Quote Originally Posted by Del Murder View Post
Is there really anything with a 4x weakness that would be more negatively affected by an 8x weakness? Any trainer with half a brain would be aware of a potential 4x weakness move coming and switch out, or take the hit aware or unawares expecting to be one-shot by it. I'm not sure how doubling the power of those moves would make any difference.
It does make some difference actually, mainly because of the move Hidden Power. Let's take Mega Scizor, just as an example (since that's a pokemon I use quite a bit).

If your Mega Scizor is staring down a Heatran (a mon with massive Sp.Atk stat and STAB on its powerful Fire Moves) then yeah... you get the heck out of there.

However, a lot of mons in competetive play use moves such as Hidden Power in order to hit mons hard that they normally wouldn't be able to hurt much. Let's take a Latios using Hidden Power Fire as an example. Latios has a pretty good Sp.Atk stat too, but since it lacks a natural Fire-coverage move, it has to resort to Hidden Power Fire in order to hit Mega Scizor hard. Hidden Power Fire is a base 60 move and doesn't get STAB bonus, so despite being 4x effective on it, most Mega Scizors will be able to take one such hit still. So in order for Hidden Power Fire Latios to straight up beat Scizor, it has to predict the Scizor switch-in and catch it with a Hidden Power on the switch so that it can then treathen to outspeed and land another one before Scizor straight up OHKOs Latios on the following turn (or you can have other mons whittle Mega Scizor down a little first to get it in range for HP-Fire).

Now, if Mega Scizor had an 8x weakness instead, you wouldn't need to make any predictions against it with a Latios that has Hidden Power Fire. And Mega Scizor and Ferrothorn would also have to live in constant fear of Hidden Power Fire even on far weaker mons. Even some physical attackers would be able to run Hidden Power Fire to hit Scizor or Hidden Power Ice to hit Garchomp/Landorus if those mons were 8x weak instead of 4x to those Typings.

The move hidden power is mainly used to hit mons that are 4x weak to the specific Hidden Power that you are using. But most of the time, it's more of a surprise move to inflict massiv damage on mons that would otherwise beat you badly, rather than straight up OHKOing. If a fair amount of mons became 8x weak to a certain typing, you could pretty much put "Hidden Power *said typing*" on every other mon, no matter their Sp.Atk stat, and it would still kinda work out.





...anyway, even if this was not the case, I'm not really a fan of the idea of tripple typings, mainly because it would get pretty darn messy very quickly. Plus, there would be lots of potential for some reeeally broken typings.