Fun fact: Bugs can't get dizzy from spinning around. They don't have an inner ear like us humans that controls their balance and tells them which way is up. So it makes sense for them to not be confused.
It's hard to know WHAT exactly confusion is as the anime is not canon to the games, but confusion likely just means that the Pokemon is disorientated. When a Pokemon hurts themself in confusion, it is implied the Pokemon isn't just tripping from being dizzy as the damage is based on the Attack stat. Like I said, anime isn't canon but the anime explains this by confused Pokemon being unable to land their attacks and instead missing and hurting themselves. This would explain why the Attack stat is used, the harder you try to hit a Pokemon the more damage you will take if you miss them and hit the ground or a wall.
I never knew that, that’s crazy cool! Makes sense, considering they climb all over the place in weird angles and such. From one arthropod enthusiast to another, thanks for the cool fact!
Fairy being resistant to Bug was the most baffling part of the type when they added it. Here's a new type we're adding seemingly specifically to balance overpowered or underperforming types... And make it resist Bug because Bug really needs a 7th type that resists it? Why tho? Who thought Bug needed nerfs?
So just on a note here. Lorewise Bug should beat fairy and i think that it was intended to make Fairy Weak to bug instead. But because of a programming error they kept it this way and gamefreak doesnt really like editing and changing type matchups frequently So i guess they just roled with it. Usually in alot of cinography and stories Fairy or Fae hate bugs but also commonly lose vs bugs. The amount of times that fairies get caught in a spiders web or killed by wasps is very very common. Bugs tend to be seen often as evil vs fairies. Thus i personally think this was a programming error that needs to be fixed but what never happend I mean it took them 5 generations to balance the overwelmingly powerfull dragontype. Change the overpowerd steel type, and ballance out some of the weaker typings. But cucked teh already really weak bug typing
@@Princess_Narii Interesting. I'm not very knowledgeable about fey lore, so that's not something I was aware of, thanks for the info. Definitely sounds like it would have made more sense to make it a weakness than a resist from that perspective. I'm not sure I believe it though. The thought has crossed my mind before just from a balance perspective, it would have made more sense to buff bug than nerf it. However it's hard to believe they would make such an error all the way in Gen 6. Gen 1 was filled with incorrect type coding, complicated brand new series with a team that isn't familiar with that type of game, understandable. Gen 1 was somewhat glitchy in general. By Gen 6 they definitely had a handle on things though, and Gen 6 doesn't really have other major glitches that make it seem like it's an outlier in that regard. Hard to imagine them making that kind of mistake so late in the Pokemon series. They did also remove Steel's resistances to Ghost and Dark, so changing type matchups for existing types isn't out of the question. it's not something they do often, but I would think if they made a programming error and coded a weakness as a resist instead they should be willing to fix that mistake at least. But who knows. Maybe it was a mistake and now they just don't want to fix it because in some way that would be admitting to it being a mistake, however silly that might be.
@@borismuller86 That would be weird, given the fact the idea for the Pokémon franchise was inspired by Satoshi Taijiri catching bugs as a kid. But maybe there was an anti-bug coup or something within Game Freak's upper management sometime in the past. I dunno.
I love them being immune to Confusion because that means the hypothetical Dragon/Bug type I want so badly would be able to spam Outrage without the drawback
For the Fairy type to be immune to Dragon, strong against Dark and Fighting and to be only damaged super effectively from the second weakest type (Poison) and the rarest type (Steel), there is absolutely no need for it to be strong against Bug too.
steel is not actually the rarest type, its ice followed by ghost. however steel is mostly a defensive type (and the most stupid one at that) with few options for reliable good moves. but at the same time fairy being weak to these 2 was good because their ofensive presence was way too low. poison was only effective against grass which is weak to 4 other types, and steel was only effective against rock and ice which had also 4 and 3 other weaknesses respectively. steel got slightly nerfed by not resisting either dark or ghost anymore, but it still resists 10 out of 18 types which is kinda ridiculous. i personally would remove its psychic resistance while making bug resist psychic instead.
I think everyone agreed with that and I honestly would have let Bug resist it instead. Like, Bug already resists Fighting which makes little sense, so why not give it a buff?
@@hawkticus_history_corner Bug resists fighting because it's commonly believed that chasing insects like cockroaches is difficult similar to trying to birds. For fairies to be resisting bugs, makes no sense other than fairies in modern media work alongside bugs so why aren't fairies resistant against grass-types? But I agree they should really push this idea. Make bugs super effective against fighting types like flying types. Maybe we should see bug-type as a swarm type. Like a martial artist against a large swarm of locusts.
@@puppies3330 i know and? psychic isnt even that strong anymore and what made it so strong in gen 1 was in big part due to a glitch. now it would make much more sense and be more balanced to remove steels resistance to it and give it to bug
Fun Fact: It was his love of collecting and cataloging bugs that gave Satoshi Tajiri the initial idea for Pokemon. So it’s a shame that the bug type performs so poorly imo.
I am pretty sure that is why the bug type even exists at least that’s what I thought anyway. It’s a good thing he didn’t become a entomologist as then Pokémon would never exist. So in a alternate universe Tajiri is a famous entomologist.
@@LenOnTheDoor0000 Same reason why fairy is weak to fire. Fairies are associated with nature, and insects control/eat/transform nature by eating plantlife or even changing the environment (like termites).
@@LenOnTheDoor0000Fairy is a pretty girly type. Girls typically hate bugs. I think you'd often see boys gross girls out with them on tv and stuff. It's similar to why Bugs are strong against Psychic since many people, boy or girl, are scared of bugs. Fairy is just more specific to girls. That's my take on it, anyway.
@@yonatanbeer3475 yes and yes (though I get your argument) have you ever tried cutting water with a knife? That's why water resists steel. in MANY MANY legends and folk lore there are stories of fairies dying off because their forests or rivers are poisoned and dying. Fairies are tied to the health of nature and that dying kills them. That's why fairy is weak to poison.
@@yonatanbeer3475 I think it's the pesticide angle, like herbicides against grass. But then bug should be weak to poison as well, and they did have mutual weakness in gen1.
And I would like to start the bug being weak too bug and water instead of fire and rock train (if bug was weak to fire and rock shouldn’t normal as well)
Massively agree with this, especially with the rework of X-scissor. It really has no point in existing when you consider that leech life and Lunge both have the same base power of 80 and have the secondry effects of healing and ATK debuff. But if X-scissor get that higher crit chance then Sniper bugs like Ariados would be so fun to use, especially with the fairy changes.
@@savedark12yearsago70 I feel what people want from a light type that fairy type sorta lacks is big ass nuclear energy lasers so i propose we add something like energy type. (Cant come up with a better name seeing as nuclear type is a guaranteed nono)
But also they still keep the normal Defensive and Offensive Fairy Type Set but also make it so it'll struggle against a bug. Plus, Fairy-esque moves like cute charm and sweet kiss can confuse many mons. I also think that it's poison moves could Non-Paralyze Flinch Water Types when it has a trait like Misty as partly a reference but to partly further increase its strength. Bug can still die however from Water Pulses.
@@FaeMagicexisting typing doesnt always make sense like why is Normal weak specifically to Fighting? And there's a lot of other dumb typing whereas fairy being weak to bug makes a lot of sense.
Aside from removing Fighting’s resistance to it, I’d say everything changed made thematic sense. Being... for lack of a better term, simple creatures, Psychic’s mind tricks, Dark’s manipulation and overall confusion would be too foreign for them. And being the world’s most abundant type of animal, bugs if any creature would be more connected to nature than fairies, plus that connection means Fairy could be considered a “pseudo-Grass” which Bug is also strong against.
I feel like a lot of Bug types "strength" flavourwise is basically the other types going "EW GROSS!". Its why Ghost is strong against it. People are scared of spiders, but would be terrifed by ghosts. Of all the types I feel Fairy would hate Bug the most, being stereotypically girly. On the flipside Fighting being stereotypically macho would probably just smush them rather than be scared of them.
@@insaniac112 I think bug resisting fairy makes thematic sense, although I'm not so sure about bug being super effective against it. Meanwhile I think it'd be entirely reasonable to just make them neutral both ways for fighting types, maybe even resisting them. You can crush a bug sure, but have you ever *tried* punching a mosquito? Bugs can be hard to hit, and it's not like knowing how to punch well is going to make a bug bite hurt any less. Bugs should also do neutral damage to poison types, due to the fact that bugs hunt with poison all the time, but poisonous bugs also get hunted by other bugs. No actual reason that I can think of for poison to resist bug.
@@insaniac112 Bug type is resistant of Fighting because they have exoskeleton. If the bug were the size of a human baby kicking him will not affect him at all.
Definitely think that the fairy change makes a ton of sense, it would also do a bit to weaken fairy types and increase their weaknesses, since 2 seems super low.
ngl I think fairy should be resisted by ice, grass and bug. Would give it an actual downside to beating what are otherwise some of the best types in the game.
I can understand bug resisting fairy, but being super effective against it? Wouldn't it make more sense for bug to be supereffective against ground because of all the digging most insects do.
I really like the concept of bug being super effective on fairies and resistant to it. Fairy pokemon usually have a royalty or cutesy feel to them, so i think it would make sense for them to be scared or grossed out by bugs.
Fighting and Bug mutually resists eachother because in japan Bugs are often associated with superheroes, the idea is that they're both "Heroic" types just as Dark is actually pretty close to an "Evil" type, which is why they're both super effective against it as well, this was a very intentional interaction that just doesn't translate that well outside Japan Edit: Some typos
It's not just Japanese media that associates bugs with superheroes, western media does it as well with famous superheroes such as Spiderman and Blue Beetle.
The only problem i have with this is that it would make Uturn even more broken in singles. I think bugs resisting fairy and dealing neutral damage to it would already be good enough
Yea, and like, why do ghosts resist bug anyway? Is like they had to lose to everything in gen I. Of the types that didn't got a gym in gen I it is also the only one not used by a elite four/rival. (Flying and normal are used by pidgeot)
As someone that has recently discovered how many Bug Pokémon they actually like, I really appreciate this video. Would love to see Kricketune or Armaldo become viable
I would love ledian kricketune and parasect..... not scizor or volcarona , they are strong because one Is metal and other Is fire....... I really want to see a really bug type using bug moves, being competitive.
Personally other Bug Steel types like Durant, Escavalier, and especially Forretress deserves some love in the sense that they all provide a sort of coverage that Scizor does not. Especially in Escavalier’s case with its damage output straight lethal on trick room teams having access to Fell Stinger. But more importantly this would give Bug type moves more viability since GF is more key on buffing their move set but not their type matchup.
As bug type lover, I was furious when I found out they made Fairy resist Bug, and I always thought that it was beyond silly they didn't take that particular opportunity to buff Bug, when they sure took it to improve the offensively nigh-useless Steel and Poison types. Thematically I found it fitting as well, fairies are seen as something mystical, spawning from human imagination. Why not have a natural counter in something that doesn't have the imaginative prowess humans do, thus being resistant to it(if not immune)? I think for the second stage, I'd rather see Bug deal neutral damage to Ghost rather than neutering Psychic even further, it's already one of the least desireable offensive types. I personally don't dislike Bug being resisted by Fighting while resisting it too, I find it much more offensive that Dragon and Ghost are super effective against their own kin. I don't really have an opinion on the changes in move damage(and/or accuracy) of the staple bug moves you mentioned, but I will say that adding a bug version of Close Combat, Superpower and/or Brave Bird would massively impact Bug viability too. Pin Missile working like Triple Axel might also be an idea worth exploring(or inventing a new move), as currently the only 100+ damage Bug move is restricted to not even a handful of Bug pokemon, the only useful one being Heracross and that one doesn't even run Megahorn - ironically enough - when it mega-evolves.
I feel like testing this kind of theorycrafting in Showdown would be super interesting (for each stage) to see how powerful it would really be in practice and against other people
@@Nephenon Hail is tricky, and i feel maybe a little too tied to the ice type, whereas other weather has more flexibility. Honestly, I'd like hurricane to get the accuracy+pierce boost in hail, but thats a strange mix of "quite a lot" and "does it even matter?"
Ice has been getting the most investment ever with the addition of Snow and Aurora Veil. To the point where it could potentially be OP if Ice type moves were boosted by weather. The only “fixing” ice needs is a couple of added resistances - maybe to water and electric considering ice is a terrible conductor because it lacks mobile electrons
All you'd really need to make Ice types better is to give it more resistances. It's already an amazing offensive typing, but it just has no survivability whatsoever.
I've been giving it some thought so I'd like to share some ideas. Skimming through the moves physically they don't have good general moves outside of ice punch. Icicle Jab: 70 power, 1 stage crit chance, 100 accuracy. Physical move. Frost Slam: 90 pwr, no effect, 100 acc. Physical move. Heat Sap: After 1 turn the opposing pokemon effected by this move will be frozen. Status move. (A variation of yawn) Flash Freeze: Status move. 60% accuracy. Freezes a target. (variation of hypnosis) I would like to buff hail too since most weather types have multiple effects. The best ones I believe are Harsh Sunlight and Rain. They give attack bonus' and debuffs to fire and water respectively. Sandstorm's secondary effect gives rock types a 50% increase in special defense. Personally I would prefer a snowstorm over a Hail for the changes I have in mind but to keep in theme the Offensive buff would be the same chip damage each turn and the defensive change would be a chance to flinch per turn (so it needs to start this effect after moves were chosen). Since I am biased towards Abomasnow a unique thing to do is to make 2 weather moves. Hailstorm and Snowstorm and Ice Warning as another normal ability for Abomasnow. Snowstorm can increase Ice type moves' power and the secondary effect is to lower the speed of other types by 50% each. OR it could give a 50% increase in both defense stats and in combination with aurora veil we can get ice tanks, sadly only alolan ninetails can use it effectively while abomasnow has a neutral stat allocation so it doesn't excel at anything and easily gets overwhelmed. Matchup-wise it's resisted and effective against the more common types and sadly it has no resistances other than ice.. It's designed to be an offensive typing too. I personally don't get the Fighting weakness, people slow down and shiver when cold so I would at the very least make it neutral. Thematically Ice usually resembles a lack of life. I would make it resistant to grass or bug but those two typings are already weak. The next thing would be to make it resistant to Fairy since a harsh reality is a polar opposite of a dreamy fantasy.
I'd say giving them resists against Water, Ground and Dragon along with a 25% physical Def buff in hail would be good enough. Ice's main issue is its horrible defensive profile especially against physical moves, so with this change it would still be weak to key types (Rock, Fighting, Fire, Steel) but also strong against other big ones (Dragon, Ground, Ice, Water). Good risk-reward balance. It's great offensively already so offensive Ice types get a bit more survivability but it's the defensive ones (way more in number) who get massive buffs and new niches.
When it comes to a passive that all Bug Pokemon share, I think an immunity to entry hazards would be cool because bugs are either small or nimble and should easily avoid traps. This would also remove the need for virtually all Bug Pokemon to use Heavy-Duty Boots and would pair extremely well with U-turn. To me, confusion is moreso something all Psychic Pokemon should be immune to. Rather than adding resistances, I think removing some of the types that resist Bug would be a better change. Poison, fighting, fairy, and ghost could be removed, and maybe rock could be added. Like you were saying, Bug's problem lies in its offense; if the Fairy type had Bug's moves, it would be an even better type, so I think it really comes down to terrible offensive coverage. EDIT: Forgot this was a VGC community LOL EDIT 2: A more balanced idea would be to make Bug-types immune to all traps, but Stealth Rocks would still calculate damage for secondary types.
immunity to entry hazards is a huge buff in singles but a minimal one in vgc. wolfey was coming at this from a vgc perspective so that does not at all fit what he was going for.
Please no, immunity to entry hazards is an insanely large buff on top of an already greatly improved type matchup spread. Just think about Queen Quiver Dance over there getting to run an item other than HDB for free, or Scizor taking zero chip from U-turn spamming. Kinda breaks some stuff.
In singles it would also be borderline broken, if not entirely so. Bug-types are generally crippled by entry hazards, so I understand the reasoning behind this idea, but it would have no effect in one format while being wildly imbalanced in another. Not a good fix.
I like this idea combined with the fairy interaction change. To add some craziness I’ll borrow from someone’s idea of flinch immunity. Maybe based on the bug’s height/weight, it becomes immune to entry hazards (small) or to flinching (large). This way mons like scizor can’t abuse u-turn spam, but can still set up on you if not careful.
For anyone wondering about the Fighting/Bug resistances, it's most likely because Fighting used to be seen as sort of a "hero" type, compared to Poison/Dark's "villain" role. In Japan, bugs have a history of being associated with heroic characters like Kamen Rider, so Bug and Fighting are kind of like allies. I think that's cute!
I love the fairy swap, makes complete sense to me just picturing a fairy like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan vs a Wasp. She would and should be terrified of it
Sure tinker bell would be terrified of it but what a fairy is is actually really broad so you cant really make the type weak to bug just because one of the many kinds of fairies there are would be terrified of it especially since some of the others tend to go more in the direction of being creatures that think stuff like murder is a fun prank to play on people and I doubt those would care about bugs
For tier 3 I would personally make them immune to being flinched, thematically it fits with their strong exoskeletons they could still move and competitively it would be huge for something like trick room who could get its setter picked off with fake out, Orbeetle couldn't for example. It would also make setting up very scary for bug types.
@@Mr.Sax. probably not considering his main stab attack is priority and is pretty null when considering that you have to go second to be flinched. It would more so be a VGC buff from rockslide and fake out being omnipresent.
@@ThePolice2012 Swords Dance, U-Turn, Roost, Superpower... You name it. Those aren't priority moves. Also the main move to look for flinches, Fake Out, is a +3 priority move.
@@Mr.Sax. I’m not trying to be a dick but you clearly don’t play bdsp OU. Scizor doesn’t have access to super power and it’s best fighting move is brick break. Scizors best set atm is specially defensive BP roost defog u turn to check Latios the strongest attacker in the tier. Offensive scizor isn’t really good atm and even if it was the immunity to flinch wouldn’t mean anything due to it relying on bullet punch. Again not trying to argue just think you are over eating scizor due to its high usage. It’s just great at what it does from a defensive pivot aspect. I’m a 1600s player so take what you will
Honestly, i believe they should change swarm as an ability. Seeing how most bugs thrive in summer. Change swarm so they gain from sunny day. It would also make them viable with sun teams
@@CocoLocoToco i know. This video was about buffing bug types. And bugs being more active in the summer would make sense for swarm to be changed to being an ability to buff bugs during sunny day.
@@CocoLocoToco ok but competitively that makes your team heavy on bugs. Which makes your team weaker in the long run. But making an ability for them run off an already popular weather type that sees play already you make them viable without being reliant on having to have other bugs around
I love seeing this though when it comes to xerneas i do 100% understand why its annoying and stinky but its always left a middling thought to roam my head. Why isnt Xerneas Fairy/Grass, with such typing and appropriate move set changes It probably could of been alot more balanced and not the mention how such type compliments its origins as a embodiment of the TREE of LIFE
@@LilyCelebiFlipnote Yes for real one of the reasons it should be like many other box art legendary's having counter types to each other (still doesnt help poor zygarde but tbh idk what to do about that)
@@junkofromprojecttouhou7612 Eh, Ground is sort of an opposite to Flying and Dragon is an opposite to Fairy, so it... sooorta works? Just not with the weaknesses, lol. I wouldn't change anything about Zygarde either, though.
There's in a fact a reason for fighting and bug resisting one another! Bugs as heroic figures is a common idea because of the influence of Kamen Rider, so the "superhero" and "martial artist" types going easy on one another makes sense. This is also the reason both fighting and bug hit dark, the "villain" type, super-effectively.
Bug was super effective on Poison in the first gen, which was the first "Villain" type too. You also have moves like "Signal Beam" and "Silver Wind" which a pretty tokusatsu flavored.
Blew me away with how differently I think of bug type when you went over strengths & weaknesses. It being supereffective against poison in Gen 1 changes the math for parasect significantly. High-risk, High-reward on an odd typing that I think was amongst the most inspired designs in good ol genwon
Honestly, just making fairy and fighting lose their resistances to bug sounds good enough. Balance through Moves like Quiver Dance could be interesting, where they get more weird abilities and Moves rather than focusing on the type match-ups alone. Maybe having Bug Moves also be Boosted in Grassy Terrain could be rad. Or giving a Special Defense buff or something. Lastly, Compound Eyes can have a bonus effect such that it ignores Stat debuffs or enemy buffs to Evasion. It's not a lot, but it can be something tasty and tactical. Or, Compound Eyes can tell you a random Move the opponent has.
Imagine if there was a new weather type: "Damp". Basically it's very warm and wet, it'll lower the dmg from rock, ground and steel but boost the dmg of grass, water and bug. Could even disable the use of self-fainting moves like the ability does now, so that the ability won't be useless
@@DJ-Rose I like the concept. It is common for bugs to like damp and humid areas. It would be cool to se and change it up for the bugs. But I don't know how it would be implemented. We already have damp as an ability. And that would suit the weather conditions very well. But it only prevents explosions. Well it is at least a cool concept.
The Fairy type interaction change is so good and straightforward: give the worst type in the game a resistance to the best one, while still making sense. That's is the kind of stuff I want for the Ice type video and had some thoughts about, but never considered about the Bug type.
I like the idea of "niche" types like ice or bug being useful against the majors like Fairy and Dragon. Even if they won't be good as a general sweaper the way that normal can (bellydrum linoone w/ return, guts + poison swellow w/ facade can both sweep the hoenn elite 4) In both competitive and normal playthroughs. And as far as specific pokemon go, some buffs through abilities or just rebalancing stats & move pools wouod go a long way. Ex: Kriketune could double sound based moves damage (like how chewtle doubles biting damage). Or ledian could be a dedicated physical attacker and only learn physical moves. I am very salty over trying to use Sneasle in Coliseum only to realize that it is a pure physical attacker, and in gen 3 both ice and dark use special (with the exception of its signature move beat up where every conscious party member makes a base 10 typeless physical attack). And even after gen 4's split the keep giving pokemon signature moves or strongest stab moves using their considerably weaker attacking stat. Bugs current strongest ability is tinted lenses, which is most common on Venomoth and Yanmega and is makes "not very effective" moves hit for neutral damage and i love it.
i think this was the idea when they made bug strong against psychic, but the fact that bug doesn't RESIST psychic really stopped that from being too effective
@@kkutya same thing about making ice strong against dragon but not resist it. the effectiveness is cool but the type sucks if there's no defensive utility because otherwise they just die to a very powerful type
I agree with every idea presented here, one thing I would personally add to the final phase of buffs being an immunity to Sticky Web (strictly an immunity, not a switch-in removal property like Poison-types with Toxic Spikes)
I have thought the same thing before, it doesn't really make sense thematically. Bugs are basically the primary targets of webs in real life. If anything Bug types should be MORE susceptible to Sticky Webs (though I don't think that's a change they should actually make haha). I think it would make more sense if Fire types burned away sticky webs when they switch in, kind of like Poison types do for Toxic Spikes.
Honestly I think having an immunity to Priority would help it’s speed trap game a lot better. Especially since most bugs have superior reaction time and spatial awareness against larger foes in general. That way it can do much better job of set up, and not loose to Accelerock, Gale Wings, Sucker Punch, and Extremespeed. Kinda like Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense
I personally love this style of content and would be more than interested to hear your thoughts on fixing other types, or just mechanics in general you'd like to see changed. Nintendo probably won't ever use em, but I'm sure some fangame developer will
As a lover of the creepy-crawlies, I'd be ecstatic if they gave Bugs any reasonable buff. Thank you for providing the food-for-thought on what the Bug-type's dreams look like! I'd love to see this continue, because even without my bug bias I think it's really neat to hear a competitive player's thoughts on what makes things balanced or unbalanced. I'd love to see Poison after Ice!
Imo, I'd say Ice is alright tbh. The type for me screams "glass cannon" which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'd give it a resistance to grass and that'd probs be it tbh if I had to make a change.
I want to point out how cute it is that the Pokémon are animated to move around and react to the script (like the segment at 2:08), it's a very nice touch :)
I personally don’t agree with changing darks interaction with bug type Pokémon. Dark is already an average type as it is, the previous buffs to bug would just drip dark a little too low for balance.
@@marcopaolo1643 I think that one's fine personally. I'd rather have bug deal super effective damage to an s tier type like Fairy rather than a c tier Dark.
I wouldn't agree with the Psychic type either though because Psychic type is just a worse fairy. Any Fairy types who have a primary or secondary psychic typing actually gets hurt by the psychic type on defense.
@Marco Paolo Ghost is already a hard type to hit for super effective damage and it wouldn't too badly hamper Ghost types like Gengar, Rotom-H or Chandelure who's 2ndary type makes them resist bug anyway so I 100% agree with this
Keep in mind my points come from an exclusively singles perspective. I do agree that Bug is the worst type of all, but I wouldn't say that it's much better defensively than offensively. Resisting Fighting and Ground is actually really good, but they are also partially nullified by a Rock weakness, which many of the pokémon from these types run. Grass is a similar type which doesn't share this issue, making it much more reliable defensively. Keeping this in mind, I'd say giving Bug a Dark resistance would really benefit it and make it much more reliable. Many Fighting pokémon and some Ground pokémon (basically LandoT, Gliscor, Mamoswine, Diggersby) run Knock off as coverage due to its insane usefulness whilst having a high bp on the first hit. This would make Bug much more reliable, though I could see Dark being really bothered since it's a type whose identity, similarly to Ghost, lies in being hard to resist. To compensate, I would make Bug moves hit Dark neutrally, making pokémon like Hydreigon and Tyranitar less prone to being abused by U-turn spam. Regarding Fairy, I do agree that Bug should resist it too, giving another important extra defensive niche to it. However, I think Bug should be neutral against Fairy, not supereffective. Hitting fairies neutrally would be a sufficient offensive buff without giving U-turn (yes, you again) too many new victims. I believe this is the best way to buff Bug types without overbuffing non-bug U-turn users. I believe that with these changes, Bug would be in a perfect spot as a niche type that offers unique defensive utility but unremarkable offensive presence. Edit: I've been thinking how I would nerf Fairy to a more fair point, and alongside these changes I would make it so Fairy is hit neutrally by Dark (still hits it back for supereffective damage, similar to Ice vs Grass). This would completely compensate Bug resisting Dark and make Dark even more spammable than it currently is, bringing it closer to Ghost. Fairy would end up only being weak to Poison and Steel, two bad offensive types, but also only resisting Fighting with a Dragon immunity. We balance both Bug and Fairy in just a few changes, and improve Dark a bit in the process.
Despite their improvements as a whole in recent years, I've still been thinking about how there's missed potential in the bug type. I really like most of your ideas, and I don't even play competitively. Making them immune to confusion is a really cool idea that I probably never would've considered. Good work.
I really like the Fairy effectiveness swap and confusion immunity. I think those two in conjunction would fix the type and make it comfortably sit in the mid tier. Ideally the worst type in the game would still be a mid tier instead of one with glaring issues
I actually love the idea of bug being immune to confusion and I think If I were going to change bug I'd probably swap it's interaction with fairy like you suggested, make bugs immune to confusion, and make some of the changes to the move pool while adding a few more moves to the move pool of bug type and leave it there.
Honestly being strong against fairy, resisting fairy, and being immune to confusion is good enough. Then again i doubt gamefreak will ever do it. Ice type buff video will be an interesting. I believe they only need a resistance buff. These include water, flying, and ghost. Also maybe a defense buff during hail… but aurora veil is a thing.
Honestly I think having Hail buff Ice moves like Rain boosts Water moves would be much more beneficial, while perhaps less thematic. It's almost impossible to design effective defensive Ice-types with how poor the type is defensively; yes Hail stall has existed in the past in Gen IV and V, but they weren't usually using multiple Ice-types. Just Abomasnow for setting the weather and checking Water-types, then maybe either Froslass or Walrein depending on what kind of gimmicks you like. If Hail had an offensive advantage, you wouldn't have to try to play to Ice's weaknesses and could instead focus on its strengths. I also thinking getting good Slush Rush Pokemon would do a ton for hail. Arctozolt isn't half bad, but Beartic and Alolan Sandslash are just terrible. Slush Rush Mamoswine would be a MASSIVE buff for Hail teams, providing an enormous offensive threat that is well worth building a team around. Heck, Slush Rush Glaceon spamming STAB Blizzard would at least be useable. It pained me personally when Glaceon got the nearly useless Ice Body for its Hidden Ability. A final potential buff for Hail could be making Snow Warning the only permanent weather ability. Hail stall died after Gen V, because you just couldn't reliably switch Abomasnow in to refresh your weather and similarly couldn't afford to waste its item slot on Icy Rock. If Snow Warning was a permanent weather ability, it would have merit over the other weather abilities to make up for its inferior weather and potentially make using Pokemon like Ice Body Avalugg a worthwhile investment.
@@nsiderultimaseth I think Ice is already good enough offensively that it doesn't need any more buffs in that department. Especially since most Ice pokemon are defense-oriented slowpokes anyway this won't help them much. A more interesting change imo would be to give it resistances to Water, Ground and Dragon (all very good types) and a 25% defense boost in Hail. Pokemon like Lapras, Walrein, Avalugg and Frosmoth would probably get some unique niches, and ones like Weavile and A-Ninetales would definitely appreciate the extra survivability.
@@sheenyhive That's sort of my point, Ice is a terrible defensive typing and yet we keep getting defensive Ice-types. Sure we can completely change Ice's type matchups to make the type work defensively, but in terms of changing the effect of Hail as a weather, giving Ice defensive buffs would do nothing at present because you essentially can't use Ice as a defensive type outside of very niche circumstances. Using weather defensively in general is not great; without permanent weather, defensive weather doesn't last long enough to be useful in singles and doubles is too fast-paced for defensive weather strategies. Tyranitar is sort of the exception, because he buffs HIMSELF, has incredible bulk on his own that skyrockets in sand, and has the power to make a significant impact in doubles with the extra turn of survivability his bulk can give him. Yes, changing Ice's type matchups could make a defensive buff from Hail worthwhile (though Weavile is a bad example for your point, because he is extremely frail regardless) but as-is giving Hail a defensive effect would essentially be wasted on a typing that does nothing defensively. Ice is a solid offensive typing, so giving Hail an offensive boost would play to the type's strengths in the current game as opposed to squandering a defensive boost, and have a greater impact on the viability of Hail as a weather. If Hail gave a 50% boost to Ice types' defense, I don't think it would affect the viability of most Ice-types outside of MAYBE Avalugg. But if it was an offensive boost, people would probably start trying to run Blizzard spam teams to take advantage of it and it would have a greater impact on the metagame overall.
@@nsiderultimaseth I think your Tyranitar example actually supports my argument because "buffs itself in [weather] for bulk and chip damage + extra turns survival in doubles" would describe most Snow Warning pokemon with my suggested changes (+ Aurora Veil), doubly so since TTar has big type weaknesses yet thrives anyways due to good stats, good STAB and good coverage. Ice types are mostly hindered by their type working against their stat distributions and abilities (Aurorus and especially Frosmoth are the biggest examples) and lack of non-STAB coverage. EDIT: Read your comments more carefully. Agree with the Hail boosts and the ability point. I still think no weather should be permanent though. And I still disagree on defensive buffs not being useful. Personally I think buffing Ice defensively *and* knocking hyper-offense down a peg would still be a good approach and would definitely matter just as much as offensive buffs if not more. (Apologies for the multiple edits if you saw them, didn't sleep well so I struggled to get my thoughts across)
@@sheenyhive lol what are you talking about? tyranitar is only good offensively, and he packs one of the best move coverages, and abilities in the game. tyranitar is a MON not a type, but he also so happens to resist 7 TYPES one of which is a immunity, compare that to a ice type whooping 1 resist lol. "and knocking hyper-offense down " thats not even relevant, no style of play is making ice types unviable, ice types just suck in basically all styles of play and the few were they are viable is offense, giving a type with no resistances a 50% defense boost wont do anything. with your proposal you are literally nerfing ice types. what makes tyranitar so good is that he is offensively broken strong, and has absurd stats, if you made tyranitar a ice type it would suck. most ice type will never benefit from a defense boost, ice types unlike rock type dont have steal rock type moves and being weak to stealth rocks is terrible. the defense boost is "nice" but certainly would not make ice types viable by a large marging simply put ice types suck and if you give them a defense boost it wouldnt do anything. and in double nobody would use ice types anyways, because they would still suck, if you dont resist anything in VCG forget it, even with hail you just have any weather setter come in or any mon that has super effective moves.
The one downside I have with Stage 1 is that Poison would once again be offensively outclassed by Bug. You can fix this by making Poison super effective against Water, and maybe making it resist Water too. We would finally have another type that could both switch into a strong Water-type attack and smack them back super hard. Plus, more reliable Poison-types means that the strong Fairy-types will need to work a little harder
I feel like poison should hit steel for neutral, or at least half damage. Steel can still be immune to being poisoned, but it would allow them to make more acid based moves, and have it make sense. Poison could be super against dragon too?
I always thought it strange that Poison had no interaction with Water types. Water types are one of the stronger types in my opinion, so having Poison have some form of advantage over it would be neat.
I would like to see poison have a similar interaction to Burn/Paralysis in that it halves damage from special attacks, instead of physical attacks/speed. That would make poison an actually useful status condition.
I have an idea! Types have more than just their Matchups. Electric is immune to Paralysis, fire is immune to burn, Ghost pokemon can't be trapped etc. So, lets give Bug type something special! How about...Bug types are immune to entry hazards? (Bugs are tiny and can get past through most obstacles after all)
aDrive would be happy from watching this video! Also, it would be interesting to see how you could fix the Ice Type since it's also on-par as being the worst type alongside the Bug Type.
To fix Ice, give it resistances. It's already great offensively. I think it should resist Flying and probably something else like Psychic, Dark or Ground.
@@arch3223 Ice should have resistance to water, at the very least. both because water is one of the game's best types, and because like... Ice *is* just frozen water! They should mutually resist each other, with the exception of moves like freeze dry and probably scald.
Can we fix Ice next? I think taking away Water's resistance to Ice, taking away one of its weaknesses(Maybe Ground?), and give it a new resistance, maybe Fairy? All that would go a long way to making it better
Ice being resistant and super effective against Fairy would make a bit of sense. Fairy can be seen as both a nature type (nature magic) and a light type. Nights are longer during the winter and Winter/snow is commonly seen as a sort of death in nature. So it works out pretty well.
Honestly, if they had just made Fairy weak to Bug and Bug immune to Fairy I think that would have been all that they would have needed to do. I hated the addition of Fairy because they made it OP.
@@BramLastnameYeah fairy was a great addition and I love it (except for the fact that I constantly forget it exists and get confused when Clefable survives getting punched in the face). And it's role of reining in dragons while buffing steel (offensively) and poison types was great. But that bug interaction makes no sense. I get that bug is supposed to be a weak type because, well, they are bugs. But they are too much weaker than other types.
@@88porpoise Also lore wise it doesn't even make sense, Because yes Hags, Trolls and Goblins, which are fairies by technicality, do often eat bugs in the fairytales. But in the same regions there's tales of those creatures destroying entire rooms in an attempt to squash a single bug Or tiny fairies who's most feared predator is a spider. So I don't see how Fairy resisting Bug is a flavour thing, Like at least Fire resisting Fairy has a clear inspiration for it, Even if there's sources that contradict it. In no story (of cultural significance) is it ever mentioned that fairies of any kind are more resilient to bugs than any regular human.
Bug is basically treated as that type you get early, evolve quickly and then discard before gym 3. Rip Butterfree, even ash left you behind. Most of its strongest members are "gimmicky" like Shuckle and Forretress being absurdly tanky (look at Shuckles base stats then know in gen 4 it gets a power trick to average its attack stats with its foes, imagine getting averaged with base 10 (both atks) and having to hit base 230 (both defenses)). Other strong members are Yanmega and its Tinted lenses letting it treat 1/2x resistance as 1x, or Shedinja & wonderguard. Its traditionally strong members are Scizor, Heracross, Pinser, Volcarona and so on and they are generally not top teir.
Long-Time Bug pokemon fan, and subscriber. Loved this video!! Ever since your last video on the worst types, I've been thinking about how to fix bugs too, and Fairy resist was what I came up with too. I think making them super effective against Fairy would be icing on the cake, but even just giving them that resist and removing Fairy's resist to them would make a huge difference.
I've been confused at why the fairy/bug interaction wasn't reversed ever since fairy was introduced - nerfing an already niche and lackluster offensive type made no sense. I mostly pay attention to singles, but it's nice to see that such an expert in doubles play also came to the same conclusion. Just goes to show how much bug has gotten ripped off over the years.
@@xemnahort2 it doesn't even need to be a counter to Fairy though. It could simply be a reversal of resistances giving Bug a resistance to Fairy but not deal super effective damage against Fairy.
Then just simply nerf the power of U-Turn. Gamefreak is the type of company to use a nuke to kill an anthill. If they nerfed U-turn to like 50 base power that would have been better. Or maybe like 40 base power so technician bugs like Scizor can’t benefit
If you really wanted to make a bug over powered, in addition to being immune to confusion, you could create an Outrage-like move for the bug type. Maybe just turn skittersmack into bug type outrage
I'd actually like to see Skitter Smack become the Sp.Att version of Lunge. However, I think a Bug-flavored Outrage would be *hysterically* beautiful, and I would love so greatly for it to exist!
Wanna know something scary?, if bugs in our world were as big as they’re counterpart Pokemon versions? *We as a human race would be devoured in months* An ant can lift x10 its own wait, and even a Mantis or Spider are capable of hunting and eating larger prey such as small rodents, Small reptiles, Some amphibians, and even the freaking flying types themselves, Birds (albeit small species) If bug were the same size as Pokémon?, the strength would be enough to kill and rip apart even larger predators such as tigers or even sharks
Your first change being exactly what I thought bug needed made me feel so good, I don't get how Gamefreak were like "Let's introduce fairy to tone down how strong dragon is." but then just making Fairy take that spot in bustedness
I always questioned why Fairy resisted Bug, but assumed it was to somehow address "U-Turn spam." Unfortunately, that failed if it was the case. Thematically, I do not think Bug should resist/be strong against Fairy, because they usually coexist with each other. They either get along or prey on fairies, so, it wouldn't make sense if they are suddenly strong against them. However, that coexistence should remove Fairy's resistance to them. I am also of the mind that Steel should lose its Bug resistance because bugs can get into ANYTHING when they try. Like hornets in vents or spiders in offices... I even had a personal horror story where roaches managed to break into my fridge. An absolute mess that was. No longer being resisted by the 2 best types would help it so much.
@@-hypertheninja-4280 Obviously not, but they can still circumvent and get around them by finding weak spots such as holes. Which is why I think they should lose the resistance, since bugs can and will get into places no matter how hard you try to keep them out...
Excellent video as always! As for buffing Ice Types, I've always thought they should have resisted Normal and Water. Normal because Ice can be hard as rock and Water cause Ice is made out of Water. I guess you could make Ice good vs Water, but that would invalidate Freeze Dry. Idk if any of these changes would help Ice that much though. P.S. I always found it weird though that GameFreak often gives Ice types defensive stats but only gave them one resistance
If Ice was super effective against water that would be a huge buff. Water is one of the strongest defensive types and ice is already strong offensively, making this change would give Ice-types a lot of wall-breaking potential.
Water should still have a resistance to Ice, but it would make sense for Ice to resist Water. In return, we can make Scald the reverse Freeze Dry. Ice should definitely resist Normal and/or Flying, though. Ice’s offense is undoubtedly one of the strongest, so we don’t have to change anything about it, but it having absolutely no defenses whatsoever despite being on several defensive Pokemon is absolutely criminal.
@@ThisIsntAUA-camr "Water should still have a resistance to Ice," No it shouldnt, water types are broken as fuck, and have consistently been way too powerful with only 2 weaknesses one of which sucks.
@@C3l3bi1 Then give other types a chance to strike back at Water. Ice isn't the only type that's in trouble. Poison, for example, would be a good candidate to be made super effective against Water without being imbalanced, and it would thematically make sense. We still want to buff Ice defensively, but there is no reason to improve its offensive capabilities at the same time. It's already good there as is.
Ok this really needs to happen. You have no idea how much of my bug types I’ve killed by switching in from thinking it was resistant to psychic and dark. That and fairy types being resistant to bug are among the things that never made sense to me
I’d make Ground weak to Bug considering that Bug already resists Ground. Yeah I know that would give Krookodile & Claydol a quad weakness & Torterra a second quad weakness as well.
Ice is my favorite type and I've spent literal years thinking about how to buff it :) I'd love to hear what other people think about these ideas, which are listed in order of bizarre-ness. In my opinion, all ice needs is some defensive buffs since its already a fantastic offensive type. Ice should 100% resist ground, grass, flying, and maybe water. I would also like to see ice be neutral against ice but I don't think that's necessary. I do also think a bug type resistance would make sense but it wouldn't be entirely necessary. Assuming all these changes were made, every single dual ice type Pokemon, except for Rotom Frost, Alolan Ninetales, and all versions of Kyurem, would lose one or more of its weaknesses. Pokemon such as Aurorus and Abomasnow would even lose three weaknesses! Additionally, ice types should obviously gain a 20% physical defense buff in hail. This last one, however, is SUPER weird, but hear me out. I think that ice should have additional weather benefits outside of just hail. For example, Pokemon like Eiscue, who are ice types but are more melted, tend to have a higher speed stat. Meanwhile, ice types that are more frozen, such as Avalugg, tend to be slower. I think that, using this logic, it'd be interesting if harsh sunlight gave ice type Pokemon a 20% speed buff! It would lead to more diversity in the Pokemon used on sun teams and would allow for ice type Pokemon to maybe punish Pokemon that rely on sun. I'd also love for ice to get some kind of a stat boost in rain but I'm not entirely sure what it should be or if it makes sense.
Ice is my favorite type as well. It definitely needs to resist Dragon. I can see it resisting Fairy (if they don't make Bug resist Fairy) to try to balance it too. I've flirted with the idea of Ice resisting Water or even Electric.
I think make ice a glass cannon( ice knife) style type would be interesting. *2 to fire and fighting, freeze grinding spell(*2 to rock and steel). Still, defensively /2 from water and elect are good ideas. I think immune from water is a possible choice.
Honestly Ice is a victim of old game design. Originally Ice type was created as THE counter to dragon type. And look, Gen 1 did not care much for balance, which is absolutely fine - it was a single player RPG first and foremost. It did not have to be balanced at all. But going forward some of it's themes were carried over, even if balanced started to be important. Among these ideas was dragon types being really strong, which honestly Fairy type existing pictures exactly why Ice type has been so weak the whole time. Because if you make a dragon countering type actually good, it suddenly is overwhelmingly the strongest type. But for some reason they forgot to change Ice when the type balance changed. So now we have the Dragon type that has been dethroned, Fairy type being the new strongest, and poor Ice that was weak because they didn't want it to be the best type despite the fact countering dragon type is no longer THAT big of a deal.
1) Making Ice resist Water and Flying is good, I'd go one further and say it can resist Normal as well (as ice can be as thick and sturdy as rock) 2) Hail buff, obvs. 3) Remove Ice's Rock weakness (never made sense to me) 4) Maaaybe remove Water's resistance to Ice
Honestly, the minute you were beginning to talk about step 5, I also came to the confusion immunity thought. It really would play well with both lore and making the type more usable. Love the insights.
Wait how can bugs be supereffective against fairies, when in every story and fairytale, fairies and pixies coexist peacefully with nature, fostering wildlife?
Can't wait for that Ice type buff video! I feel like a solid place to start would be making Ice super effective against Water. I always thought it was a no-brainer, after all, Ice freezes Water right? And now you've got a cool rock-paper-scissors triangle with water-fire-ice.
A lot of Water Pokémon are based on things that thrive in cold climates like penguins and seals so it would seem weird if they were weak or neutral to it. I think defensively Ice should resist water and flying (most birds migrate away from colder climates during winter) and it should have one of the weaknesses to fighting/steel/rock become neutral. I feel making it neutral to steel is probably the most useful and has some merit because ice can really hinder the effectiveness of machinery.
@@caldw615 ice weaknesses to fighting, rock & steel make sense to me lol steel can damage ice like how you can scratch it ice is easier to break remember? Water being resistant to ice kind of make sense to me since water types can control their own temperature ice type moves won't do much to them I can see water especially being more warm damage ice so ice types being resistant to water doesn't really make sense to me there Ice maybe should resist flying I don't see how flying types should damage them much lol The thing is steel type pokemon are more poweful than regular machines I don't think ice types will mess up their machinery lol
This video is straight up amazing, please do more of this - although even without that this video adds so much depth of understanding to a current imbalance
Having a confusion resistance would be super cool and would fit thematically. I always saw confusion as seeing double or being dizzy, but bugs have millions of eyes at once, and so would be immune to the confusion that the mammal, fish and bird Pokemon would be.
I feel like aside from making them immune to confuse(which makes a lot of sense), making them immune to sleep also makes sense, a lot of bugs never or sleep or rest, for example, ants dont sleep
Everything except the fighting and offensive fairy changes would be the most realistic imo. Resisting fairy, dark, and psychic should be a given and the bonus of eliminating confusion would be great
Ice could definitely be improved, One interesting suggestion I saw Was to make them resist water And hit water for neutral damage, But in exchange Ice gets hit Super effective by Scald And Water becomes immune to hail. Which might sound like you'd end up at neutral again, But I'd argue that the existence of the water type is the biggest issue for ice types currently.
Bug is my favorite type since gen 7, so I really enjoyed this video! The fairy/bug interaction only makes sense to me realistically and would love to see it become real so both bug and fairy get more balanced towards the middle ground.
Personally, I really enjoy the hypothetical content and hope to see more of it. It’s really interesting to look at how more minor changes can have major ramifications for the meta game.
I’d like Bugs to be immune to sound moves as well, it wouldn’t really affect them that much but it’d be a fun change just because insects don’t have ears like vertebrates
A really interesting change to bug would be to give it an extreme interaction with Electric; make Electric weak to Bug, but also Bug weak to Electric. Bug zappers are a thing yeah, but small insects are also known to fry circuitry if they manage to get inside them. If you really wanted to purely buff Bug though, you could leave the Electric weakness out and just add the offensive buff. This would add a niche to Bug that is currently monopolised by Ground; an already really powerful type.
if anything the bugs frying the circutry has nothing to do with electricity being weak to bug but the copper cables sucking. so its more like steel should be weak to electric. you can break a circuit with a twig if you want to.
Honestly, I think bug should be 2× effective against ground. Like... Because of ant hills. Bugs burrow through the ground, why do they deal 1/2×?? I understand rock being strong against bug, bc a rock is usually too tough to burrow through, and rocks can crush bugs. But I think bug should be supereffective on ground
This was a great! I never realized how bad Bug types had it. I don’t play competitively but I really liked this video! Would be interested in more content like this 😸
The two types with the most widespread defensive problems actively affecting their viability are, in my opinion, Bug and Rock. Bug because of chronic stat-spread and move base-power problems combined with often terrible type matchups, and Rock because of a mindblowingly large number of Rock dual-types with one or more 4x weaknesses that largely negate the attempts at bulk their stats sometimes aim for. Rock suffers from a similar defensive problem to ice, with a similar current result in Rock and Ice coverage moves being largely better than bringing actual mons of those types. The key difference between Rock and Ice being that Ice hits more of immediately important targets super-effectively than Rock and doesn’t have the same widespread 4x weakness issue that Rock does. Ice isn’t generally trying to be defensive to begin with either, whereas rock has repeatedly tried and utterly failed at nearly every turn due to chronic 4x weaknesses, and common weaknesses at that, negating bulk as a relevant tool.
While I gotta say you’re right I think the difference between the two is rock types are found early on so there’s 5x the amount of rock types than ice types and, well, rock resists SOME types ICE RESISTS NONE
Just look at gen 1, 11 rock types and only 1 of them doesn't have a 4x weakness, and the other 10 have 4x weakness to grass. I think the initial thought was to make the rock type what the steel type is, the most defensive type of the types, but they failed and then steel type came in and took the spot. Another way to buff rock is to increase the accuracy of their moves, out of 14 moves that deal damage, 4 have 100% accuracy, the strongest of them dealing 80 damage with no effects
@@igorlopes8463 after generation 1 they then proceeded to use Water/Rock again… and again… and again in later generations all the way up to Sword&Shield, and then also use Rock/Steel multiple times on different pokemon with incredibly low speed and no access to Trick Room
@@realfishscience7842 Ice only resists itself actually, but regardless, Ice doesn’t even try to be a defensive typing, unlike rock that leans hard into defense in stats but utterly fails because of type matchups. Ice knows it’s going to be a glass canon, unlike Rock that seems hardwired to try to take hits that it can’t.
I don't think Bug moves are part of the problem. Lunge and Leech Life are great physical moves, while Bug Buzz is good enough as a special one. Mega Horn is also a thing. Maybe there could be a Bug type priority?
Do Ice and Poison next please! They’re my two favorite types and seeing them ranked just barely above Bug is disheartening, though I honestly get it and *kind of* agree, though I’d rank Poison a bit higher simply because I think it has underrated defensive viability
It is really hard to defend yourself against bugs with punches and kicks. So honestly, I feel like it would make a lot of sense for bug type to be super effective against fighting.
I've always thought about the bug and fairy swap. Cool to see that volc would be good in vgc. But as a singles player buffed volc would cause me endless pain haha. Good video.
Would love to see the fairy resistance changes, move improvements and the confusion type trait as they make more sense and make the type much more viable. The psychic dark super effective would be icing on the cake really
Imagine a bug/dragon type being immune to confusion with outrage and something like x-scissor for fairy types that try to switch in. Only need a coverage move for steel types at that point.
I would really love the buffs to ice, and one of the, personally speaking, should be removing freeze dry and adding an overall effectiveness and resistance to water
I'd like to see how you'd buff ice or poison. Especially poison. (I'd start by making corrosion let pokemon hit steel types with poison moves as well as being able to poison them, as well as distribute the ability to more than just salazzle)
I don't think poison is particoularly terrible. Yes it's kinda bad offensively, but it's quite good defensively and i don't see it holding back many mons they way ice do.
Poison is a weird one and with Ice resisting Ground and Fairy puts it on par with the most defensive offense based type, ground (hitting 5 types and resisting 3).
@@blakdeth oh yeah and then there's this thing where Poison is resisted by three different types rock, ground, and ghost. It is also ineffective against steel and resisted by itself. It's just unreliable at filling it's role as a Fairy killer in comparison to Steel. If Poison was resisted by less types it would actually serve as a viable Fairy counter. If Poison could hit more Fairy types for super effective damage it cod be more average. When I (and maybe even most people) think of a Fairy killer, I think of Steel not Poison. Lastly, it'd be cool to see what would happen if Bug and Poison were super effective against each other again.
Another suggestion: U-turn could be exclusive to Bug. Or at least less accessible to other type mons, as you don't see non-electric mons using Volt-swtich
11:16 imagine what could potentially be done if this was real, in doubles you could have something like say speed boost scolipede out and then your other pokemon could know and use swagger on the scolipede, it's attack would raise without the confusion combined with scolipede's speed from speed boost would give you a very quick and powerful sweeper
Before watching, I would improve bug by making them offensively neutral against fairy and fighting. they could also be made to resist fairy and psychic. The next change is that bug should NO LONGER resist fighting. So in total, removing 2 offensive weaknesses, adding 2 defensive strengths, and removing one defensive strength. I don’t think bug needs to be made super effective against anything else. Also note that the fairy changes nerf fairy, which indirectly defensively and offensively nerfs steel by making its positive matchup less important. The changes to the interaction between fighting and bug nerfs fighting defensively in exchange for an offensive buff. Fighting types aren’t used for defense anyway, so the buff to their offenses is worth the trade here (and thematically makes sense). You’ll notice this change then indirectly nerfs steel AGAIN by making a type it’s weak to more powerful. All of this is excellent because fairy and steel are op and bug is weak. It’s actually pretty cool that it’s possible to fix all of this a little bit with just these changes WHILE having the changes make sense. Another little balancing coincidence is that the psychic type is a type that I actually don’t see as particularly powerful. It gets an offensive nerf here that it doesn’t really need, but in exchange it makes a type that it’s strong against a little more important to balance it out. YET ANOTHER balancing coincidence in relation to the Ice and Rock types is that the buff to fighting is balanced out by the nerf to steel. Both of these types struggle defensively so it’s great that they don’t get even weaker. Now i’m being crazy, but since I’m in this mode and the comment is this long I want to add some changes to these two types. For the ice type, the first change is to add a defensive resistance to water, the second is to add a defensive resistance to flying, and the third is to increase all ice types’ defense by 50% while in hail. So kinda like sandstorms interaction with rock types. The last thing would be to change the freeze status to “frostbite” and have it do one of the following: lower defense or special attack by 30%. Water is another strong type so it can afford the nerf, especially in the defense department. For rock, the only thing I can think of is to remove its weakness to ground. It’s within the realm of justifiability thematically. The case can be made that ground’s strength vs rock would be much more defensive than offensive. The change also works pretty well again because ground, like water, is an upper tier type and can afford a slight offensive nerf.
I would like to see more stuff like this! This was interesting to hear about. I really like the bug type, so it's cool to hear what it would take for them to be stronger.
The reason why Bug and Fighting resist each other is pretty simple. They're basically taking the real life equivalent of say...an MMA fighter vs A House Fly. It's small and evasive and can be frustrating for the fighter, but at the same time...it's a fly. Even it lands a hit...it's a small bug, it's not gonna do very much to a fighter.
@@VoraciousHeart Well...it's all about who lands the killing blow first. Does the fighter crush the bug before it has a chance to sting, or does the bug's evasive maneuvers prevail?
@@blazingblackness4442 so wouldn't it make sense if they were both super effective? Also let's think about this logically. Many of the bug pokemon are several feet tall so evasion wouldn't be as easy. However that would also make bites and sting significantly more dangerous
Let me know if you want to see more videos like this!
i do 😼
More more more
We want to see more videos like this!
yes please
Yes
Fun fact: Bugs can't get dizzy from spinning around. They don't have an inner ear like us humans that controls their balance and tells them which way is up. So it makes sense for them to not be confused.
I learned something today :>
It's hard to know WHAT exactly confusion is as the anime is not canon to the games, but confusion likely just means that the Pokemon is disorientated. When a Pokemon hurts themself in confusion, it is implied the Pokemon isn't just tripping from being dizzy as the damage is based on the Attack stat.
Like I said, anime isn't canon but the anime explains this by confused Pokemon being unable to land their attacks and instead missing and hurting themselves. This would explain why the Attack stat is used, the harder you try to hit a Pokemon the more damage you will take if you miss them and hit the ground or a wall.
@@floofzykitty5072 I learned TWO things today :D
The world need more people like you
I never knew that, that’s crazy cool! Makes sense, considering they climb all over the place in weird angles and such.
From one arthropod enthusiast to another, thanks for the cool fact!
Fairy being resistant to Bug was the most baffling part of the type when they added it. Here's a new type we're adding seemingly specifically to balance overpowered or underperforming types... And make it resist Bug because Bug really needs a 7th type that resists it? Why tho? Who thought Bug needed nerfs?
My theory is someone high up at GameFreak has a massive bug phobia.
Also makes no sense, if anything bug should resist some they're the same size of "fairies" so they wouldn't be falling for their power tricks
So just on a note here.
Lorewise Bug should beat fairy and i think that it was intended to make Fairy Weak to bug instead.
But because of a programming error they kept it this way and gamefreak doesnt really like editing and changing type matchups frequently
So i guess they just roled with it.
Usually in alot of cinography and stories Fairy or Fae hate bugs but also commonly lose vs bugs.
The amount of times that fairies get caught in a spiders web or killed by wasps is very very common.
Bugs tend to be seen often as evil vs fairies.
Thus i personally think this was a programming error that needs to be fixed but what never happend
I mean it took them 5 generations to balance the overwelmingly powerfull dragontype.
Change the overpowerd steel type, and ballance out some of the weaker typings.
But cucked teh already really weak bug typing
@@Princess_Narii Interesting. I'm not very knowledgeable about fey lore, so that's not something I was aware of, thanks for the info. Definitely sounds like it would have made more sense to make it a weakness than a resist from that perspective.
I'm not sure I believe it though. The thought has crossed my mind before just from a balance perspective, it would have made more sense to buff bug than nerf it. However it's hard to believe they would make such an error all the way in Gen 6.
Gen 1 was filled with incorrect type coding, complicated brand new series with a team that isn't familiar with that type of game, understandable. Gen 1 was somewhat glitchy in general. By Gen 6 they definitely had a handle on things though, and Gen 6 doesn't really have other major glitches that make it seem like it's an outlier in that regard. Hard to imagine them making that kind of mistake so late in the Pokemon series.
They did also remove Steel's resistances to Ghost and Dark, so changing type matchups for existing types isn't out of the question. it's not something they do often, but I would think if they made a programming error and coded a weakness as a resist instead they should be willing to fix that mistake at least.
But who knows. Maybe it was a mistake and now they just don't want to fix it because in some way that would be admitting to it being a mistake, however silly that might be.
@@borismuller86 That would be weird, given the fact the idea for the Pokémon franchise was inspired by Satoshi Taijiri catching bugs as a kid.
But maybe there was an anti-bug coup or something within Game Freak's upper management sometime in the past. I dunno.
I love them being immune to Confusion because that means the hypothetical Dragon/Bug type I want so badly would be able to spam Outrage without the drawback
Retroactively change Flygon to Bug/Dragon so it can spam Outrage and unlock the potential it truly deserves.
really cool idea but fairy will always make outrage have a drawback
@@leer6871 I think Ground/Bug would be better for Flygon.
The next pseudo-legendary should be Bug type. doesn’t matter what its other type is, we need more super powerful bug types in the game
That would be pure terror
For the Fairy type to be immune to Dragon, strong against Dark and Fighting and to be only damaged super effectively from the second weakest type (Poison) and the rarest type (Steel), there is absolutely no need for it to be strong against Bug too.
steel is not actually the rarest type, its ice followed by ghost.
however steel is mostly a defensive type (and the most stupid one at that) with few options for reliable good moves.
but at the same time fairy being weak to these 2 was good because their ofensive presence was way too low. poison was only effective against grass which is weak to 4 other types, and steel was only effective against rock and ice which had also 4 and 3 other weaknesses respectively.
steel got slightly nerfed by not resisting either dark or ghost anymore, but it still resists 10 out of 18 types which is kinda ridiculous. i personally would remove its psychic resistance while making bug resist psychic instead.
I think everyone agreed with that and I honestly would have let Bug resist it instead. Like, Bug already resists Fighting which makes little sense, so why not give it a buff?
@@hawkticus_history_corner Bug resists fighting because it's commonly believed that chasing insects like cockroaches is difficult similar to trying to birds. For fairies to be resisting bugs, makes no sense other than fairies in modern media work alongside bugs so why aren't fairies resistant against grass-types?
But I agree they should really push this idea. Make bugs super effective against fighting types like flying types. Maybe we should see bug-type as a swarm type. Like a martial artist against a large swarm of locusts.
@@unkindled6410steel was made along with dark to counter psychic
@@puppies3330 i know and? psychic isnt even that strong anymore and what made it so strong in gen 1 was in big part due to a glitch. now it would make much more sense and be more balanced to remove steels resistance to it and give it to bug
Fun Fact: It was his love of collecting and cataloging bugs that gave Satoshi Tajiri the initial idea for Pokemon. So it’s a shame that the bug type performs so poorly imo.
Maybe Masuda hates bugs
Yeah, it's very ironic!
Also Kamen Rider
I am pretty sure that is why the bug type even exists at least that’s what I thought anyway. It’s a good thing he didn’t become a entomologist as then Pokémon would never exist. So in a alternate universe Tajiri is a famous entomologist.
Bug type has come so far from Gen 1 where it was absolute trash.
But it's still bottom of the barrel T.T
I was dumbfounded when I first found out fairy resists bug… It doesn’t make any sense and I’m so glad you pointed that out
As for making it super effective against fairy, what’s the thematic sense? I don’t get it and am very open to hearing it.
@@LenOnTheDoor0000 Bugs are found everywhere you would expect fairies to be. Conclusion: Bugs are eating all the fairies
@@LenOnTheDoor0000 bug dont believe in fairies. Because they are the counter part of faeries. Butteflies etc
@@LenOnTheDoor0000 Same reason why fairy is weak to fire. Fairies are associated with nature, and insects control/eat/transform nature by eating plantlife or even changing the environment (like termites).
@@LenOnTheDoor0000Fairy is a pretty girly type. Girls typically hate bugs. I think you'd often see boys gross girls out with them on tv and stuff. It's similar to why Bugs are strong against Psychic since many people, boy or girl, are scared of bugs. Fairy is just more specific to girls. That's my take on it, anyway.
Love the idea of swapping around the Fairy interaction. Really this alone would probably make using bugs actually fun in a casual setting as well!
But what is the logical explanation why would bug be strong against fairy?
@@enioandries3537 predatory bugs :)
Why are bugs super-effective against dark types?
@@enioandries3537 Is there a "logical" reason why water resists steel, or why fairy is weak to poison?
@@yonatanbeer3475 yes and yes (though I get your argument) have you ever tried cutting water with a knife? That's why water resists steel. in MANY MANY legends and folk lore there are stories of fairies dying off because their forests or rivers are poisoned and dying. Fairies are tied to the health of nature and that dying kills them. That's why fairy is weak to poison.
@@yonatanbeer3475 I think it's the pesticide angle, like herbicides against grass. But then bug should be weak to poison as well, and they did have mutual weakness in gen1.
I've been on the "make bug super effective against fairy" train for a while, good on you for expanding on it
For fucks sake who at game freak thought that bug needed another type to resist it ? Who had a vendetta against bugs ???
@@teami1star all of them. Look at how they replaced one nearly OP type with another.
#BanceFreak
It's both a great buff to bug and a mild nerf to fairy, and I think both are fine
And I would like to start the bug being weak too bug and water instead of fire and rock train (if bug was weak to fire and rock shouldn’t normal as well)
lol shouldn’t bug be super effective against bug since they fight each other for survival
Massively agree with this, especially with the rework of X-scissor. It really has no point in existing when you consider that leech life and Lunge both have the same base power of 80 and have the secondry effects of healing and ATK debuff. But if X-scissor get that higher crit chance then Sniper bugs like Ariados would be so fun to use, especially with the fairy changes.
Nothing can save ariados lol
I want to see Wolfey create a new type and see how he would implement it competitively and thematically
The light type?
@@michaelcumpton5795 that one comes up a lot when talking about a new type, but fairy is pretty much a light type
the sound type is very easy to do. There's quite a few sound based moves, Pokemon and abilities
Cosmic type, let's gooooo
@@savedark12yearsago70 I feel what people want from a light type that fairy type sorta lacks is big ass nuclear energy lasers so i propose we add something like energy type. (Cant come up with a better name seeing as nuclear type is a guaranteed nono)
I’ve always thought that fairy should be weak to bug, the reason is that I always imagine a fairy getting caught in a spiders web.
But also they still keep the normal Defensive and Offensive Fairy Type Set but also make it so it'll struggle against a bug. Plus, Fairy-esque moves like cute charm and sweet kiss can confuse many mons. I also think that it's poison moves could Non-Paralyze Flinch Water Types when it has a trait like Misty as partly a reference but to partly further increase its strength. Bug can still die however from Water Pulses.
I guess? That doesn’t make sense for all types of fairies, though.
@@FaeMagicexisting typing doesnt always make sense like why is Normal weak specifically to Fighting? And there's a lot of other dumb typing whereas fairy being weak to bug makes a lot of sense.
@@randomname9723 because if dwayne johnson punched you in the stomach, youd collapse.
@@MakenaForest if something (including humans) get hit with a flamethrower it's also most likely dead
Aside from removing Fighting’s resistance to it, I’d say everything changed made thematic sense. Being... for lack of a better term, simple creatures, Psychic’s mind tricks, Dark’s manipulation and overall confusion would be too foreign for them. And being the world’s most abundant type of animal, bugs if any creature would be more connected to nature than fairies, plus that connection means Fairy could be considered a “pseudo-Grass” which Bug is also strong against.
I feel like a lot of Bug types "strength" flavourwise is basically the other types going "EW GROSS!". Its why Ghost is strong against it. People are scared of spiders, but would be terrifed by ghosts. Of all the types I feel Fairy would hate Bug the most, being stereotypically girly. On the flipside Fighting being stereotypically macho would probably just smush them rather than be scared of them.
@@insaniac112 I think bug resisting fairy makes thematic sense, although I'm not so sure about bug being super effective against it. Meanwhile I think it'd be entirely reasonable to just make them neutral both ways for fighting types, maybe even resisting them. You can crush a bug sure, but have you ever *tried* punching a mosquito? Bugs can be hard to hit, and it's not like knowing how to punch well is going to make a bug bite hurt any less. Bugs should also do neutral damage to poison types, due to the fact that bugs hunt with poison all the time, but poisonous bugs also get hunted by other bugs. No actual reason that I can think of for poison to resist bug.
@@insaniac112 Bug type is resistant of Fighting because they have exoskeleton.
If the bug were the size of a human baby kicking him will not affect him at all.
@@STDVH uhh that actually makes sense... i never thought of it that way
@@STDVH Kick the baby!
Definitely think that the fairy change makes a ton of sense, it would also do a bit to weaken fairy types and increase their weaknesses, since 2 seems super low.
Let's not forget that the 2 types they are weak to are not even common offensive types
@@hanmoamo although Steel rose to a slight occasion since it was already phenomenal
ngl I think fairy should be resisted by ice, grass and bug. Would give it an actual downside to beating what are otherwise some of the best types in the game.
I can understand bug resisting fairy, but being super effective against it? Wouldn't it make more sense for bug to be supereffective against ground because of all the digging most insects do.
I really like the concept of bug being super effective on fairies and resistant to it. Fairy pokemon usually have a royalty or cutesy feel to them, so i think it would make sense for them to be scared or grossed out by bugs.
ooo that's an interesting angle
Fighting and Bug mutually resists eachother because in japan Bugs are often associated with superheroes, the idea is that they're both "Heroic" types just as Dark is actually pretty close to an "Evil" type, which is why they're both super effective against it as well, this was a very intentional interaction that just doesn't translate that well outside Japan
Edit: Some typos
It's not just Japanese media that associates bugs with superheroes, western media does it as well with famous superheroes such as Spiderman and Blue Beetle.
And yet Bug's also the worst type in the game..
100% agree with the bug/fairy type effectiveness swap, this would make the game so much more balanced
Yeah I am so in favor of that also would add in that fire is super effective against fairy as well
Clef getting bopped by every uturn would be great in singles. Stop allowing it to come in on everything
The only problem i have with this is that it would make Uturn even more broken in singles. I think bugs resisting fairy and dealing neutral damage to it would already be good enough
Although does it make sense? Why should bug do super effective against fairy?
@@yuakim why does flying beats fighting or why does psychic beats poison
I loved this video. Justice for the bad bugs
Hey Mikey!
Would love to see you making a video on the changes you would make to the Type Chart!
MIKE!
I just think all of it should be added, I love most bugs like Scizor and Volcarona.
Yea, and like, why do ghosts resist bug anyway? Is like they had to lose to everything in gen I. Of the types that didn't got a gym in gen I it is also the only one not used by a elite four/rival. (Flying and normal are used by pidgeot)
As someone that has recently discovered how many Bug Pokémon they actually like, I really appreciate this video. Would love to see Kricketune or Armaldo become viable
I would love ledian kricketune and parasect..... not scizor or volcarona , they are strong because one Is metal and other Is fire....... I really want to see a really bug type using bug moves, being competitive.
@@raphaels33 Same here! I'd love to see a Bug-type become viable *because* of its Bug typing rather than because of another type.
Kriketune would need an entire overhaul,
But from what I remember Armaldo isn't bad,
Just not competitive.
Also love Heracross even tho I know he’s an average bug, wish he could do more in terms of use considering his weaknesses.
Personally other Bug Steel types like Durant, Escavalier, and especially Forretress deserves some love in the sense that they all provide a sort of coverage that Scizor does not. Especially in Escavalier’s case with its damage output straight lethal on trick room teams having access to Fell Stinger.
But more importantly this would give Bug type moves more viability since GF is more key on buffing their move set but not their type matchup.
I feel like if bug just wasn't resisted by fairy, fighting, or ghost it would be just ok.
yea no sense at all
ua-cam.com/video/-DliQDMPkn4/v-deo.html this kind of dynamic has existed for a long time as a joke, this video explains the dynamic
@@Sanguine_Jackson He's not saying bug type shouldn't resist fighting. He's saying fighting type shouldn't resist bug
Honestly I understand Fighting resisting bug but Fairy and Ghost seems a bit odd
Fairy should be weak against bug because most of the time bugs are ugly monsters that fairies are afraid of.
As bug type lover, I was furious when I found out they made Fairy resist Bug, and I always thought that it was beyond silly they didn't take that particular opportunity to buff Bug, when they sure took it to improve the offensively nigh-useless Steel and Poison types. Thematically I found it fitting as well, fairies are seen as something mystical, spawning from human imagination. Why not have a natural counter in something that doesn't have the imaginative prowess humans do, thus being resistant to it(if not immune)?
I think for the second stage, I'd rather see Bug deal neutral damage to Ghost rather than neutering Psychic even further, it's already one of the least desireable offensive types. I personally don't dislike Bug being resisted by Fighting while resisting it too, I find it much more offensive that Dragon and Ghost are super effective against their own kin.
I don't really have an opinion on the changes in move damage(and/or accuracy) of the staple bug moves you mentioned, but I will say that adding a bug version of Close Combat, Superpower and/or Brave Bird would massively impact Bug viability too. Pin Missile working like Triple Axel might also be an idea worth exploring(or inventing a new move), as currently the only 100+ damage Bug move is restricted to not even a handful of Bug pokemon, the only useful one being Heracross and that one doesn't even run Megahorn - ironically enough - when it mega-evolves.
I feel like testing this kind of theorycrafting in Showdown would be super interesting (for each stage) to see how powerful it would really be in practice and against other people
What did you do to make Caterpie cry?!
wussup john!
im subscribed!
It’s tough love
He used stealth rock
So much love that he made a creature with no emotion cry
I quite like this, and I'd like to see the ice type.
In a similar vein, how about types that need new attacking moves to broaden their usefulness?
@@Nephenon Hail is tricky, and i feel maybe a little too tied to the ice type, whereas other weather has more flexibility.
Honestly, I'd like hurricane to get the accuracy+pierce boost in hail, but thats a strange mix of "quite a lot" and "does it even matter?"
more 100 accuracy rock moves please
@@Shethwind I feel like Hail should at least give Ice types a 50% boost to defense, to mirror Sandstorm's 50% boost to Rock types' special defense.
does hail give blizzard 100% accuracy?
Ice has been getting the most investment ever with the addition of Snow and Aurora Veil. To the point where it could potentially be OP if Ice type moves were boosted by weather.
The only “fixing” ice needs is a couple of added resistances - maybe to water and electric considering ice is a terrible conductor because it lacks mobile electrons
I’d really like to see how you’d buff the ice type, these buffs all sound great
All you'd really need to make Ice types better is to give it more resistances.
It's already an amazing offensive typing, but it just has no survivability whatsoever.
I've been giving it some thought so I'd like to share some ideas.
Skimming through the moves physically they don't have good general moves outside of ice punch.
Icicle Jab: 70 power, 1 stage crit chance, 100 accuracy. Physical move.
Frost Slam: 90 pwr, no effect, 100 acc. Physical move.
Heat Sap: After 1 turn the opposing pokemon effected by this move will be frozen. Status move. (A variation of yawn)
Flash Freeze: Status move. 60% accuracy. Freezes a target. (variation of hypnosis)
I would like to buff hail too since most weather types have multiple effects. The best ones I believe are Harsh Sunlight and Rain. They give attack bonus' and debuffs to fire and water respectively. Sandstorm's secondary effect gives rock types a 50% increase in special defense. Personally I would prefer a snowstorm over a Hail for the changes I have in mind but to keep in theme the Offensive buff would be the same chip damage each turn and the defensive change would be a chance to flinch per turn (so it needs to start this effect after moves were chosen).
Since I am biased towards Abomasnow a unique thing to do is to make 2 weather moves. Hailstorm and Snowstorm and Ice Warning as another normal ability for Abomasnow.
Snowstorm can increase Ice type moves' power and the secondary effect is to lower the speed of other types by 50% each. OR it could give a 50% increase in both defense stats and in combination with aurora veil we can get ice tanks, sadly only alolan ninetails can use it effectively while abomasnow has a neutral stat allocation so it doesn't excel at anything and easily gets overwhelmed.
Matchup-wise it's resisted and effective against the more common types and sadly it has no resistances other than ice.. It's designed to be an offensive typing too. I personally don't get the Fighting weakness, people slow down and shiver when cold so I would at the very least make it neutral.
Thematically Ice usually resembles a lack of life. I would make it resistant to grass or bug but those two typings are already weak. The next thing would be to make it resistant to Fairy since a harsh reality is a polar opposite of a dreamy fantasy.
I'd say giving them resists against Water, Ground and Dragon along with a 25% physical Def buff in hail would be good enough.
Ice's main issue is its horrible defensive profile especially against physical moves, so with this change it would still be weak to key types (Rock, Fighting, Fire, Steel) but also strong against other big ones (Dragon, Ground, Ice, Water). Good risk-reward balance.
It's great offensively already so offensive Ice types get a bit more survivability but it's the defensive ones (way more in number) who get massive buffs and new niches.
I mean its already a pretty good offensive typing, just add a resistance to like 2 types and ur good to go
Personally I’d say Ice (my fav type btw) should resist Flying and be immune to Water
When it comes to a passive that all Bug Pokemon share, I think an immunity to entry hazards would be cool because bugs are either small or nimble and should easily avoid traps. This would also remove the need for virtually all Bug Pokemon to use Heavy-Duty Boots and would pair extremely well with U-turn. To me, confusion is moreso something all Psychic Pokemon should be immune to.
Rather than adding resistances, I think removing some of the types that resist Bug would be a better change. Poison, fighting, fairy, and ghost could be removed, and maybe rock could be added. Like you were saying, Bug's problem lies in its offense; if the Fairy type had Bug's moves, it would be an even better type, so I think it really comes down to terrible offensive coverage.
EDIT: Forgot this was a VGC community LOL
EDIT 2: A more balanced idea would be to make Bug-types immune to all traps, but Stealth Rocks would still calculate damage for secondary types.
I like this idea better
immunity to entry hazards is a huge buff in singles but a minimal one in vgc. wolfey was coming at this from a vgc perspective so that does not at all fit what he was going for.
Please no, immunity to entry hazards is an insanely large buff on top of an already greatly improved type matchup spread. Just think about Queen Quiver Dance over there getting to run an item other than HDB for free, or Scizor taking zero chip from U-turn spamming. Kinda breaks some stuff.
In singles it would also be borderline broken, if not entirely so. Bug-types are generally crippled by entry hazards, so I understand the reasoning behind this idea, but it would have no effect in one format while being wildly imbalanced in another. Not a good fix.
I like this idea combined with the fairy interaction change. To add some craziness I’ll borrow from someone’s idea of flinch immunity. Maybe based on the bug’s height/weight, it becomes immune to entry hazards (small) or to flinching (large). This way mons like scizor can’t abuse u-turn spam, but can still set up on you if not careful.
For anyone wondering about the Fighting/Bug resistances, it's most likely because Fighting used to be seen as sort of a "hero" type, compared to Poison/Dark's "villain" role. In Japan, bugs have a history of being associated with heroic characters like Kamen Rider, so Bug and Fighting are kind of like allies. I think that's cute!
I love the fairy swap, makes complete sense to me just picturing a fairy like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan vs a Wasp. She would and should be terrified of it
Sure tinker bell would be terrified of it but what a fairy is is actually really broad so you cant really make the type weak to bug just because one of the many kinds of fairies there are would be terrified of it especially since some of the others tend to go more in the direction of being creatures that think stuff like murder is a fun prank to play on people and I doubt those would care about bugs
@@acetrainerdevin1164 invasive insects wrecking the ecosystem (emerald ash borers, and invasive termites come to mind, also many bugs are venomous)
Or small elfs vs evil scorpions
Exactly! If fairies were real, predatory bugs would probably try to kill and eat them like they would any other bug.
I picture Smurf Village being ravaged by a preying mantis 🥺😂
For tier 3 I would personally make them immune to being flinched, thematically it fits with their strong exoskeletons they could still move and competitively it would be huge for something like trick room who could get its setter picked off with fake out, Orbeetle couldn't for example. It would also make setting up very scary for bug types.
That makes a ton of sense! More sense than the confusion part, I think.
Scizor would be discussed to join the Uber tier in BDSP
@@Mr.Sax. probably not considering his main stab attack is priority and is pretty null when considering that you have to go second to be flinched. It would more so be a VGC buff from rockslide and fake out being omnipresent.
@@ThePolice2012 Swords Dance, U-Turn, Roost, Superpower... You name it. Those aren't priority moves. Also the main move to look for flinches, Fake Out, is a +3 priority move.
@@Mr.Sax. I’m not trying to be a dick but you clearly don’t play bdsp OU. Scizor doesn’t have access to super power and it’s best fighting move is brick break. Scizors best set atm is specially defensive BP roost defog u turn to check Latios the strongest attacker in the tier. Offensive scizor isn’t really good atm and even if it was the immunity to flinch wouldn’t mean anything due to it relying on bullet punch. Again not trying to argue just think you are over eating scizor due to its high usage. It’s just great at what it does from a defensive pivot aspect. I’m a 1600s player so take what you will
Honestly, i believe they should change swarm as an ability. Seeing how most bugs thrive in summer. Change swarm so they gain from sunny day. It would also make them viable with sun teams
Well sunny day boosts fire moves too.....
@@CocoLocoToco i know. This video was about buffing bug types. And bugs being more active in the summer would make sense for swarm to be changed to being an ability to buff bugs during sunny day.
@@CocoLocoToco same applies for all grass types.
Bug types need a atk boost when two bug types are in a double battle in a team
@@CocoLocoToco ok but competitively that makes your team heavy on bugs. Which makes your team weaker in the long run. But making an ability for them run off an already popular weather type that sees play already you make them viable without being reliant on having to have other bugs around
I love seeing this though when it comes to xerneas i do 100% understand why its annoying and stinky but its always left a middling thought to roam my head. Why isnt Xerneas Fairy/Grass, with such typing and appropriate move set changes It probably could of been alot more balanced and not the mention how such type compliments its origins as a embodiment of the TREE of LIFE
Xerneas can transform into the shape of a tree to rest, but it isn't literally a tree.
It also provides a nice parallel to Yveltal's Flying typing. Dark is hit hard by Fairy, whereas Grass is hit hard by Flying. Balances them out more.
@@LilyCelebiFlipnote Yes for real one of the reasons it should be like many other box art legendary's having counter types to each other (still doesnt help poor zygarde but tbh idk what to do about that)
@@junkofromprojecttouhou7612 Eh, Ground is sort of an opposite to Flying and Dragon is an opposite to Fairy, so it... sooorta works? Just not with the weaknesses, lol. I wouldn't change anything about Zygarde either, though.
There's in a fact a reason for fighting and bug resisting one another! Bugs as heroic figures is a common idea because of the influence of Kamen Rider, so the "superhero" and "martial artist" types going easy on one another makes sense.
This is also the reason both fighting and bug hit dark, the "villain" type, super-effectively.
Nd this influence is mostly in Japan, that's why other people see it as not making sense.
Bug was super effective on Poison in the first gen, which was the first "Villain" type too. You also have moves like "Signal Beam" and "Silver Wind" which a pretty tokusatsu flavored.
yo thats neat
I see it more as a case of discipline vs exoskeleton and whenever you knock aside a bug you don't typically do much to them.
Kamen Rider, kuroi bodyyy!!
Blew me away with how differently I think of bug type when you went over strengths & weaknesses. It being supereffective against poison in Gen 1 changes the math for parasect significantly. High-risk, High-reward on an odd typing that I think was amongst the most inspired designs in good ol genwon
Honestly, just making fairy and fighting lose their resistances to bug sounds good enough. Balance through Moves like Quiver Dance could be interesting, where they get more weird abilities and Moves rather than focusing on the type match-ups alone.
Maybe having Bug Moves also be Boosted in Grassy Terrain could be rad. Or giving a Special Defense buff or something.
Lastly, Compound Eyes can have a bonus effect such that it ignores Stat debuffs or enemy buffs to Evasion. It's not a lot, but it can be something tasty and tactical. Or, Compound Eyes can tell you a random Move the opponent has.
Bug is one of few types that doesn't have some kind of terrain or weather or status condition associated with it.
Imagine if there was a new weather type: "Damp". Basically it's very warm and wet, it'll lower the dmg from rock, ground and steel but boost the dmg of grass, water and bug. Could even disable the use of self-fainting moves like the ability does now, so that the ability won't be useless
My only problem with that is no one is gonna run poison type with bug having the resist (tho I want bug to be able to do more things)
@@DJ-Rose I like the concept. It is common for bugs to like damp and humid areas. It would be cool to se and change it up for the bugs. But I don't know how it would be implemented. We already have damp as an ability. And that would suit the weather conditions very well. But it only prevents explosions. Well it is at least a cool concept.
@@liamskarhed6068 they almost got this with Sticky Web, but of course they didn't give that move to any remotely decent Bug.
The Fairy type interaction change is so good and straightforward: give the worst type in the game a resistance to the best one, while still making sense.
That's is the kind of stuff I want for the Ice type video and had some thoughts about, but never considered about the Bug type.
I like the idea of "niche" types like ice or bug being useful against the majors like Fairy and Dragon.
Even if they won't be good as a general sweaper the way that normal can (bellydrum linoone w/ return, guts + poison swellow w/ facade can both sweep the hoenn elite 4) In both competitive and normal playthroughs.
And as far as specific pokemon go, some buffs through abilities or just rebalancing stats & move pools wouod go a long way.
Ex: Kriketune could double sound based moves damage (like how chewtle doubles biting damage). Or ledian could be a dedicated physical attacker and only learn physical moves.
I am very salty over trying to use Sneasle in Coliseum only to realize that it is a pure physical attacker, and in gen 3 both ice and dark use special (with the exception of its signature move beat up where every conscious party member makes a base 10 typeless physical attack). And even after gen 4's split the keep giving pokemon signature moves or strongest stab moves using their considerably weaker attacking stat.
Bugs current strongest ability is tinted lenses, which is most common on Venomoth and Yanmega and is makes "not very effective" moves hit for neutral damage and i love it.
i think this was the idea when they made bug strong against psychic, but the fact that bug doesn't RESIST psychic really stopped that from being too effective
@@kkutya same thing about making ice strong against dragon but not resist it. the effectiveness is cool but the type sucks if there's no defensive utility because otherwise they just die to a very powerful type
@@stllr_ ice should resist ground
I agree with every idea presented here, one thing I would personally add to the final phase of buffs being an immunity to Sticky Web (strictly an immunity, not a switch-in removal property like Poison-types with Toxic Spikes)
I have thought the same thing before, it doesn't really make sense thematically. Bugs are basically the primary targets of webs in real life. If anything Bug types should be MORE susceptible to Sticky Webs (though I don't think that's a change they should actually make haha). I think it would make more sense if Fire types burned away sticky webs when they switch in, kind of like Poison types do for Toxic Spikes.
@@1BlueYoshi I considered the same logic myself and I agree with you, but the primary demographic wouldn't really think that far into things.
@@kobold_sushi_executive_chef Haha yeah I guess that's true
Honestly I think having an immunity to Priority would help it’s speed trap game a lot better. Especially since most bugs have superior reaction time and spatial awareness against larger foes in general. That way it can do much better job of set up, and not loose to Accelerock, Gale Wings, Sucker Punch, and Extremespeed. Kinda like Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense
I personally love this style of content and would be more than interested to hear your thoughts on fixing other types, or just mechanics in general you'd like to see changed. Nintendo probably won't ever use em, but I'm sure some fangame developer will
Good call. Some fangame developers change stuff (pokémon typings, stats, moves) without much care, these videos can definitely help.
As a lover of the creepy-crawlies, I'd be ecstatic if they gave Bugs any reasonable buff. Thank you for providing the food-for-thought on what the Bug-type's dreams look like!
I'd love to see this continue, because even without my bug bias I think it's really neat to hear a competitive player's thoughts on what makes things balanced or unbalanced. I'd love to see Poison after Ice!
Imo, I'd say Ice is alright tbh. The type for me screams "glass cannon" which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'd give it a resistance to grass and that'd probs be it tbh if I had to make a change.
I want to point out how cute it is that the Pokémon are animated to move around and react to the script (like the segment at 2:08), it's a very nice touch :)
I personally don’t agree with changing darks interaction with bug type Pokémon. Dark is already an average type as it is, the previous buffs to bug would just drip dark a little too low for balance.
If anything bug should lose ghost's resistance to it as it doesn't really make sense thematically.
@@marcopaolo1643 I think that one's fine personally. I'd rather have bug deal super effective damage to an s tier type like Fairy rather than a c tier Dark.
I wouldn't agree with the Psychic type either though because Psychic type is just a worse fairy. Any Fairy types who have a primary or secondary psychic typing actually gets hurt by the psychic type on defense.
@Marco Paolo Ghost is already a hard type to hit for super effective damage and it wouldn't too badly hamper Ghost types like Gengar, Rotom-H or Chandelure who's 2ndary type makes them resist bug anyway so I 100% agree with this
Keep in mind my points come from an exclusively singles perspective.
I do agree that Bug is the worst type of all, but I wouldn't say that it's much better defensively than offensively. Resisting Fighting and Ground is actually really good, but they are also partially nullified by a Rock weakness, which many of the pokémon from these types run. Grass is a similar type which doesn't share this issue, making it much more reliable defensively. Keeping this in mind, I'd say giving Bug a Dark resistance would really benefit it and make it much more reliable. Many Fighting pokémon and some Ground pokémon (basically LandoT, Gliscor, Mamoswine, Diggersby) run Knock off as coverage due to its insane usefulness whilst having a high bp on the first hit. This would make Bug much more reliable, though I could see Dark being really bothered since it's a type whose identity, similarly to Ghost, lies in being hard to resist. To compensate, I would make Bug moves hit Dark neutrally, making pokémon like Hydreigon and Tyranitar less prone to being abused by U-turn spam.
Regarding Fairy, I do agree that Bug should resist it too, giving another important extra defensive niche to it. However, I think Bug should be neutral against Fairy, not supereffective. Hitting fairies neutrally would be a sufficient offensive buff without giving U-turn (yes, you again) too many new victims. I believe this is the best way to buff Bug types without overbuffing non-bug U-turn users.
I believe that with these changes, Bug would be in a perfect spot as a niche type that offers unique defensive utility but unremarkable offensive presence.
Edit: I've been thinking how I would nerf Fairy to a more fair point, and alongside these changes I would make it so Fairy is hit neutrally by Dark (still hits it back for supereffective damage, similar to Ice vs Grass). This would completely compensate Bug resisting Dark and make Dark even more spammable than it currently is, bringing it closer to Ghost. Fairy would end up only being weak to Poison and Steel, two bad offensive types, but also only resisting Fighting with a Dragon immunity. We balance both Bug and Fairy in just a few changes, and improve Dark a bit in the process.
Despite their improvements as a whole in recent years, I've still been thinking about how there's missed potential in the bug type. I really like most of your ideas, and I don't even play competitively.
Making them immune to confusion is a really cool idea that I probably never would've considered.
Good work.
Most definitely wanna see more theorycrafting like this, very entertaining ideas and your editing makes pretty dang good wideos.
I really like the Fairy effectiveness swap and confusion immunity. I think those two in conjunction would fix the type and make it comfortably sit in the mid tier.
Ideally the worst type in the game would still be a mid tier instead of one with glaring issues
I actually love the idea of bug being immune to confusion and I think If I were going to change bug I'd probably swap it's interaction with fairy like you suggested, make bugs immune to confusion, and make some of the changes to the move pool while adding a few more moves to the move pool of bug type and leave it there.
Honestly being strong against fairy, resisting fairy, and being immune to confusion is good enough. Then again i doubt gamefreak will ever do it.
Ice type buff video will be an interesting. I believe they only need a resistance buff. These include water, flying, and ghost.
Also maybe a defense buff during hail… but aurora veil is a thing.
Honestly I think having Hail buff Ice moves like Rain boosts Water moves would be much more beneficial, while perhaps less thematic. It's almost impossible to design effective defensive Ice-types with how poor the type is defensively; yes Hail stall has existed in the past in Gen IV and V, but they weren't usually using multiple Ice-types. Just Abomasnow for setting the weather and checking Water-types, then maybe either Froslass or Walrein depending on what kind of gimmicks you like. If Hail had an offensive advantage, you wouldn't have to try to play to Ice's weaknesses and could instead focus on its strengths.
I also thinking getting good Slush Rush Pokemon would do a ton for hail. Arctozolt isn't half bad, but Beartic and Alolan Sandslash are just terrible. Slush Rush Mamoswine would be a MASSIVE buff for Hail teams, providing an enormous offensive threat that is well worth building a team around. Heck, Slush Rush Glaceon spamming STAB Blizzard would at least be useable. It pained me personally when Glaceon got the nearly useless Ice Body for its Hidden Ability.
A final potential buff for Hail could be making Snow Warning the only permanent weather ability. Hail stall died after Gen V, because you just couldn't reliably switch Abomasnow in to refresh your weather and similarly couldn't afford to waste its item slot on Icy Rock. If Snow Warning was a permanent weather ability, it would have merit over the other weather abilities to make up for its inferior weather and potentially make using Pokemon like Ice Body Avalugg a worthwhile investment.
@@nsiderultimaseth I think Ice is already good enough offensively that it doesn't need any more buffs in that department. Especially since most Ice pokemon are defense-oriented slowpokes anyway this won't help them much.
A more interesting change imo would be to give it resistances to Water, Ground and Dragon (all very good types) and a 25% defense boost in Hail. Pokemon like Lapras, Walrein, Avalugg and Frosmoth would probably get some unique niches, and ones like Weavile and A-Ninetales would definitely appreciate the extra survivability.
@@sheenyhive That's sort of my point, Ice is a terrible defensive typing and yet we keep getting defensive Ice-types. Sure we can completely change Ice's type matchups to make the type work defensively, but in terms of changing the effect of Hail as a weather, giving Ice defensive buffs would do nothing at present because you essentially can't use Ice as a defensive type outside of very niche circumstances. Using weather defensively in general is not great; without permanent weather, defensive weather doesn't last long enough to be useful in singles and doubles is too fast-paced for defensive weather strategies. Tyranitar is sort of the exception, because he buffs HIMSELF, has incredible bulk on his own that skyrockets in sand, and has the power to make a significant impact in doubles with the extra turn of survivability his bulk can give him.
Yes, changing Ice's type matchups could make a defensive buff from Hail worthwhile (though Weavile is a bad example for your point, because he is extremely frail regardless) but as-is giving Hail a defensive effect would essentially be wasted on a typing that does nothing defensively. Ice is a solid offensive typing, so giving Hail an offensive boost would play to the type's strengths in the current game as opposed to squandering a defensive boost, and have a greater impact on the viability of Hail as a weather.
If Hail gave a 50% boost to Ice types' defense, I don't think it would affect the viability of most Ice-types outside of MAYBE Avalugg. But if it was an offensive boost, people would probably start trying to run Blizzard spam teams to take advantage of it and it would have a greater impact on the metagame overall.
@@nsiderultimaseth I think your Tyranitar example actually supports my argument because "buffs itself in [weather] for bulk and chip damage + extra turns survival in doubles" would describe most Snow Warning pokemon with my suggested changes (+ Aurora Veil), doubly so since TTar has big type weaknesses yet thrives anyways due to good stats, good STAB and good coverage. Ice types are mostly hindered by their type working against their stat distributions and abilities (Aurorus and especially Frosmoth are the biggest examples) and lack of non-STAB coverage.
EDIT: Read your comments more carefully. Agree with the Hail boosts and the ability point. I still think no weather should be permanent though. And I still disagree on defensive buffs not being useful. Personally I think buffing Ice defensively *and* knocking hyper-offense down a peg would still be a good approach and would definitely matter just as much as offensive buffs if not more.
(Apologies for the multiple edits if you saw them, didn't sleep well so I struggled to get my thoughts across)
@@sheenyhive lol what are you talking about? tyranitar is only good offensively, and he packs one of the best move coverages, and abilities in the game. tyranitar is a MON not a type, but he also so happens to resist 7 TYPES one of which is a immunity, compare that to a ice type whooping 1 resist lol.
"and knocking hyper-offense down "
thats not even relevant, no style of play is making ice types unviable, ice types just suck in basically all styles of play and the few were they are viable is offense, giving a type with no resistances a 50% defense boost wont do anything. with your proposal you are literally nerfing ice types.
what makes tyranitar so good is that he is offensively broken strong, and has absurd stats, if you made tyranitar a ice type it would suck.
most ice type will never benefit from a defense boost, ice types unlike rock type dont have steal rock type moves and being weak to stealth rocks is terrible. the defense boost is "nice" but certainly would not make ice types viable by a large marging
simply put ice types suck and if you give them a defense boost it wouldnt do anything.
and in double nobody would use ice types anyways, because they would still suck, if you dont resist anything in VCG forget it, even with hail you just have any weather setter come in or any mon that has super effective moves.
The one downside I have with Stage 1 is that Poison would once again be offensively outclassed by Bug. You can fix this by making Poison super effective against Water, and maybe making it resist Water too. We would finally have another type that could both switch into a strong Water-type attack and smack them back super hard. Plus, more reliable Poison-types means that the strong Fairy-types will need to work a little harder
I feel like poison should hit steel for neutral, or at least half damage. Steel can still be immune to being poisoned, but it would allow them to make more acid based moves, and have it make sense. Poison could be super against dragon too?
I always thought it strange that Poison had no interaction with Water types. Water types are one of the stronger types in my opinion, so having Poison have some form of advantage over it would be neat.
Poison is bad cause of the amount of types that resist it like grass.
I would like to see poison have a similar interaction to Burn/Paralysis in that it halves damage from special attacks, instead of physical attacks/speed. That would make poison an actually useful status condition.
@@rabeechowdhury bruh what
I have an idea! Types have more than just their Matchups. Electric is immune to Paralysis, fire is immune to burn, Ghost pokemon can't be trapped etc. So, lets give Bug type something special!
How about...Bug types are immune to entry hazards? (Bugs are tiny and can get past through most obstacles after all)
aDrive would be happy from watching this video!
Also, it would be interesting to see how you could fix the Ice Type since it's also on-par as being the worst type alongside the Bug Type.
Ayy so you're here too lmao. At this point I've proabably seen you in almost every comment section
Ice typing is a slippery slope because ice moves are so strong. But IDK
To fix Ice, give it resistances. It's already great offensively.
I think it should resist Flying and probably something else like Psychic, Dark or Ground.
@@arch3223 ground resist is severely needed. Ground is broken for coverage so broken that they made levitate
@@arch3223 Ice should have resistance to water, at the very least. both because water is one of the game's best types, and because like... Ice *is* just frozen water! They should mutually resist each other, with the exception of moves like freeze dry and probably scald.
Can we fix Ice next? I think taking away Water's resistance to Ice, taking away one of its weaknesses(Maybe Ground?), and give it a new resistance, maybe Fairy? All that would go a long way to making it better
Uh ice isn’t weak to ground? Did you mean rock or did you mean that ice is super effective against ground?
Yes please
Ice being resistant and super effective against Fairy would make a bit of sense.
Fairy can be seen as both a nature type (nature magic) and a light type. Nights are longer during the winter and Winter/snow is commonly seen as a sort of death in nature. So it works out pretty well.
I think that ice should resiste water and flying, and just that would actually be a considerable improvement, since ice is strong as an offensive type
How about ice resistances to ground water and maybe grass since currently ice only resistance is ice
Honestly, if they had just made Fairy weak to Bug and Bug immune to Fairy I think that would have been all that they would have needed to do. I hated the addition of Fairy because they made it OP.
Like I love that they added Fairy type,
It's a fun and useful addition,
But nobody likes what they did to Bug
@@BramLastnameYeah fairy was a great addition and I love it (except for the fact that I constantly forget it exists and get confused when Clefable survives getting punched in the face).
And it's role of reining in dragons while buffing steel (offensively) and poison types was great. But that bug interaction makes no sense.
I get that bug is supposed to be a weak type because, well, they are bugs. But they are too much weaker than other types.
@@88porpoise Also lore wise it doesn't even make sense,
Because yes Hags, Trolls and Goblins, which are fairies by technicality, do often eat bugs in the fairytales.
But in the same regions there's tales of those creatures destroying entire rooms in an attempt to squash a single bug
Or tiny fairies who's most feared predator is a spider.
So I don't see how Fairy resisting Bug is a flavour thing,
Like at least Fire resisting Fairy has a clear inspiration for it,
Even if there's sources that contradict it.
In no story (of cultural significance) is it ever mentioned that fairies of any kind are more resilient to bugs than any regular human.
I've always loved bug pokemon, its such a shame they ended up getting the short straw. Great seeing how you would boost them
Its so ironic that the type Tajiri(pokemon creator) actually collected as a kid, seens to get the short end of the straw
Bug is basically treated as that type you get early, evolve quickly and then discard before gym 3. Rip Butterfree, even ash left you behind.
Most of its strongest members are "gimmicky" like Shuckle and Forretress being absurdly tanky (look at Shuckles base stats then know in gen 4 it gets a power trick to average its attack stats with its foes, imagine getting averaged with base 10 (both atks) and having to hit base 230 (both defenses)).
Other strong members are Yanmega and its Tinted lenses letting it treat 1/2x resistance as 1x, or Shedinja & wonderguard.
Its traditionally strong members are Scizor, Heracross, Pinser, Volcarona and so on and they are generally not top teir.
Could be worse
You could always be an ice type fan
@@Radiolonestar Me, an ice type fan-
Long-Time Bug pokemon fan, and subscriber. Loved this video!!
Ever since your last video on the worst types, I've been thinking about how to fix bugs too, and Fairy resist was what I came up with too.
I think making them super effective against Fairy would be icing on the cake, but even just giving them that resist and removing Fairy's resist to them would make a huge difference.
Bugs being immune to confusion. Free Outrage usage on Mega Beedrill or Mega Pinsir would be fun
I've been confused at why the fairy/bug interaction wasn't reversed ever since fairy was introduced - nerfing an already niche and lackluster offensive type made no sense.
I mostly pay attention to singles, but it's nice to see that such an expert in doubles play also came to the same conclusion. Just goes to show how much bug has gotten ripped off over the years.
From what I understand it was entirely to nerf u-turn
@@xemnahort2 it doesn't even need to be a counter to Fairy though. It could simply be a reversal of resistances giving Bug a resistance to Fairy but not deal super effective damage against Fairy.
Sounds more than fair
Then just simply nerf the power of U-Turn. Gamefreak is the type of company to use a nuke to kill an anthill. If they nerfed U-turn to like 50 base power that would have been better. Or maybe like 40 base power so technician bugs like Scizor can’t benefit
Technician activates before stab so unless they bump it to 61 technician would still buff it
If you really wanted to make a bug over powered, in addition to being immune to confusion, you could create an Outrage-like move for the bug type. Maybe just turn skittersmack into bug type outrage
I'd actually like to see Skitter Smack become the Sp.Att version of Lunge.
However, I think a Bug-flavored Outrage would be *hysterically* beautiful,
and I would love so greatly for it to exist!
Wanna know something scary?, if bugs in our world were as big as they’re counterpart Pokemon versions?
*We as a human race would be devoured in months*
An ant can lift x10 its own wait, and even a Mantis or Spider are capable of hunting and eating larger prey such as small rodents, Small reptiles, Some amphibians, and even the freaking flying types themselves, Birds (albeit small species)
If bug were the same size as Pokémon?, the strength would be enough to kill and rip apart even larger predators such as tigers or even sharks
Your first change being exactly what I thought bug needed made me feel so good, I don't get how Gamefreak were like "Let's introduce fairy to tone down how strong dragon is." but then just making Fairy take that spot in bustedness
I always questioned why Fairy resisted Bug, but assumed it was to somehow address "U-Turn spam." Unfortunately, that failed if it was the case.
Thematically, I do not think Bug should resist/be strong against Fairy, because they usually coexist with each other. They either get along or prey on fairies, so, it wouldn't make sense if they are suddenly strong against them. However, that coexistence should remove Fairy's resistance to them.
I am also of the mind that Steel should lose its Bug resistance because bugs can get into ANYTHING when they try. Like hornets in vents or spiders in offices... I even had a personal horror story where roaches managed to break into my fridge. An absolute mess that was.
No longer being resisted by the 2 best types would help it so much.
I'm pretty sure steel resist bug since bugs can't really break metal.
@@-hypertheninja-4280 ive seen termites get through mild steel
@@creel999 Oh, maybe instead there could be a bug move that's super effective on steel than?
@@-hypertheninja-4280 Obviously not, but they can still circumvent and get around them by finding weak spots such as holes. Which is why I think they should lose the resistance, since bugs can and will get into places no matter how hard you try to keep them out...
"Grass type is immune to sleep via powder moves"
*Shows rowlet sleeping*
Excellent video as always! As for buffing Ice Types, I've always thought they should have resisted Normal and Water. Normal because Ice can be hard as rock and Water cause Ice is made out of Water. I guess you could make Ice good vs Water, but that would invalidate Freeze Dry. Idk if any of these changes would help Ice that much though.
P.S. I always found it weird though that GameFreak often gives Ice types defensive stats but only gave them one resistance
If Ice was super effective against water that would be a huge buff. Water is one of the strongest defensive types and ice is already strong offensively, making this change would give Ice-types a lot of wall-breaking potential.
Water should still have a resistance to Ice, but it would make sense for Ice to resist Water. In return, we can make Scald the reverse Freeze Dry.
Ice should definitely resist Normal and/or Flying, though.
Ice’s offense is undoubtedly one of the strongest, so we don’t have to change anything about it, but it having absolutely no defenses whatsoever despite being on several defensive Pokemon is absolutely criminal.
@@ThisIsntAUA-camr "Water should still have a resistance to Ice,"
No it shouldnt, water types are broken as fuck, and have consistently been way too powerful with only 2 weaknesses one of which sucks.
@@C3l3bi1 Then give other types a chance to strike back at Water. Ice isn't the only type that's in trouble. Poison, for example, would be a good candidate to be made super effective against Water without being imbalanced, and it would thematically make sense. We still want to buff Ice defensively, but there is no reason to improve its offensive capabilities at the same time. It's already good there as is.
Ok this really needs to happen. You have no idea how much of my bug types I’ve killed by switching in from thinking it was resistant to psychic and dark. That and fairy types being resistant to bug are among the things that never made sense to me
I’d make Ground weak to Bug considering that Bug already resists Ground. Yeah I know that would give Krookodile & Claydol a quad weakness & Torterra a second quad weakness as well.
Ice is my favorite type and I've spent literal years thinking about how to buff it :) I'd love to hear what other people think about these ideas, which are listed in order of bizarre-ness.
In my opinion, all ice needs is some defensive buffs since its already a fantastic offensive type. Ice should 100% resist ground, grass, flying, and maybe water. I would also like to see ice be neutral against ice but I don't think that's necessary. I do also think a bug type resistance would make sense but it wouldn't be entirely necessary. Assuming all these changes were made, every single dual ice type Pokemon, except for Rotom Frost, Alolan Ninetales, and all versions of Kyurem, would lose one or more of its weaknesses. Pokemon such as Aurorus and Abomasnow would even lose three weaknesses!
Additionally, ice types should obviously gain a 20% physical defense buff in hail. This last one, however, is SUPER weird, but hear me out. I think that ice should have additional weather benefits outside of just hail. For example, Pokemon like Eiscue, who are ice types but are more melted, tend to have a higher speed stat. Meanwhile, ice types that are more frozen, such as Avalugg, tend to be slower. I think that, using this logic, it'd be interesting if harsh sunlight gave ice type Pokemon a 20% speed buff! It would lead to more diversity in the Pokemon used on sun teams and would allow for ice type Pokemon to maybe punish Pokemon that rely on sun. I'd also love for ice to get some kind of a stat boost in rain but I'm not entirely sure what it should be or if it makes sense.
Ice is my favorite type as well. It definitely needs to resist Dragon. I can see it resisting Fairy (if they don't make Bug resist Fairy) to try to balance it too. I've flirted with the idea of Ice resisting Water or even Electric.
I think make ice a glass cannon( ice knife) style type would be interesting. *2 to fire and fighting, freeze grinding spell(*2 to rock and steel).
Still, defensively /2 from water and elect are good ideas. I think immune from water is a possible choice.
Honestly Ice is a victim of old game design. Originally Ice type was created as THE counter to dragon type. And look, Gen 1 did not care much for balance, which is absolutely fine - it was a single player RPG first and foremost. It did not have to be balanced at all. But going forward some of it's themes were carried over, even if balanced started to be important.
Among these ideas was dragon types being really strong, which honestly Fairy type existing pictures exactly why Ice type has been so weak the whole time. Because if you make a dragon countering type actually good, it suddenly is overwhelmingly the strongest type. But for some reason they forgot to change Ice when the type balance changed. So now we have the Dragon type that has been dethroned, Fairy type being the new strongest, and poor Ice that was weak because they didn't want it to be the best type despite the fact countering dragon type is no longer THAT big of a deal.
@@prttt26 which is why they should make crabominable way faster.
1) Making Ice resist Water and Flying is good, I'd go one further and say it can resist Normal as well (as ice can be as thick and sturdy as rock)
2) Hail buff, obvs.
3) Remove Ice's Rock weakness (never made sense to me)
4) Maaaybe remove Water's resistance to Ice
Honestly, the minute you were beginning to talk about step 5, I also came to the confusion immunity thought. It really would play well with both lore and making the type more usable. Love the insights.
Wait how can bugs be supereffective against fairies, when in every story and fairytale, fairies and pixies coexist peacefully with nature, fostering wildlife?
Bug being good against fairy was my first thought for a change as well. I would love to see Heracross become viable.
My favourite type has always been bug type, theres a lot of sick designs but lack in the battle department ):
same, i used to battle about back in gen 6 with an all bug team, i didnt get far, but it was fun nonetheless
Can't wait for that Ice type buff video! I feel like a solid place to start would be making Ice super effective against Water. I always thought it was a no-brainer, after all, Ice freezes Water right? And now you've got a cool rock-paper-scissors triangle with water-fire-ice.
Water pokemon can be cold or hot so I can see how water types are strong against ice lol
A lot of Water Pokémon are based on things that thrive in cold climates like penguins and seals so it would seem weird if they were weak or neutral to it.
I think defensively Ice should resist water and flying (most birds migrate away from colder climates during winter) and it should have one of the weaknesses to fighting/steel/rock become neutral. I feel making it neutral to steel is probably the most useful and has some merit because ice can really hinder the effectiveness of machinery.
@@caldw615 ice weaknesses to fighting, rock & steel make sense to me lol steel can damage ice like how you can scratch it ice is easier to break remember?
Water being resistant to ice kind of make sense to me since water types can control their own temperature ice type moves won't do much to them I can see water especially being more warm damage ice so ice types being resistant to water doesn't really make sense to me there
Ice maybe should resist flying I don't see how flying types should damage them much lol
The thing is steel type pokemon are more poweful than regular machines I don't think ice types will mess up their machinery lol
This video is straight up amazing, please do more of this - although even without that this video adds so much depth of understanding to a current imbalance
These honestly seem perfect. I’ve always loved excavalier so I’d love to use him as a main trick room sweeper
Having a confusion resistance would be super cool and would fit thematically. I always saw confusion as seeing double or being dizzy, but bugs have millions of eyes at once, and so would be immune to the confusion that the mammal, fish and bird Pokemon would be.
I feel like aside from making them immune to confuse(which makes a lot of sense), making them immune to sleep also makes sense, a lot of bugs never or sleep or rest, for example, ants dont sleep
Ants do sleep, they just take a lot of very short naps throughout the day instead of one long sleep like humans
Insects generally do rest and will die if their rest is constantly interrupted.
I didnt know some of the things peopple said here, thanks clarifying
Everything except the fighting and offensive fairy changes would be the most realistic imo. Resisting fairy, dark, and psychic should be a given and the bonus of eliminating confusion would be great
Ice could definitely be improved,
One interesting suggestion I saw
Was to make them resist water
And hit water for neutral damage,
But in exchange Ice gets hit Super effective by Scald
And Water becomes immune to hail.
Which might sound like you'd end up at neutral again,
But I'd argue that the existence of the water type is the biggest issue for ice types currently.
Bug is my favorite type since gen 7, so I really enjoyed this video! The fairy/bug interaction only makes sense to me realistically and would love to see it become real so both bug and fairy get more balanced towards the middle ground.
Personally, I really enjoy the hypothetical content and hope to see more of it. It’s really interesting to look at how more minor changes can have major ramifications for the meta game.
I’d like Bugs to be immune to sound moves as well, it wouldn’t really affect them that much but it’d be a fun change just because insects don’t have ears like vertebrates
A really interesting change to bug would be to give it an extreme interaction with Electric; make Electric weak to Bug, but also Bug weak to Electric. Bug zappers are a thing yeah, but small insects are also known to fry circuitry if they manage to get inside them. If you really wanted to purely buff Bug though, you could leave the Electric weakness out and just add the offensive buff. This would add a niche to Bug that is currently monopolised by Ground; an already really powerful type.
if anything the bugs frying the circutry has nothing to do with electricity being weak to bug but the copper cables sucking.
so its more like steel should be weak to electric. you can break a circuit with a twig if you want to.
Honestly, I think bug should be 2× effective against ground. Like... Because of ant hills. Bugs burrow through the ground, why do they deal 1/2×?? I understand rock being strong against bug, bc a rock is usually too tough to burrow through, and rocks can crush bugs. But I think bug should be supereffective on ground
They deal neutral damage to ground,
Bug resists Ground, not the other way around.
@@BramLastname Oh that's my bad lolol
I actually thought bug was supereffective against ground for a long time lol
This was a great! I never realized how bad Bug types had it. I don’t play competitively but I really liked this video! Would be interested in more content like this 😸
The two types with the most widespread defensive problems actively affecting their viability are, in my opinion, Bug and Rock. Bug because of chronic stat-spread and move base-power problems combined with often terrible type matchups, and Rock because of a mindblowingly large number of Rock dual-types with one or more 4x weaknesses that largely negate the attempts at bulk their stats sometimes aim for.
Rock suffers from a similar defensive problem to ice, with a similar current result in Rock and Ice coverage moves being largely better than bringing actual mons of those types.
The key difference between Rock and Ice being that Ice hits more of immediately important targets super-effectively than Rock and doesn’t have the same widespread 4x weakness issue that Rock does. Ice isn’t generally trying to be defensive to begin with either, whereas rock has repeatedly tried and utterly failed at nearly every turn due to chronic 4x weaknesses, and common weaknesses at that, negating bulk as a relevant tool.
While I gotta say you’re right I think the difference between the two is rock types are found early on so there’s 5x the amount of rock types than ice types and, well, rock resists SOME types ICE RESISTS NONE
Just look at gen 1, 11 rock types and only 1 of them doesn't have a 4x weakness, and the other 10 have 4x weakness to grass. I think the initial thought was to make the rock type what the steel type is, the most defensive type of the types, but they failed and then steel type came in and took the spot.
Another way to buff rock is to increase the accuracy of their moves, out of 14 moves that deal damage, 4 have 100% accuracy, the strongest of them dealing 80 damage with no effects
@@igorlopes8463 after generation 1 they then proceeded to use Water/Rock again… and again… and again in later generations all the way up to Sword&Shield, and then also use Rock/Steel multiple times on different pokemon with incredibly low speed and no access to Trick Room
@@realfishscience7842 Ice only resists itself actually, but regardless, Ice doesn’t even try to be a defensive typing, unlike rock that leans hard into defense in stats but utterly fails because of type matchups. Ice knows it’s going to be a glass canon, unlike Rock that seems hardwired to try to take hits that it can’t.
I don't think Bug moves are part of the problem. Lunge and Leech Life are great physical moves, while Bug Buzz is good enough as a special one. Mega Horn is also a thing. Maybe there could be a Bug type priority?
Do Ice and Poison next please! They’re my two favorite types and seeing them ranked just barely above Bug is disheartening, though I honestly get it and *kind of* agree, though I’d rank Poison a bit higher simply because I think it has underrated defensive viability
I think the Bug type should at least be resistant to Psychic and Dark type just so it can resist what Bug is super effective against.
It is really hard to defend yourself against bugs with punches and kicks. So honestly, I feel like it would make a lot of sense for bug type to be super effective against fighting.
I've always thought about the bug and fairy swap. Cool to see that volc would be good in vgc. But as a singles player buffed volc would cause me endless pain haha. Good video.
Would love to see the fairy resistance changes, move improvements and the confusion type trait as they make more sense and make the type much more viable. The psychic dark super effective would be icing on the cake really
Imagine a bug/dragon type being immune to confusion with outrage and something like x-scissor for fairy types that try to switch in. Only need a coverage move for steel types at that point.
A Bug/Dragon type in general would be really cool!
To an outsider this might sound OP,
But then you show them Zacian Crowned and nobody's complaining anymore.
@@LilyCelebiFlipnote the mega yanmega that we all hoped for, but never came
@@zanr6943 True :,0
I would really love the buffs to ice, and one of the, personally speaking, should be removing freeze dry and adding an overall effectiveness and resistance to water
Very neato! It's interesting how such subtle changes can make such a big difference! Looking forward to further videos of this nature for sure
This is some great editing and as usual, incredible content. Keep it up, Mr Youtubist
I'd like to see how you'd buff ice or poison. Especially poison. (I'd start by making corrosion let pokemon hit steel types with poison moves as well as being able to poison them, as well as distribute the ability to more than just salazzle)
Poison just needs a move like Freeze Dry to hit Steel types with and it'll become very viable
I don't think poison is particoularly terrible. Yes it's kinda bad offensively, but it's quite good defensively and i don't see it holding back many mons they way ice do.
Poison is a weird one and with Ice resisting Ground and Fairy puts it on par with the most defensive offense based type, ground (hitting 5 types and resisting 3).
@@noukan42 fair but it's my favorite type and I'd love to see it get stronger
@@blakdeth oh yeah and then there's this thing where Poison is resisted by three different types rock, ground, and ghost. It is also ineffective against steel and resisted by itself. It's just unreliable at filling it's role as a Fairy killer in comparison to Steel. If Poison was resisted by less types it would actually serve as a viable Fairy counter. If Poison could hit more Fairy types for super effective damage it cod be more average. When I (and maybe even most people) think of a Fairy killer, I think of Steel not Poison. Lastly, it'd be cool to see what would happen if Bug and Poison were super effective against each other again.
Another suggestion: U-turn could be exclusive to Bug. Or at least less accessible to other type mons, as you don't see non-electric mons using Volt-swtich
I said it last time and I’ll say it again, theoretical Wolfey is the best Wolfe
11:16 imagine what could potentially be done if this was real, in doubles you could have something like say speed boost scolipede out and then your other pokemon could know and use swagger on the scolipede, it's attack would raise without the confusion combined with scolipede's speed from speed boost would give you a very quick and powerful sweeper
That plus his proposal of making Bug super effective against Fairy types would make Scolipede the Fairy Type slayer. Imagine the chaos.
Anyone else notice the little visual story being told with the bug types in the corner at 2:09? Adorable!
Before watching, I would improve bug by making them offensively neutral against fairy and fighting. they could also be made to resist fairy and psychic. The next change is that bug should NO LONGER resist fighting.
So in total, removing 2 offensive weaknesses, adding 2 defensive strengths, and removing one defensive strength. I don’t think bug needs to be made super effective against anything else.
Also note that the fairy changes nerf fairy, which indirectly defensively and offensively nerfs steel by making its positive matchup less important. The changes to the interaction between fighting and bug nerfs fighting defensively in exchange for an offensive buff. Fighting types aren’t used for defense anyway, so the buff to their offenses is worth the trade here (and thematically makes sense). You’ll notice this change then indirectly nerfs steel AGAIN by making a type it’s weak to more powerful.
All of this is excellent because fairy and steel are op and bug is weak. It’s actually pretty cool that it’s possible to fix all of this a little bit with just these changes WHILE having the changes make sense.
Another little balancing coincidence is that the psychic type is a type that I actually don’t see as particularly powerful. It gets an offensive nerf here that it doesn’t really need, but in exchange it makes a type that it’s strong against a little more important to balance it out.
YET ANOTHER balancing coincidence in relation to the Ice and Rock types is that the buff to fighting is balanced out by the nerf to steel. Both of these types struggle defensively so it’s great that they don’t get even weaker.
Now i’m being crazy, but since I’m in this mode and the comment is this long I want to add some changes to these two types. For the ice type, the first change is to add a defensive resistance to water, the second is to add a defensive resistance to flying, and the third is to increase all ice types’ defense by 50% while in hail. So kinda like sandstorms interaction with rock types. The last thing would be to change the freeze status to “frostbite” and have it do one of the following: lower defense or special attack by 30%. Water is another strong type so it can afford the nerf, especially in the defense department.
For rock, the only thing I can think of is to remove its weakness to ground. It’s within the realm of justifiability thematically. The case can be made that ground’s strength vs rock would be much more defensive than offensive. The change also works pretty well again because ground, like water, is an upper tier type and can afford a slight offensive nerf.
I wish there was a Bug/Electric-type Pokemon who had an ability that made all of its moves supereffective against Steel
Tera fighting is all that's needed then no ability
I would like to see more stuff like this! This was interesting to hear about. I really like the bug type, so it's cool to hear what it would take for them to be stronger.
The reason why Bug and Fighting resist each other is pretty simple. They're basically taking the real life equivalent of say...an MMA fighter vs A House Fly. It's small and evasive and can be frustrating for the fighter, but at the same time...it's a fly. Even it lands a hit...it's a small bug, it's not gonna do very much to a fighter.
yah, works fine for a fly. now try it with a killer hornet or bullet ant.
@@VoraciousHeart Well...it's all about who lands the killing blow first. Does the fighter crush the bug before it has a chance to sting, or does the bug's evasive maneuvers prevail?
Saitama vs random fly hahahaha
But why does a housefly do less damage to an MMA fighter than a rock, or a dragon, or something made of water or electricity?
@@blazingblackness4442 so wouldn't it make sense if they were both super effective? Also let's think about this logically. Many of the bug pokemon are several feet tall so evasion wouldn't be as easy. However that would also make bites and sting significantly more dangerous