Hi, I have a design question for
In The Hills or the Camomons council in general.
Camomons Ubers was recently selected as Mashups Spotlight, and it came to our attention that although Arceus displays an overridden typing based on its moves in the battle UI like other Pokemon, its inherent type-changing behaviour overrides the Camomons mechanic internally, and it remains Normal-type (or whatever typing its Plate/Z-Crystal would normally give it, if it has Multitype). After testing Silvally, which I believe is legal in vanilla Camomons, it behaves in the same way, i.e. the UI misrepresents its typing.
It seems that something is clearly wrong here, but I'm not sure what the intended behaviour was meant to be. Should Silvally/Arceus:-
1. Follow the Camomons mechanic and change typing based on their moves?
2. Ignore the Camomons mechanic, and maintain their inherent typing, but display that typing in the battle UI instead of the typing from their moves?
* I am not asking for a technical fix here, just a judgement about what the behaviour should be. Urkerab has already kindly supplied a way of implementing 2.
Many thanks for your help.
EDIT:
I discussed how option 1 would work with users on Showdown. It seems more complex than I first thought, as there are several ways it could work, but I have created sample ladders to test one version for anybody interested.
People in chat pointed out that Silvally/Arceus ignore the effects of dynamic type changes from moves like Reflect Type, and that seems correct to maintain, but it also seems orthogonal to the Camomons mechanic, rather than an argument that these Pokemon should be exempt from the mechanic in principal rather than on technical grounds. Although the implementation of Camomons is more like the effect of an in-battle dynamic change, my feeling from reading the opening post here, as well as the fact that the new typing is fully defined at build time, is that the typing change is meant to be more like a new template that exists prior to the battle starting, rather than a dynamic, in-battle effect similar to Soak.
If a Silvally/Arceus has no trigger item and would normally be Normal-typed, I think there is a strong argument to be made that the Pokemon should follow the regular Camomons rule. The base Normal typing seems to in principle represent a default that may, but not necessarily be, overridden by a compatible item; the ability wording, "If this Pokemon is a Silvally, its type changes to match its held Memory." reflects this, i.e. there is no defined change from a regular baseline state without a memory. Therefore I made non-item Silvally/Arceus follow normal Camomons behaviour on the test ladder.
Whether RKS System/Multitype in conjunction with their associated items should override Camomons typing seems like a direct behaviour conflict that could be argued either way. While a somewhat arbitrary decision, I thought it would be more intuitive if RKS System/Multitype are still able to follow their stated effect. Hence, I made it so that these items DO take priority over the new, Camomon-defined baseline typing, but this item-defined typing is shown correctly like with option 2.
But that's just like my opinion, man. You can test for yourself at
trashchannel.psim.us :-
* [Gen 7] Camomons Ubers (Mutable Basis Silvally/Arceus Test) and [Gen 7] Camomons (Mutable Basis Silvally/Arceus Test) demonstrate option 1.
* [Gen 7] Camomons Ubers and [Gen 7] Camomons demonstrate option 2.