Toxtricity Potential Buffs for Viability in Gen 9 and future gens
Toxtricity’s lack of bulk/speed and use of multi-target moves makes him a one-hit glass cannon that doesn’t even do its job properly, his better non/and STAB moves can be easily taken just switching in a Ghost/Ground/Steel type pokemon to take no damage and that doesn’t even consider other type’s resistances. The lack of self-buffing moves makes him easy to shut down and control. The lack of bulk/speed makes him require setup (speed control).
Toxtricity’s current gimmick is to Tera Normal Boomburst which can work depending on the match up but it’s very easy to punish both on Singles and Doubles.
This makes him very predictable and ineffective most of the time as well as taking plenty of resources to even have the chance to do something.
Giving Toxtricity more flexibility and secondary effects to give him room to make part of other interesting niche/non-niche strats without affecting current strats would be:
- Make Overdrive have a 30%/50% chance to either paralyze or poison targeted pokemon (gigantamax move effect from gen 8).
- Make Overdrive have a 50% power increase when it hits an already paralyzed/poisoned pokemon.
- Make Overdrive hit ground types if the pokemon are poisoned.
- Give him the Nasty Plot move.
Just picking two of these things would do wonders to his potential without making him game-breaking. No need for stat buffs.
For example:
- Picking 1/2 could make him part of a team where he tries to apply as many status effects as possible early on and then let other mon do the sweep, or maybe he could be the sweeper making him the last mon to appear after the whole team have weakened the enemy’s mons with status effects.
- Picking 2/4 could give him the damage potential to actually OH-KO stuff in doubles after carefully setting up.
- Picking 2/3 or 3/4 to keep those bulky ground types on their toes.
Let me know what you think of these changes or if you think Toxtricity is fine as it is right now.
Comments
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Another example:
Picking 1/4 would make him dish out pressure to the enemy whether he should waste a turn switching in a mon to take the hit.
Some things to consider:
- The chance of either paralyze/poison is far from overpowered and grants him the opportunity to him and his team to outspeed or stall out the enemy. Steel and Ground pokemon still come in handy to avoid this.
- Toxtricity is not bulky/speedy enough to try and set up alone but with a good read and help of his team he can manage.
- Still 4x weak to ground, also he gets easily OH-KO by strong neutral moves anyways.
- His stabs can be easily resisted/inmune by most types.
- Most of his best moves are spread moves so in doubles the extra power of Overdrive if the target is paralyzed or poisoned is not a big deal.
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These percentages shown in my post can be changed for something else in case it is too strong (like the one in the buff #2 maybe 50% is too much).
This is just a suggestion for the balance, design and dev team to try and make my favorite pokemon into something that has more potential competitively. Right now he is very one-dimensional (Tera Normal Boomburst go brr) and needs some tweaks to find truly his niche around the meta.
If any community mod could reach this to one of these teams I could greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for reading and peace out!
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It's good for raids because it can debuff and cause a status condition (paralysis) with damaging attacks, which means it can use them even when the raid boss's shield is up.
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Overdrive as an unique move having no secondary effect is very strange. His gigantamax move version having a chance to poison/paralize adds an element of chaos and teambuilding to it for you or the enemy to take advantage of. Makes sense for a mon with the Punk Rock ability to cause chaos with its unique move.
But now that Gigantamax is not available in Gen 9 he loses his only way of disrupting the enemies reliably as he is very slow and lack of bulkyness.
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