>>54413511I don't think they were even thinking at all. It seems that for the first three generations, whoever distributed stats and movepools was under the impression that the physical/special split already existed. There had to have been some kind of disconnect. I mean for fucks sake Shadow Ball in gen 3 lowers SpDef despite being a physical attack. Beat Up deals damage scaled off user Atk and target Def but is special in category. I think the intent was to have the split, but some programmer either half-assed it and didn't tell anyone, or they couldn't figure out how to do it until gen 4.
This may be why we have so many mixed attackers in gen 3. It was a sort of bandaid fix for a problem they weren't sure was going to get solved.
