The Problem with Legacy Moves

Legacy moves, or “Exclusive” moves, have a long and storied history in Pokémon GO. The first wave was only 45 days after the game’s release, on August 19th 2016, when 17 Pokémon lost access to various Fast and Charged moves. There were two more major waves after, on February 21st, 2017, and then again on December 8th, 2017. Since then, more and more have been added, bit by bit, through Community Days and random events. It’s not worth counting them all, but rest assured: there are a lot of them, and they keep on coming. We still have Gust Pidgeot and Aeroblast Lugia coming Soon™. And the thing is, they’re all bad. Legacy moves are nothing more than an arbitrary way to gate valuable things behind events to drive engagement. This gives them a purely negative impact on the game’s accessibility and fairness, especially given the power of many of these moves. The core issue with legacy moves is this: Good things should not be gated, and when they are, it harms the game and the players.

Do note that, for the duration of this piece, it will be assumed that the player is seeking out competitive optimality. This means no Flash Cannon Metagross, no Charge Beam Zapdos, and no Solar Beam Venusaur. While there are some situations where less optimal moves (Overheat Charizard) can still work, they are not as good, and will thus be treated as less desirable.

Frankly, this is probably worthy of an article on its own, but it’s worth trying to summarize here. When all players are on an even playing field, then the outcome of any match will be more decided by skill. However, when the players are on uneven footing, the value of skill is diminished. There are many people just now getting into PvP, with the advent of GBL, who don’t have many of the incredibly important Legacies because they were either not playing during, or didn’t care about PvP during the relevant Community Day events. These players are now at a distinct disadvantage over the players who were, in a way that does not effectively represent their skill levels. 

Those reading who played in Silph Arena tournaments may remember trying to hunt down a Last Resort Umbreon in Ferocious Cup (and the sheer number of players who didn’t have them). For those who weren’t playing then, here’s a brief summary: Ferocious Cup was a tournament format in which Umbreon was incredibly dominant, arguably the best Pokémon around. However, to fully function, it needed its Community Day move. Due to PvP not existing when it was available, many trainers didn’t bother to evolve an Umbreon with its Legacy move, or evolved their biggest one (thus putting it over 1500, making it ineligible for Great League). As such, it was in the painful intersection of “valuable” and “rare.” If you’ve experienced trying to hunt one of those down, you’ll understand the frustration of trying to get ahold of one of these Legacies when they aren’t easily accessible. It had a meaningful negative impact on the health of those formats. Not having a Last Resort Umbreon there put you at a real disadvantage in terms of your ability to win those tournaments, no matter how skilled a player you are.

If a more skilled player is disadvantaged because they are arbitrarily gated from having the right Legacy, there is a problem with the system. The current implementation of Legacies is severely broken, and it holds back otherwise skilled players.

Adding old Legacy moves back to Pokémon’s regular movepool (de-Legacying) good moves was a huge positive step. Taking Dragon Breath/Dragon Claw Dragonite from one of the most sought-after Legacies to perfectly accessible was fantastic for the PvP community.

In a sense, the only good Legacy move is a non-Legacy move. Niantic has made some great steps in taking old hard-to-find Legacies and making them accessible again. Notable examples of this are Shadow Ball Haunter, Dragon Breath/Dragon Claw Dragonite, Body Slam Snorlax, and Cross Chop Machamp. That’s really cool, and it’s hugely appreciated! In fact, they’ve de-Legacied most of the useful old Legacy moves! Additionally, bringing back Hurricane Articuno, Thunder Shock Zapdos, and Sky Attack Moltres in these latest raid weeks has been fantastic. This is the first time these moves have been available in raids since their respective raid days approximately 2 years ago! It’s a huge boost in accessibility to some very valuable Pokémon.

Giratina-Altered is a fantastic Pokémon in Ultra League, with two very powerful variants. While it consistently runs Dragon Claw + Shadow Sneak, both Dragon Breath and Shadow Claw are incredible fast moves with real viability. And with the investment of a single Fast TM, you can switch back and forth! However, the same can’t be said for every Pokémon.

Lapras is a Pokémon with meaningful utility in both Great and Ultra Leagues, and it has two primary movesets: Ice Shard (L) + Surf and Ice Beam (L), and Ice Shard (L) + Surf and Skull Bash. The Ice Beam variant is most common in Ultra, and the Skull Bash variant is at its strongest in Ultra Premier. The issue is, these are mixed Legacy sets. If you want an IS/S/IB and an IS/S/SB Lapras at 2500 CP, you need to make two separate Lapras. And the same for Great League. Assuming you got your Ice Shard Lapras from Raid Day (caught at Level 20), and are now running optimal IVs (which then has to be powered up to Level 40), prepping both Lapras will cost a grand total of 600,000 Stardust! That’s all but prohibitively expensive for so many players, for no good reason.

FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, is anxiety caused by, simply, feeling like you're missing out on something. Legacy moves exploit this feeling in a major way. One of the most frustrating aspects of Legacy moves is that they just...feel bad. Two possibilities: you know they’re coming, or you don’t. First case: you know it’s coming. Every Starter Pokémon through Gen 4 has had a community day for Frenzy Plant, Blast Burn, and Hydro Cannon. Many legendaries have received signature moves as Legacy moves (Psystrike Mewtwo/Armored Mewtwo and Sacred Sword Cobalion). It’s not unreasonable to believe more are coming. Virizion and Terrakion need to get Sacred Sword at some point, and Lugia already had an Aeroblast event announced (which was then cancelled, but is inevitably coming back). Kyogre and Groudon have Origin Pulse and Precipice Blades, Darkrai has Dark Void, Ho-Oh has Sacred Fire. In general, these moves are better than what the Pokémon already has, at least from a PvP context. If you know that the Pokémon are going to get these moves eventually, and you won’t be able to get them on your existing Pokémon, suddenly it feels terrible to invest in those Pokémon. Why max a Lugia now when you know there’s a strictly better version coming in the future? 

While it’s one thing when you can see the moves coming, like for Starters and Signature Moves, it’s even more stressful when Niantic just randomly drops exclusive moves on things. Remember Grass Knot Breloom? Body Slam Lickitung? Why was Fire Punch Groudon made Legacy when Aqua Tail Palkia wasn’t? Why is Gust Pidgeot Legacy, rather than just getting added to the movepool? Why would anyone expect Pidgeot to get an exclusive move? Now you, the player, don’t just have to worry about “Oh, this Pokémon’s inevitably getting a Community Day.” There are no safe species to invest in. There’s a constant creeping feeling of anxiety whenever you spend dust that your investment is going to get outclassed and negated, and now you have to spend it again.

The creation of new Legacy moves ends up being incredibly frustrating for players, because you know that you won’t just be able to use TMs to get these moves on your Pokémon. If you were able to simply get the moves whenever they are released, they would be cause for excitement rather than stress. Instead of expanding your options, Legacies just pigeonhole you into using new things every time.

Shadows and Return: When Return is desirable, you need to specifically get a Shadow mon with the right IVs, and then Purify it. Shadows in general have risky overlap with exclusives, since “getting rid of Frustration” is basically an event-exclusive move on its own.

Shadows and Purified Pokémon add an entire new layer of frustration to the situation. I discussed this here in depth, in a previous piece on Shadows.

In short, there’s a serious issue with the overlap between Exclusive moves and Shadow TMing. In a fair situation, there is a reasonable time between knowing you need to get something, and getting it. So when Porygon was actually removed from the Rocket Grunt pool before the voting for and subsequent announcement of Porygon-Z’s community day, nobody had the informed opportunity to get themselves a Shadow Porygon-Z with Tri-Attack. You had to have randomly TMed (but not evolved) a Shadow Porygon during the GoFest window if you wanted to prepare one. Without knowing if Porygon’s coming back, or if there’s going to be another TM window any time soon, there’s even uncertainty about whether or not it’ll be accessible during a Community Day Wrap-Up event in December.

Return brings with it its own set of issues. As a move that’s only accessible by Purification, it’s very annoying when it’s useful. While most Pokémon don’t run it, it still sees play on Sableye, Dusclops, Porygon2, and Wobbuffet. This means if you want a good one of these, you have to get lucky with purified IVs. While, yes, it’s limited, and you can still trade Purifieds, it’s another layer of gating that doesn’t need to exist.

Two primary reasons: Mega Raids, and the upcoming Charmander Community Day in October. Charmander Community Day gives the opportunity to get Charizard, with the fast move Dragon Breath. While this isn’t a problem if you just want a Dragon Breath/Dragon Claw Charizard to turn into a Mega Charizard X for raids, it suddenly becomes an issue when you consider that every PvP Charizard wants Blast Burn. While, as referenced above, Overheat can work, it doesn’t mean it’s optimal. And suboptimal teams give suboptimal results. This means that, unless Niantic decides to sneakily give every Charizard on Cday Blast Burn as well, the Pokémon you evolve are going to be half-finished.

Possibly even more egregious is the handling of Mega Raids. When you do Mega Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur raids, they don’t have Blast Burn, Hydro Cannon, or Frenzy Plant. That means they’re useless as is, no matter the IVs. Shiny hundo Charizard? No point in using it. And unlike not-fully-evolved Pokémon, like a high rank Chikorita where you can just wait until December Wrap-Up Weekend, these Pokémon are just stuck in uselessness limbo. Can you use them without their moves? Yeah, but you shouldn’t. They’re bad. Even now, Mega Pidgeot is in raids without Gust, a move that’s not going to be released until the Flying Cup. Niantic absolutely could have chosen to give these Pokémon their Legacy moves, but they made an active decision not to.

You may be wondering why, up to this point, I haven’t mentioned Elite TMs. “If you want to get Blast Burn on the shundo Charizard you picked up from a Mega Raid, you just can just drop an Elite Charged TM!”  “If you want Smack Down on your Shadow Tyranitar, just spend an Elite Fast TM!”

But it’s just not that easy. Let’s start with the free Elite TMs you get from GBL. You can get one Elite TM per season, rotating (so far) between Fast and Charged each season. At the time of writing, partway into Season 4, you could now have up to 1 Fast TM and two Charged TMs. Now, let’s take a look at the number of Legacy moves that have been released since the start of GBL. GO Battle League’s Preseason started the week of January 18th. So, starting from there,

Community Days

• Rock Wrecker Rhyperior
• Counter Alakazam
• Bullet Seed Shiftry
• Drill Run Beedrill
• Shadow Punch Gengar
• Aqua Tail Gyarados
• Tri Attack Porygon-Z

Ultra Unlock Events

• Earthquake Ho-Oh
• Fire Punch Groudon
• Grass Knot Cresselia

Other

• Sacred Sword Cobalion
• Body Slam Lickitung
• Body Slam Lickilicky
• Draining Kiss Kirlia
• Gust Pidgeot

So, that’s 15 total new Legacies, of which 3 are Fast and 12 are Charged. Additionally, Shadow Legendaries (notably Zapdos, Moltres, and Mewtwo) really want their Legacy moves (Thunder Shock, Sky Attack, and Psystrike), so if you want to use those, that adds a few more.

For Pokémon that want multiple Legacy moves at once (Shadow Mewtwo with Psystrike and Shadow Ball, Ice Shard/Icy Wind Dewgong, the upcoming Dragon Breath/Blast Burn Charizard), that’s even more costly, taking away so many of your free Elite TMs. But if you want more, there is a solution: monthly Community Day boxes.

Every month, you can get one extra Elite TM (again, rotating back and forth between Fast and Charged). The catch, though, is that each box costs 1280 Coins, about $12 (prices vary based on your currency). While the other contents of the box may vary, the main reason to buy it is that Elite TM. And viewing each Elite TM as being valued at about $12 really puts things into a new perspective. Ice Shard/Icy Wind Dewgong is cool, but it’s also a $24 Pokémon. Psystrike Shadow Mewtwo costs $12, as does Fire Punch Groudon. Frankly, that’s really expensive! It turns some of these Legacies really pay2win! Going back to Ferocious Cup with Last Resort Umbreon: imagine that situation again with Dragon Breath/Blast Burn Charizard. If you want to be competitive, you need to have one, or else play some weird, generally worse alternative option. Except this time, there’s no way to find it in your inventory, or trade for it with a friend. You have to spend that Elite TM. You’re now left with a $12-to-enter tournament format. That’s not fun, and that’s not fair. Yes, you can get it for free from GBL, but it’s just not enough. It restricts your potential ability to use your resources as you want.

Niantic has created a problem for the players with Legacy moves. Elite TMs have just allowed them to monetize the “fix.” It’s incredibly frustrating, and it’s not fair to the players. Yes, you can theoretically afford that with just gym coins, but then that’s almost all the coins you could make in a month, assuming you get 50 coins every single day. Is this better than having to try to hunt down that one guy in a discord two hours away willing to trade their IS/IW Dewgong? Maybe, but it’s so much worse than the moves just…being accessible. You can justify the extreme cost of Elite TMs if you want to. They are technically accessible without spending money, but only barely, and not at a reasonable rate. Playing at a competitive level should not be a premium product. Whenever it is, it damages the competitive integrity and fairness of the game.

So, in a sense, never. But, if anywhere, some of them certainly make sense. The “illegal” Legacies (the ones where the Pokémon actually doesn’t learn the move in the main series), it’s reasonable for them to not exist in GO. For useless Legacies (Psybeam Chansey, Scald Poliwhirl), it doesn’t inconvenience anyone for it to be inaccessible. However, that’s about as far as you can push it.

In a dream world, there would be no Legacy moves. Everything would be TMable, all the time. However, Niantic is probably too deep into creating exclusive moves to expect that. However, there are a few steps that they could take to ameliorate the issue.

First and foremost, moves should really be TMable during their event windows. If you already have a Porygon-Z evolved, you should be able to get Tri-Attack on it during the Community Day evolve window. While Thunder Shock Zapdos is in raids, you should be able to get it on your existing Zapdos. This still creates the event engagement that Niantic desires, without making it feel so terrible for a new Legacy to get added to a Pokémon you already invested in.

Second: Elite TMs should not only give a Pokémon a certain move, it should add it to their accessible movepool. If you Elite TM your Mewtwo to be Psystrike/Shadow Ball, you should be able to subsequently TM off without having to spend another Elite TM to get it back.

Third: Elite TMs need to be more accessible. Getting one per season for getting to Rank 7 is fine, it’s a relatively simple process, but it’s not enough. Elite TMs should show up in Special or Limited Time Research events, for those who don’t PvP or those who need more than GBL can provide. And even past that, the Community Day boxes are far too expensive. 1280 Coins is an absurd amount to have to pay for, basically, just the Elite TM.

Fourth: Add old Community Day moves to the normal movepool. The 2018 Community Day moves should be TMable starting in December. This helps ameliorate the issue of Pokémon with multiple Cday moves (most notably Charizard in this case). It has to happen eventually. It was messy enough trying to get the 2018 Cday species during 2019’s December Wrap-Up weekend, and it will only be worse this December with a full extra year of species to handle.

Fifth: Finish de-Legacying the useful moves. Stone Edge Blaziken, Dragon Pulse Lapras, and Ice Shard/Icy Wind Dewgong are a few key examples of moves that really do belong back in the pool for the players.

Legacy moves are fundamentally bad. Not only are they bad for the game from a competitive integrity level, but they also just feel bad. They damage every trainer’s play experience to some degree, no matter who you are. Even worse, the deeper into the game you get, the greater the negative impact is. The fact that the ingame “solution” ends up being pay2win just makes it even more problematic. Like with Mega Evolutions, and with Shadows, the players deserve better. But we won’t get it unless we ask. Legacies are something the player base as a whole seems to have largely accepted. However, they make up an issue that deserves more attention.