Charm496

No changes in lines, but it didn't make the dialogue weird because Heather doesn't actually talk to the player and the villains effectively introduce her again.

Update: went through the Beryl ward up to right before the pulse battle, freed all the officers and headed back, and when I went back into the forest to check up on Heather she'd disappeared. I have no idea what exactly triggered Heather's disappearance, maybe the officer sidequest somehow affects one of her flags? Either way, I'll go fight Taka/ZEL and see if her dialogue is any different.

There isn't one single team that can do well throughout the entire game and is obtainable early on, especially not if you want to abstain from starters/giftmons (which most good early game mons are). Breeding would kind of help, but a lot of pokemon can't be bred until you get ditto, who's obtainable midgame. If you care most about avoiding starters and gifts, you'll probably have to capture and re-capture a lot of wild pokemon that are well-suited to the next big challenge. You won't be able to have a viable team unless you heavily counterpick whatever you'll be facing next. If you care most about having a consistent team of six pokemon that you all obtain early on, really consider relaxing the 'no starters/gifts' rule. There's probably a solid team that can be made out of six early-game pokemon with only the odd addition necessary. If neither of those is an option... play something else? What you're describing sounds like it'd work really well in a main series game, or one of the lighter fangames. Reborn is notorious for its difficulty, and the playstyle you're asking for doesn't mesh well with it.

Guaranteed damp rock rain with very little counterplay (which halves fire damage and buffs swift swim anorith + a couple mons with water coverage), which in turn preserves forest field bc fire moves no longer transform it. Anorith has telluric seed so it's guaranteed to get two fast rock slides off, which means something on your team will probably get flinched. On top of that it's a double battle, meaning that your best pokemon can be worn down sooner and you don't get free switches. Basically, it's a team that constantly does pretty okay versus a lot of the would-be counters to mono bug (fire, rock, stealth rocks) as opposed to relying on one pokemon for each weakness, and it has a lot more synergy when all its tricks work in tandem (in my experience). Not hard to counter if you focus on that, but in previous gyms you could usually bring 1-3 good pokemon + sac fodder and walk away fine: here that just gets you overwhelmed.

I decided to play through reborn again and ran into an interesting situation. After beating Taka for the first time, you're supposed to jump down a ledge (only way out of the battle area) and encounter Heather. Knowing this, I decided to try and see if I could skip it. Because Taka's area has a bunch of grass I just fought random beedrill until my party passed out, which landed me back at the Jasper Ward center. I was now free to explore vine-less Jasper, move on to Beryl, anything I'd normally be able to do, with Heather still present in her preset event location. That said, has anyone else experienced this? If so, will this affect my game? Is this just going to result in an oddly-placed sprite (which will be hilarious by the time the 'find heather' quest hits), or does this fail to trigger some important event flag? Either way, I'll keep people updated on this.