Opdeeznutz

I don't know you and we're not friends, so you can quit it with the patronizing terms of endearment. These are all exactly the cookie cutter gimmicks I'm referring to, prankster debuffs, fear, baton pass and free setups. For all your supposed creativity all you could put together is a bunch of suboptimal teams employing samey tactics. To call this "not restrictive" is just completely delusional. It's really no more engaging at all than clicking destiny bond 5 times, the only reason that was banned was so people would have to grind more levels and EVs. Saying these bosses are well designed because you can impose arbitrary restrictions on yourself is an absolutely ridiculous argument, especially in an MMO where these rewards are timegated and players are heavily incentivized to maximize their chances of success as much as possible.

I am not complaining about the "difficulty" of hard mode bosses. They are not challenging at all, period. Giving their pokemon impossibly cracked out stats is such a lazy and ineffective attempt at creating difficulty and it doesn't work, it just makes them cheap, tedious and frustrating - it pigeonholes players into building extremely specific gimmick teams leaving zero room for actual strategy or creativity. These gimmicks require no thought or skill to pull off, and are 100% failsafe, unless of course you eat a crit to the face after 20 turns of mindlessly spamming boosting and accuracy dropping moves. Bosses are unsatisfying to win against, and when you lose it's not because you made a mistake or need to improve your strategy, it just feels like you got unfairly cheated out of free money solely due to rng. Not to mention how insanely restrictive this system is on teambuilding - it's borderline impressive that there are even fewer relevant pokemon in boss battles than there are in the plain old competitive metagame. It would be nice if the non pvp endgame content actually encouraged more diversity since the vast majority of mons are useless in pvp anyway. I don't have any better ideas for challenging bosses off the top of my head, but gamesharking all of their stats to absurd levels has got to be the worst and laziest one imaginable. Is this really all you can come up with?