Description of Thievul Crest deceptive

[MhicKy]

The description of the Thievul Crest according to the game AND wiki is
"Adds half of the opponent's Attack stat to Thievul's own."

However, what it actually does is lower the S.Atk of the opponent by one stage and give one stage of S.Atk to Thievul.. Gotta say tho' this version is much better than the description since it makes Thievul a good devuffer considering it also learns Parting Shot but.. Still.. Already reported this bug but just wanted people to know if they wanted to use the crest.

[ty_taurus]

I can confirm this. I've been working on modding in new crests and fixing bugs in existing ones and it's definitely a bizarre case with Thievul. As you mention, how the effect works is it lowers 1 opponent's special attack by 1 stage and increases Theivul's special attack by 1 stage. One thing though in the AI script is that the game actually thinks Thievul's crest works the way it's written in the description--that it lowers the opponent's attack by x0.5 and adds that to Thievul.

 

There are a few other bugs too that I'd like to correct, like how Claydol's Crest doesn't actually account for Defense boosts to increase Special Attack even though it should considering how the Typhlosion Crest works.

[Mageknight]

4 hours ago, ty_taurus said:

There are a few other bugs too that I'd like to correct, like how Claydol's Crest doesn't actually account for Defense boosts to increase Special Attack even though it should considering how the Typhlosion Crest works.

I don't think this is a bug, since that's how its been for a while, so it probably would have been changed it if it was wrong. Also, it could be kind of broken if you got to set-up multiple cosmic powers and end up being almost invincible, and really powerful.

[MhicKy]

10 hours ago, ty_taurus said:

There are a few other bugs too that I'd like to correct, like how Claydol's Crest doesn't actually account for Defense boosts to increase Special Attack even though it should considering how the Typhlosion Crest works.

 

5 hours ago, Mageknight said:

I don't think this is a bug, since that's how its been for a while, so it probably would have been changed it if it was wrong. Also, it could be kind of broken if you got to set-up multiple cosmic powers and end up being almost invincible, and really powerful.

 

Me neither, I think this is intention since, like MageKnight said, spamming Cosmic Power would turn Claydol into a massive wall with nukes on it's side..
But yeah, the Thievul is a weird one.. When I saw it at first I never though of using it since Thievul kinda sucks.. The best status it has is S.Atk and Speed and it's overshadowed by better mono Dark-Types like Zoroark anyway and getting an increase in it's feeble Attack stats? That didn't sound like it would fix anything but I decided to finally test it and noticed that the description doesn't match the effect..

[ty_taurus]

Hmm... Okay, so any of the crests that have physical or special moves scale off of a different stat all have the same basic function, and it looks kind of like this in Claydols' Case:

 

Battler's index Special Attack = Battler's index Defense. Whether or not Defense boosts Special Attack is part of a different function which, for example, Typhlosion's crest does specify.

 

In other words, the game is basically overwriting Claydol's Special Attack stat with its Defense stat rather than changing how the damage calculation works. In that regard, the description is slightly misleading, but what I'm trying to get at is they all have a certain function to them, and I think it's very weird that the design team would actively choose to make that very inconsistent from one Pokemon to the next based on balance alone especially when the details of how that works are left obscured to the casual player, and I'm not a fan of that. In my opinion, if you're going to create a trend of Pokemon Crests that cause certain stats to mimic other stats like that, then either all of them are also boosted when using that mimicked stat's boosting moves, or none of them do. Otherwise, anyone not paying attention to the forums and just playing on their own will likely not be able to understand properly, because they're presented with multiple conflicting examples that don't actually specify whether boosting does or doesn't affect that stat.

 

If Claydol's too broken by getting a special attack boost from Cosmic Power, then perhaps the answer was that having its special attack get replaced with defense was a mistake and something else should've been done instead. Or perhaps the game should take into account boosting shenanigans and give opponents more ways of countering boosting Pokemon. But that's just my 2 cents on that.

 

Regarding Thievul though, I'd rather fix it to work as it's described. Sure, Thievul's attack stat isn't great, but its special move pool is pretty shallow, and Thievul almost exclusively learns physical moves from level up. Decreasing your opponent's attack by half and adding that value to your own can end up having a much more significant effect for Thievul than 1 special attack boost does. Not only that, but you'd get to neuter strong physical attackers a lot more than 1 special attack decrease for special attackers, and both of these essentially work to cover Thievul's weaker physical stats.

[PulsarNyx]

Could've sworn the Claydol crest used to work with Defense boosts before in V12, or maybe I just underestimated my damage output.

[MhicKy]

1 hour ago, PulsarNyx said:

Could've sworn the Claydol crest used to work with Defense boosts before in V12, or maybe I just underestimated my damage output.

Used to, got nerfed for obvious reasons