Unpopular opinions

[Basedwell]

You state already that there is an opportunity cost to not running these moves to mitigate evasion boosting strategies, but I would say that the opportunity cost for actually running them is even bigger. Sure, you could run shock wave, but the majority of the time you would much prefer thunderbolts higher power as that comes up in a large majority of scenarios. Sure, you could run sweet scent, but that is literally just for wanting more encounters (which besides the attribute that they cause horde battles in ORAS, you never really want that attribute since you can just walk around) and stopping evasion strategies. The issue has never been that there isn't options, there has always been options, but that using these options are so constraining because you don't really want them in any other scenario. So if you do counter it, you are making yourself a lot worse against literally everything else.

The only moves that I would consider splashable that counter evasion are:
Taunt
Body slam (only works on minimize though)
Stomp (also only works on minimize)
Smart Strike (only a few pokemon want to run it since they don't have iron head though)
Defog (only useful in Sinnoh and competitive games after Gen 6)
Z-Moves (which is for one gen and do you really want to waste your z-move? Also you might not even have the right z-move for the battle, so you might be only dealing 40% damage)

So its really only one move that is splashable that can beat evasion with a lot of others with asterisks. And that one move doesn't have any astreisks you have to immediately switch in that pokemon to counter it. And unless you put taunt on most of your pokemon, then you could be screwed by something having it that none of your taunters want to take on.

You’re saying strategy A is annoying, I’m telling you that the game gives you several solutions to it, and you’re saying that those solutions aren’t worth implementing because they don’t help against strategy B and strategy C. Which seems to imply strategy A isn’t worth dedicating resources to, which implies it’s not a big problem. You don’t need that many non-STAB moves, and can usually fit some utility and tm moves on someone on your team.

...no the argument is focused on in-game. if you follow the chain of quotes this all started with someone complaining about Juan's Kingdra.

Yeah, I’m not talking about PvP or in postgame Battle competitions, those are different beasts altogether. I can’t comment on the battle facilities because I’ve never played Gen 3’s, I don’t own Emerald and don’t like the games enough to play through them on my PC just for the postgame lol

 

[Mex]

You’re saying strategy A is annoying, I’m telling you that the game gives you several solutions to it, and you’re saying that those solutions aren’t worth implementing because they don’t help against strategy B and strategy C. Which seems to imply strategy A isn’t worth dedicating resources to, which implies it’s not a big problem. You don’t need that many non-STAB moves, and can usually fit some utility and tm moves on someone on your team.

Speaking personally, as someone who doesn't particularly plan out things when I play these games, moves like Shock Wave and Aerial Ace aren't worth it because Evasion strategies aren't particularly commonly used.

Despite this, every single time i encounter one my exact reaction is something along the lines of "here we go again" and I set aside about half an hour because I, frankly, expect to miss that much in the end. This doesn't make sure hit moves any more appealing to me because there are so few situations where I would see myself using them, and I like to keep my movesets as consistent as possible for playthroughs, so teaching a move like Aerial Ace just for the sake of maybe making a single fight easier isn't something I'm inclined to do at all, and I doubt i'm the only person who works that way

In the end, it's a massive annoyance that doesn't happen often enough to incentivise using worse moves to counter it, while also being pretty much a 50/50 on being either completely irrelevant or a massive annoyance when i do see it

 

[Just A Seaking]

I think the problem with evasion in-game is that it's not satisfying, either to use or go up against. Frustration isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in order to be worthwhile you need to have some catharsis, and beating evasion doesn't really give you that - because there's really not much skill involved in beating it. Either you finally got some mileage out of that crappy 60 BP move you've been carrying around the entire game, or you just clicked a button until you finally hit through all the RNG - neither feels especially satisfying to me.

I think the big problem evasion has design-wise is that it operates using the same stat stage system as every other stat, which is insane considering that missing is effectively 100% damage reduction, which is significantly higher than either Defense or Sp. Def. I think if evasion modifiers were halved, with evasion moves granting some other perk in addition to the stat itself to compensate - Double Team, for example, could give +1 Spd - they'd be a lot less frustrating to deal with.

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

...no the argument is focused on in-game. if you follow the chain of quotes this all started with someone complaining about Juan's Kingdra.

My bad

I think the problem with evasion in-game is that it's not satisfying, either to use or go up against. Frustration isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in order to be worthwhile you need to have some catharsis, and beating evasion doesn't really give you that - because there's really not much skill involved in beating it. Either you finally got some mileage out of that crappy 60 BP move you've been carrying around the entire game, or you just clicked a button until you finally hit through all the RNG - neither feels especially satisfying to me.

I think the big problem evasion has design-wise is that it operates using the same stat stage system as every other stat, which is insane considering that missing is effectively 100% damage reduction, which is significantly higher than either Defense or Sp. Def. I think if evasion modifiers were halved, with evasion moves granting some other perk in addition to the stat itself to compensate - Double Team, for example, could give +1 Spd - they'd be a lot less frustrating to deal with.

And that's why my previous point still stands. It's just a pedestrian form of pseudo-stall that I couldn't possibly care less.

Remember, especially in-game, these mons are not actually getting any kind of passive damage in, and you're going to inevitably roll through them once you get a hit in.

Passive bonuses are fine, but when something actively clicks Double Team I'm like

It's a mild inconvenience. That's it. Even Juan's Kingdra is hardly worth mentioning because of how passive it is with all the turns you get off his DT spam. In fact, you can hilariously use X Accuracies just to mess with him lol.

 

[Heatranator]

You’re saying strategy A is annoying, I’m telling you that the game gives you several solutions to it, and you’re saying that those solutions aren’t worth implementing because they don’t help against strategy B and strategy C. Which seems to imply strategy A isn’t worth dedicating resources to, which implies it’s not a big problem. You don’t need that many non-STAB moves, and can usually fit some utility and tm moves on someone on your team.

Because evasion is such a niche strategy that you don't know when it will appear. Why the hell should I have to dedicate a moveslot to something that won't be used 90% of the time? At least with the utility moves or tm moves, they will be used quite a bit. Some tm moves are honestly quite useless, like defog in gen 4 for those like 2 routes. But here's the thing, I can then delete it and now not have to worry about it, as if I for some reason come across a foggy route, I can put it back on my pokemon no problemo. I can't do that with evasion. Unless I've played the game before, I don't know if X trainer has evasion, and if they do, then I literally need to carry around it for the entirety of my playthrough. It isn't a big problem, but its one which if I see will grind my gears

 

[pika pal]

You’re saying strategy A is annoying, I’m telling you that the game gives you several solutions to it, and you’re saying that those solutions aren’t worth implementing because they don’t help against strategy B and strategy C. Which seems to imply strategy A isn’t worth dedicating resources to, which implies it’s not a big problem. You don’t need that many non-STAB moves, and can usually fit some utility and tm moves on someone on your team.

In this case the issue is that Strategy A is not worth dedicating resources to because the resource demand is excessive compared to how often it will return a benefit over its alternatives. Despite this, Strategy A will show up 1/100 battles, and in said battle, not dedicating the resources doesn't make you less likely to win so much as take much longer to win completely independent of skill. If the skill and strategy angle is what we're observing, one aspect of this is to make the most out of a limited amount of resources, be it your items, TMs, Team Slots, or just time spent grinding. Anti-Evasion tools are so seldom used and so inferior outside of their specific niche that it is decidedly less useful (and thus a worse skill expression) to run them unless you know you're going up against Evasion spam specifically.

It brings to mind the "This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman" trope, in which a situation is essentially tailored to favor a skillset/resource/character who would be horribly specific or inefficient anywhere else. And in this case I'd also add that in many cases, the anti-Evasions strategies still stink at fighting them. Shock Wave or Aerial Ace (especially if non-STAB) are such low power attacks that they might take about as long hitting-consistently to Faint an opponent as just blind-firing a regular move with higher BP that only has to land 2-3 times.

To make a comparison, Pokemon Go has some niche corebreakers in its PvP mode such as Chesnaught, who don't have the most effective neutral play into the Meta at large, whether due to heavily polarized match ups or just trends they take a lot of support to deal with; that said, if you run them into the Core they are advantages against (for example, certain Rollout + Ground users like Dunsparce), they can put you in a very advantageous position compared to what good play with "standard" useful options would achieve, so in exchange for struggling a bit more with other opponents, they perform SIGNIFICANTLY better against what you use them for, as opposed to "consistent but mediocre" into their counter.

In the case of Evasion strats, better examples would be something like Meowscarada's Flower Trick, since Meow is a competent Pokemon and Flower Trick a move it would reasonably run even if you never encountered a single opponent where its niche added benefits (No-Miss and Auto-Crit to ignore boosts) came up, regardless of if you might have stronger options like the Flamethrower vs Fire Blast decision. As a disclaimer, I know Meowscarada in practice doesn't have a stronger Grass move, but Flower Trick is still one of the few examples of a "can't miss" move that isn't strictly inferior to another strong move in its type such that you might still pick it over Power Whip. Aura Sphere vs Focus Blast also comes to mind, but the former is so low in distribution that most Pokemon don't have the option to even weigh.

 

[CynicalGiant]

Also the way evasion spam is done in Pokemon is entirely uninteresting, and the ai in my experience tends to just spam it without actually using it to setup or deal damage or anything other than waste my time. People have pointed it out well enough that the tools they give you to even deal with evasion spammers aren't fun or adequate most of the time so I won't repeat those too much.

Yes the point of evasion boosts in rpgs is to force you to employ a different strategy and have the necessary tools to combat it, but when you compare how Pokemon does it to how it is done in SMT or Metaphor it is just lame. Not only is the AI geared to take advantage of it, but they build the encounters specifically to abuse it, and the turn system is built to further incentivize both you and the enemy to abuse it, since you can lose your entire team's turns or multiple actions if you miss, or if the enemy misses you can gain A LOT more than you ever could in Pokemon. In a lot of older rpgs, a particular one that Pokemon takes inspiration from like the early Dragon Quests, they just used evasion boosting as a way to make you waste resources, which also isn't really something that comes up very frequently if at all in Pokemon outside of specific challenge hacks.

When I run into the double team spammer set in Pokemon I just groan. When I run into something like Matador in SMT 3 Nocturne or the Fishy Fandango spammer in Metaphor I'm filled with excitement and dread.

 

[LPBvgc]

Bringing the GTS to the Mobile version of HOME was a good idea since it prevents people like Adventure Snivy (and copycats) from repeating what they did on the 3DS.

 

[Samtendo09]

Also the way evasion spam is done in Pokemon is entirely uninteresting, and the ai in my experience tends to just spam it without actually using it to setup or deal damage or anything other than waste my time. People have pointed it out well enough that the tools they give you to even deal with evasion spammers aren't fun or adequate most of the time so I won't repeat those too much.

Yes the point of evasion boosts in rpgs is to force you to employ a different strategy and have the necessary tools to combat it, but when you compare how Pokemon does it to how it is done in SMT or Metaphor it is just lame. Not only is the AI geared to take advantage of it, but they build the encounters specifically to abuse it, and the turn system is built to further incentivize both you and the enemy to abuse it, since you can lose your entire team's turns or multiple actions if you miss, or if the enemy misses you can gain A LOT more than you ever could in Pokemon. In a lot of older rpgs, a particular one that Pokemon takes inspiration from like the early Dragon Quests, they just used evasion boosting as a way to make you waste resources, which also isn't really something that comes up very frequently if at all in Pokemon outside of specific challenge hacks.

When I run into the double team spammer set in Pokemon I just groan. When I run into something like Matador in SMT 3 Nocturne or the Fishy Fandango spammer in Metaphor I'm filled with excitement and dread.

I’m curious what do you mean by how evasion boosts in other RPGs forcing the player to employ a different strategy, and how Matador or fishy Fandango spammers are reliably dealt with.

Back to Pokémon’s evasion, it certainly isn’t an exciting stat to use in the slightest, and one of the bigger issues it has is that it is inconsistent. It’s a miracle that evasion spam haven’t caught up in VGC partially due to inconsistency, but nonetheless, evasion spam can also teach the player a bad (or at least boring and unfun) strategy that don’t amount much except trolling.

And having more chances for the move to miss entirely can add up to “skip your turn” statuses like Flinch, Paralysis, Sleep and Freeze, so if an NPC trainer has Evasion + either of the three former statuses, this can get ugly real fast.

Once Evasion became legitimately threatening in VGC and the countermeasures not catching up is when VGC become a true RNG fest that the games themselves get - sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly - accused off.

 

[CynicalGiant]

I’m curious what do you mean by how evasion boosts in other RPGs forcing the player to employ a different strategy, and how Matador or fishy Fandango spammers are reliably dealt with.

up to the point in Metaphor where the enemy with the move Fishy Fandango appears, you can get by from just spamming high damage moves and focusing on weaknesses. Fishy Fandango increases this enemy's hit rate and evasion, making it so you will miss hitting them and they won't miss hitting you. This enemy exists to teach the player to have ways to dispel enemy buffs or die. This is essentially what the evasion boosting pokemon defenders were saying about forcing people to have Shock Wave or Aerial Ace or whatever at all times, but increasing your own accuracy or lowering the enemy's doesn't have that much general usage in Pokemon. Removing enemy buffs or removing ally debuffs is basically always useful in Metaphor and SMT tho.

And having more chances for the move to miss entirely can add up to “skip your turn” statuses like Flinch, Paralysis, Sleep and Freeze, so if an NPC trainer has Evasion + either of the three former statuses, this can get ugly real fast.

Yeah I find this play pattern by npcs in pokemon to be a lot more interesting, that and the ai and the systems themselves are more built for it. Even in Let's Go, a game that is much easier than most pokemon games, you will run into a trainer with Magnemite that does Thunder Wave into Supersonic into damage move.

Once Evasion became legitimately threatening in VGC and the countermeasures not catching up is when VGC become a true RNG fest that the games themselves get - sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly - accused off.

I hope that day never comes, as one of the most rng moves in competitive history is already rather controversial in VGC from what I can tell, and that move is Dire Claw. People are starting to use Sneasler and Dire Claw more and a lot of people are justifiably pissed lmao.

 

[vishy fishy]

unpopular opinion, I prefer sneasler to urshifu in terms of gameplay.

(This is from someone who doesn’t even protect much)

 

[Heatranator]

unpopular opinion, I prefer sneasler to urshifu in terms of gameplay.

(This is from someone who doesn’t even protect much)

My brother in christ, that's like picking between satan and lucifer. They both are evil.
(Idk if lucifer is actually evil but what I'm trying to say is that they are both the devil)

 

[DreamPrince]

This probably isn't a only a Pokemon-thing, since Disney is also guilty of it as well, but am I the only one who dislike how Pokemon hunters are portrayed as evil and illegal- along with hunting as a frowned upon sport as well as people who portray it. Hunting can actually be a good way to manage animal populations that have gone overboard like deer in which natural predators like cougars and wolves have been drawn to near extinction. Not to mention there are laws protecting animals, one cannot shoot legally without a license- and there are many restrictions to hunting: For example, one cannot shoot mothers with young, or juveniles that not have fully grown. Also one of my friends is a hunter and he is one of nicest people I met, so I don't like how popular culture portrays hunting as evil.

 

[Adeleine]

Yeah. I see this as a combination of like, hunters / poachers are very easy to frame as negative in media - they make good villains - and broader issues with Western values. In general, while Western attitudes towards animals, have improved in recent decades, they've often improved in flawed, self-contradictory, and hypocritical ways. E.g. dogs often being categorized as "pets" and pigs often being categorized as "livestock", despite their similar intelligence levels, making one often taboo to kill and the other unquestioned to kill, even though reversing the arrangement is certainly plausible. I see current hunting attitudes and portrayals as similar.

 

[Bakugames]

i think it also depends on so many things. hunters of different countries and different groups that hunt different animals are. different lmfao. sometimes hunters are anti wolf and kill coyotes and sometimes theyre their hardest defenders. sometimes hunters approve of whaling and shark poaching and sometimes they want to hunt local invasive species like lionfish. some hunters are native people and others are there for prestige. etc

its much easier to just... get a group that practices specific harmful hunting than to criticize the vague concept of hunting. like if you had idk whale poachers as a concept in pokemon. then again the games flipflop on whaling and seem to be vaguely pro whaling (in the same way that people who arent super tuned in the news and saw some vague new info are)

 

[Celever]

To be fair my interpretation of hunters/poachers in Pokémon has always had the assumption of “they’re trophy hunters”. Probably because they are portrayed as evil or evil-lite and trophy hunters are the versions of hunters that are evil in their intent. It probably also comes down to how the term trophy hunter is used, we tend to only say it pejoratively either in regards to them killing protected species illegally, or at least in killing animals we respect or think shouldn’t be killed. Their portrayal in mons is “they shouldn’t be hunting mons” so they fit at least one of the two categories.

Like I know what you mean, not all hunters are bad, but population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik so these hunters obviously aren’t doing it for that reason. Idk why your mental journey would be “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the good hunters unfairly” instead of the more natural “Pokémon’s hunters are bad -> some irl hunters are good and some are bad -> Pokémon is portraying the bad ones”. (I know the terms good and bad here are reductive, they do the job).

I don’t think little Timmy is ready for the conversation about how we need to shoot the cute lil Deerling because they eat too many leaves anyway.

 

[DrPumpkinz]

population management has never been mentioned in Pokémon media afaik

 

[Sonikku A]

Shout outs to that guy that bred and released them...

 

[AztecCroc]

That would be the opposite of a situation where hunting could help.

 

[Karxrida]

Limited use TMs are not inherently a bad thing. I think it's more interesting from a game design perspective to force a player to commit to a choice than be able to slap Earthquake on everything. Too much player freedom can easily (and ironically) lead to homogeneity, as I've learned from playing Final Fantasy V.

TMs should still be unlimited use once you beat the champion, though.

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

Limited use TMs are not inherently a bad thing. I think it's more interesting from a game design perspective to force a player to commit to a choice than be able to slap Earthquake on everything. Too much player freedom can easily (and ironically) lead to homogeneity, as I've learned from playing Final Fantasy V.

TMs should still be unlimited use once you beat the champion, though.

I think SV got it right tbh.

You can get them in the overworld, encouraging exploration, you can also get multiple of them by crafting as well.

I never really liked infinite use TMs. You either have things locked until way too late, or something slips through the cracks and utterly breaks the game (BW2's Return, and SM's Scald are easy examples of this.)

On the other hand, with limited TMs, you can get cool things like Platinum's early Earthquake TM, which is such an incredible move that actually makes you stop and think what is getting it.

Where the old games failed was making them infinitely available at some point, especially post-game.

 

[Bakugames]

maybe its the open world bad!! bias but i dont like sv's system, both because i dont like the material system - which feels like it only exists to artifically increase the "depth" of the open world without offering anything interesting - and that it ends up like mindless grinding/the ui is kinda ass. something where maybe theres a crafting tree where crafting/unlocking lower level tms is part of unlocking the high level ones. so the pace would be the players pace and how much they want to work towards certain moves, and maybe they could have tasks to be able to learn those moves by exploring, instead of just being another thing on a shop you buy. id keep them infinite use this way

Id say things more out of there but I think that'd just be wishlisting

 

[Hugin]

I think SV got it right tbh.

You can get them in the overworld, encouraging exploration, you can also get multiple of them by crafting as well.

I never really liked infinite use TMs. You either have things locked until way too late, or something slips through the cracks and utterly breaks the game (BW2's Return, and SM's Scald are easy examples of this.)

On the other hand, with limited TMs, you can get cool things like Platinum's early Earthquake TM, which is such an incredible move that actually makes you stop and think what is getting it.

Where the old games failed was making them infinitely available at some point, especially post-game.

Gen II made field move TMs available in the Dept Store for purchase after you found them in the wild. I was always shocked that never made a comeback for all TMs. Selling them Post-Game for BP would also make sense.

Problems and benefits with each system we've seen:
Limited use, 1 supply: Players have to seriously consider whether to use a TM, which is good for forcing decisions, but leads to a lot of players hoarding TMs during their playthroughs for fear of wasting them, and makes postgame/competitive stuff excessively awkward.
Infinite use: TMs have to be excessively expensive or hard to find due to how much of a power-boost they can be. This makes buying a Swords Dance or even Rock Tomb/Bulldoze TM a serious decision. But once the player has access to a TM, they have no reason NOT to use it on every mon they can if it's an improvement, which makes broken early TMs a serious balance problem and even generic good moves will show up on enough sets to make various mons all feel very samey. The high cost can severely mess with the in-game economy.
Limited use, crafted supply: The crafting system isn't very interesting and feels artificially limited in which mon drops apply to which items. The supply also isn't limited enough to really feel like it's forcing decisions even early playthrough. But it makes post-game reasonably smooth and it encourages using TMs early-game without the XY effect of every physical attacker on your team sharing 2-3 moves.

I like the crafting system most, but both reducing the different types of mon drops(just give us like 3 types of drop for each type) and then increasing the number required per TM might be the way to go.

 

[DreamPrince]

Stantler’s entry in RSE and its remakes also mention how it was driven to near extinction for its antlers.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

Limited use TMs are not inherently a bad thing. I think it's more interesting from a game design perspective to force a player to commit to a choice than be able to slap Earthquake on everything. Too much player freedom can easily (and ironically) lead to homogeneity, as I've learned from playing Final Fantasy V.

TMs should still be unlimited use once you beat the champion, though.

I mentioned this a while ago, but one of the things that really underscored how goofy TM-related balance can be was Toxic's distribution in earlier gens.

In a lot of the early games, a ton of Pokemon could be taught Toxic via TM regardless of how much thematic sense it did or did not make, but the Toxic TM was usually a true one-off: one found in the quest, with no way to buy or farm more. This makes a decent bit of game balance sense specifically for the quest: the player gets to choose only one party member to teach a pretty unique move to (lots of other moves can inflict other status conditions, but only Toxic inflicts its unique brand of poison), but he or she could choose pretty much any party member to be the recipient. There's a trade-off.

Later on, once TMs were infinite-use, something like Toxic suddenly looks completely out of place. Now that the supply was no longer limited, it really draws attention to the fact that pretty much everything could learn it and how little sense that makes.