"The case for implementing Heart Scales (and also why we should NOT implement TMs)"

#PokemonGO: Many people on this subreddit lately, have been suggesting adding TMs to Pokemon Go, as a way to make your useless pokemon with good IVs less useless. While me and all my 9 Steel Wing Dragonites agree, I do not think that TMs are the way to go.First of all, TMs in the main games only go from TM 01 to TM 100. Since there are more than 100 individual moves in Pokemon Go, how would we decide which moves do get a TM and which don't? How would we decide what Pokemon we can make usable again, and which we can't do this with?Another question would be, how would you obtain TMs in Go? In the main series games, in earlier gens you get 1 TM of each move (some TMs are purchasable repeatedly in special stores in the earlier games), and the TM is removed from your inventory when you teach it to a Pokemon. In later games, this is changed to every TM being reusable, and you can only obtain one copy of each TM. This brings up a question of how you would balance this in Go. Would you:a) Have 1 time use TMs that you pick up from Pokestops, meaning that every TM would be extremely rare and frustrating to find (imagine having a low chance of finding a TM, then having a 1 in 100 chance of getting EXACTLY the one you want for the exact pokemon you want.b) Have unbreakable TMs which would easily break the entire game, by allowing players infinite perfect moveset Pokemon of a species, once they get the TM. Say you could make EVERY SINGLE DRAGONITE YOU EVER CATCH into a dual Dragon STAB moveset, once you find the TMs required. Would this not be unbalanced?These are the problems I currently see with TMs in Pokemon Go, although I might have overlooked something.Now, let's have a look at a core feature in the main series games, a feature which has barely changed through the generations of Pokemon since Ruby and Sapphire came out.There is a rare item you can find, often hidden well inside rocks or behind your line of sight, called the Heart Scale. If you hand over one of these Heart Scales to an NPC in the main series games, you can re-teach one move to a Pokemon in your party. The only limitation (although this limitation is removed in gen7) is that your pokemon needs to be over a certain level to be able to learn certain moves. Say you have an Alakazam at lvl 28 and you want to teach it a move with a Heart Scale. This would then (through gen6) limit you to teach it moves available to Alakazam before lvl28, making it so you cannot have an Alakazam at lvl28 with Future Sight, a move it learns at lvl48 (again, this is now possible in gen7).Due to the nature of the Heart Scale, and its already known function in the main games, I see several ways that Niantic could implement and properly balance Heart Scales in Go.The most straight forward way, is to completely copy the abilities of the Heart Scale from the gen7 main series games, and let your Pokemon learn any move in its moveset at the cost of a Heart Scale.This first method might be overpowered, by allowing you to teach your Pokemon a move of your choice no matter what. A nerf to this way of handling the Heart Scale could be to add a lvl limitation for moves in Go, so that you would have to spend stardust and candies on your Pokemon to level it up to an appropriate level before it can learn a move. To use Alakazam as an example again, say you would need to level up your Alakazam to lvl30 to be able to teach it Future Sight. This method would sadly lock casuals out of gyms even more than they already are, so perhaps this is not the best option.My third and final suggestion, and the one which I prefer, is to make the Heart Scale randomize one of your Pokemons moves. Again, I will use Alakazam as my example. I own a 98% IV Alakazam, which got Confusion/Shadow Ball as its moveset. With a Heart Scale, I could choose to reroll its Shadow Ball, and hope to get Future Sight. But there is still a chance that I might get Focus Blast through this method, making my Alakazam worse than it was in the first place, and forcing me to spend another Heart Scale on it, to make it usable. This way you keep the RNG which currently is a big part of the game, but you can also make Pokemon that were previously unusable, good for battling.As for Heart Scale rarity, I was thinking it could be something like the gen2 release evo item drop rates, which is to say very rare. I believe you should have to work quite hard to find a Heart Scale, but anyone should be able to find it after a while of playing.Discussion is welcome, I just wanted to put my opinion out there, see what you guys think. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2pB31rx