remove the requirement of being hit for the healing to activate, have it on a timer instead. wish has a lot of potential as a healing move since it is the only one that can heal pokemon in other slots on your team. the issue is it will usually get you killed if you rely on it as it currently is.
the reason it will kill you, is that you need to be hit for the healing to take affect. this means you cannot control how much you heal. like at all. since if you use wish before you get in a fight you will gain hp while running in, and then when hit you will only gain back the hp of that one hit (since you will be close to full anyways). and if you use it when low you either will die cause you wasted a move use during combat, or it won’t activate until you have already healed from running.
to fix this, I recommend removing the “needs to take a hit” requirement in favor of a timer. this is entirely feasible; safeguard, reflect, and light screen all have timers tied to them that scale to the user’s level (higher level, longer screens) and when their timer runs out an event triggers where the effect fades. so you could just duplicate the timer without the level correlation, or invert it so that it’d be longer the lower the level, and apply it to wish. so in effect when you would use wish, it adds the wish status and starts a timer, when the timer runs out the status is removed and the healing is applied. the scaling with level isn’t required, it would just make it more interesting, and fit better with the moves that add a status to the player that are already there.
so why would this be worth the time of day to change you ask? well as it is right now, if you want to heal without items or belly use you need to have a move slot taken up with a healing move. on every pokemon on your team. the only exception to this is the moves morning sun and moon light. these two heal both the pokemon using it, and any friendly pokemon nearby. but it doesn’t heal any non-active pokemon, so you still need a healing move on each pokemon. unless you want to rely on someone else to heal you.
wish has the potential to fill this niche, and in fact looks like that was what it was originally designed to do seeing as the status for wish affects the active pokemon regardless of which one uses it. It would allow players to free up move slots on their fighters allowing people to use status/janky moves without increasing their dependence on pp restoring items for the damaging/sane moves (example: my flygon has roost outrage earthquake and dragon dance, I would use a lot less ethers if I ran the standard rock slide instead of dragon dance since between outrage and earthquake the flygon has only 32 pp on damaging moves).
but wish isn’t on many pokemon you say?
here is the list of pokemon that have access to wish in gen 7 (the gen that pmu’s movelists come from):
and here is a list of the pokemon that have access to morning sun in gen 7:
morning sun is used a lot. I see no issue with the number of pokemon that this affects.
I think that changing wish to being on a timer rather than happening when the player is hit not only makes sense gameplay-wise, but also thematically. wish in the main series games is on a timer. you use it one turn and then the next (regardless of what the opponent does) it heals you. so in my opinion, forcing you to take a hit to heal is not an accurate representation of the move.
as for how it would change the pmu meta, I think it could become a support staple. it opens so many options, and adds another trade off to consider when picking a support pokemon (there aren’t nearly enough trade offs. there is next to no difference between me using corsola or pyukumuku) so we could expect more diversity in the team construction people use. maybe even inciting people to coordinate with a party member who brings what support moves.
it has its niche, it just needs to be good enough to take benefit of it.
those are my points. please consider updating the move wish.
(image source: Pokémon Search - veekun)
