I have heard no such news, because I live under a rock with a stack of books.

But really, good lord.  You’re telling me they finally managed to make something that broke the Uber tier?  The metagame that was perfectly content with pre-Drizzle-nerf Kyogre?  That Uber tier?

I think power creep is a legitimate concern.  The problem is that, given the way Pokémon works as a franchise, Pokémon get more stuff every generation, and very rarely have anything taken away from them (even the loss of moves taught using TMs or move tutors is often temporary).  It’s very rare for a Pokémon to actually become objectively inferior to a previous version of itself – which means that Pokémon who don’t get much attention or whose design doesn’t justify cool new powers easily will just get steadily weaker and weaker relative to everything else that’s going on around them, and often those are Pokémon who were pretty terrible to begin with.  Farfetch’d scores more critical hits now!  And also Mega Pinsir exists so f$#% you, Farfetch’d.  Now, Pokémon has never really cared about game balance anyway, so to that extent you can sort of just say “eh; screw it,” and more to the point it’s probably impossible to balance something as old, vast and heterogeneous as Pokémon without ripping the whole thing apart and basically building a new game from scratch (I mean, if you want an example of how hard it is to create balance that satisfies everybody, take a peek at the Starcraft II forums some time; they have people whose full-time job is making balance tweaks, and there are only like 50 different units in the whole game, but two-thirds of the forums is just people screaming about how obviously and horrifically broken they think the game is – and these people are the fans, or at least I think they are).  On the other hand, it sucks when your favourite Pokémon is one that’s just objectively not very good.  Vileplume is my favourite Pokémon and the truth is that Vileplume is terrible compared to a lot of other Grass-type supporters like Venusaur and Ferrothorn.  And yes, you can say “well, no, you have to look at Vileplume in its proper context, which is the NU tier,” but the unavoidable fact is that the existence of tiers is the result of the fanbase bending over backwards to do something that most other franchises would regard as the developers’ job, and the tremendous volume of hatred that gets inflicted on the poor Starcraft II balance team is instead pointed at bloody Smogon.

Basically what I’m getting at is that whether power creep is harmful sort of ties into the question of whether you think game balance in Pokémon is desirable or even possible, and we are not even close to answering that one…

I sort of think we were on the way there anyway.  A lot of the best TMs could be bought repeatedly from various shops, game corners and battle areas across different games, and really any TM is reusable if you breed for it (it’s just sort of unfairly discriminatory to genderless Pokémon).  In most cases, you could already get around the fact that TMs were limited-use – it was just boring and time-consuming some of the time.  I’m okay with things not being boring and time-consuming.

I think this has been sitting in my in-box for quite some time now.  I had a hectic week or three.  Sorry about that.  But now I’m sitting in the Houston airport for like four hours and have time to work through this rather menacing backlog of questions, so whatevs.

I think I had a question *like* this earlier in the year regarding changes to the type as a whole… yeah, here it is.  I think I might add to that a suggestion that maybe Solarbeam, having been charged up once, could fire repeatedly without charging again for as long as the Pokémon in question remained in play; that might make it somewhat more viable, particularly outside of dedicated sun teams.

Anyway, to the specific Pokémon… there are sort of quite a lot of them to give individualised answers to… but I can talk about Vileplume to give you an idea of the kind of direction I might take, because Vileplume is my favourite Pokémon.  Vileplume is actually on the up and up already in generation six.  X and Y, you may have noticed, kindly gifted her with some extra points in special attack, which helps a lot; I think a little more HP as well would not be out of the question, but I’m not going to make a fuss about it.  Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby also seem to have given Oddish (though not Gloom) Moonblast on her level-up list, and Moonblast kicks the living cr@p out of every other special coverage attack Vileplume has ever had (i.e. Tri Attack via Nature Power) as well as making good thematic sense, so that’s wonderful.  Anyway, what more can we do?  Giving a boost to Effect Spore, which is her Dream World ability, would help a lot, because as it stands Effect Spore is a terrible ability (a 30% chance to inflict a status condition, which you can’t choose, if you’re hit by a contact attack = at best a 10% chance of being useful), and her only other ability (Chlorophyll) is a really great ability for a sweeper, which Vileplume emphatically is not.  Let’s maybe say instead that Effect Spore could give perfect accuracy to ‘powder’ moves (Sleep Powder, Stun Spore, Poisonpowder, Spore, Rage Powder, Cotton Spore and Powder) and lets them bypass Protect and Substitute.  If we really wanted to mix things up we could throw in a signature move – maybe ‘Allergen’ or something – that causes paralysis and confusion.  That would be nasty.