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Too many irrelevant Pokemon?

I just checked out my Pokedex again and it occured to me just how many of the Pokemon are utterly irrelevant in the game, and what a shame that is.

Back in the day, before Pokemon Go, when thinking how it would be if Pokemon were real I imagined it differently. i imagined every Pokemon would have its place in the so-called "meta", and that if properly trained (or maxed out), up to a certain point every Pokemon could beat another.

When I look at the reality that is Pokemon Go it seems to me people are always talking about/using/hoarding a handful of species of Pokemon. I think a list of 20 or so relevant Pokemon could easily be made, if not less. But what about all those others?

I find this most striking with the Pokemon that are in between two evolutions and the Pokemon that don't have any evolutions. Has anyone ever used a Girafarig, for example? A Stantler? A Gligar? A Plusle?

I haven't, because they seem to suck, but when I look at all those Pokemon it seems to me that there's a lot of wasted potential. Or am I playing this game wrong?

Asked by Grimgroove7 years ago

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Answers

I don't know if the evolution of Gligar will be useful or not, but it will have one.

When prestiging was a thing, a lot of pokemon had uses as 1/2 cp prestiging attackers. Some of my favorites were parasect and tangela, while others, such as wigglytuff were popular. It was fun coming up with uses for otherwise useless pokemon.

I miss that.

Man it was the best thing about pokemon go. I used to use almost every pokemon i catch to prestige gyms. I was cool seeing different moves other then few op ones.

Usually Pidgey is the last mon standing in a gym, if that gives you any comfort

The obligatory stock answer: Every pokemon doesn't have a place in the meta in the handheld games, so we should not expect that in Go either. There will always be better and worse pokemon.

With that out of the way, Go could certainly use some balancing to make more pokemon viable and other ways to use them than the current system that rewards DPS and basically nothing else. The stat conversion handles hp, defenses and speed poorly and should be remedied into something a bit more sensible.

The Plusles and Stantlers that you mention are designed to be weak. The handhelds need pokemon for various roles and a lot of them need to be early game mons with low stats. That doesn't really apply to POGO the same way so those mons don't seem to have a role. Something to remedy this could be to create a system in gyms that rewards you for bringing in low CP stuff like prestiging used to be.

this.

The balancing occurs over time. Remember when Arcanine was the best fire attacker, and Gyarados was hampered by no fast water move? Then Gary got Waterfall, and almost immediately after, Kyogre came out. Magnezone and Rhyperior will make Magneton and Rhyhorn relevant again in G4, etc. Eggy learning bullet seed made it the best grass attacker for most things (strongest use of Solar Beam with STAB) until Frenzy Plant came out, and that was just available for 3 hours.

Part of the nature of the game is that the new is better than the old, otherwise why bother? (Although Latios/Latias and the Regis are kind of destroying that paradigm by not being that great relative to the weather trio, but then again, almost nothing is that great relative to the weather trio, except maybe Mewtwo.)

In time ? You mean in few years?
Things are changing super fast in this era. Pokemon go doesn't need years to get balanced.

The balancing occurs whenever Niantic bothers to deal with it. How do you explain the fact that ice has half a dozen viable attackers while rock has 1 that's not extremely rare legacy, except by Niantic being too busy to deal with the actual game design of their game?

You are of course right in that there needs to be some power creep to keep up player interest, but that doesn't excuse some of the outright bad balancing in the game. Arcanine losing its spot as top fire was not balancing because what got the top spot was Flareon, which is much easier to get in most biomes. Balancing would have been to change the movesets so that Arcanine stays top, because it's harder to get than Flareon. Or to make Eeveelutions harder to get since Vaporeon was outright broken in the beginning of the game and all three were top of their type for very long.

They are good for gym defense, not blissey like defense but disposable. Since not many people know of their moves they might even hurt attackers, low cp low decay. Then again pidgey does the same as well

Put a pidgey in a gym and:
1: it will invite attacks, since there is effectively 1 less defender
2: nobody will feed your pidgey if the gym gets attacked. they’ll just let it drop and someone else will slot in 10 mins later.

People here already ignore L20 raid catch ttars when GRB defending. They’ll definitely ignore a pidgey.

It is definitely more of a collectors game than a gamers game. Everyone goes crazy for shinies, even though the odds are they will be less useful than your best normal version of the same mon.