AOTW Rapid-Fire!! Damp, Frisk, and Battle Armor

Don’t mind me, folks. Just step over my lifeless form as I recuperate from Comic Con.

…What’s that? You want an article? Dang it… okay, fine. Let’s see… Eh, screw the lead-in. This is Ability of the Week Rapid-Fire: Damp, Frisk, and Battle Armor.

In the time it took for you to hit the jump, I grabbed some coffee. Should be okay now. Anyway, first up on this Rapid-Fire is Damp. This is a generation three Ability that negates the use of Selfdestruct, Explosion, and the Ability Aftermath. Eighteen pokémon have access to Damp, most of them via the Dream World, and nearly all of them Water-types. The most obvious use of this Ability is the negation of Explosion against Rock-types, as if the likes of Golduck and Poliwrath needed any more help against them. Damp could also useful against stalling the your opponent’s use of a trap-layer like Forretress, preventing it from kamikaze-ing out to a different monster for at least another turn.

Most of the time, you can at least guess the nature of the held items your opponents’ pokémon are packing, if not the exact item. Sometimes they just go together, like Snorlax and Leftovers, or Marowak and the Thick Club. But some folks like to surprise you with some out there item selections. Perhaps they’re unencumbered with the preconceived “right way” to do battle like some of the Mareep of the Smogon community (by the way, I SO mean that), but either way, Frisk is a handy built-in way to discover exactly what your opponent is hiding up their sleeve. Eleven pokémon have access to this gen four Ability, and the spread of Dream World vs. natural users is pretty even. Apart from the obvious use, some Frisk-users have access to moves like Embargo, Trick, or Knock Off and Frisk takes the guesswork out of using moves like these. In fact, Banette has access to all three! A Frisk-user would also be an ideal candidate for Travis’ “scouting” strategy, where you Protect the first turn out to get an idea what your opponent is planning.

Finally, we come to Battle Armor. This Ability from generation three can only be used by four evolutionary lines; Marowak, Kabutops, Armaldo, and Drapion. Battle Armor is simple, but useful, in that its one and only function is to protect your pokémon from critical hits. That Scope Lens your buddy is packing? Useless. That Octillery with Sniper? Oh well. All the Battle Armor-users already have pretty respectable Defense and Special Defense stats in the first place, and with this Ability, their staying power improves even more. What’s more, Armaldo’s only natural Ability is Battle Armor, and it has no 4x weaknesses. It also packs a 125 in Attack, so why not take one out and see what you can do with it!

That does it for this week’s Rapid-Fire, folks! I’ll see you back here next week- same poké-time, same poké–channel! Later!

-Wil
www.wheretheresawil.com