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r/stunfisk • … • u/Wulfsiegner

Serious question. If multiple abilities at once were a mechanic (not exclusive to Calyrex), how wild would everything get?

Not all abilities are made equal, and the standards of power creep for abilities in relation to a mon’s power budget is becoming more and more absurd by the generations, with 9 setting new standards for ridiculousness via the likes of Gholdengo, the Treasures of Ruin, the legendaries, and several other Pokémon I won’t bother mentioning for the sake of time, as well as certain other abilities becoming held items like clear body (clear amulet) or shield dust (covert cloak). At the same time, odds are Game Freak can only make new mons with the currently existing formula of typing stats learn set and ability for so long. Just look at the multitudes of “rehash” mons like Hatterene or Ariados or the majority of gen 5. It’s really hard to give Pokémon niches that make em stand out. After checking out Emerald Elite Redux for a bit, it got me thinking on a possible way to shake things up: multiple abilities. Granted, the combinations need to be balanced, and the choices need to be lore accurate at minimum, but I think Game Freak can get away with giving every Pokémon 1-2 if not even 3 extra minor passives that’ll provide relatively minimal yet distinguishable impact to their performance so that way they can still kinda be distinguishable and perform very differently even while having 90% overlaps or something.

Tldr short version: if games were built around multiple abilities like in fan games/rom hacks like Elite Redux, would it improve the overall variety and health of the meta game, or would we just have a rich get richer situation?

Edit: https://forwardfeed.github.io/ER-nextdex/ Here is the Elite Redux Pokedex for further context. Basically, what if this sorta thing was the standard where abilities like Overgrow or Shield Dust were like, secondary passives attached based on their biology while the more impactful ones like the immunity abilities or magic guard or intimidate were like, major abilities that you could pick one of. Basically that one Showdown metagame where every mon can have all their abilities but toned down slightly to prevent certain Pokémon like Excadrill from abusing all their broken abilities at once or something. I’m still testing the waters on this concept and am still not entirely sure about how much power I think every Pokémon should have. 3 minor abilities in particular feels a smidge too overkill for my liking while I’m still not entirely sure what should be disallowed outside of idk immunity stacking?

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