I know I haven't been very active in this metagame, so I took a few minutes to get to 1250 so I can share some substantiated impressions. Some of what I've noticed has already been hashed and rehashed, so I'll stick to things that I don't see a lot of people talking about.
1) Sableye is the biggest troll in the metagame. If you are a physical attacker and you are not a fire type or have Guts as your ability, Sableye shuts you down. I mean, it's pretty much just that simple. It has no weaknesses for anything to exploit, meaning that it takes like 40% maximum (from a burned CB Escavalier, which is the highest damage I ran into). It's also a nasty stallbreaker, being able to tank weaker special hits and burning opponents while taunting their recovery. Surprised I haven't seen it around more often.
Definitely. Sableye is one of the most underused Pokemon in UU (pun intended), and it just plainly doesn't lose to Physical mons vulnerable to Burn. It deserves a lot more usage as it's also a non-CM Alakazam counter.
2) I haven't seen anyone talk about weavile, but I've seen a lot of them around. Weavile is fantastically anti-metagame. I'm not a big fan of the CB set though - the SD set is so much more dangerous.
Yep. Weavile is a great anti-meta Pokemon. It handles all the new big threats like Hippo (weakened), Rose, every damn Ghost besides Sableye, and makes a fantastic trapper and revenge killer
3) Sand seems like a very powerful playstyle, but I don't see it being broken quite yet. I actually made a team before I read anything about stoutland here, and my team has no normal resists...and I've only been swept by stoutland once and lost to sand itself twice (out of the dozen or so sand teams I ran into). Granted, I do have a weather changer. Maybe once I get higher in the ladder I will run into better teams/players, but so far it's only been slightly harder to kill hippo than it is to kill abomasnow and stoutland is faaaaar less annoying than whorelass.
Froslasshole is ten times worse than Stoutland. However, I think you might underrate Sand teams a little, but I guess that's pretty moot this early in the meta.
4) Speaking of which, RD kingdra! Get RD kingdra in against a sand team and set up rain dance to cripple the entire team. They can't get hippo in against you without sacrificing it (or something else) and kingdra has enough power to muscle through any generic walls they might have (except for a random cradily I ran into...) Make sure roserade is a smidge weak first though, so Ice Beam can KO.
4/4 on being right
5) I'm liking alakazam a lot. UU needed a powerful special attacker that can KO without setup.
Alakazam is an asshole, but it's not, not, not broken! If you predict very well with it you will sweep. Otherwise you might not even get a single kill with it because of Pursuiters. It also has to use Focus Fail to hit most Pursuiters.
6) What happened to Darmanitan? Seems like everyone forgot about it with all the sand around, but it's still one of the best revenge killers in the tier...
Sash Zam is a better revenger, Stoutland is faster, there are better priority mons, etc. No Sun to make Darmanitan into the Rape Machine it is in OU also hurts its viability. All the bulky Waters don't help either
7) Chandelure and Tornadus are just incredibly underwhelming.
Yep. Tornadus is great in OU though
Thoughts?