NidoKING of My Heart

For today’s posts, I’m going to be giving a brief competitive guide to one of my favorite Pokemon.

Nidoking, is a poison ground monster from the first generation that looks like a magnificent beast. With its horn, awesome muscles, and thick armor chestplate, this is creature made to battle.

Looking at Nidoking’s stats, you could be forgiven for finding them lacking. Every stat is okay, but it’s only the attack stat that actually goes over 100.

 

Then we look at abilities. Poison Point has a 30% chance to poison when being hit by a contact move, an okay ability at best for a not very bulky ‘mon, and Rivalry boosts attacking power on the same gender but decreases it against the opposing gender, an ability that hurts as much as it helps.

 

Then there’s Sheer Force, an absolutely phenomenal ability, that’s a little hard to explain. The basic idea is that moves with secondary effects have the secondary effect removed while the power is multiplied by 1.3. Secondary effects are almost all side effects of moves except those that negatively affect the user, like stat drops or recoil damage.

 

For example Poison Jab is a base 80 power physical poison move with a 30% chance to poison the target. With the Sheer Force boost, it’s base power 104 (80 X 1.3) with no chance to poison.

 

However, the way secondary effects are programmed, Sheer Force removes all effects of moves that occur after they damage the opponent. This includes Life Orb damage. For a quick refresher, Life Orb is an item that also boosts a user’s attacking power by 1.3 but at the cost of 10% of a user’s health. With Sheer Force, when using a move with a secondary effect, Life Orb damage does not happen.

 

So Nidoking using Poison Jab with a Life Orb is actually about 135 base power (1.3 times 104) with no life orb recoil.

 

This makes Nidoking a massive threat. Looking at Nidoking’s stats you’d expect him to be a physical attacker, but I most often prefer Nidoking as a special attacker. Let’s look at his attacks.

With all these physical moves, it has a decent movepool. Yet both of its best ground type moves have no secondary effects, and the best moves with secondary effects are Aqua Tail and Body Slam, neither of which are good offensive types (water and normal).

 

Now looking at its special movepool is where Nidoking truly shines.

Look at this! Earth Power and Sludge Wave are great offensive moves, providing higher base power than Earthquake and Poison Jab after the Sheer Force Life Orb boosts. Not to mention Ice Beam and Thunderbolt (Bolt-Beam), provide near perfect coverage, and Blizzard, Focus Blast, and Fire Blast can always function as wonderful nukes.

 

This is what truly makes Nidoking terrifying. With all these coverage options, Nidoking has no safe switch in.

 

I find a good partner for this beast is a Sticky Web user, like my god Shuckle, to enable it to outspeed threats like Greninja or Tapu Koko that would otherwise be able to revenge kill it.

 

Other good options for Nidoking include Substitute and Stealth Rocks. Nidoking forces a lot of Pokemon to switch out for fear of one of its coverage moves, and on the switch you can set up a Sub to enable it to defeat whatever comes in, in one or two hits, or just get Rocks up to prevent switches later.

 

Nidoking is one of the rare Kanto Pokemon that truly uses the insane movepool that those monsters have. He’s also one of my favorites, both for design, and because in one of my first Pokemon games, I named my Nidoking after my dad. Nidoking is not only fun to use, he reminds me of how cool Stephen is.

 

Good luck folks, and as always, have fun.