For some reason, I really like 'Mons that go in pairs. After having cruised Kalos with its two resident fossils Amaura and Tyrunt, I decided to lavish my attentions on Seviper and Zangoose, a.k.a. the sworn ennemies of the Pokemon world. With a long-running feud as a backstory, I expected that pair of 'Mons to sport opposing battling styles and Move pools, and I was curious to see what they had in store for me. I decided to start with Seviper, because I've been wanting to run solo with a pure Poison 'Mon for, like, ages. At the end of that much-awaited run, my main question was: why? Why does Seviper perform worse on the poisoning department than a 'Mon with Poison as secondary type such as Venipede? Why is Seviper such a one-trick pony, and a pony that cannot even pull out its main trick most of the time? Why so much wasted potential? Why, why, why?
Don't get me wrong, dear fellow gamers: I cruised Kalos just fine with the Poison snake, and reached the heights of the Pokemon League without breaking a sweat; so we're dealing with perfectly decent solo run material there. On the other hand, I just cannot wrap my head around how pointless Seviper is on the battlefield. Sure, he has high offensive stats, with a perfect balance between Attack and Sp.Attack; unfortunately, my Seviper's Moves were just a tad too weak to one-shoot everything with abandon, unless a Type weakness or particularly low defensive stats were involved. Seviper is also painfully slow — probably because despite what his name implies, he's actually closer to an anaconda when it comes to measurements. As far as my run was concerned, this means that blows were traded more often than not: and with Seviper's HP and defensive stats being as crappy as they are, I suffered quite a lot of damage on a regular basis. Hits from opposing 'Mons routinely drained a good third, if not half of my Seviper's life bar, and I had to keep him on a constant potion diet — I used more than 100 potions during that run, and that's my personal record in a Pokemon solo run. And mind you, all that happened with the benefit of overleveling. That probably means that in a regular run, Seviper can hardly ever strike first and cannot survive even one hit in most cases. So I have to ask: what's the point of that 'Mon? What's his fighting niche?
Fighting niche? He's a serpent-like pokemon. I'm not kidding, the only time I've ever seen it used either in teams or competitive, was when the player was doing a 'serpent' theme, so pokemon like Servine, Arbok, Onyx and Dragonair were included.
ReplyDeleteAnd to be fair, other than that there's no use for it. I never cared for the "rival pokemon pair" thing so I never used either, but I have used the other pair with that theme, and Durant VASTLY outperforms Heatmor, which as a bug trainer, makes me pretty happy. So I'm guessing Zangoose is way better.
"He's a serpent-like pokemon": Okay, I actually laughed out loud. :D Heck, I knew this thing was useless on the battlefield. I struggled even with an overleveled Seviper, so I really don't want to imagine how utterly impotent that snake is under normal playing circumstances. I swear, it nearly qualifies as trolling at that point. :P
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