by Doc – Owner, Founder, C’mon, You Gotta Admit That’s a Funny Title for This Post
This will forever be known in competitive Pokemon history as “the time Whirlipede kept an entire meta hostage”.
So if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the Legends Z-A meta since its release, and it’s a safe bet to say that’s going to be the case for the next 2 to 3 months until my work schedule picks up. Well, much like other mainline Pokémon meta games, this one is already having a significant amount of headwinds as far as its fairness goes. Generation 1 RBY had Mewtwo. Generation 7 had Mega Rayquaza. Pokémon Legends Z-A has Infestation.
It has been said by members in the 1v1 community that Infestation is the single most broken move to have ever existed in any Pokémon game, ever. I’m not here to evaluate that statement, but I will explain the feelings behind why it has been made. In mainline Pokémon games, Infestation is largely useless, because while it does do some damage over time, it’s a Bug-type move with base power of 20 and it requires the Infestation user to stay in, lest the effects be removed when they switch out. These effects were balanced by only giving the move to physically frail Pokémon who would die quickly anyway, so Infestation never saw much use. Why would it? It didn’t have much practical effect.
Infestation is Different This Time
Well, in Legends Z-A it has been tweaked slightly. It’s still a base power 20 Bug-type move that does a bit of damage over time, but now… the user of Infestation can switch out freely. Everyone except for Ghost-types gets trapped by this move, so much like the Shadow Tag or Arena Trap strategies that were banned back in basically every generation up to Sun/Moon, all one has to do is hit Infestation on their opponent, swap out to the counter of whatever Pokémon the opponent has and land the KO. This is something that previous Pokémon generations already decided was too broken, and now we are faced with it.
To make matters worse, it’s not as if there is a single Infestation user to plan against. In last week’s tournament, Whirlipede was the most prominent user (Scolipede has less bulk) but the move is in the move sets of several other Pokémon, most notably including Bellsprout. That’s right – there were situations where Bellsprout was playing a helping hand in getting top-tier Pokémon killed. That’s how broken Infestation seems to be. So even if you pack say, Fire-types galore with your team in the hopes of encountering a Whirlipede, your opponent can simply bring an Infestation user that does not have that same weakness.
There appears to be precious little counterplay to this – I’m sure that, given enough time, it will eventually emerge, but we have the DLC in one month anyway so what’s the point of ruining the next month of tournaments just to see the same strategy over and over again? We may as well put it up for a suspect vote to ban it and get rid of the thing.
…And that’s exactly what we did, and it did not pass the 60% threshold needed to ban it (my guess is that an influx of /r/stunfisk players came in and voted no despite having never competed, because Reddit ruins everything it touches). So I’m putting this call out there: we need to have this tournament on Saturday, we need people to realize how stupid and broken Infestation is, and we need to have the suspect vote again to get rid of this thing. As long as Infestation remains in its current state it will be an unplayable metagame. Without Infestation there could be a very wide and interesting meta that exists in 1v1 Z-A, and the DLC is coming so quickly that there’s no point in wasting another week of tournament play.
Let’s get some pesticides going.
Amiibo Doctor 