>>43298745Better movepool, better BSTs across the board, better abilities. As it stands, Ice is actually a really interesting typing with a handful of cool strategies only it can pull off but it's gimped by the fact that none of them matter at all in the grand scheme of things and they don't do enough damage to make them actual viable combos in any meta ever.
Pokemon has an extreme issue with it's battle system. It very rarely changes or improves. And from 3rd gen going forward the changes were so small they may as well have not existed. They kind of just heap ideas on and hope that they'll work, so we get a lot of strands of ideas at the end of the day that go nowhere and the core gen 3 battle system. If they were to revise battling, I assume fixing ice types would be as easy as rewarding players for having those ice types out for more than a few turns. So something like: during hail, Ice types get snow heaped on them. This status effect buffs their defenses (because GF is dead set on Ice types being defensive), and evasions, and removes some of their weaknesses (fire?) in exchange for dropping their speed as long as they aren't hit by a physical attack. So every turn during hail an Ice type gains a stage of defense and a stage of evasion while losing one or two stages of speed and gaining resistance to fire or something like that, because "The snow is piling up". It would make them harder to get rid of as a team and kind of promote a more stall heavy meta but if they fixed more systems than that, I imagine it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
You could also probably buff Freeze as a status ailment. It's sort of supposed to be their thing, but it's always been trash. It's super unlikely to freeze anything during a battle because of low chances, so maybe double the chance of freezing the target with ice moves across the board to a maximum of 95 (unless the move is supposed to garuantee freeze) and then add the effect to more moves retroactively.
