OU Playstyles - Week #05 [Sun Offense] - READ OP FIRST!

[Myzozoa]

Sun Offense has always occupied a niche in bw OU tournament play. Against players who favor weatherless offense or rain offense, Sun is a good choice because it has decent match-up against these two and does passably if they choose to use a frail variant of Sand offense. SO if you expect your opponent to use offense, Sun is a strong choice to avoid an unfavorable team match-up.

However sun really can never escape from it's problems with Dragon type pokemon, Dragonite, Latios, and Garchomp essentially ascertain that one of your pokemon will die every single time they switch in. In addition, any balanced Sand team will dominate the weather war unless they misplay and get caught by Dugtrio. Finally the glaring problem of Stealth Rock weaknesses mandate the use of magic bounce pokemon, or else reliable Rapid Spinners that ruin any sort of offensive flow.

Anyway, in my opinion the best Sun abuser is Darmanitan because it OHKO's everything with flare blitz, and with U-turn it can allow dugtrio to catch opposing weather inducers leading you to an easy victory:

Darmanitan@ Choice Scarf
Max Attack Max Speed
Jolly
U-turn
Flare Blitz
Super Power
Fire Punch

It OHKO's Terrakion and Latios with Flare Blitz, in addition to anything that doesn't resist Flare Blitz. And it doesn't have the problem of V-Create where your speed gets lowered after you ko something, and it isn't weak to pursuit and has better attack than Victini.

 

[Tobes]

Oh hey this looks like an opportunity to shamelessly plug my RMT

Sun Offense can generally be broken down into a few components:

• Endgame threat (usually Venusaur or Volcarona)
• Dedicated slots for winning weather wars (entry hazards, Dugtrio, Rapid Spin, Weather Trapper Heatran)
• Offensive supplements
• Revenge killers
• Defensive backbone

The biggest problem with sun offense (not counting the fact that Ninetales is ass) is that because of how it uses teamslots it is usually stretched too thin defensively to cover everything and therefore has a harder time with coping when unable to execute its own strategy. Let's take a look at a pretty standard starting line-up:

• Ninetales
• Dugtrio
• Venusaur

Here we have the founding of a standard offensive sun team. It has its weather, its primary win condition, and a supporting Pokemon to aid both of these Pokemon. Unfortunately, these three Pokemon are all pretty much useless if the weather war is lost, and at the moment there are gaping, gaping defensive issues here. Dragons, Landorus, and Volcarona all pose a very severe threat. Rain teams are also daunting to face while the sun isn't up (Venusaur cannot switch into rain teams forever; your average sun team is going to need at least one more Water-type resist). We could use Latias to cover Landorus and rain, and Scarf Garchomp to revenge kill Dragons and Volcarona. Since we're lacking a Steel-type, we could go with Heatran.

So we could come to a line-up of Ninetales / Dugtrio / Heatran / Latias / Garchomp / Venusaur. Doesn't seem too bad. Oh, wait. We only have one switch-in to Latios and that could get killed by an opposing Dugtrio. And our only answer to Landorus is Pursuit-bait (we can't even safely trade Latias for Tyranitar to win the weather war because Landorus could just set up on most Dugtrio and run right through us if we aren't using HP Ice Venusaur [and we probably aren't if we're using Dugtrio]). Oh and Mamoswine also stomps us. Come to think of it so does Weavile if Ninetales gets weakened a bit. Wait how the fuck do we even switch into Landorus-T? Oh and OTR Reuniclus runs a train on us with Latias out of the way...

You get the idea. These are the problems that you'll consistently run into when building a sun offensive team. You either have to sacrifice some offensive optimization to better shore up your defenses (and you still probably won't cover everything well enough), or you'll have to accept some weakness and hope you don't have to deal with them. Alternatively, you can ignore defensive foundations entirely and focus on executing your offense as quickly and efficiently as possible. A great example of this was the archetype that popped up near the end of BW1, which was Ninetales / Tickle Wobbuffet / Dugtrio / Venusaur / Volcarona / Dragonite or something like that. It focused entirely on winning the weather war, removing anything that could block a sweep, and then going to town with some of the most dangerous offensive Pokemon in the game. I think Gothitelle could give this archetype some new legs, but Wobbuffet is a criminally underrated Pokemon.

Also as an aside: go defensive with your Ninetales. Sunny Day Offensive Ninetales is shit in BW2; it was a decent set in BW1 but times have changed and there are now too many dangerous offensive sets that can hose you pretty badly for it to be worth it. Better to go with something that has a better chance of living long enough to do its job in my opinion.

 

[LilOu]

Congratulations to Tobes! He is the first one to post a team (the first one in 5 weeks).

• Click here to check the new archive's format and the team!
• If you want your team posted here you need to have soome success with it on the simulators and a RMT with more than 10 luvdiscs. This is only to prove that the team works!

 

[LilOu]

Sorry for double posting but I want this to be read. The playstyle was supposed to be changing today; however, I had some issues and I couldn't change it. Tomorrow i'll do it, thanks to everyone for participating here, this thread keeps going on because of you!

 

[Joga]

Gratz

 

[Neliel]

Oh.. were we supposed to also post teams? If so my last rtm is perfect :0 this is a perfect example of a sun offense team completely different from tobes team. Ps. I'm on the phone sry for the poor description