>>21123909This excalated quickly... Why was he deluded? He agrees that the ability is crazy, just that the pokemon itself isn't. Which, I guess, is understandable reasoning. But the pokemon and the ability are one unit, so I can understand what your're saying...
Sure, Talonflame is only good because gale wings is good, but at that point you may as well say Garchomp is only good because of high attack and speed. Its what the pokemon is.
If we were to set that aside, though, and look at talonflame's stats we'll easily see that it could have been a lot more broken than it is. It's decent and has good moves with good typing (can't be burned, SE or at least neutral on a lot, a very valuable immunity) but it's no Garchomp (which is amazing despite having irrelevant ability.) Since the topic of the thread is what ABILITIES are best, though, and has nothing to do with the pokemon, I guess gale wings is still a serious contender.
Personally I'd consolidate abilities as follows
>anything that gives speed or priority(prankster, gale wings, speed boost etc)>anything that boosts attack power (adaptability, protean, huge power, Pixelate, etc)>Anything that makes a pokemon harder to kill (wonder guard, multiscale, intimidate, etc)>Any ability that locks or traps or disables some functionality for the opponent (shadow tag, arena trap, mummy, etc)>Finally...... Is there really anything else?Hairs can be split over which ones are actually the best and a lot of it actually comes down to the pokemon (a good ability can go a long way but being decent pokemon in the first place is pretty crucial) but the best abilities always come back to these basic things. They either make you faster, make you stronger or directly fuck with your opponent and favor probably goes in that order.
