Tl;dr - Normally, I love the articles on GoHub, but the article in the Quality of Life changes read more like a Damage Control for Niantic in front of investors.
Long version (I’ll try to be brief):
-Yes, skills like Roar of Time are awesome. You know what’s not fun? Grinding for a fomo skill and hoping you get a good Dialga or Palkia you can use in future raids because of the drastic dps differences. A 1-2+ dps difference matters in raids and Rocket fights. The rates for these fomo skills were very low last week.
-No, people still hate the avatar changes, and very few people are buying the cosmetics. Many outfits are still ruined as far as I know. There’s at least one person still criticizes Niantic on posts and tweets for the avatar update. I would buy some cosmetics before the change, and since then I only bought white sneakers and what could cover up my avatar’s ugly doughboy face.
-Yes, Biomes look good. No, Pokémon spawns still suck, especially during events. I don’t see city Pokémon when I have enough courage to go to the nearest Hipster city in my area. Revisit Kanto made me hate Biomes because it was such a terrible event that ruined other events.
-Fusions are okay, but there are balance issues in pve and pvp.
-Yea, the AR feature is good. Don’t really care for it tbh.
-Party buffs/boosts is the only good feature from 2024.
-Dmax and Gmax are p2w disasters even when Niantic made changes. Expecting 9-39 to do Gmax fights is ridiculous even if you were to increase the stardust to 250k. You are not getting a gmax anytime soon if you don’t live in areas full of Pogo players. Even if you have a group, they consume and demand too much from players new and og. To add insult to injury, the rewards are a slap in the face even if you get stardust and rare candies.
Max Out Monday doesn’t work as intended because I saw Dmax fights that were not the targeted Pokémon (in other words, I didn’t see Drillburs in their max out Mondays). Making a p2w mushroom when Dmax and Gmax are already p2w is only going to irritate more players if Laplas and friends are going to be tougher. I’m not going to lie: Unless it’s Urshifu, Melmetal, and Eternatus I’m not going out of my to get every gmax from a p2w side game. I’m also not going to rebuild 3 Machamps or other Pokémon I’ve caught (a regular/shadow, a dmax, and a gmax).