I wouldn't mind seeing -poison- as a status effect getting a little overhaul too.
Maybe give toxic poison its own status icon (txc) and make regular poison similar to burn, lowering defense by one stage as well as inflicting damage each turn.
Of course I doubt this will happen, since poison is meant to be a low-ranking status effect that mainly occurs early game, but if we are to use poison moves more commonly in X/Y, randomly inflicting with regular poison off sludge bomb should never be a bad thing.
You're right about poison's usefulness according to Game Freak. I think that the biggest disqualifier for Poison getting better is when they nerfed poison as a status affliction in BW. Since it doesn't hurt your Pokémon outside of battle anymore (and they're quite adamant about keeping certain gameplay changes, so that may not go back to how it used to be any time soon), I don't know that there would be anything they would do to kinda compensate for that. Nerfing the poison condition made it a more survivable intro to status problems, and I like to hope that's where they want to keep it. Out of all the status afflictions so far, it does become a good lead-up to the others, particularly burn for being 3 times more of a pain to deal with if your physical Pokémon is the burnt one.
The flaw with that assertion is that well over half of all Poison types are from the first generation. The trend for the 4 generations since then averages to about 6 per generation. So we might only get Skrelp's evo/s and like, 4 others.
I'd like to change my comment from "1-3 out of every 17-18 new pokemon" to 1-3 out of every 17-18(maybe 17-20) Pokémon available in the Kalos region. In the Johto and Sinnoh regions, there wasn't necessarily a new early Poison type, but a new relative to an old mostly common Poison type that you may have had to raise a Pokémon of the same evolutionary line to obtain a Pokedex entry on the new addition, so I don't want to set myself up for disappointment if there isn't a completely new Poison type to run into by route 3. I find it equally likely that we may see Nidoran, Spinarak or another similar preexisting Poison type instead, but this is assuming that Game Freak is using the segmented Pokedex to make further use of as many of the 550 some odd available Pokémon (not counting starters and legendaries) to show off as much wildlife diversity as possible. Given some of the implied choices that they're putting in the game (Taillow and Ledyba judging by the commercials, and Zigzagoon as we saw from the image of the new Pokedex), they could be planning to use an old Poison type for the early routes to make the type present.
If GF ever worried about gyms being too easy, they wouldn't have given us Sableye in Hoenn before Brawly's Fighting gym, and they also wouldn't have given us Magnemite in the Virbank complex before Roxie's Poison gym in the most recent installment. I'm sure there are other examples of this, as it is a game that has a primary target market of 10-12 year old children. It wouldn't make any sense to make the game too difficult. Whitney was the exception to this assumption.
That being said, I would love for GF to build on the difficulty system they implemented in BW2. Making it available from the start, and boosting the levels slightly more than previously. This would make the games themselves more challenging for experienced players.
As for the lack of poison types having been released so far, I would just give it time. GF aren't about to give us the entire pokedex before the game is released. I'm sure they'll release a bug/poison counterpart for Vivilon, as that's the way it's been most generations, baring 4th with Mothim. It's only my guess though.
Yeah, and don't you usually run into an ace-in-the-hole kind of Pokémon not too long before reaching most gyms? in BW, they give you a monkey that would help you in the Striaton City gym if you chose to use it. Any children who understand type compatibilities would want to use that knowledge to their advantage in a gym challenge, and Game Freak has almost always distributed different types of Pokémon fairly to give trainers the upper hand if they want to act on it. I don't think that we should be flooded with Poison types, or even one that should show a lot of late-game promise, but I agree. I don't think the victory becomes a give-away if there's at least one available species that can support your team during a fight against a gym leader before you meet them, like finding Geodude two towns ahead of Violet City, or Electrike before Fortree City.
And why focus on just the fairy leader? I doubt there will be a lack of Flying &/or Fire &/or Rock types before Viola, for instance
Wait, don't you mean you doubt there will be a plethora of Flying, Fire or Rock types before fighting Viola? Either way, chances are that we won't have much to choose from if we want to win thanks to some type favorability, in which case FLETCHLING, who could probably Peck your way to your first badge if he can't Flame Charge that early on
