the thing about status moves in pokemon is that we grew up never using them, but it was because we didn't realize how powerful they actually were
if you spend a turn on swords dance, you make up for lost tempo on the next turn
now, swords dance is unusually strong but still, 1.5x damage or resistance going forward is nothing to sneeze at
@monorail gosh, paralysis used to be the least useful and most intermittent free turn effect imaginable to me
but now, it's basically the "oh hey! now i can topple teams 3 times my level if they don't know what's up" status effect
@monorail (in case someone reads this without knowing what it does, it also cuts speed by 75%! meaning you can outspeed things otherwise-colossally stronger than you)
@thingywott oh i thought it was only half, that's a lot
@monorail oh huh! you're right
it looks like it was bumped from a 75% cut to a 50% one in gen 7!
@monorail ahh! i definitely did the most theorycrafting in gen 6, when i wanted to make a competitive team with a lot of pokemon that weren't tiered high on smogon (and mawile, because i love mawile)
so there's a lot of changes since then that i completely missed
@thingywott oh wild
i think it's less that i was i was right and more that "i was wrong, but then my mistaken belief became correct later" because i've been thinking that since gen 5 haha