It must be said that Venonant looks a little silly. Cute, but silly... It also isn't very good. All of its stats are just meh, from its 60 base HP, 55 attack, 50 defence, 40 special attack, 55 special defence and only 45 speed. This is pretty poor, since it doesn't excel at ANYTHING. It's also bug/poison, so it has a lot to live up to in the previously visited Mega Beedrill.
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| It's like Gohan staring at the moon again... |
One blessing of Venonat is that it evolves just by level up, though this is at 31, which is quite high. You start off with tackle, disable (stops the foe from using that move again) and foresight (allows normal and fighting moves to hit ghosts and negates evasion changes). You can get supersonic (causes confusion) and the psychic special attack confusion. You can get poison powder, leech life (20 base bug physical that drains health with STAB), stun spore, and then you can upgrade confusion to psybeam and then get sleep powder. At this point you could then just evolve before you get to signal beam (75 base bug special with a small chance of confusing your foe) and then zen headbutt (psychic physical with a chance to cause flinching), poison fang (STAB poison physical with base 50) and then psychic (base 90 psychic special).
The TM/HM spread is quite small, mainly with the standard fare. You can grab venoshock for STAB poison. You can also get sunny day/solar beam combo, psychic if you aren't high enough level, and then more specifically of focus you get struggle bug, sludge bomb and infestation all as special STAB moves. You can get substitute and double team, and these can both be passed on by baton pass, which you can get from breeding... Also from breeding you could consider giga drain, morning sun, toxic spikes and skill swap, which can be interesting. Skill swap allows you to swap abilities, so you could dump the awful run away for something good... You could circumnavigate the necessity of breeding for giga drain by tutoring it, and if you chose rest then you could pick up snore.
Now that you have Venomoth, you get some interesting stat increases. Rather than just across the board boosts (you do get small improvements to everything at the very least) you get specialisation, with an enormous boost in special attack to 90, which goes well with 90 speed. 70 HP, 60 defence and 75 special defence allow some survivability but 65 attack is probably best ignored.
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| This is a little impressive than Gohan's giant monkey form... |
Suddenly you get some good moves via level up, like signal beam, quiver dance (both special stats and speed go up one stage), bug buzz (90 base and can lower opponent special defence) and silver wind (60 damage and chance to raise all five of your main stats, that is attack, special attack, defence, special defence and speed). Add these and gust (a weak flying special) onto the Venonat list and done...
TMs wise you can get energy ball as a fairly powerful grass special attack, and things like hyper beam and giga impact remain utterly pointless. Aerial ace and acrobatics are decent flying moves for coverage, but lack bite due to their physical nature, and U-turn suffers the same fate, yet has utility as a switching move. The only addition from the tutor is tailwind.
Venonat is pretty useless if you don't plan on evolving it, but Venomoth is actually pretty good as a low tier special sweeper: it's fast and hits hard, but the main drawback is that it has a lack of coverage moves: you get psychic, bug and poison that hit hard, but basically nothing much else other than energy ball.
(All artwork presented by Ken Sugimori, taken from the Bulbapedia image archives)
Venonat is cute.
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