Anonymous asks:

Could you try to fix carnivine for me? I quite like the concept as a beginning but wish there were a bit more…

Like, mechanically speaking?  Eh, I can give it a shot, but no promises…

So, what’s wrong with Carnivine?  Um.  Well.  Just about everything, to be honest, but the short list would be rock-bottom speed, mediocre defences, and a terrible offensive movepool (which does a brilliant job of mitigating the one useful thing about Carnivine, its good – but by no means excellent – attack stat).  So, um… what do we do with that?

Carnivine is a Venus fly-trap; it lies in wait and springs traps.  That kind of concept makes me want it to have “reactive” techniques – stuff that punishes opponents for whatever they’re trying to do to you.  Revenge and Payback, for starters; Carnivine is so slow that it’s not going to be outrunning much anyway, and they give it some coverage options, albeit not the most reliable ones.  Counter as well, maybe even Mirror Coat, but thematically that one’s hard to justify.  Having some stuff like that to mix-and-match with the traditional Grass-type support abilities that Carnivine gets could help a lot, although you sort of have to buff its defences if there’s going to be any hope of that working, of course.  It’d probably help to change the type as well.  Levitate is currently wasted on Carnivine – does a pure Grass-type really need immunity to Ground attacks?  Tack on Poison, though, (and hey, it already learns some Poison attacks anyway) and Carnivine suddenly picks up a bunch of neat resistances, plus an extra type to attack with, and is already immune to Poison’s most dangerous weakness.  As long as we’re here, there are also two general changes I’d like to make that would happen to help Carnivine.  I’ve thought for a long time that a good way to make Stealth Rock less of a centralising force would be to have other moves of different types that work in the same way, but (and this part is important) can’t be used together – Bug and Flying Pokémon don’t get punished to the same extent if some teams are using, say, Vine Snare instead of Stealth Rock, no?  A move like that would fit perfectly with the kind of “reactive” theme I wanted for Carnivine.  The other thing is that buffing Stockpile, Swallow and Spit Up somehow would really not be a terrible idea – sure, Swallow and Spit Up have damn powerful effects if you Stockpile three levels, but there are very few Pokémon for whom it isn’t more efficient to spend those four turns doing something more useful.  Maybe if you could keep the Stockpiled effect even after using Swallow or Spit Up, until you switch out, those would be worth using?  Don’t know if that helps Carnivine at all, but maybe?

So, yeah, I don’t even know if all that will make Carnivine good, but “competent” is still an improvement, right?