Vikavolt: Great Power and No Responsibility

 

As a fan of Bug types, I was ecstatic to see all the cool and strong Bug options added in Sun and Moon. Sadly, they all seemed to end up with pretty crippling flaws in one way or another. While most of its fellows were cursed with paper-thin defenses on the physical or special side (or both), Vikavolt has at least passable defenses. No, what holds this electric death cannon back is its crippling speed stat of 43. When you're that slow, passable defenses don't cut it anymore and its breathtaking Special Attack never gets the chance to shine. To really rub salt in the wound, nearly all of its Pokedex entries talk about how swift, agile, and speedy this Pokemon is as it weaves through trees and blasts Flying types out of the sky. Too bad that in-game, Toucannon can just nuke this poor beetle with a Supersonic Sky Strike long before Vikavolt gets a chance to do anything.

Vikavolt Base Stats courtesy of Bulbapedia

Now that we know some of its problems, how can we help out Vikavolt while maintaining its identity as a very hard hitting electric attacker? It already has a very respectable base stat total of 500, so I don't want to just dump a bunch of stats on it or it will start bumping into Legendary territory. At the same time, I don't want to transfer its Special Attack into Speed until the point that it's just looking like another Galvantula. The solution I arrived at was a new ability. Currently, Vikavolt only gets access to Levitate, and while it's always nice to have a Ground immunity I would say this ability is not pulling a lot of weight. Instead, I want to actually reference and utilize Vikavolt's incredibly badass jaw rail gun that the Pokedex says it uses to focus and fire hugely powerful beam attacks. Meet "Rail Launcher," a beam/bolt companion to the Mega Launcher ability. While the latter only affects pulse and aura moves, Rail Launcher will use a new "beam" categorization to power up moves like Signal Beam, Charge Beam, Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Tri Attack, and so on. Running some quick calculations on Pokemon Showdown's damage calculator, we can drop Vikavolt's base Special Attack all the way down to 80 while still doing just as much damage as long as it is using a boosted move. Now we just pop those newly freed stat points over to Speed and we have an actually threatening special attacker.

Proposed Stats

HP: 77

Attack: 70

Defense: 90

Sp. Atk: 80

Sp. Def: 75

Speed: 108

Total: 500

I really love this change from an in-universe standpoint. Now we have a Vikavolt that truly is blazingly fast and mobile. It is outrunning a lot of Flying types and threatening them with devastatingly powerful Thunderbolts. At the same time, its power is now strictly tied to its rail gun jaw. We already know that it was using its jaw to amplify its beam attacks, so it makes sense that a Bug Buzz or any other special move not utilizing that power would be much weaker. This gives Vikavolt a good niche in that it can hit hard and fast, but it is very limited by its movepool and I can easily make adjustments to coverage moves if it feels too powerful or weak. I could take some points from Attack here and further buff HP or a defensive stat, but honestly Vikavolt is already boasting pretty stellar defensive power for a mon in its speed tier, and I don't want to tip the scale so far it moves into "overpowered."

For another option, Vikavolt also gains access to the hidden ability Electric Surge. This will allow it to keep the same 50% power boost for its Electric moves and amplify any Electric moves for its allies at the cost of much weaker moves of every other type. This can allow it to provide some utility to the team if the player opts for it instead of just being a damage juggernaut.

If you were paying attention, you might now complain "wait, isn't re-worked Vikavolt just a better Galvantula in every aspect?" A fair point, as it now has the same speed as Galvantula, better defenses, and has a Thunderbolt that hits harder than the spider's Thunder, which is kind of Galvantula's whole gimmick at this point. Fortunately, there's no way I'm allowing Galvantula to continue on in this hack as a one trick pony that tosses out a Sticky Web and then spams Thunder and Energy Ball until it faints. In a future post, I'll be going into my plan to turn Galvantula into a fast yet defensive mon that focuses on speed control for not just utility, but a terrifying passive damage package.