>>36670774>Catching, breeding, soft resetting, and RNG abusing for the most useful abilities and nature>PointlessThe point is getting the best tools you can for battling, something that's always been a part of Pokemon since the very first games. Some might call searching for Chansey in gen 1 a "pointless grind", given how rare it is, but it turned out to be an amazing special tank in OU. Gen 3's additions were good, they made competitive better, and you can't complain about accessibility to competitive anymore, they've made it easier than ever to obtain competitive Pokemon. You don't even need RNG abuse anymore, you can breed pentaperfects from dogshit in no time.
>>36670802Oh, I see, you don't want more depth in battle. Also
>Certain moves can already do the same shit as abilitiesYeah, and those moves are worse than said abilities. No one runs growl, even in metas without Intimidate. Growl will give your opponent a free turn of set-up or a chance to hit your growl user, while you've done effectively nothing. An ability activating when you enter battle will always be miles better than wasting a moveslot and a turn using it.
And if you really wanna bitch about EVs and IVs, they were so much worse in gen 1 and 2. You had no means of controlling its equivalent to IVs, and EVs in the early gens were even grindier than they are now. I recall the calculations being something like requiring the player to defeat 300 Mews to max out EVs in every stat. Not only is that obviously not possible in regular gameplay, but that's obscene even by gen 3 standards, where the modern EV system was at its grindiest.
>I feel like abilities is what casualized itThe opposite, actually, it made battling more complex. So did natures and the reworking of EVs. In previous gens, everything was much tankier thanks to being able to max out everything. Pokemon in general had much more limited options for sets to run, too, which meant much less gambling and prediction.
