion starts
- Ability & movepool discussion ends after 3 days, ability & movepool poll starts
- Poll ends after 2 days, stat discussion starts
- Stat discussion ends after 2 days, stat poll starts
- Stat poll ends after 2 days
- Pok?mon is complete!​

"Discussion" is essentially the nomination phase. Suggest anything during then to see it in the next poll. Additional moves will have to be grouped with your ability suggestions. You can suggest multiple versions of these.​

CSS by Archy

 

[gimmepie]

Castform and Flygon are doing well so far. This pleases me.

 

[TheLegendaryGuy]

Oh crap! Flygon is in par with Arcanine. Come on, Arcanine.

 

[Del]

Arcanine is the one for sure!

 

[blue]

From that line-up it definitely has to be Flygon.

 

[Mister Coffee]

Come on Arcanine! I so want to see a new move pool for him!

 

[Abby]

So it seems there's two clear favourites...
Good thing I didn't vote for either ^^

 

[wolf]

There were 3 Pokemon tied with each other: Arcanine, Flygon, and Sandslash. I used an RNG to pick one, and it chose Arcanine!

Now then, please suggest ability and move combos for Arcanine! e.g. Sheer Force w/ Bolt Strike, Sheer Force w/ Bulldoze, Sheer Force w/ Bolt Strike and Bulldoze, and so on. You don't need to list each option individually, we can do it ourselves in the poll. You are allowed to create your own abilities and moves. Try to keep them balanced though. Also keep in mind that we can always revisit these changes in a later IaP project.

My suggestions would be Tough Claws or Rock Head. Arcanine would still have survivability issues with Tough Claws, but with it Arcanine becomes a much better breaker. It'd be able to 2HKO stuff like Slowbro easily. On the other hand, Rock Head helps with survivability, but Arcanine would continue to have issues with Stealth Rock damage. Arcanine doesn't need any additional moves to be honest. Recover would be nice, but I'm not sure if it fits well with Arcanine's design.

 

[Caaethil]

I've written this post out a few times and I'm just gonna skip the "I vote Rock Head" thing and say what I really think. Leave the abilities and the moves. It feels a bit silly to vote on them because they aren't what's holding Arcanine back. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a discussion on why Arcanine is weak before we talk about changes? Imo we should spend a couple of days discussing the problems with Arcanine and why Arcanine isn't OU, then go with changes.

I believe Arcanine's issues are stats and typing. If I have to vote on an ability, Rock Head. If I can vote for nothing, I'm doing that. Intimidate is a perfectly valid ability, it gives Arcanine a bit more bulk to switch into things, and Flash Fire is the same. If you want to just turn Arcanine into a super powerful Fire type to dominate OU, sure, change everything, but I'm not sure its for the best. Sure, he doesn't have the best abilities, but he can be OU with them. We should focus on patching up what is keeping him out or else we'll just have a boring Pokemon which doesn't seem like the original. What we want is to improve Arcanine, it should still feel familiar. I don't think we should be changing everything.

Sorry if I got some stuff wrong here, I'm not actually that well versed in the metagame. Just my thoughts.

 

[Aurora]

Tough Claws
One of Arcanine's issues is the fact that offensive sets are outclassed by Entei, as Entei is faster, bulkier, and stronger than Arcanine. Tough Claws remedies this issue somewhat by boosting the power of every move offensive Arcanine uses, such as Extreme Speed, Flare Blitz, Wild Charge, Close Combat, and Crunch, by 1.3x. Fortuitously for Arcanine, this boost stacks with Life Orb, making Arcanine an obscenely powerful wallbreaker. Suddenly, Arcanine's Wild Charge can now 2HKO the most physically defensive of regular Slowbro, while Extreme Speed is boosted to the extent where Arcanine can act as a fantastic revenge killer. Even the humble Stunfisk, which, while not viable in OU, completely walls normal offensive Arcanine, is now easily 2HKOed by Flare Blitz. Tough Claws is better than Reckless because it boosts all of Arcanine's physical moves... not to mention that it boosts them to a greater extent than Reckless (1.2x vs. 1.3x). It is also better than Rock Head as Arcanine is not exactly the sturdiest Pokemon, meaning the benefits of incurring no recoil damage from its moves are outweighed by the negatives of losing switch-in opportunities afforded by Intimidate or Flash Fire.

Of course, Tough Claws is balanced out by the fact that Arcanine's recoil moves now kill it much more quickly due to their increased damage output. Furthermore, it does nothing to solve Arcanine's issue with every entry hazard, particularly Stealth Rock.

 

[Desert Stream~]

I've written this post out a few times and I'm just gonna skip the "I vote Rock Head" thing and say what I really think. Leave the abilities and the moves. It feels a bit silly to vote on them because they aren't what's holding Arcanine back. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a discussion on why Arcanine is weak before we talk about changes? Imo we should spend a couple of days discussing the problems with Arcanine and why Arcanine isn't OU, then go with changes.

I believe Arcanine's issues are stats and typing. If I have to vote on an ability, Rock Head. If I can vote for nothing, I'm doing that. Intimidate is a perfectly valid ability, it gives Arcanine a bit more bulk to switch into things, and Flash Fire is the same. If you want to just turn Arcanine into a super powerful Fire type to dominate OU, sure, change everything, but I'm not sure its for the best. Sure, he doesn't have the best abilities, but he can be OU with them. We should focus on patching up what is keeping him out or else we'll just have a boring Pokemon which doesn't seem like the original. What we want is to improve Arcanine, it should still feel familiar. I don't think we should be changing everything.

Sorry if I got some stuff wrong here, I'm not actually that well versed in the metagame. Just my thoughts.

Rock head would probably put it in the OU teir. It has lot of recoil moves. Also tough claws could be a good ability.

 

[Caaethil]

Rock head would probably put it in the OU teir. It has lot of recoil moves. Also tough claws could be a good ability.

Arcanine has a lot of good qualities, and his abilities are one of his better aspects. Sure we can just give him a super overpowered ability and that'll make up for all his other issues, but that feels less like improving Arcanine and more like just turning Arcanine into anotherpowerful Fire type. It feels kind of lazy to me. Arcanine's abilities are one of his strongest points.

Here's what I would do to Arcanine:

Bump up its Speed, for a start. It's just holding back the poor guy so much and it makes it a lot harder for him to be a threat. Maybe give it a bit more bulk, though his abilities already help with this somewhat.

Change its typing to take neutral Stealth Rock, too. Fire/Steel doesn't really make sense, and I'm assuming flavour is something we want to factor in (i.e. he's not getting hydro pump).

Fire/Ground has potential, the trade-off being a 4x Water weakness, but that's all it loses there. We could probably do with giving him Earthquake or something if we want to do that.

The last option is Fire/Fighting. You could probably make a case to justify a Fighting-Type Arcanine flavour-wise, as the Fighting-Type represents heroic Pokemon, not just punching/kicking/whatever fighters. Arcanine looks pretty heroic too me, but it is a stretch. Think Coballion, Keldeo, etcetera. Anyway, a Fire/Fighting Arcanine loses the Rock weakness, but gains Flying and Psychic.

So yeah, I'm voting no new moves or ability. But if we choose to change the typing to Fire/Ground, we should get the option to give it some Ground-Type moves even after this stage. I personally think we should have voted on the typing first, doing it this way doesn't make much sense to me. The typing immediately tells us what will threaten Arcanine and what we need to be able to deal with.

Tough Claws
One of Arcanine's issues is the fact that offensive sets are outclassed by Entei, as Entei is faster, bulkier, and stronger than Arcanine. Tough Claws remedies this issue somewhat by boosting the power of every move offensive Arcanine uses, such as Extreme Speed, Flare Blitz, Wild Charge, Close Combat, and Crunch, by 1.3x. Fortuitously for Arcanine, this boost stacks with Life Orb, making Arcanine an obscenely powerful wallbreaker. Suddenly, Arcanine's Wild Charge can now 2HKO the most physically defensive of regular Slowbro, while Extreme Speed is boosted to the extent where Arcanine can act as a fantastic revenge killer. Even the humble Stunfisk, which, while not viable in OU, completely walls normal offensive Arcanine, is now easily 2HKOed by Flare Blitz. Tough Claws is better than Reckless because it boosts all of Arcanine's physical moves... not to mention that it boosts them to a greater extent than Reckless (1.2x vs. 1.3x). It is also better than Rock Head as Arcanine is not exactly the sturdiest Pokemon, meaning the benefits of incurring no recoil damage from its moves are outweighed by the negatives of losing switch-in opportunities afforded by Intimidate or Flash Fire.

Of course, Tough Claws is balanced out by the fact that Arcanine's recoil moves now kill it much more quickly due to their increased damage output. Furthermore, it does nothing to solve Arcanine's issue with every entry hazard, particularly Stealth Rock.

My issue with this is the same thing I've been saying. Sure, a new ability makes Arcanine tough, but I just don't feel like it's the right way to do it. Abilities are one of the few things Arcanine has over Entei, it makes more sense to me to just fix Arcanine's SR weakness and buff his stats a bit.

 

[ddrox13]

Gen 1's beloved fire-dog-thing and Ninetales' Droughtless mirror. Not my favorite mon, but let's go with it. RK9 has a wealth of fun toys to play with as it is, with 2 good abilities and one average one. It's typing is pure fire, Leaving it weak to Water, Ground, and far more importantly Rock. And it's entire movepool makes him kill himself. Perfect.

Rock Head makes him amazing ingame, but has no thematic reason for existing.
A Type Change to Fire/Ground is boring. Less SR damage is good, but not awesome enough.
Reckless is reckless. Put a Scarf on this guy and there is not a character in UU that can survive both of his attacks. An HP buff might pair well with this.
Tough Claws ends up serving as Reckless lite. Not helpful.

Here are some of my ideas:
Thematically, a Speed Buff should be in the works somewhere. It's pokedex entries consistently mention it's blazing speed, and base 95 ain't exactly blazing.
Hyper Voice should be looked at for similar reasons, however useless in battle.
Flameiate. Cliche and probably a bit OP, I know. However, 110 Attack STAB boosted Extremespeed would hurt to hell. Return becomes a stronger Flare Blitz with no recoil. Close Combat and Wild Charge provide perfect neutral coverage with Flare Blitz.
Drought matches it up with it's game mirror, Ninetales.
The last thing that I can think of ability wise is Moxie. Moxie hugely rewards picking up a revenge kill with Blitz or ESpeed by making Blitz basically KO everything and ESpeed 2HKO basically everything else.
For moves, the thing deserves Earthquake

 

[gimmepie]

@Caethill: I think you're missing a big point with what Aurora said. Changing Arcanine's ability to Tough Claws would fix Arcanine's biggest flaw. It's an offensively oriented Pokemon (albeit one that can sometimes work defensively), a wallbreaker since it's too slow to sweep, but it lacks the power to break through a lot of common walls. Changing its ability to Tough Claws would allow it to compete with Entei and actually fulfil the role it was designed for.

@ddrox: I don't think we really need to give Arcanine Earthquake. It's movepool is already expansive enough and Iron Head/Close Combat already cover its weakness to Rock. With a moveset that already easily covers 2/3 weaknesses and can hit the third with murderously powerful neutral damage (assuming Tough Claws) adding more moves is rather unneeded. It's coverage lets it hit all the types that resist it fairly easily too since it gets Outrage if you need to counter Dragons. The only thing EQ adds is the ability to super effectively hit Poison-types and Electric-types and since these improvements will send Arcanine to OU easily, that's a pointless help since all the OU Poison Pokemon are also part Grass whilst all the OU electric types are either frail, Magnezone (weak to Fire) or immune anyway cause they're Zapdos. Besides EQ is already too widespread.

I'm voting either
a) Tough Claws to deal with Arcanine's desperate need for more wall breaking power or
b) Magic Guard to deal with the Stealth Rock problem in a way that doesn't force us to change Arcanine into something its not with a type change or something. This ability also fits the mythos just fine.

 

[5qwerty]

Darn, I was just going to make a joke about giving it Magic Guard.

I kind of thought about Arcanine defensively for a bit. Regenerator wouldn't make sense, and I didn't think that Magic Guard made too much sense either. I was debating whether Fur Coat would be too strong on Arcanine or not. I think that because of the Stealth Rock weakness, it wouldn't be too broken.

I also thought that maybe Sand Rush could be good on it too? Stoutland gets it, so it can make sense logically. Could see some mixed Life Orb set. I also thought Defiant and Unburden would be kind of nice on Arcanine, but I don't know if they make that much sense.

 

[Squirrel]

Eheheh I know just what to do with this puppy. Let's slap on Refrigerate (because what Pokémon is cooler than Arcanine? ;)) and let it go crazy with +30% power Ice-type Extremespeed or an even more devastating Return for some ridiculous coverage with his beastly Attack stat. Can anyone say OP? Probably not, but still!

 

[Sirfetch’d]

There were 3 Pokemon tied with each other: Arcanine, Flygon, and Sandslash. I used an RNG to pick one, and it chose Arcanine!

Now then, please suggest ability and move combos for Arcanine! e.g. Sheer Force w/ Bolt Strike, Sheer Force w/ Bulldoze, Sheer Force w/ Bolt Strike and Bulldoze, and so on. You don't need to list each option individually, we can do it ourselves in the poll. You are allowed to create your own abilities and moves. Try to keep them balanced though. Also keep in mind that we can always revisit these changes in a later IaP project.

My suggestions would be Tough Claws or Rock Head. Arcanine would still have survivability issues with Tough Claws, but with it Arcanine becomes a much better breaker. It'd be able to 2HKO stuff like Slowbro easily. On the other hand, Rock Head helps with survivability, but Arcanine would continue to have issues with Stealth Rock damage. Arcanine doesn't need any additional moves to be honest. Recover would be nice, but I'm not sure if it fits well with Arcanine's design.

Recover would rock but yeah it doesn't fit. At least it gets Morning Sun for moderately reliable recovery.

That said, I fully support Rock Head. With moves like Wild Charge and Flare Blitz, it can easily spam those moves without the risk of recoil. Morning Sun can help recover hazard damage and Life Orb recoil.

 

[Desert Stream~]

Eheheh I know just what to do with this puppy. Let's slap on Refrigerate (because what Pokémon is cooler than Arcanine? ;)) and let it go crazy with +30% power Ice-type Extremespeed or an even more devastating Return for some ridiculous coverage with his beastly Attack stat. Can anyone say OP? Probably not, but still!

Well, that could work, but it is a fire type. Maybe drought/solarbeam?

 

[Abby]

I know it wouldn't be the best ability, but Strong Jaw could be an interesting option, as well as giving it the elemental fangs.

 

[Syndrome]

Give it Magic Guard. Tough Claws is nice and all but an immunity to entry hazards and recoil on Flare Blitz / Wild Charge (and Life Orb) is too good to pass up, imo. I don't think a few coverage moves not being boosted by Magic Guard matters too much.