When is it too late to add Pokemon to your playthrough team in Diamond/Pearl?

Question

I'm playing Pokemon Pearl and only have four Pokemon in my team. Is it too late to add the other two to my team?

I got my 7th badge.

Comments

You can catch wild Pokemon whenever you have Poke balls. Is this question asking whether it's a good idea to do that?

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Yes it is,bc im afraid to lose at elite 4 bc i dont hace enough pokemon to cover weaknesses

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Smaller teams are usually better than bigger teams because they let each Pokemon gain more experience and reach higher levels. Unless your entire team is weak to psychic or something like that, I would recommend not adding any more Pokemon to it.

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Tysm! That is really helpful !

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When you climb Mount Coronet, you can find high level Pokemon like Abomasnow near the top, as well as your Legendary Pokemon, that will be great additions to a late game team

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Abomasnow in particular isn't very useful because it has a lot of weaknesses, and its attack stats are only a little bit above average. I think Azelf is one of the few good late-game Pokemon in DP.

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Abomasnow one shots Garchomp with Snow Warning Blizzard, and can take any one of its hits if it doesn't crit.

In my experience, Abomasnow is a late game menace with priority Ice Shard, always hit Blizzard, and great STAB Wood Hammer. As long as you didn't choose Torterra as your starter, it's a great late game option if your looking for more team Pokemon

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Why would you use Abomasnow over other Pokemon with ice attacks, like Empoleon, Floatzel, Medicham, or Gyarados?

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Floatzel and Medicham don't take a hit.

Gyarados is bad in other ways, has a horrendous movepool in Gen 4, Ice Fang and Surf are the pinnacle of it's moveset.

Empoleon is usually good, but not all people have access to it, and it only gets Ice Beam through TM, and it's not STAB. For some it could be a waste of a move slot.

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Gyarados's movepool sure is horrendous when you ignore half of it.

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Floatzel and Medicham are obtainable earlier, have higher physical attack and speed, and have less weaknesses. I think that's enough to compensate for their lower defense stats.
Also why did you ignore more than half of Gyarados's useful moves?

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Level up moveset. And besides, even if you were going to waste all of your TMs on Gyarados, it wouldn't be helpful against Garchomp in particular, which is the whole reason I brought up Abomasnow. Besides Earthquake and Stone Edge, all of the usually great moves it can learn by TM are special moves, which don't leave a mark with Base 60 Sp.Atk.

Medicham will never outspeed Garchomp, and doesn't get STAB to any of the E4's main types. Floatzel has higher base speed than Garchomp, but without serious grinding to get Floatzel to Level ~63+ there is no way Floatzel outspeeds. It's a shame Medicham doesn't get Ice Shard.

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In that case, why did you ignore dragon dance and waterfall? Gyarados can learn both without TMs. Also the Pokemon League uses 5 Pokemon that are weak to fighting, so that's effectively equivalent to one Elite 4 member.
Why are you putting so much weight on each Pokemon's usefulness against Cynthia's Garchomp? The Pokemon League has 25 other Pokemon, and the other boss battles have several dozen Pokemon. Even if Garchomp is the single most difficult opponent in the game, spending one slot on your team and 120,000 experience just to defeat Garchomp will help against Garchomp a lot less than it will hinder you in boss fights that are almost as difficult as Garchomp.

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If you get Abomasnow, you don't need to spend 120,000 experience because you catch it at Level 40.

If the OP is asking for final additions to his late game team, it is much more time efficient and beneficial in the short run that would be the rest of the game to just add an Abomasnow.

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A level 40 Abomasnow can't survive Cynthia's Garchomp's brick break. Using any Pokemon that's under level 50 has a significant cost and will likely be less "efficient" than an empty slot.

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It would level up between mt coronet and the league through normal play...

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That's exactly when it'll take 120,000 experience that could have been gained by other Pokemon.

Answer 1

This is really more about personal preference than anything else. In DP, all 3 starters are more useful than most of your other options, so the easiest way to finish the game is using only your starter and a few HM slaves. However, using up to 3 or 4 battling Pokemon will make the game take only a little bit longer, and many people think this is more fun than a solo run. If you want to do this, it doesn't really matter when you add Pokemon to your team. Just stop before adding too many, and don't add Pokemon that have very low levels (ie. don't use Lucario and don't catch a Starly from Route 201 after getting through Victory Road). Additionally, adding a very high-level Pokemon (that also has a high attack stat and good moves) to your team won't hinder you very much, even if you do it later, because this effectively gives you a bunch of experience for free. In DP, this mostly applies to the box art legendaries, Azelf, and maybe also Mesprit.

Comments

If this guy has the patience to level up his Pokemon, then the best way to do so is on Mt. Coronet or Victory Road.

As well as using Rare Candies to reduce time leveling up.

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I think it's faster to repeatedly challenge the Pokemon League until you get enough experience to win.

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I think it's faster to just go beat the league, I beat Cynthia with a team of level 39's on my first attempt