my man,,, nihilego is not a top 3 scarf user
Oh, damn, someone should have told me.
keldeo, terrakion, garchomp, greninja, latios, and dugtrio are all better scarf users and sit above 100+ speed since they either provide a spammable move (keldeo & terrakion), excellent typing and bulk (garchomp), momentum (greninja), or utility in trick/defog/arena trap (latios & dugtrio). i'd even say tapu koko is a better choice scarf user but that's for another time.
Nihilego performs a different function than Gren and Dug. Gren grabs momentum and breaks with its coverage, dug traps. Scarf Nihilego is primarily a revenge killer as well as a SpAttacker check and a lategame wincon. Latios is rising in the meta for its specs set, scarf isn't as relevant and really only good for speed control, plus it's walled by steels just like Nihi lol.
In terms of the rkiller role, Nihi rkills basically every non-steel. Just going down the viability list (and assuming power gem/sludge wave/HP Ice/Thunder[bolt]), it rkills Lando, both Grens, standard set automotize Celesteela, Tangrowth, Lele, chipped Zygarde, Volcarona (unless Charti, but it leaves it open to priority if so), sash-broken Dug, slightly chipped Chomp, chipped Keldeo, Koko, Mega-Alakazam, CharY/X, Clefable... you get the point, probably. Well, hopefully. Poison is a fantastic rkilling type with the tapus running around, and lowkey BoltBeam to go along with its STAB is great. It hits a LOT of set up sweepers as well as several other hugely relevant threats (Mega Pinsir, anyone?). In terms of revenge killing, it's an incredible scarfer.
landorus-t and tapu lele are also better than nihilego.
Lando-T scarf is not really great compared to his other sets and Lele scarf suffers from low speed and is pretty underwhelming in terms of revenge killing set up sweepers. [/quote]
secondary checks such as zygarde and mantine. i'm expecting you to say some volcarona carry hidden power [ice] or mantine has a stealth rock weakness (!!!) to refute this point considering the nature of how you have been posting in this thread.
This is a ridiculous straw man argument and frankly irrelevant to the topic of Nihilego, especially coming from the person who said that shattered psyche from +1 Volc breaks Heatran.
how about i provide you this perspective? nihilego is not a volcarona check!
Lol you need to go back over what a check is.
Volcarona can just bop nihilego on the switch with hidden power [ground] or shattered psyche. not to mention the prevalence of charti berry in tournament play. neither are any of the scarf users i listed volcarona checks since they all get shitted on if volcarona predicts the switch right which is often because a volcarona in play forces you to immediately go into your scarf user unless you have chansey or mantine.
"If you predict right" arguments are some of the worst to grace this thread. You can win with basically whatever if you predict right. That doesn't mean that basically whatever is good. Take this OUPL replay for example:
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7ou-285051. Gligar, Mega-Steelix, Tauros, and Kommo-o are all unranked, yet Ricardo near 6-0s his much more meta opponent. Why? He predicted right. That doesn't mean that the aforementioned mons are good, it means that Ricardo is.
the point is volcarona is fucking broken. it seems like i am leaving the point of the discussion since i am arguing pro-nihilego drop, but i am going to talk about volcarona for a moment. volcarona is literally the most disgusting pokemon in the tier. despite dropping in popularity, firium z sets are excellent as always, being able to nuke common defensive checks; it makes volcarona a threat without a quiver dance boost because of how powerful inferno overdrive is. charti berry destroys so many teams because people use imaginary checks like stone edge keldeo and nihilego which you are arguing as a check (and also top 3 scarf user lmao). shattered psyche is a different dynamic, completely blowing back toxapex, while the move itself has raw power to break weakened zygarde and the like without the use of hidden power [ice] for example. yes, volcarona cannot run all these sets at once, yet volcarona always finds a way to completely bullshit its way past matchup because of how easy it is to support in terms of offensive synergy. the only thing you have to worry about is stealth rock. and this leads me into my next point: "hazard removal is in a shitty state." i agree with this, if this was 3 months ago....stealth rock itself is not hard to remove when we have a huge variety of hazard removers right now like latios, mega scizor, mew, mantine, zapdos (even if 3 attacks is better, defog is still fine), tapu fini (i'm going to get shit, but please open your eyes and realize this is still viable), and y'all even arguing starmie as much as i detest this pokemon. to be honest, stealth rock is not the problem. spikes is. no one said stealth rock was hard to remove so i don't get where this argument is coming from.
i think articulation was one of the main problems since a lot of the pro-rise group for volcarona were not able to verbalize their reasoning, causing a great amount of controversy in this thread. now that i've done it, what can i say? look at some smogtour replays. that is all.
Cool. Not relevant to Nihilego. Great thoughts on Volc.
back to what you were saying, metagross leaving the tier does not automatically help Nihilego since it led to the rise of other steel-types that appreciate metagross being gone. magearna is the primary recipient in terms of viability, which just recently rose to a+ as well.
Yes, it does. Megagross was a huge fucking obstacle for it. Nihilego always had an issue with AV Mag and it was never one of the targets it wanted to rkill anyway. It being more common doesn't affect how well Nihilego revenge kills what it wants.
other pokemon that rose in usage that check nihilego are celesteela and tyranitar, the latter which traps nihilego. not to mention the addition of mega mawile in the metagame. i'm also going to bring up zygarde as dumb as that sounds because nihilego carry hidden power [ice].
Celesteela is a shaky as shit check considering how much thunder/tbolt does and automotive cele straight up loses to Nihi unless you're running a non standard set (like steelium z or some shit). TTar is an issue, too, which I addressed. Thing about both of these mons is that they're also fantastic partners for Nihilego. SpD Cele and Nihi check almost every relevant SpAttacker together and in general have pretty decent type synergy. Nihilego loves the sandstorm that TTar provides since it turns into an absolute SpD behemoth (+2 252 SpA Volcarona Hidden Power Ground vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Nihilego in Sand: 288-340 (80.2 - 94.7%) -- guaranteed 2HKO).
the thing is, nihilego is hard to use. i'm going to get shit for this, but how something works in practice a 100% determines a pokemon's viability. look at fucking gengar and heatran which are scary as shit on paper but their performance in practice is what prevents them from rising to a+.
Saying something does not make it so. If you're gonna say it's hard to use, you'd best explain how.
i don't even need to explain how bad it is to be trapped by dugtrio which itself is preventing certain pokemon from rising in the rankings such as hoopa-u and kyurem-b.
Dugtrio can't switch into Nihilego. Non-sash gets OHKOed by HP Ice, sash gets 2HKOed by Sludge wave. Due to this, it needs to come in on a sack. If it's doing that, Nihilego has already performed its function.
nihilego is overrated as shit and needs a drop.
Solid argument.