Far-reaching? How so? I\'m just curious. As someone who played almost exclusively UU during Gen. IV, I\'m taking a completely neutral standpoint, since I never bothered with Infernape, Garchomp, and those shenanigans.
They were like, \"We -need- to have new, useful items, and we -need- to buff specific stuff to make them as awesome as we feel they should be.\"
We got the Choice Scarf, which threw off the balance in Speed tiers significantly, thus turning counters on their head, thus making frail Pokémon really difficult to use at all.
We got the Life Orb, which creates a massive power boost for, in many cases, almost nothing at all (it could\'ve been balanced by activating the HP loss against Substitute, Protect and missed attacks, as well as being 1.2[5?])x instead of 1.3x, but, noooo). This made the strongest sweepers really troublesome to deal with; that Draco Meteor is going to disintegrate whatever you decide to send in.
Outrage became base 120 power...but not Thrash or Petal Dance? Rock Blast is base 25, but Bullet Seed and Icicle Spear are base 10? Feint is base 50 power? Draco Meteor exists? They made some weird choices with moves. I know a lot of the move stuff was fixed in 5th gen, but that doesn\'t excuse 4th gen.
The main troubles are the items and super-powerful moves; they created too many threats to be able to reasonably deal with. At this point, every team ends up being dreadfully weak to something specific and not very popular. For the longest time, teambuilding was bottlenecked (\"Okay, so I have my two Steels and a bulky Water to deal with a single Dragon-type\"), and the physical/special split was really bad for competitive play. Kingler has physical STAB? That\'s cool, until you realize that Salamence actually has good attacks.
It was quite the cluster****.