[Meta thread] Iron's PokeRole Adventure: The Skull Ruins

[Dragonstrike]

Random Fun Fact about Unova's Elemental Monkeys: starting in Gen 7, they can be tutored the 3 Pledge moves.

Interesting. I always look the three monkeys in important as Started pokemon (in my opinion at least). Perhaps a little better than the actual starter in Unova.

Now, I not actually hate the design of the starters. Serperior is cool, Emboar is a bit...okay I guess? It's kinda heavy in the balance in two previous generations already was Fire/Fighting. And Sumoroot...I like very much the design of a Water Samurai. But he could have at least a better ability than Damp (and a more large movepool).

The Elemental Monkeys also get Overgrow, Torrent, and Blaze as their HAs! However, access to the Elemental Hyper Beams is still exclusive to the actual starter pokemon (and Sketch users).



???

Do you mean Shell Armor?  Because that's what Samurott's HA is, not Damp.  Swampert is the one with Damp as its HA (and given how meta Explosion used to be, it's an Ability it would have loved to have had back in gens 3 and 4)

Samurott has a decent enough movepool to make ends meet, thankfully.  Megahorn is an amazing move for it to have.  And Oshawott does also get access to Sacred Sword via breeding starting in USUM (thanks to Smeargle's Sketch shenanigans).  And believe it or not, Night Slash and Air Slash are also egg moves for the samurai otter.  Serperior has more movepool problems than Samurott does (but has an incredible HA to more than make up for that)