Improvements for competitive battling over original games

[Likuet]

I would suggest that PRO doesnt blindly follow original games where they in my opinion failed to produce a truly competitive environment. I am a very competitive player and like to do alot of research and theorycrafting into any game I play and there is no worse thing than getting punished for something that you could not possibly predict. Allow me to explain what I mean with a few examples.

The reason pokemon can never reach its potential is the insane amount of RNG possibilities that can occur during a match, possibly retarding your original plan on how you want to beat/outplay your opponent. There are some RNG scenarios that I know cannot be avoided and can potentially make the game more challenging because it forces you to adapt down the road but these are the ones that you can somewhat expect and prepare for.

 

Examples:

 

Critical hits make competitive play dull and serve no real purpose. When a crit happens, often times its gamechanging. It means that your pokemon wont be able to Will-o-wisp that DD d-nite because you will be 2hit KOd instead of 3hit KOd and will be sweeped afterwards. The winner likely wont feel accomplished by that aswell since no brainpower had to be used to get that win.

 

Moves like Toxic, will-o-wisp and leech seed really have no reason for not being 100% accurate. There is no scenario in teambuilding process where you would say ¨Oh I chose not to use this move on this particular pokemon because it might not hit when it needs to.¨ You always use them and just pray that they land. Every good player can fairly accurately predict which pokemon are users of these 2 moves and can switch in appropriate pokemon that will not get crippled by them. If however they switch in a scizor on a willowisp or SD up with scizor when will-o-wisp is about to come in and they pull it off simply because will-o-wisp missed, you are straight up promoting bad play. Whenever bad play gets rewarded where it should get punished, I think its safe to say that we might have a problem.

 

Previous chapter does not however try to say that all moves should have their accuracy changed. Lets take Focus Blast for an example. You know you have a higher risk high reward play to be made. When picking this move you know that it can and will miss but you are willing to accept that chance. You have different choices. According to the gameplan you want to pull off, you might want to pick aura sphere in place of focus blast or pick a different pokemon with similar role but a move with higher accuracy instead.

 

Some arguments in favor of more RNG say that its good because it makes the game more fun to watch for a casual spectator. I think this can be satisfied by the fact that there is still quite alot of it in pokemon. First you dont know what kind of team your opponent is going to bring. You dont know for sure what movesets they are running. Switching cannot be fully predictable and as mentioned above there will always be powerful moves which have lower than 100% accuracy.

 

There can be alot of discussion about many moves that could or could not be changed but I think the changes I propose would be healthy in PVP and make it more fun. If people like it in PVE they can easily stay there.

 

Please share your opinions and thoughts. Thanks.

 

Liku

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention that this can be implemented down the road and isnt urgent since stuff like making alot of moves and abilities work first should be a priority.

[Parpar]

Agreeing with this post simply because of how much I can relate. I can't even tell you how many times I've made the right play and used Will-o-wisp on the physical attacker switch in, or leech seeded the Blissey as it comes in, or called a switch into a wall and used toxic just for it to miss. As you said these are strategic moves that a good player should know how to identify and play around, and throwing a win at someone because of a 10% chance seems a little dumb.

 

They might go for this seeing as they removed Accuracy and Evasion boosts and drops, but if they wanted to keep it the same way I'd somewhat understand that they want, but disagree.

 

A counterpoint might be that this will induce a more status heavy meta, and the way the meta is right now is very stall heavy with the lack of such power as the choice items(band and specs) but after we get band/specs working along with heal bell/aromatherapy(if they don't already work) I think it'd be a great change.

[Likuet]

I disagree. I think it would not create a stall heavy meta. Stall heavy meta is created by the absence of items like lifeorb and choice items which makes pokemon less likely to slowly tear apart a 6 wall stall team as well as taunt not working properly. As i mentioned, i think that toxic and willowisp users would stay exactly the same as they are right now. Noone will say:˝Now that toxic is 100% i will use it on my Ninatales, because 90% didnt make it viable on it before.˝ There is just no such scenario. This wouldnt be the case with moves such as fireblast and thunder and hurricane obviusly which need the lower accurace.