#my first thought was to use ''white smoke'' which prevented stat-drops altogether - but that's also for opponents only

[racke7]

Me vs Hackmon

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days in front of my Pokemon excel-sheet, poking and prodding at it for hours on end rather than actually playing the game. As you do.

And then I had a most brilliant awful idea, and it was glorious and I loved it to bits, but I had to look it up to see if it would work and-... It doesn’t work.

The idea?

The Ability “Defiant” gives +2Atk for every negative stat-change it receives.

There’s a status-move called “Shell Smash” which gives the user +2Atk, +2Sp.Atk, +2Speed, -1Def, and -1Sp.Def.

In a perfectly wonderfully terrible world, that would mean that for the low price of slightly lowered Def and Sp.Def, you too could max-out your Atk with +6 in a single turn (along with boosting your Speed and Sp.Atk).

(Compare that to giving up half of your HP in order to max it out with “Belly Drum”, or spending three turns with “Swords Dance” to do the same.)

(It would also mean giving “Stored Power“ a base-power of 220. Since it’s affected by how many positive stat-changes you have.)

Basically, it would’ve been so unimaginably broken that I couldn’t help but fall in love.

But, unfortunately, Defiant only activates if an opponent lowers its stats. Which is very balanced and reasonable and I hate it.