If getting a Pokémon with a hidden ability is hard, why are movesets written with hidden abilities?

Question

Hi, I’ve seen many competitive or even Ingame movesets of Pokémons with their hidden abilities, but do these players even get Pokémon with hidden abilities? How?

Comments

In competitive, it is imperative to use the best ability possible for a Pokémon's Role. You can breed a Pokémon with a HA with another Pokémon of the same species (or ditto) and hatch a Pokémon with an HA. There are also a few other ways to get HA Pokémon, like SOS chaining. As for legendaries with HA's, people find ways of getting their hands on ones that are released. They either come from events or Virtual console transfers from Pokémon Bank :P

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Some competitive battlers will do anything to get a good Pokemon. It's usually easier to assume everyone is like that than to assume some people have limited time and some don't.

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Accessing Hidden Abilities is far from the hardest thing people do in these games. There are plenty of other processes involved in getting competitively-bred Pokémon that are several times more difficult, both mechanically and in their time allotment.

Answer 1

2 reasons.

1. Those movesetes are written for competitive use, meaning that the people who'll be using them will be using Pokemon Showdown as the battling platform which allows you to use any Pokemon with any stats/ability.

2. Hidden Abilities are hard to get, but not impossible. So even if you're battling in a regular game such a Sun/Moon etc., it's still possible for you to get the Pokemon with the desired moveset.

Comments

I guess it’s worth mentioning too that a lot of builds are made in theory, and so it doesn’t really make sense to discount good strategies on the basis of being too hard to attain.