I have to say if Brimstone's Burn chance was 10% I wouldn't be bitching about it at all. In fact I would say that then the two choices - TechAP and Brimstone would be pretty equal. TechAP has more power, Brimstone has more PP. Both have a 10% chance of a cool and useful side effect.
Why do we need to make the Technician set and Levitate set equal? Not every ability given to a Pokemon are made equal, look at Bronzong and his seemingly equal abilities. People tend to use Levitate over Heatproof because Levitate is better than it overall. The same thing is happening to Rockmon in terms of ability choice. With the addition of Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, Flamethrower, and Earth Power in it's movepool, Tech doesn't look so appealing compared to Levitate. I will admit that Technician have it's perks, what with the following moves:
- Hidden Power Ghost, Dark, Bug, Steel, Dragon, Psychic, Fighting
- Ancient Power - 90BP (135 with stab) move with a small chance of raising all stats by 1.5x. Yes I'm aware of talk about the boost being not so useful, just wanting to point out that AP does have something over the new move.
- Giga Drain - 90 BP attack that heals, have to have some merits
- Air Cutter - 82.5BP move with a heighten critical hit factor.
- Water Pulse - 90 BP move with a 30% chance of confusing foes
- Vacuum Wave - 60 BP Fighting priority...wished Rockmon was Rock/Fighting now :c
- Any physical move with 60BP or below (Gimmick CB set)
Technician would have a better shot at being used more if it was the primary objection within this project and some weird add-on that people will probably forget.
Because it changes the occurrence of burn from 1 in 3 to 1 in 10. Duh. Fire Blast was popular as a filler in RBY precisely because you had a 1 in 3 shot of crippling a physical Pokemon. 1 in 3 is pretty darn good odds, since you can generally switch out 2 or 3 times, and it only takes one Burn to render your counters ineffectual at taking out anything that isn't explicitly weak to their attacks. For the entire game.
What the pro-Brimstone forces don't seem to get is that Burn makes a physical counter useless for the entire match.
Erh....that's sorta was the point of Brimstone, to lessen the impact of moves dealt from those physical counters and force switch-outs. It just so happens that burn does a better job at it with the cost of being near permanent and sapping the Pokemon of HP but hey well have to make sacrifices. That 1:3 chance of weakening said counter is also one of the few reasons why it's 30% in the first place.