Dream World General Metagame Discussion

[White symphoni]

Originally Posted by Fat superbadd

I'm really worried that once it gets released in standard, people will do anything to ban it. >.> I hope you guys are ready to come to it's defense.

Anyway, what's with darkrai? Can we finally come to a decision about it? How long do we have to wait?

I definitely want it in OU,becoz I love it!Sadly It's not for the likes of you and I to decide.Council members and perhaps some important members or Auths decide that.I also fear it like u that people will try anything to ban it D:

People just ban stuff they dont like to face.anyway I would always want to bring current Ubers down to OU to balance things if Chandy is truly broken and I'm pretty sure every single one of u disagree with my suggestion :P

[Sewa]

Well, as I said before, Chandelure is good. But it's far from being broken. It dislikes rain and Tyranitar eats it for breakfast and these are the main styles in DW. Team preview and Shed Shell easily balance its power. I'll come in its defense after its release.

[White symphoni]

Originally Posted by Fat Sewa

Well, as I said before, Chandelure is good. But it's far from being broken. It dislikes rain and Tyranitar eats it for breakfast and these are the main styles in DW. Team preview and Shed Shell easily balance its power. I'll come in its defense after its release.

I agree.It's good to know that there are some other peoples who support chandelure to be in OU ^_^

[Antar*]

So question:

PS has Dream World tiers (OU, Ubers and also UU--for direct challenges) implemented now. Is there a reason why you guys aren't playing on Dream World on PS?

[Tobes]

Showdown had a spotty implementation of the banlist (Kyurem-B/W, DrizzleSwim, Soul Dew were all unbanned), disuading people from laddering. But now that that's fixed hopefully activity will return to normal soon.

Unfortunately, server instability, alongside DW losing some notable exclusives, is probably contributing to some of the decrease in battles.

[LucaroarkZ]

Originally Posted by Fat Sewa

Well, as I said before, Chandelure is good. But it's far from being broken. It dislikes rain and Tyranitar eats it for breakfast and these are the main styles in DW. Team preview and Shed Shell easily balance its power. I'll come in its defense after its release.

As someone who is anti-Chandelure, here's what I have to say.

In DW, it's not as good due to the dominance of Sand. Hell, the June statistics had Tyranitar at nearly 80% usage in the 1337 stats. However, in regular OU, Choiced Tyranitar got massively nerfed due to Tornadus-T, and Sand is nowhere near as dominant because Excadrill is banned in non-DW OU.

It's not that Chandelure is unstoppable, because it's very stoppable. It's that the metagame is so centralized around Chandelure that if you want to win, you are practically required to run Tyranitar, hence why Tyranitar is so god damn high in the 1337 stats. If you thought Scizor's 1337 usage in OU pre-BW2 was insane, think again, because Tyranitar's usage is even more insane. In my case, I do not want to be forced to run Tyranitar on every single team I make just to win. It's like how back before Excadrill was banned from Standard OU, Excadrill could be stopped, but you were required to use Pokemon such as Gliscor or use your own weather just to win. When almost 80% of DW teams in the 1337 stats run Tyranitar, and you basically must use Shed Shell on anything defensively oriented (such as Skarmory), you know something's wrong. Chandelure is the reason I don't play DW much, and as soon as it's released, I'm just going to quit OU if it doesn't get banned because I refuse to use Tyranitar on every successful team, especially since Tyranitar is even easier to beat now.

[superbadd]

You don't have to use tyranitar to counter chandelure. Snorlax is also a hard counter. Massive special defense, immune to shadow ball, resists fire, and takes less from hp fighting than tyranitar. It can also pursuit trap it just as well as ttar. Snorlax isn't a push over either. Fighting types are declining in usage, giving snorlax more viability. It's also a good check to sun teams and can even take on rain teams. It counters volcarona, heatran, celebi, politoad and numerous top tier threats. It's actually pretty antimeta atm. 2 viable counters exist. Along with a frenzy of checks. There are pokes in ou with no counters but can be handled. Really, it's not broken, it can be played around rather easily and it isn't hard to take out. Weakness to all hazards doesn't help it either.

[White symphoni]

Originally Posted by Fat Antar

So question:

PS has Dream World tiers (OU, Ubers and also UU--for direct challenges) implemented now. Is there a reason why you guys aren't playing on Dream World on PS?

PS is unstable and has disconnection issues.You can already see a lot of of players report about being disconnected in the PS Forums.Plus there are numerous bugs and the those unbans like Tobes mentioned.There will be more players when these problems are solved.I think we moved to PS a bit too soon.

[White symphoni]

Originally Posted by Fat LucaroarkZ

As someone who is anti-Chandelure, here's what I have to say.

In DW, it's not as good due to the dominance of Sand. Hell, the June statistics had Tyranitar at nearly 80% usage in the 1337 stats. However, in regular OU, Choiced Tyranitar got massively nerfed due to Tornadus-T, and Sand is nowhere near as dominant because Excadrill is banned in non-DW OU.

It's not that Chandelure is unstoppable, because it's very stoppable. It's that the metagame is so centralized around Chandelure that if you want to win, you are practically required to run Tyranitar, hence why Tyranitar is so god damn high in the 1337 stats. If you thought Scizor's 1337 usage in OU pre-BW2 was insane, think again, because Tyranitar's usage is even more insane. In my case, I do not want to be forced to run Tyranitar on every single team I make just to win. It's like how back before Excadrill was banned from Standard OU, Excadrill could be stopped, but you were required to use Pokemon such as Gliscor or use your own weather just to win. When almost 80% of DW teams in the 1337 stats run Tyranitar, and you basically must use Shed Shell on anything defensively oriented (such as Skarmory), you know something's wrong. Chandelure is the reason I don't play DW much, and as soon as it's released, I'm just going to quit OU if it doesn't get banned because I refuse to use Tyranitar on every successful team, especially since Tyranitar is even easier to beat now.

It isn't necessary to run Tyranitar to beat chandelure.There were many rain teams high up the ladder in DW OU.MewTen even peaked #3 with a Hail team.Like you said,the increase in popularity in rain has caused Ttar's fall in usage,Rain will also do the same thing to chandelure.Chandelure relies on its powerful fire STAB moves like overheat and fire blast which is nerfed in rain.Plus Bulky water types can usually take Energy ball and KO with their water STABs.

You're logic is that you refuse to run ttar and shed shell on every team?Dont u run counters/checks for Scizor,Dragons like dragonite,latios,salamence,Terrakion and other OU threats on every successful team?Also,you think that Tyranitar is the only counter to chandelure when in reality there are other counters than can take on chandelure as well.Count the fact that Chandelure is SR weak too.

[LucaroarkZ]

Originally Posted by Fat White symphoni

It isn't necessary to run Tyranitar to beat chandelure.There were many rain teams high up the ladder in DW OU.Seed Bomb even peaked #3 with a Hail team.Like you said,the increase in popularity in rain has caused Ttar's fall in usage,Rain will also do the same thing to chandelure.Chandelure relies on its powerful fire STAB moves like overheat and fire blast which is nerfed in rain.Plus Bulky water types can usually take Energy ball and KO with their water STABs.

You're logic is that you refuse to run ttar and shed shell on every team?Dont u run counters/checks for Scizor,Dragons like dragonite,latios,salamence,Terrakion and other OU threats on every successful team?Also,you think that Tyranitar is the only counter to chandelure when in reality there are other counters than can take on chandelure as well.Count the fact that Chandelure is SR weak too.

First off, by definition, a counter needs to be able to directly switch in, so nothing can really be considered a "counter" to Chandelure, per se. Also, the weather argument is moot IMO. If you're not using your own weather in DW OU you're doing it wrong.

Since my argument didn't work, let me try this one. You're running a Sand team, and you want to sweep with Excadrill. You don't like Breloom switch-ins at all. With Chandelure, you can predict Breloom to switch in on your Excadrill as you attempt to force out something Excadrill beats and roast it with a Fire-type move. Even if something comes in to trap it, it still accomplished its job. It is now easier for Excadrill to sweep.

The "run counters/checks for scizor/dragonite" and whatever argument you made is... I don't understand. The difference in between Scizor and Chandelure is that you have more options to stop the threat of Scizor. Magnezone (only if Scizor is CB, Magnezone loses to Jolly SD Scizor), Scarf Magneton, hell, just about anything faster that resists Bullet Punch is a good check to Scizor. Dragonite's only niche is removed by SR (though spinning is really easy at the moment so that's pushing it) and practically any Choice Scarf user outspeeds it. The point is though, all the threats you mentioned are significantly easier to deal with than Chandelure. Hell, I've put multiple viable checks/lures to Scizor on my OU teams without even thinking of Scizor. You have to use Pursuit to 100% reliably check Chandelure, but even then you don't necessarily stop it from doing its job. Team preview also helps against Pursuit users. Tyranitar is the only relevant one (Snorlax is uncommon and Scizor isn't reliably trapping Chandelure at all), so let's use it. Many ways to beat it. Keldeo and most Pokemon with Fighting-type moves do pretty well against it, for example. Serperior 2HKOes with Leaf Storm, and there's also this neat little Pokemon called Dugtrio. CB Dugtrio outspeeds and always OHKOes ScarfTar with Earthquake after SR, while Reversal Dugtrio OHKOes any non-Chople Berry Tyranitar with a full-powered Reversal (even if Tyranitar uses Chople Berry it will be weakened too much to effectively trap Chandelure). Tyranitar doesn't really like Garchomp either. Or Breloom, or Scizor... As for the weather argument, you just have to win the weather war (not that difficult).

Anyway, I'm not going to budge on my opinion on Chandelure regardless of any arguments made, so I'm just not going to bother with this argument. If I bother with it any longer, it will get to the point that we both get infracted.

[White symphoni]

I kinda misunderstood you there,what you're trying to say is that chandelure has less checks than other pokemons and it itself will cause a big change in the metagame.Which is totally true.

But Chandelure does have it's checks and counters and like you said about exca and breloom.But what if Breloom holds a shed shell?you can then troll chandelure and switch to something like Snorlax or Tyranitar?Then Chandelure is screwed.

Anyway,Its hard to tell if something's broken or not without actually experiencing it in game.DW OU is quite different from OU.So I'll not advance either.

[Kidogo]

Just adding another opinion on the chandelure debate.

Lucaroark, I think the point you make is a very valid one, in that if countering something requires that you have at least one of such a small list of pokemon (2), this perhaps begins to lean towards overcentralization. Of course, the cut-off point between "threat that every team should prepare for" and "over-powered threat such that extreme specification is needed to counter it" is rather ambiguous, but there is something that is important to note. Metagames have their own "flavors", including what team styles and strategies are popular, but also including what common pokemon are. Of course, a huge facet of DW's "flavor" is tyranitar's immense popularity, which substantially decreases chandelure's usefulness. Is this necessarily over-centralization? I don't think so, since tyranitar has a huge amount to recommend it without including its status as a chandelure check. Would chandelure be broken if tyranitar weren't so popular? Maybe, I would probably say yes--requiring something like snorlax on every team IS, IMO, over-centralization. But requiring tyranitar doesn't seem like broken to me at all--when i built my team, chandy wasn't even on my mind when i selected SS and ttar. To make a parallel, there are pokemon such as solar power charizard that are every bit powerful enough to merit being OU, but that are held back because of their stealth rock weakness and the fact that is on practically every team, dropping them down to UU. Volcarona might be pretty much impossible to deal with if not for stealth rock's ubiquity, but with it volcarona is nowhere near broken. tl;dr, whatever potential brokenness chandelure might have, the metagame is so adapted to it that it is not broken. If the metagame were to change with ttar suddenly dropping in usage (i doubt it), perhaps then it would be broken, but IMO, atm it is not.

[Audiosurfer]

Well something that bothers me about the tier is the huge drop in usage. Maybe it's only me who feels this way but it feels like since we switched to PS the tier sorta died/fell drastically in usage. Like when I look through battles to watch and stuff I'll see like a handful of DW battles every few days, and it takes forever to actually find a DW match, and when I do, it's the same few people every time. Maybe we should do something to try and reinvigorate the ladder. Then again it could be just me.

[White symphoni]

Originally Posted by Fat Audiosurfer

Well something that bothers me about the tier is the huge drop in usage. Maybe it's only me who feels this way but it feels like since we switched to PS the tier sorta died/fell drastically in usage. Like when I look through battles to watch and stuff I'll see like a handful of DW battles every few days, and it takes forever to actually find a DW match, and when I do, it's the same few people every time. Maybe we should do something to try and reinvigorate the ladder. Then again it could be just me.

PS is glicthy,unstable and has disconnection issues.So some of the DW OU players don't play there.

[Audiosurfer]

Yeah, but even outside of that, the amount of good matches one can find is sorta disappointing imo. Even when we were on PO I'd find alot more people using this as the tier where you slap a bunch of mons like Charizard and stuff onto a team with no thought and go about playing than people actually using it for competitive play, so some sort of activity to improve ladder quality couldn't hurt.

[White symphoni]

Yeah I had that too on PO.there were many people using weird teams that didn't have any kind of strategy or even good mons.I think it's becoz some weak players try out unrealeased DW abilities and get taken to DW OU.and sometimes they try out DW OU without knowing much about the tier and just use random stuff.I had reached 1400+ once with beating only one player over 1300.

There's a simple solution to improve the ladders quality.Just lower your range.Unfortunately it's hard to find any kind of battles that way :/

[Kidogo]

It's totally not just you audiosurfer. Before PS release, all I played was DW, but now I've totally switched to OU because smogon disappeared and no one plays DW on PS, and PO's DW bans are way different from smogon's. So yeah, it feels as if the shift is kind of killing DW.

I actually think that, since this is not only an entire tier, but also the hypothetical future of BW, this is a noteworthy issue--perhaps we can have a thread or something to try to get people more aware of this, and thus to spark more interest and hopefully reinvigorate the tier.

[Tendie]

I'm with kidogo. I just stopped caring after the switch, where I just played the same guy again and again.
Wake me up when Chandelure gets its new ability.

[Audiosurfer]

Yeah. Nice to see I'm not the only one with this issue. What do you guys think could be done to spark more interest in DW? Should it be something like a contest for highest ladder run, another tournament with prizes, or something more than that?

[Tobes]

There's a good chance the ladder is going to be shaken up very soon. Take this as you will. I'm also thinking of back-up ideas in order to rejuvenate the ladder should an upcoming event not do the trick.

[White symphoni]

Tobes,does that mean we are finally getting something special to bring back DW :D

[Omicron]

Indeed. Though I'm still better than Tobes ;)

[superbadd]

Skymin or blaziken coming back? Or is it darkrai? =o

[Audiosurfer]

I'm pretty sure Tobes already said Skymin was on his list of things he's never retesting, along with Deoxys-N and Soul Dew. Blaziken coming back would make me the happiest person, but I doubt that's it. Whatever it is, it should be great :)

[White symphoni]

Yeah,Blaziken retest would be nice.I'm almost certain that Darkrai will be retested sooner or later.I mean after what we saw in the logs of the Darkrai tourney,it can not be considered THAT much overpowered.