I was not planning on playing Comfey in Pokemon Unite this week. Like Hoopa, the “Posy Picker Pokemon” can be a powerful support Pokemon that serves a unique role on a well-organized team - heavy emphasis on well-organized. Pro players might find a lot of utility in Comfey, but for people like me that solo queue the ranked ladder, the Pokemon sounds like a liability. But my curiosity got the better of me when I discovered everyone received a three-day Comfey trial license for free. As expected, playing Comfey below Master Rank is a borderline torturous experience. I didn’t think I could hate my teammates more than I already did, but I was wrong.
Here’s a scenario that should be familiar to any Unite players. You’re playing bottom lane and things are off to a bad start. Your lane partner is feeding and your jungler hasn’t shown up once, meanwhile the enemy is pushing your goal and scoring some early points. The clock strikes 7:00 and the enemy team groups on your Regi-whatever while you desperately try to hold your ground. They take the Regi, then break your T1 goal before making a push to T2. You scan the map and find that top lane is suffering a similar fate, and it feels like the game is lost before it even started. While the enemy gets free rain on the map, your entire team is nowhere to be found. Where the hell did everyone go?
Comfey is here to answer that question, but you’re not going to like it. The Pokemon’s unique passive ability, Triage, allows it to attach itself to teammates and travel with them while providing a shield. There’s a lot of benefits to having a Comfey on your team. Whichever Pokemon Comfey is attached to receives a shield and a constant source of healing, making them very difficult for the other team to deal with. Comfey also scores when the Pokemon it's attached to does, and it picks up any extra Aeos Energy the Pokemon can’t hold, so it’s a great partner for players with a score-focused build. Just having two players together can make a huge difference in the early games, so having a Comfey almost guarantees some degree of cooperation, which is a good thing.
The problem isn’t Comfey, it’s everyone else. When you attach yourself to other players as Comfey, you’re completely reliant on them to make plays, score goals, and try to win. Unfortunately, a lot of teammates don’t seem to be trying to win, and playing Comfey forces you to helplessly watch as they wander around the map making themselves anything but useful.
In just a half dozen matches as Comfey I saw everything from extremely questionable to downright objectionable. Players I was attached to would abandon goals to just a single opponent that we could have easily beaten, they’ve given up on fights to go aimlessly farm wild Pokemon, and they’ve practically helped the enemy team by refusing to deal with invaders and goal scorers. When you attach to someone you expect them to recognize that they have a power boost and play more aggressively, but more often than not they seem to think you’re trying to get some alone time together and instead wander off into the jungle to do nothing.
Comfey might be a great tool for teaching others the Pokemon Unite macro game. If I had a friend just getting into Unite, I might tell them to play Comfey and stick with me until they learn all the spawn timers and objectives. As a mostly-solo player though, there’s no way I’ll ever play Comfey by myself. Playing a Support Pokemon in the solo queue is usually a mistake because they don’t have the carry potential that All-Rounders and Attackers have, but playing Comfey adds another level of disappointment. Not only are you less useful, but you get to see first hand how useless your teammates are too.