"All the Pokémon are basically the same"

#PokemonGO: The battle system in the game is way too simple, and it results in the Pokémon being largely undifferentiated.I am looking at three of the most spectacular Pokémon of Generation IV, Garchomp, Dialga and Palkia, and they bring basically nothing new to the table.Garchomp is the only meta-relevant Gen IV Pokémon who is neither legendary nor a final evolution of an existing Pokémon.Garchomp’s optimal moveset is Dragon Tail/Outrage. With this moveset, he is a strong generalist, who is almost identical in every context to Rayquaza and Dragonite, who do literally the exact same thing, and very similar to Latios and Salamence, who do a very similar thing. He is bulky, which may be nice for gyms, but his DPS is lower than Rayquaza’s, and since his candy will be very scarce, it’s better to invest in another Rayquaza than a Garchomp. If you hatch a good Gible, the best thing to do with it is to stash it away and see if it gets a meta-relevant Community Day move. That is about the least fun possible best practice for getting a good pokemon.Dialga does Dragon Breath/Draco Meteor, which is a very slight variation on what other Dragon generalists do. In practice, he does the same thing as Rayquaza, but slightly worse.Palkia gives you a choice between Dragon Breath and Dragon Tail, and a choice between Draco Meteor and Hydro Pump. He’s a worse dragon attacker than Rayquaza and he is a worse water attacker than Kyogre.Because the battle system in Go is so simple, moves are basically reduced to: quick attack (fast animation), quick attack (slow animation), and one-bar, two-bar and three-bar charge moves, with varying damage numbers and animations making some of them good and some of them bad.There is always a mathematically optimal Pokémon for any battle, and anything else you might choose just does the same thing but worse. I am a big fan of Dialga and Palkia. I shiny-hunted both of them in USUM. And it is pretty disappointing to see the gods of time and space reduced to just being undifferentiated Dragon generalists in GO.If Niantic wants to keep players interested for in this game for years to come, it really needs to reevaluate how it handles battles, because new Pokémon feel a lot like old Pokémon, and releases that should be exciting are underwhelming as a result. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2COLxmz