Honestly, I don't think that really changes anything. I always felt that the Elite Four was the pretty much the ultimate challenge to overcome as a Trainer, to test everything you learned from those 40 hours of training, catching and team-building. Having healing stations and stuff just defeats that theme.
For me, I just want a hard/expert mode option with better AI and different teams for all the trainers. And one that isn't stupid-ly implemented either(Black 2 please go die).
The problem is though, without a healing station in between, the designers of the games can be uber lazy (which they have been with every incarnation of the Elite Four to date). See, for me, it's always come down to either putting myself 10 levels above everything in the Elite Four so I have no issues or saving every single Pokeyen I have in order to purchase full restores and revives in order to get through them all. Neither of those is a "test of skill" in the least. That is a trainer taking everything he's learned in combat for those 40 hours and dumping it down the drain in order to "Brute Force" the marathon fight that is "The Elite Four" because it's one of the only viable options by the time you reach them. I've always been absolutely annoyed by this because by the time you get to the Elite Four, even after fighting every trainer and catching every available mon at the time, your levels are going to be 5 under the first person in the Elite Four and about 12-15 under the highest leveled trainer there. It only got worse with Black and White where it was a 6 trainer marathon as well as a CAPTURE battle with no way to heal in between any of the fights. I never feel like I lost at the Elite Four because my strategy was worse or theirs was good. I've felt like I lost at the Elite Four because my levels weren't high enough or I didn't have enough Revives to outlast all the strongest attacks of the mons.
When the most viable strategy against an opponent is "wait until they run out of their really good attack and then whittle them down slowly to death", it isn't really a strategy. It's more the thing you do when you don't have an actual strategy, or when current strategies don't work.
The Elite Four need to have their parties changed up to reflect "balanced teams" or at least teams with good synergy (to promote STRATEGY in battle) and have a healing station between members because if they provided a good fight like they should have with each member, you shouldn't need the artificial difficulty of a "marathon battle". It's really a lazy design decision that a lot of people don't realize it is.
Let me give you a really great example. Do you play FPS games? I'm going to assume you do. "artificial difficulty" is when you choose say... Hard Mode in an FPS and instead of the AI being smarter or coordinating themselves better, they simply have better accuracy, more health, and do more damage with the same weapons than you can do. Remember the Halo 2 Jackal Snipers on Legendary? Perfect auto-aim headshot? Yeah, lazy design decision to make up for the absolutely TERRIBLE AI (which was somehow worse than that of the first game, which they let drive in that one for some reason). To fight those Jackal Snipers didn't require any kind of real skill. It came down to luck or learning how to bypass those sections of the levels by getting out of the map or just bumrushing through an area while marines were in it to take the deathshots for you. No strategy, no skill, just blind luck and figuring out ways to break the game in order to even complete it. That's essentially what the Elite Four is. It's lazy programming. The AI is absolutely terrible, the mons have no synergy with each other at all, the typings are fairly basic and don't usually have moves you wouldn't expect on them, and they're jacked up higher in level and run in a marathon to even be a challenge. The fact that adding a healing station between the trainers would "break the challenge" in your opinion merely illustrates my point about how terrible the Elite Four concept is and how poorly programmed it has always been.
You know what's even worse than that? I've perfected the "make the AI waste their healing items on their easiest destroyed mons" in every single game because the AI is so simplistic and stupid that it values all mons equally and is only programmed to drop a healing item on a mon if you put them into the red, but don't kill them. The fact that they can be exploited like that all the way back to Gold/Silver (that's Gen II) and all the way up to Black2/White2 is a fantastic indicator that they've never overhauled the AI at all. I'm not even using an actual real tactic. I'm just exploiting the poorly programmed AI. It's dang frustrating that I have been able to use that for so long without them having ever tried to patch or fix it.
Oh sure, they tell you the AI is better each generation... But, it's really not. You know what they do when they claim that? If you go to whatever they're passing as "The Battle Tower" of that particular generation, all that happens is the RNG more often rolls in favor of the AI instead of you there. That is their version of "better AI", making the computer able to cheat a bit in order to add challenge. It is especially obvious when the AI can achieve "full party wipe" using nothing but Confuse Ray on your team while you can't ever manage to land a single blow because your mons hurt themselves in confusion 6 times in a row. Meanwhile, if you use Sand Attack on the enemy over and over and over again, they'll still manage to hit you about half of the time.
I'm just looking for actual challenge that doesn't require lazy programming which either adds artificial difficulty or RNG cheating to accomplish. What we have now is frankly... beyond frustrating.
