Damn Vapes
Some people likes how easy Vaporeons are obtained, and how great they are. I just think its sad since they make all other water pokemons irrelevant. 25 candies to evolve a Vape, and 124 to evolve a Blastoise is a joke.
Answers
Luckily only 3 Eevee move sets are not ideal: Discharge, Flamethrower, and Heatwave. Out of those 3 only Discharge is truly awful.
Regarding the actual post this gripe with Vaporeon could be had with how easy it is to obtain Flareon and Arcanine as opposed to Charizard. So Blastoise isn't the only one to feel unappreciated.
Are you suggesting my level 30, 87% IV discharge Jolteon is not a top tier defender??? ;-)
Yeah, all three evolved forms of the starters have gotten the shaft (Venusaur a bit less so, but I'd still take Exeggutor any day): they are fairly rare spawns, cost a huge number of candies to evolve, and are still outclassed by cheaper pokemon. :/
I agreed right up until you said Discharge is worse than Pulse. I get much more use out of my Discharge Jolts (of which I seem to get almost exclusively when I evolve him) than my Pulse Vapes.
1 - Relative rarity vs. Other Electric mons. If you don't get Hydro Pump on Vape it's WAY easier to make up for it. There are 11 usable Pokemon with Hydro Pump, whereas only 3 with Thunder. They're also WAY more common than Electabuzz/Raichu
2 - Pulse is actually a steeper DPS loss vs. HP than Discharge is vs. Thunder. It's so bad on offense, matter of fact, that it's faster to just spam Water Gun and completely ignore your charge move. At least Discharge provides some type of DPS gain!
Au contraire, weary traveler! They are most definitely not irrelevant :)
I have found the other water Mons very convenient to evolve for prestige team purposes. This lets me focus on only my best Eevees rather than evolving junk in the lvl 10-15 range
Even hatched Eevees are way too high CP to use for training.
So, that's what the other Hydro Pump 'mons are for. They have their place on a balanced team just like Vape does :)
