Defenders play a vital role in Pokémon UNITE’s ranked gameplay. From engaging conflicts with the enemy team to protecting your allies from such initiations, these tanky members form the backbone of most team compositions.
In Pokémon UNITE, like in any MOBA, dealing damage is incredibly satisfying, and defeating enemies with that damage is a popular, rewarding experience. However, this is far from the only way to play, and there is much satisfaction to be had from utilizing defense before offense. Enter the Defender class—persistent, high in crowd control, and brutally disruptive characters that form the basis for many a successful gameplan.
These beefy bruisers tend to have high base stat totals, powerful moves, and tremendous sticking power for dealing with opposing members. Being a nuisance that’s difficult to take down is an incredibly valuable boon for your allies, both when playing offensively and defensively. As such, let’s take a look at how Defenders can greatly impact the outcome of a game, both on the back foot and on the front lines.
Defenders are, in a word, walls. They have high defensive stats and health pools, large amounts of crowd control in their movesets, and solid base damage values for their offensive moves. As such, these bulky characters function as effective tanks capable of both engaging on vulnerable enemies and protecting their teammates from attack—sometimes simultaneously. Whether focusing more on offense or defense, the general rule of thumb is to stay between the enemy and your teammates, forcing opponents to respond to your presence as your allies function unabated.
Out of every Defender in Pokémon UNITE, only one does not evolve: Snorlax. This means that the lumbering behemoth has abnormally high stats in the early levels, allowing it to be an incredible early bully before any Pokémon evolve. Even after others evolve, Snorlax remains an incredibly powerful Pokémon still able to pester those who have not reached their final forms while staving off those who have. Many other Defenders, while still requiring evolution to reach their full potential, do so early at level four. This means that while not quite on the early power curve Snorlax commands, these tanky members such as Slowbro and Crustle receive a substantial power boost very early on, allowing for powerful strategic maneuvers during the early stages of the game.
The last category of Defender contains those who evolve twice, taking much longer to reach their full strength but with heavier scaling on their stats and abilities. This group contains Blastoise and Mamoswine, who are still capable of bullying other unevolved Pokémon in early levels but therefore struggle against those who power up quickly. While less oppressive than their counterparts, these Defenders still seek to harass their opponents while playing on the back foot, as they try to amass resources for a quick evolution while not falling too far behind.
Once they manage to level up enough times to evolve, they will join the battle in earnest, their increased stats an ample reward for those able to reduce early disadvantages. While the different categories of Defender tend to play the early stages of the game differently depending on their evolution progress, all Defenders are fully capable of helping their teams in tremendous ways.
Arguably the most important duty for any Defender is establishing a sturdy front line between the allied and enemy teams, protecting the former from harm while distracting and interfering with the latter. This is simple enough when everyone stays on their side of the map, but this rarely happens for extended periods of time as the game progresses. Many more mobile Pokémon will attempt to establish flanking positions to bypass your defenses, meaning that paying attention to positioning is crucial to ensuring your team cannot be ambushed or caught on the back foot—especially when posturing around objectives.
Of course, you can’t be in every place at once. It’s impossible to always be in a position to keep every enemy at bay, so choosing where to establish your line of defense is pivotal to success in this role. To do this, you must determine for yourself which side of the fight is more important for you to be present in. The specifics of which option is correct inevitably will differ depending on the situation at hand, however one useful concept is to consider which side of the battle you will more effectively be able to neutralize. However, you must also consider how endangered the respective sides will be if you do not act on them. It is the combination of these two factors that can often form a solid basis for situational positioning.
For example, consider the following: your team is being attacked on two sides—the front by four enemies, and the flank by the fifth enemy. You can either try to neutralize the four members’ assault, or you can attempt to protect your damage dealers from the flanking member. In this case, assume that if you stop the four members’ assault, then your damage dealers will likely perish due to the flank, leaving the fight lost anyway. Meanwhile, if you take down the flanking member first, then your team as a whole will take more damage, but your damage dealers will survive. In this hypothetical scenario, protecting your high-damage teammates from the incoming flank is the superior option, due to the consequences of leaving the flank uncontested. Again, each situation will be wildly different, but you can use this principle of ease versus consequence to at least generally judge which line of action is more favorable.
Unlike roles like Attacker or All-Rounder, being a major source of damage is not the main goal of Defender Pokémon. Rather than being able to eliminate enemies by defeating them directly, Defenders excel at defeating enemies by being incredibly obnoxious and annoying to deal with. That is to say, between isolating enemies from their team and preventing your vulnerable teammates from being defeated, you can use your high defensive stats and crowd control abilities to become quite the nuisance both on offense and on defense.
When attempting to go on the offensive, Defenders make use of incredible crowd control abilities to shift the lines of battle in their favor. Not only can they pressure enemies with the risk of an engage, but they can attempt to single out targets that get too close so that allies can pick them apart. In the case of the former, if the enemy team as a whole is within your range, you can attempt to engage a teamfight, using your crowd control Moves to set your teammates up with a favorable fight by wreaking havoc on the enemies’ positioning. A perfect engage is difficult to pull off, so picking your moment is crucial—go too early or too late, and you risk putting yourself in a dangerous position that your teammates can’t bail you out of.
The defensive side to being a nuisance involves defending your teammates from incoming attacks. This can be done in the form of countering or walling off an enemy engage, or in simply keeping ambushers from sticking onto your vulnerable carries. In the case of the former, as previously mentioned keeping yourself positioned to physically separate enemies from your team can in itself help prevent harm. However, in addition to this many (if not all) Defenders have access to moves that can stun, shove, or otherwise incapacitate enemies for a short time. For enemies that have low defensive stats and health pools, these Moves are incredibly threatening, as being stunned for even a few moments can completely take them out of a fight. Even for enemy tanks, these Moves can still be incredibly annoying to work around, as if they get incapacitated then your team gets the opportunity to reposition themselves more appropriately.
In some cases, rather than simply walling off enemies so that they can’t go in, it falls upon the Defender to help teammates disengage from combat that has already started. This line of actions can be described as “peeling” for teammates (as in, peeling enemies off of teammates). Mainly done through crowd control, peeling involves using largely crowd control focused Moves to target opponents who have engaged in ambushes or other fights to try and defeat a vulnerable teammate.
Of course, many allied Pokémon can have some form of “self-peel” abilities such as mobility to run away with or self-buffing Moves with which to defend themselves. In the face of well-executed ambushes by high-damage enemies, low health allies may need additional help to escape, or risk being defeated. By using stuns, displacements, and other crowd control effects to provide your ally with some space, the ambush can likely be thwarted, leaving the enemy (and inevitably their team as well) in an incredibly compromised position.
Finally, in many scenarios both while holding a frontline and/or while peeling for teammates, the threat of action can be just as (if not more) intimidating than the action itself. If you launch a Move and miss, the opponents know that you will not have it for a brief time, allowing them to move up and threaten you and your team. However, if you simply threaten the fact that you have the Move available, then opponents will have to respect the fact that you could hit them with it at any time. This being the case, enemies will be forced to play more defensively until they determine that either you cannot hit them with a threatening Move, or that they can avoid your presence altogether. However, the point stands that by merely implying that a Move of yours can hit its mark through proper positioning and patience, enemies will have a significantly more difficult time finding ways to get past your defenses. Keep this in mind while peeling for your teammates or trying to prevent enemies from dashing in for an engage.
Overall, playing as a Defender in Pokémon UNITE is far from the most bombastic playstyle. While the base damage numbers for their Moves are generally high, Defenders often do little damage overall when compared to more offensive roles. However, where they lack in damage they make up for in utility and defensive capabilities, unleashing powerful crowd control capabilities to stave off would-be threats before they can ruin your team’s plan.
For this reason, along with their sturdy nature and high HP pools, Defenders are decidedly difficult to take down in a fight without high amounts of consistent damage. Whether forming an impenetrable wall to keep would-be attackers out or using their presence to force apart a fight that’s already happening, characters like Defenders are a crucial aspect to any team composition, and they (and characters like them) remain incredibly healthy aspects of MOBAs like Pokémon UNITE.
