>>52965509What I had in mind was that every mon has one innate trait that will always be there by default. For many species, this would be the Levitate/Airborne trait if they're clearly in the air but not flying type, but all others would have an ability that either defines their concept or to give most abilities some time in the spotlight.
For the remaining two slots, the player would be able to choose from an available pool of traits to activate. The pool might change depending on the number of badges or what level/stage the Pokémon is to avoid top tier picks to be available early. Regardless, with this system, there would always be one trait that hints towards what kind of strategy the species can employ, but then give the player the option to optimize or experiment.
This would also not require the player to catch enough species to find one with the "right" trait, which is something that has personally annoyed me whenever one of any given species' ability is vastly superior/inferior than the other.
Like I mentioned before, since you'd be able to choose multiple traits, drawbacks wouldn't be out of the question either. Perhaps it could be done where each trait has one positive and one negative perk, but the innate/locked slot doesn't trigger the negative one. This can definitely be up for discussion, but I don't see why each trait would need to be a clear upgrade and instead a risk vs reward that the player can decide whether they want or not.
