168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon Sword & Shield has one of the largest pools of moves than most 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon games🍸 prior. Alongside several returning moves with new andꦇ changed effects, there’s a massive supply of new attacks that add to the game’s complexity and push the limits of a Pokémon’s power. After nearly a year since its release, though, it’s clear that not every move is evenly balanced.
There are tons of new and old moves that are all exceptionally weak and underwhelming, while others are unsettlingly powerful and alarmingly common in online play. Many moves have seen buffs and nerfs in the past, and with Pokémon Sword & Shield’s post-release updates and Expansion Pass, it’s possible for us to🐻 see certain moves change before the next game.
10 🌳 🎶 Buff: Grass Knot
The weight-based special move Grass Knot has always been a bit of a missed opportunity in the Pokémon series. While it's fairly clever for a move to be dete🐟rmined by the opponent’s weight, its variability makes it mostly useless against most opponents, even compared to relatively weaker Grass-type moves like M💙agical Leaf.
However, Grass Knot is especially useless in Pokémon Sword & Shield as it fails to work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon using Dynamax since their weight in this form is technically unknown. While it would be great for this move to have more consistent power, simply letting it be us♋able against massive Dynamax foes would at least make it usable.
9 🍬 Nerf: Snipe Shot
Compared to the signature moves of Galꦆar’s other starters, Inteleon has a major advantage over its peers with Snipe Shot. From the game’s description, this move seems pretty simple as a Water-type damage effect, negati😼ng abilities that draw in attacks to ensure perfect accuracy in Double Battles.
However, this move is slightly overpowered due to its 🐲secret secondary effect, which is an increased Critical Hit rate. As a result, using a move like Focus Energy while holding an accuracy-increasing item can lead to a perfect Critical Hit rate on the move, something that should be nerfed or at least acknowledged in the in-game description.
8 🐼 Buff: Attract
Another missed opportunity of the series is an unusual status affliction of Infatuation. With this move, the target falls in love with the user, causing each move they use to fail fifty percent of the time unless they’re switched out. This effect is available through multiple abilities and moves, but the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:actual status move of Attract has always been quite hard to land.
This is much because this move only affects foes of the opposite gender, and fails against foes who are genderless. This is an extremely limiting factor for a 🐈potentially useful alternative status effect, and would be a great new tool for defensive trainers to use if it wasn’t so restrictive.
7 🃏 ꦇNerf: Spore
Significantly less restricted is the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Powerful Grass-type move Spore, a highly uncommon move that puts opponents to sleep with standard accuracy. Since it rarely misses without the opponent having increased Evasion stats, this move can immediately shut down foes si✱gnificantly faster than other sleep moves Yawn, and more accurately than Sing or Hypnosis.
The main weakness to it is that most Pokémon who learn it are quite slow, but through moves like Trick Room and After You, this speed detriment isꦆ hardly an issue. Putting an opponent to sleep can often result in the battle simply ending, and losing from an inability to make any attacks is an extremely disappointing way to lose.
6 𒉰 🅺 Buff: Fairy Wind
Pokémon has many moves that are meant for competitive play, but some are lower in poꩲwer to not be overpowered in the main story. One of these is Fairy Wind, which deals half the damage of the more powerful Dazzling Gleam, but with the same lack of secondar𒊎y effects.
These moves serve a purpose in the main playthroughs of Pokémon games, but add𝓀ing some sort of secondary effect would give them much more reason to keep using. For a move like this, it would even be flavorful to provide a Defog effect to el𒊎iminate entry hazards and other changes to the battlefield, but as it is this move is just strictly worse and useless compared to others.
5 𓄧 Nerf: Hurricane
Among the weather-based strategies you can use in, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon in heavy rain can often be the strongest. Not only does this let you use extremely powerful Water-types, but it also gives power to Electric-type🏅s using the move Thunder with perfect accuracy, giving it much more range than other t💛ypes.
Hurricane, however, gives Rain Dance teams a slightly intense edge, being another move that gains perfect accuracy in rainy weather with an obscene amount of damage. This attack already exceeds th♌e damage for most Flying-type moves, but its chance of caus﷽ing Confusion gives more effects than most moves in the game are typically allowed to have.
4 ✱ Buff: Sticky Web
A frequently forgotten entry hazard in the Pokémon series comes in the form of Sticky Web, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:unique Bug-type move that coats the battlefield in a material that slows down Pokémon who enter battles. In theory, this is quite useful to slow down rapid opponents, but it only applies the stat decrease to fꩲoes who switch in after the move is used.
This sort of move could desperately use an immediate effect, slowing all foes when it’s used or even dealing some light damage. At the moment, this move is far too slow to be effective in most battles, as taking a turn off of da♔mage can frequently lead to fast opponents annihilating your team single-handedly.
3 Nerf: Tr♋ick Room 🧸
Casual players might not understand how effective Trick Room can be, but this move is key t🐬o one of the most dominant strategies throughout competitive Pokémon. Reversing the turn order for five turns means that slow tanks move unnaturally fast, and by affecting the whole battlefield it can help an entire team outrun an opponent with just one use.
It would certainly help if this battlefield effect lasted fewer turns, but the mainꦓ problem with Trick Room itself is just how common the move is, as it’s learnable by all sorts of Pokémon through a TR. If this move was simply learned through leveling up and breeding by a smaller set of Pokémon, it’d likely be more predictable and manageable.
2 ⛄Buff:꧃ Scale Shot
The Isle of Armor DLC brought tons of new moves to the game, bringing at least one for each Pokémon type as part of the Master Dojo’s new move tutor. These moves are incredibly variant in power, having several unique effects that mostly rel꧋ate to terrain effects, but there are a few moves that act as surprisingly effective general attacks.
One of these is Scale Shot, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon-type move that hits up to five times while lowering the user’s Defense and increasing the use꧒r’s Speed. Having a guaranteed boost of Speed combined with some minor damage is great, but this move suffers from a low accuracy that causes it to miss ten percent of the time, making it risky to rely on.
1 Nerf: Surgi𒁃ng Strikes & Wicked Blow
Two other moves from the Isle of Armor are significantly more on the overpowered end, both being signature moves of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the new Fighting-type bear, Urshifu.ꦜ Depending on which tower it evolves in, it🐎’ll learn either the Water-type move Surging Strikes or the Dark-type move Wicked Blow, both of which deal high damage and will always result in a Critical Hit.
This means these moves not only deals additional damage, but also ignores most stat boosts. They get even more powerful with Gigantamax, where the moves can even negate Max Guard to ensure damage. Most guaranteed Critical Hit moves have low damage to compensate for these boosts, b🐻ut th𓃲ese two moves have high damage and too many other unfair utilities.