Pokémon/Useless Useful Spell

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With how competitive Pokémon has become in recent years, there are several ways for players to spec their critters to make them viable in a competitive environment. While there are many tools that each Pokémon can utilize, there are some instances where they aren't very useful. This could be the result of many factors, including but not limited to:

1. Having abilities that don't benefit that particular species.
2. Learning moves that don't compliment the Pokémon's stat spread.
3. A shallow movepool that cannot take advantage of a Pokémon's typing, stat spread, or ability.
4. Abilities that can be made redundant due to typing.
5. Moves and abilities that don't work for how the Pokémon is meant to function.

Examples

Abilities

• The most notorious example is Frillish and Jellicent having Damp as their hidden ability. Having immunity to self-destructing moves is great and all, but as they are part Ghost-type Pokémon, Frillish and Jellicent are already immune to those moves anyway. It doesn't help that the generation they were introduced in also nerfed Explosion so it no longer halves the Defense stat, making them less useful in the first place.
  • As of Pokémon X/Y, Electric-type Pokémon can no longer be paralysed by any means, which similarly makes Stunfisk's Limber redundant.
• Solid Rock is a fantastic ability that reduces damage from incoming super-effective attacks by 25%. Unfortunately, the two Pokémon that can have this ability , Rhyperior and Camerupt, not only have crippling 4x weaknesses to the mostly Special Water-type moves (Rhyperior is also doubly weak to Grass), but their Special Defense stats are below average at best: 75 for Camerupt, 55 for Rhyperior.
• Aside from allowing the player to see the opponent's held items, the ability "Frisk" is not useful for anything else in competitive play.
• Weavile gets two abilities: Pressure and its hidden ability, Pickpocket. The former doubles the opponent's PP usage, the latter lets it steal the opponent's held item when said opponent makes contact. However, Weavile's stat spread isn't suited for PP stalling (70/120/65/45/85/125), since is meant to play as a Glass Cannon, thus it can't really afford to take a physical hit. The same thing applies to "Pickpocket", since Weavile's unimpressive 65 Defense means it doesn't want to take a physical attack. These two abilities are much better suited to Pokémon that can take some punishment.
• Lightning Rod draws in Electric-type attacks, and boosts the Pokémon's Special Attack while also making the Pokémon immune to Electric-type attacks. However, out of the 20 Pokémon that can have this ability, only 6 of them have a Special Attack stat that is at least serviceable, while the other 14 do not.
• Salazzle's signature ability, Corrosion, allows her to afflict Poison- and Steel-type Pokémon with poison; however, it doesn't allow Poison-type attacks to bypass Steel's Poison immunity, and like Weavile, Salazzle is not built to whittle down her opponents with Poison damage, due to being a Fragile Speedster.
• Some abilities can even invoke this trope; any kind of stat alteration can become this when the opposing Pokémon has this little ability called Unaware, which will ignore all negative stat changes it suffers, as well as the opponent's stat boosts.
  • Likewise, Poison, Burn, Entry Hazards, Weather, Abilities, Items, or any other indirect damage will become an afterthought if used against a Pokémon that has the ability Magic Guard, which only allows direct attacks to damage it.
  • Intimidate is a popular ability that weakens the opponent's Attack upon entering the field, but is made useless by Abilities that prevent stat drops like Hyper Cutter, White Smoke, and Clear Body. As of Sword/Shield, Intimidate is useless against users of Inner Focus, Own Tempo, Scrappy, and Oblivious.
• Like the other Ultra Beasts, Xurkitree has the ability Beast Boost, which ups the Pokémon's most proficient stat when it KO's an opponent. However, not only is Xurkitree so geared towards Special Attack that it is impossible for Beast Boost to boost any other stat regardless of whatever min/maxing the player does, but it also gets Tail Glow, which can maximise Xurkitree's Sp.Atk in just two turns.
• The popular Sheer Force is extremely potent, as it removes all secondary effects of moves to boost their damage by 30%. It also removes the recoil damage from Life Orb while retaining the item's damage boost. Unfortunately for one Pokémon, Toucannon, it learns very few moves to properly take advantage of Sheer Force, and the moves that do have drawbacks:
  • Rock Smash and Flame Charge have low base power (40 and 50 respectively).
  • Flash Cannon and Heat Wave run off Toucannon's sub-par Special Attack.
  • Sky Attack requires two turns in order to use (ironically, the only move that Toucannon can get both a Sheer Force boost and STAB from).
  • Steel Wing and Gunk Shot are not very accurate moves, with Gunk Shot being the worse off of the two.
• Ledian can have the ability Iron Fist as its Hidden Ability, which boosts the power of punching moves by 20%. To be fair, Ledian can learn a handful of these moves (including the priority move Mach Punch). To be unfair however, even with Iron Fist, Ledian's atrocious base 35 Attack stat still gives it the power of a feather.
• Talonflame can have the priority granting Gale Wings, which is useful for getting the jump on opponents when using Flying-type moves. However, not only is Talonflame pretty fast anyway with its base 126 Speed stat, but the ability was nerfed in Sun/Moon, so it only works at full HP. And with the prominence of Stealth Rock in competitive play, it probably won't stay at full health for long.
• Orbeetle has the ability Swarm, which boosts its Bug-type moves when its HP drops below 33%. Unfortunately, Orbeetle only learns 4 Bug-type attacks (2 via level, 2 via TM/TR), and out of those 4 moves, only Bug Buzz is even useful because Infestation has poor base power, while U-Turn and Leech Life run off its poor base 45 Attack stat. Outside of that, its other Abilities are of extremely limited use (Frisk reveals the opponent's held items, Telepathy is only useful in double battles).

Moves

• A good handful of Ghost-types, like Cofagrigus and Chandelure can learn the move Dream Eater, a powerful move with base 100 power, and HP recovery. It's just too bad that those two Pokémon don't actually learn any sleep inducing moves, though.
• Shedinja has access to the move Final Gambit, a sacrificial move that does damage equal to the user's remaining HP. So naturally, it makes sense that the one Pokémon that only has 1HP can learn this move...
• Electrode can learn Gyro Ball, a move that does more damage the slower the user is compared to its target. But Gyro Ball is almost useless when used by Electrode considering not just its poor Attack stat (50), but Electrode is one of the fastest Pokémon in the games with its 150 base Speed. Luckily, it learns Electro Ball as well.
• The resident Stone Wall of Sun/Moon, Toxapex, has a signature move in the form of Baneful Bunker, a protection move that poisons a foe that tries to make direct contact. However, the move is very prediction focused, and has a chance to fail if used in succession. Toxic is far more reliable since it is guaranteed to hit coming from the part Poison-type Toxapex.
• One Hit Knockout moves instantly knock out the opposing Pokémon. However, because these attacks have an accuracy stat that depends on the level difference between the two Pokémon (to be specific, 30 plus [User's Level - Foe's Level]), and the fact that the level is always set to either Level 50 or Level 100 in competitive play, these attacks usually get passed up for other moves because they are that unreliable.
• Umbreon can have Synchronoise as an Egg move, which only damages opposing Pokémon the same type as the user. So you can just image what kind of damage this Psychic-type move can have when used by the Dark-type Umbreon...
• Cryogonal is able to learn Attract, but can't do anything with it seeing as it is a genderless Pokémon.
• The Elemental Punches were this to Hitmonchan prior to the Physical/Special split in Gen IV, since they all worked off the Special Attack stat, which Hitmonchan's Sp.Atk was a pathetic base 35!
• Similarly, neither of Gengar's STAB moves were of much use prior to the split since both Ghost- and Poison-type moves ran off the Attack stat, which Gengar's is a pretty miserable 65, which is only half of its Special Attack of 130.
• Most Dark-type Pokémon before Gen III couldn't use their STAB moves effectively because of Dark being a Special type at the time. Only Houndoom had a decent enough Special Attack to offset this issue, but everything else was a physical attacker. Thankfully, the Physical/Special split happened in Gen IV changed all existing Dark moves into Physical moves.
• In an odd case were a useful move became useless, Jynx was able to make excellent use of the move Ice Punch in the first few generations thanks to Ice being a Special type combined with its 115 Sp.Atk. From Diamond/Pearl onward though, Ice Punch is no longer useful for Jynx since it is now a Physical move, and her Physical Attack stat of 50 is vastly inferior.
• Sword/Shield introduced a new Fighting-type move known as Body Press, which uses the user's Defense stat to deal damage instead of its Attack. While most Pokémon that can learn it have a high Defense stat, Wailord's Defense is so crap (45) that it is not worth teaching that move to it. Its pre-evolution, Wailmer, is even worse; with 25 Defense, Body Press will barely leave a scratch.
• The weight-based move Heavy Slam increases in power the heavier the user is compared to its target. Flapple also gets this move, but at only 2.2lb/1kg, but it can only get maximum power from the move against 7 Pokémon; that is less than 1% of the entire Pokédex!

Stat Spreads

Each Pokémon has a stat spread that gives it a certain play style in battle, but sometimes they have move pools that do not benefit said spread.

• Flareon has a base Attack of 130, but it has such a shallow movepool that the 3 physical Fire-type attacks it gets STAB from either have low base power, or have terrible recoil damage. Poor Flareon really did come off the worst of the Eeveelutions after the Special split in Gold/Silver.
• Any Pokémon that can learn Reflect and/or Light Screen while also having poor defensive stats. Alakazam for example can learn Reflect to boost its Defense stat, but that's not saying a whole lot when you realise that its HP and Defense are very low (55 and 45, respectively).
• Shuckle's incredible defenses of 230 each are majorly mitigated by its extremely poor HP stat of 20. Similarly, while its atrocious base speed of 5 benefits the move Gyro Ball, the damage it will do is almost non-existent thanks to its abysmal 10 Attack.
• The majority of Ice-type moves are special moves, which are useful to Pokémon like Glaceon, but to others like Alolan Sandshrew, who has the lowest Sp.Atk of any Pokémon, Ice Beam, Blizzard, Frost Breath, and Icy Wind will hit with the power of a gentle summer's breeze.
• Shedinja can learn Substitute, but it will always fail due to only having 1HP.
• Guzzlord is essentially an Inversion of Shuckle, in which it has a massive HP stat of 223, but that is greatly offset by having terrible defenses of 53 apiece. Its low 43 base speed makes it very hard to get a hit in without having its HP shaved off in large chunks. Same thing applies to Regidrago with its 200 HP and 50 Defense and Sp.Def, though it does have an average Speed stat of 80, so it can at least get some mileage as far as dealing damage goes.

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