"[Discussion] - Do we overestimate the importance of Individual Values in this game?"

#PokemonGO: There's often a lot of showcasing of perfect IV Pokemon here, and I want to advance the controversial-to-some stance that functionally, perfect IV Pokemon are just trophies. These Pokemon enjoy little-to-no real functional advantage over lower IV Pokemon - 90% or even 80% IV Pokemon will essentially perform the same. Because higher IV % Pokemon become increasingly harder to get as you go up in %, aiming for high IVs on everything becomes a game of diminishing returns: you have to, on average, go through many more catches to get 5% or even 10% more, with little improvement in how they behave. To support my point, I want to bring up three pieces of evidence.First is the analysis conducted by /u/SilphRoad here, comparing the advantage that various IV tiers have with each other; you can see that a 100% IV Pokemon will only enjoy a tiny 2.66% advantage over a 90% IV Pokemon, and 5.36% over a 80% IV Pokemon.Second, because IVs are a fixed stat bonus, differences between IVs matters even less for high-tier mons. For instance, a stamina IV on Snorlax barely contributes to the final HP because of Snorlax's base stamina of 320. Thus, IVs are less important for high-tier attackers and defenders.Third, where IVs are more important are for lower-tier mons, because you have lower base stats, allowing for the IV to make up a larger proportion of their stats. However, I will argue that on the converse, there are a few caveats here that make IVs less valuable. Because of stardust restrictions, you often are disincentivized from investing stardust into lower tier mons. Second, it is actually not desirable in many cases to max out a lower-tier mon, because these mons play the role of training gyms, and you want to keep them at as low of a CP as viable to fill this role. If you have two Pokemon of the same species, one of a lower IV and one of a higher IV, the lower IV Pokemon could easily gain similar or higher stats just by means of leveling up a few times over the higher IV Pokemon. Thus, I submit that IVs are only important when comparing across max level Pokemon of a species - there's no point in bragging that your Lv. 20 Wigglytuff has a 100% IV if you're not planning on maxing it out, because you could easily just get something like a Lv. 22 Wigglytuff with lesser IVs for similar performance.The point about Pokemon not being maxed out is also relevant to high-tier mons because of the rarity of some candies. Realistically, if you have a 90% perfect Lapras at CP 1000, and a 60% perfect Lapras at CP 2000, the latter one is still better unless in the long run, you somehow manage to get enough candies to max out the former, it will always lag behind the performance of the higher CP Lapras as an attacker due to the massive CP gap.Overall, I think the emphasis we pay on IVs is way overblown here - on a practical level, they're nice to have, but they aren't as essential to this game. Personally, I just aim for 75%+ at this stage, and I don't bother with obsessing with it if it's a rare Pokemon that I rarely ever get - in fact, I will try to evolve lower IV Pokemon if they have a higher level to save on stardust, because of the diminishing returns.Thoughts? What % of IV do you personally aim for in your Pokemon before you consider it competitive? via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2baxety