CAP 17 CAP 6 - Part 3 - Threats Discussion

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Just making this clear: if we are Belly Drumming, we can't run a scarf
So even if we give CAP 6 Base 130 speed(which it is NOT getting), with the need for defensive investment, it will probably run 252 HP/252 Atk/4 Def which means it hits 296 speed without investment. This means ANY scarfer(practically speaking) outspeeds this thing. And a LOT of scarfers resist priority.
So no, we aren't potentially outspeeding much.
I honestly don't even get this post. First of all, don't make any absolute statements regarding what CAP 6 is or isn't going to get further down the process. Saying that it's "NOT" getting a certain something down the road just because you think so is definitely not what you should be doing. For all we know, it could get base 140 Speed. Next, I don't know why you would assume that CAP 6 would run 252 HP/252 Atk if it even gets base 130 Speed. Why would someone forgo taking full advantage of that Speed stat, knowing that it outpaces basically every single non-Scarf Pokemon, as a Belly Drum user? That minimizes revenge killing opportunities by your opponent. Does Jolteon run 252 HP/252 SpA because of its Speed? No. Even Deoxys-S, the fastest Pokemon in the game, runs max Speed. For your purposes of "need for defensive investment," you should be running 252 HP/252 Spe. Lastly, you have to consider that this CAP will have access to Speed-boosting things. It's unlikely it won't get something out of the ability stage given that we're trying to design the most successful Belly Drum user possible and it therefore needs to not be easily revenge killed, but even if it doesn't get a Speed increasing ability, there's still Salac Berry. So yes, we are potentially outspeeding much so it's safe to make an assumption as such; however, assuming CAP 6 is going to outspeed (close to) everything, which no one has yet stated, then we have a problem.
 
I gave this thread more time than I initially intended due to the opening of the art thread. The discussion is getting to the point that there doesn't appear to be much more to be said. So I'll give the thread another 20-24 hours. We have a decent idea of how CAP 6 could/should handle threats before the Belly Drum thanks to posts like Fuzznip's and Korski's, and people like Fuzznip and jas61292 have listed possible revenge killers for CAP 6, while advocating having little opposition otherwise, if any. I can get behind this general direction, though some of the specifics have run into somewhat of a disagreement.
 

ginganinja

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I am not making any assumptions, i am listing Pokemon that the CAP could potentially force out, offensively or defensively, based on the only clue we have right now (our typing), in order to setup. I don't know what else to say to make this clearer to you really. What i posted wasn't personal opinion, it was just the Pokemon that the CAP either resists their STABs, hits super effectively with its STABs, or the combination of both.
Highlighting this because its the main part of your post. What nyttyn and I are referring to your posts here

  • Gliscor (we will be faster than defensive Gliscor with Taunt so it's not a concern)
This is an assumption. You are, right there, claiming that CAP 6 will run a higher speed stat than GLiscor. There is no indication this will occur, this is just you imposing your own assumptions on this CAP. Its possible you set out to avoid assumptions, but this didn't really happen :(

Worth noting you also said this

This is also an assumption. You are a making an exceptionally bold claim (that calculation is skewed in that Roar also has a significant percentage on Hippowdon) that Hippowdon does not run a phazing move. This is incorrect. Whirlwind is Hippowdons 4th most common move, and together a phazing move comes in at around 65% ish in terms of how common a move is. If you went, and looked at statistics between top rated players on PO or PS!, thus removing statistics from the lower ranked players, that percentage would shoot up to 90%. Heck, you rejected the Sand Force Hippowdon set that went through QC as being unviable, which was pretty much the only Hippowdon set that didn't run a phazing move. Should I try and push the set through again?



Basically you are ASSUMING that CAP 6 can force out Hippowdon, when thats obviously not the case. Hippowdon is not weak to any of our STABs, and has excellent bulk, there is nothing in our typing that could lead you to assume CAP 6 will beat Hippowdon, outside of the Ground Immunity, but with Whirlwind Hippowdon can and will phaze you out. Point being, under your quoted post, you assumed Hippowdon lacked a phazing move, since iirc your not forcing Hippowdon out otherwise. You are assuming that you can Force out Perish Song Celebi, that we outspeed Gliscor, assuming you can force out Ferrothorn, as well as Zam, and so on. Despite this, many of the pokemon you list don't get forced out by CAP 6. You are also assuming certain things. For instance, why would you list Venusuar, Volcarona, Infernape, and all the others, as mons CAP 6 can force out, if you were not assuming (in your head at least), that CAP 6 would outrun them, that it could OHKO them, that it could somehow take STAB moves from them. Even if you are not assuming anything, then your list is so wide (in that we include everything that CAP might beat with the correct typing, ability, stats, moves etc which is a huge list) that it is useless. Like heck, undeer your logic, I could potentially assume Heatran as something CAP 6 could force out because "we might give it Earthquake". Point being, you are making assumptions on CAP 6 which your comments on Hippowdon and Gliscor alone indicate.
 

DetroitLolcat

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I agree with alexwolf that a speed-boosting ability or a natural means to outspeed common Choice Scarf users is more important than priority. CAP6 would prefer not to have to use moves with poor coverage and 40-80 BP. We all know there are ways to make Choice Scarf opponents much less threatening, but since I don't want to polljump I'll leave it at that.

Now, there are two schools of thought when designing a Belly Drum Pokemon. We can either build a Belly Drummer whose goal is to defeat offensive teams while being more vulnerable to defensive teams, or we can make a Belly Drummer that greatly threatens defensive teams while struggling against offensive teams. Defensive teams will try to defeat CAP6 by walling it, phazing it, or wearing it down with residual damage. Offensive teams will try to defeat CAP6 by attacking it while it sets up or revenge killing it. It makes sense, therefore, to focus on choosing either to be walled by common walls OR to be revenged by common revenge killers, but not both.

The question is: which one do we want to defeat? Defensive threats such as Skarmory, Hippowdon, and even Ferrothorn seem designed to take this Pokemon's hits and counter with a Roar, Whirlwind, or even Leech Seed and Protect. On the other hand, speedsters like Scarf Terrakion, Keldeo, and non-Scarf Jolteon exist in this metagame for the purpose of shutting down Physical sweepers and limiting the number of Pokemon they can take out.

Now, it is definitely possible to take down either or both of those groups if we wanted to. However, making a Belly Drummer that can easily take down offense and defense will be broken without question. The question is: do we target offensive teams or defensive teams? I believe the typing we chose, Flying/Steel, is conducive to defeating defensive teams while being more susceptible to revenge killing. When we debated Steel/Ghost versus Steel/Flying, we chose the offensive prowess of the Flying type and the Earthquake immunity over the Normal immunity, Fighting immunity, STAB Shadow Sneak, and Ice resistance. This makes CAP6 more vulnerable to incoming priority while giving it neutral STAB against the likes of Forretress, Ferrothorn, and overall more powerful attacks. We wanted more powerful STAB and better coverage rather than immunity to Mach Punch and ExtremeSpeed and a resistance to Ice Shard. Instead of countering offensive teams by trying to outspeed priority users, we should play to our strengths, namely, the potential to have powerful STABs and the great neutral coverage Flying has.

If we target defensive teams, which inherently are easier to set up against than offensive teams, then we should counterbalance the advantage we have against defensive teams with a susceptibility to common counters to set-up sweepers on offensive teams. Specifically, I'm taking about priority attacks and Choice Scarf users. I believe that few, if any, common walls should threaten CAP6. CAP should threaten few, if any, revenge killers.

Specifically:

Threaten

-Steel-types. CAP6 should threaten Steel-types because most Steel types are used for defensive purposes. Although Steel resists both Flying and Steel, the most popular Steel-types in the tier are Ferrothorn and Scizor. Neither of those Pokemon resist Flying. We don't want to be walled by Skarmory when we naturally do well against so many defensive Pokemon because it makes us much more susceptible to stall.

-Ground-types. We're naturally immune to their STAB, most Ground-types cannot hit us super-effectively, and only Hippowdon and (to an extent) Garchomp even have recourse against us. If we can find a way around being phazed then Ground types become the best Pokemon to set up against.

-Mono-attacking Water-types. No, these Pokemon are not common. Yes, they pose a great setup opportunity. Tentacruel, defensive Politoed, and Vaporeon should not threaten us severely and serve as great fodder to set up against.


Be (Specifically) Threatened By

-Choice Scarf Latios, Latias, Jolteon, and Starmie. The best of the best revenge killers should be able to take us down.

-Mamoswine, Breloom, and Choice Band Dragonite- These powerful priority Pokemon are offense's best answer to fast Physical sweepers. We should not be going out of our way to defeat. I don't believe these three Pokemon should come in and clean us out, but each should be able to revenge kill us well enough.



This isn't an exhaustive list, but it's not the most important part of this post. The best way to take down CAP6 should be to attack it as it sets up, then finish it off with some priority if need be. If CAP6 can set up against a team that has its priority attackers taken out, then honestly it deserves to win the game right there. This isn't a simple case of "remove counters, set up" like most setup sweepers are in OU. This is "remove revenge killers, sacrifice 50% of your HP, take a hit while doing so, sweep", and it's fair to expect victory once those criteria have been met. Furthermore, two Pokemon in particular, Ferrothorn and Garchomp, have abilities that can shave off the last of CAP6's HP. If the opponent has no fast Scarfers or priority users left (or at all) and allows a Belly Drummer to set up against them, they do not deserve to win the game. Specifically...

Any Pokemon that can do 50% to CAP6 with any move immediately threatens CAP6 and prevents it from setting up. We are literally "checked" or threatened by about 95% of the OU tier.
 

ginganinja

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lolcat brings up a good point, that I feel like touching on. I agree with his post in part, however I disagree that beating common walls is the best option for CAP. Every single defensive team out there, has a revenge killer, just like 75% of offensive teams also have a revenge killer. This means that against any given team, CAP 6 likely has to play around a revenge killer, which makes pull off a successful belly drum, really hard. The mere presence of revenge killers tarnish the viability of this cap, and I would argue focusing on beat offensive teams actually works better since you can prevent the crippling weakness of Belly Drummers, ie the revenge kill.
 

alexwolf

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@ginganinja

Are you really still going on with this? Do you honestly thing that assuming the CAP will be faster than defensive Gliscor is a long shot? We are making a sweeper and you are trying to tell me that it won't be able to outspeed defensive Gliscor? Stop and think about it for a second. If you really think that this is an assumption we can't make then we could as well not assume that the CAP will have more than 40 base Atk and therefore won't be able to threaten anything out with offensive pressure right?

And for one last time, about Hippowdon, THIS IS NOT AN ASSUMPTION. The list said that we could setup on Whirlwind-less Hippowdon and then i put in a parenthesis how much use does this move see. How is this an assumption at all? Those are facts. You are right that i forgot to mention Roar's usage, which i should have, in order to show how often Hippo carries phazing moves, but this was both an unintended mistake from my part and has nothing to do with your accusations of me, assumptions.

You are also assuming certain things. For instance, why would you list Venusuar, Volcarona, Infernape, and all the others, as mons CAP 6 can force out, if you were not assuming (in your head at least), that CAP 6 would outrun them, that it could OHKO them, that it could somehow take STAB moves from them. Even if you are not assuming anything, then your list is so wide (in that we include everything that CAP might beat with the correct typing, ability, stats, moves etc which is a huge list) that it is useless. Like heck, undeer your logic, I could potentially assume Heatran as something CAP 6 could force out because "we might give it Earthquake". Point being, you are making assumptions on CAP 6 which your comments on Hippowdon and Gliscor alone indicate.
You still don't get it? Weird because it's pretty clear and i already mentioned this like 5 times by now. The two lists i made include everything that the CAP can potentially threaten offensively and defensively based on its typing alone. This means that any Pokemon whose STABs are resisted by the CAP and cannot hit the CAP with a super effective coverage move is in the list of defensively threatened Pokemon and any Pokemon that is hit super effectively by the CAPs STABs (and a few with pathetic physical bulk that can't hurt the CAP back such as Dugtrio and HP Fire-less Espeon) is in the list of offensively threatened Pokemon. So if we decide that we do want to threaten offensively Volcarona, Keldeo, and Infernape then we would want to give to the CAP a higher Speed stat than those Pokemon. This is the purpose of the damn list. To point out exactly on which Pokemon and individual sets the CAP has the potential to setup on and ignite further and more specific discussion. And come on man i know that you can think, but after all those times of me mentioning how this list was made based on the only clue we have right now, our typing, do you seriously try to mock me with examples such as using Heatran because we might have EQ, which are totally baseless and based on assumptions (which for the last time i made none, (except from the completely logical and almost necessary assumption that the CAP will be able to outrun defensive Gliscor)?

Anyway, it's time to finally mention the exact threats i think we should setup on against and should check/counter us but before i want to address something that DLC said:

DetroitLolcat said:
Now, it is definitely possible to take down either or both of those groups if we wanted to. However, making a Belly Drummer that can easily take down offense and defense will be broken without question. The question is: do we target offensive teams or defensive teams? I believe the typing we chose, Flying/Steel, is conducive to defeating defensive teams while being more susceptible to revenge killing. When we debated Steel/Ghost versus Steel/Flying, we chose the offensive prowess of the Flying type and the Earthquake immunity over the Normal immunity, Fighting immunity, STAB Shadow Sneak, and Ice resistance. This makes CAP6 more vulnerable to incoming priority while giving it neutral STAB against the likes of Forretress, Ferrothorn, and overall more powerful attacks. We wanted more powerful STAB and better coverage rather than immunity to Mach Punch and ExtremeSpeed and a resistance to Ice Shard. Instead of countering offensive teams by trying to outspeed priority users, we should play to our strengths, namely, the potential to have powerful STABs and the great neutral coverage Flying has.
Your reasoning for choosing to threaten defensive teams is very sound but allow me to present the reasons why i think that Steel/Flying might be better to deal with offense than Steel/Ghost (in a non broken way of 'course). The first is that Flying moves have better coverage and thus can allow for more flexible and versatile movesets. This means that the CAP can more easily fit priority on its set without sacrificing too much coverage which in turn helps deal with offensive teams. The second reason is that if we would have made a Steel/Ghost Belly Drum sweeper designed to sweep better against offense and thus outspeed most scarfers, how would offensive teams deal with this thing? Extremspeed and Mach Punch are out of the way as the CAP would be immune to them, which leaves only Ice Shard and Bullet Punch as capable tools, which are both resisted. This would leave offense teams almost helpless against CAP and would create an unwanted impact on the metagame. On the other hand, even if we choose to threaten offense with the CAP (the one we have now, with the Steel/Flying typing), even if we do outspeed all scarfers, we can still be checked by priority. Of 'course we resist half of the common priority moves used in OU, but we are neutral to the other two and we can be hit by all four kinds of priority commonly found in OU which means that no matter what, the opponent will be able to get that last bit of damage off in order to not get swept in a moment's notice after the CAP has set up. This doesn't mean that the CAP won't be effective at sweeping offensive teams, it means that offense will have some means to deal with it after it sets up, as should happen with any non-broken threat. The last and final reason, that doesn't has to do so much with typing, is that there are enough awesome wallbreakers in OU and we don't really need more of them. Breaking through defensive cores is not something hard really. Power, coverage, and the right setup chances and you are set. It's a very easy concept that has been done and explored countless times. But holding back fundamental Pokemon (Landorus-T, Garchomp, Celebi) in offensive teams and using those Pokemon against them, all the while losing 50% of your health (which is a big deal against offense but not so much against defense) and trying to get a clean sweep, this is something much more interesting. A punisher for offensive teams if you wanna call it. An anti-offense sweeper. For all those reasons, i think we should aim to threaten offensive teams.

As for the Pokemon we should be able to setup on, i think that everything on my two previous lists is fair game (the right sets of 'course, not the ones that could hurt us, such as Hidden Power Fire Espeon or Salamence out of rain) with a few exclusions. From the list of the Pokemon we would want to threaten offensively i think we should remove Venusar and Alakazam. Venusaur is usually seen in sun and has HP Fire, so outspeeding him or taking a hit from him isn't an option, at least not before setting up. Alakazam has a base Speed of 120, which would mean that in order to threaten it with a KO before it does would be to outspeed him, something which would give is too many Speed, at least imo. Everything else, meaning Pokemon such as Keldeo and Infernape, i think it would be reasonable to be able to outspeed them in order to force them out, before setting up of 'course. As for the Pokemon that we should threaten defensively it is quite easy to give to the CAP the tools it needs to do it. It will mostly need a semi-bulky stat spread, something similar to this of Keldeo or maybe even Jirachi, but i don't think that this will be a problem as we already have many scary sweepers in OU with equally amazing typing and such levels of bulk (Garchomp, Keldeo, Jirachi).

EDIT: Oh and ginga's reasoning as to why going after offense is very correct and something i had mentioned and wanted to mention again in this post.
 
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So, to threaten offensive teams, CAP should have high speed and good bulk, supported by its amazing defensive typing. Not being revenge killed easily in this case either means tanking hits at 50% health or be sure to outspeed almost everything threatening. I think that by trying to threaten offensibe teams, we'd end up making if not a wall, at least a great defensive pivot.
 

ginganinja

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So, to threaten offensive teams, CAP should have high speed and good bulk, supported by its amazing defensive typing. Not being revenge killed easily in this case either means tanking hits at 50% health or be sure to outspeed almost everything threatening. I think that by trying to threaten offensive teams, we'd end up making if not a wall, at least a great defensive pivot.
Except we are concerned with making Belly Drum its best set, which means losing 50% of its health is not going to make it a defensive pivot at all. Skarmory (I imagine), would outclass it with access to Spikes, Stealth Rock, Roost and Whirlwind, and nothing that iv seen indicates that we plan to give CAP 6 moves such as this. Just because something is "difficult to revenge kill" doesn't actually mean its going to be a wall or something. I would classify Dragonite at being tricky to revenge kill for example (im not saying we should give CAP 6 MS...) which is often best used as a boosting sweeper. Perhaps the previous is an imperfect example, but you get my meaning.
 
Time to end this. The threat lists I'm about to give are from weighing the arguments given in the thread. If anything proposed in the rest of the process potentially alters the threat list, that fact should be made clear.

Pokemon for CAP 6 to threaten

CAP 6 should go all in with the threat of Belly Drum and/or moves that directly facilitate using Belly Drum. To this end, it should potentially threaten:

Ground-types: Landorus Therian, Hippowdon, Garchomp, Donphan
Defensive Water-types: Politoed, Tentacruel, Vaporeon
Scizor
Ferrothorn
Blissey
Celebi

This doesn't necessarily mean that CAP 6 should easily succeed in setting up against all of these Pokemon, because I suspect that that mentality will lead to a plethora of countermeasures to secondary effects, and in particular I don't want to overwhelm the ability stages with all that.

Pokemon to threaten CAP 6

There should be no automatically ensured switch-ins to CAP 6 after a Belly Drum.

Checks, i.e. CAP 6 must take specific measures in its set to beat these:

Skarmory
Heatran
Jirachi
Physically defensive Rotom Wash

Revenge killers and switch-ins during a Belly Drum:

Choice Scarf revenge killers: Latios, Latias, Gengar, Starmie
Priority users: Breloom, Mamoswine
Chlorophyll / Swift Swim boosted revenge killers

I've decided to take a bit from both sides of the "offensive checks versus defensive checks" argument. The checks listed need a hell of a lot of power to get through with a resisted STAB to begin with, and the specified Speed-based revenge killers are so fast as not to be too unnecessarily limiting to the rest of the process. Hopefully, this strikes a balance between being shut down by common revenge killers and needing to go out of one's way for a revenge killer. Maybe in some ways I'm kicking the can down the road. Oh, well.

 
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