Daily Pokemon #008: Breloom

Breloom

Shroomish > Breloom

While Grass Fighting may seem like a bad type at first because of its poor defensive coverage and redundant offensive coverage against Rock, the amount of overall coverage that it has more than offsets these drawbacks. It is not the easiest type to use though, one has to be careful when switching in breloom because of its x4 weakness to flying and its other common weaknesses like Fire and Ice. It is also worth noting that this type possesses 6 resistances.

Stats:

Breloom is a fantastic physical sweeper despite its mediocre speed to the point where its defensive stats are not relevant at all. Access to moves like Mach Punch, Seed Bomb and Bullet Seed make Breloom a unique sweeper because of the synergy with its ability.

One thing that puts Breloom over the top is that its typing is reflected on its movepool by having having access to both good Grass moves and good Fighting type moves. This means that it has access to all the great utility moves that make Grass types such good support pokemon, moves such as: Leech Seed, Stun Spore and even worry seed. But what makes Breloom stand out against other Grass types is its access to Spore which is the best sleep-inducing move in the game because of its 100 accuracy. This makes Spore a staple for most Breloom builds, as making a pokemon go to sleep can either help out in taking out a very problematic pokemon, or buy a turn to boost your Breloom with Swords Dance.

Abilities:

• Effect Spore: when a Pokémon with this Ability is hit by a move that makes contact, there is a 30% chance that the attacking Pokémon will become paralyzed, asleep or poisoned.
• Poison Heal: if the Pokémon is poisoned or badly poisoned, it will gain 1/8 of its maximum HP at the end of each turn instead of taking damage.
• Technician (hidden): increases the power of moves which have a power of 60 or less by 50%.

Effect Spore is a decent ability, but, like most abilities that rely on the enemy doing something, it is unreliable. This ability is decent enough for the adventure where the AI doesn't really take these sort of abilities into account. Do remember one thing though, you have to get lucky for this to work.

One might discard Poison Heal because of Breloom's low bulk, but in reality it is a very viable option for a bulky set. Despite its multiple weaknesses, Breloom still has 6 resistances which means that Poison Heal against certain foes will be surprisingly effectively. With a little bit of patience a set with Substitute, Swords Dance, Spore and Mach Punch (or even Focus Punch) is actually viable thanks to Poison Heal. Besides, its really fun to pull off sweeps with that.

Finally Technician. It is amazing, no questions asked. It makes Breloom jump from just being a good sweeper to being one of the best because of its utility alongside its monstrous ATK stat and access to Mach Punch. Technician will now make it so that moves like Mach Punch will have a base power of 60 instead of 40 which makes it a lot easier to sweep with it. Additionally, it will boost Bullet Seed from 25 to 32.5 per hit, which means that it can have a potential base power of 162.5 before STAB. (243.75 after STAB and granted that you get 5 hits.) That sort of power is ridiculous, and also Technician can also be used to boost Rock Tomb (from 60 power to 90) and actually make it a viable move that will not only provide coverage against flying types but potentially cripple incoming foes thanks to the speed debuff it provides.

Conclusion:

I will come out straight and say it: I love Breloom. It is my favorite pokemon for the reasons I just explained. Its access to Technician and access to Spore gives it a niche as sweeper with utility, an unusual role to say the least.It also gives it one more thing: versatility. It is hard to find a pokemon that can sweep and assist, but Breloom can do both things at the same time if the situation calls for it.