Ting-Lu (Especially RestTalk) for obvious reasons, and Glowking + Great tusk can usually get the job done. Glowking can slow pivot tusk in, if it Tera fairy’s Glowking can finish the job. Fast EQ lando too I guess
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4
- Thread starter TPP
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I've been using AV Slowking-Galar or just Sp.Def boots Glowking with Toxic. However, Ting-Lu or Unaware Clodsire is as easy as it gets in terms of defensively answering Raging Bolt. There's also Sp.Def 250 speed Gliscor, but really any ground type that outspeeds Raging Bolt will do regardless of amount of Calm Mind boost. This list is Gliscor, Landorus-Therian, Great Tusk, Iron Treads and if you really want to stretch it Garchomp.
The ground type list also extends into Tera-Types like Tera Ground Roaring Moon, or Tera-Ground CM Iron Crown but speaking of Roaring Moon faster electric resist work too. For example Roaring Moon with Booster Energy attack is pretty good at threatening Raging Bolt Offensively, so long as it's not at 30% or something. This extends to other Pokemon like Dragapult and Kyurem too, hope this helps.
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Not a single ground type mon is a reliable Rbolt check, same with Dragon Types, hes just using Tera Fairy and kills everyone.
Whirlwind Ting-Lu and Glowking (especially with AV) are good, yes
Tera Ground Iron Crown looks like a joke, tho i saw that leng loi used it yesterday lol
Whirlwind Ting-Lu and Glowking (especially with AV) are good, yes
Tera Ground Iron Crown looks like a joke, tho i saw that leng loi used it yesterday lol
I don’t base my opinions on what is popular. I am not going to put such an otherwise useless item covert cloak on my team for one mon. Garg imo belongs in the cheese pile with all the uncompetitive moves and abilities that are banned.
Glad to see the Raging Neck hate percolating. The mon is cracked. Your best bet is Great Tusk (which should be on every team anyway) + Steel / Fairy… and prayer.
nooooobody is using covert cloak
It's not like Raging Bolt takes non-negligable damage from a lot of the Pokemon listed, and oftentimes Raging Bolt takes chip damage prior to swapping in the offensive check, via hazards or on the turn it used Calm Mind. Forcing the Tera on Raging Bolt at all is pretty valuable as well.
Garg is at worst a pest to fat cores. I mean, I play a ton of HO so i've never been super affected by salt cure damage but even if I do play a bulkier team it's really easy to manage by just switching out. You'll rarely ever keep a single mon in place for long enough, salt cure damage is easy to deal with just through regenerator, and it serves as a legitimate way to kick out mola and slow down gliscor. Gen 9 is already an annoying enough metagame to play with all the matchup fishing and reverse sweeping and tera bullshit, and one single mon with semi-reliable chip damage (which is still less damaging than toxic) is nowhere close to the biggest issue in the metagame.
Ground types have the benefit of being able to actually abuse bolt's slow speed since they're completely unaffected by bolt's priority option. Mons like tusk, gliscor, or kyurem are free to click their ground moves and bolt is forced to switch or take considerable damage. Spdef gliscor can pretty handily shut down bolt with nothing but a slow pivot, which if the bolt user is kind of an idiot and uses an electric move, may not even be necessary.
Careful vest tyranitar is my go to. 2hko with any attack vs bolt while bolt only 5hkos. Pretty useful for many special attackers, but im not sold on its overall usefulness.. wish there were better sand abusers than excadrill to accompany
The team I currently run has Galar Weezing which just makes taking Dragon Type moves much easier. I also run Tera Ground Frosmoth but it doesn't need to exhaust Tera to check Raging Bolt.
slowking-G + a ground type. pairing it with ting-lu gives you a very sturdy core that raging bolt struggles to make progress against, tho you could also use gking to slow pivot into great tusk or lando-T and either kill it outright or force a tera
I run a core of Gliscor - Tinkaton.
Gliscor can absorb dragon attacks, and Tinkaton can encore into Calm Mind and Dragon moves. Gigaton Hammer can also smash a good deal, especially after tera Fairy.
The pair is also extremely good at setting hazard.
Most Mons can just Sub on the Steath Rock set since Salt Cure is a pretty weak move
Ting-Lu and Gliscor are the best Ground types defensively. Clod, too, but I tend not to like how passive Clod is since I don't play stall. Beyond that, you either need to answer it offensively with a Ground type, Tera Ground, or an Electric resist like a Dragon, or you need to switch around and make predictions to avoid Draco or Thunderclap 50/50s.
There are some mons with high Sp. Def. that can also work. Same for some AV mons like Rillaboom, would might be able to take a turn 1 Draco and resist the Thunderclap. It is sometimes possible to build some teams without Ground types on them, but this is very tricky to do well since you'll need multiple resists and a plan for T-wave spam.
Nah. Covert Cloak is a good item. People just have biases against it because it doesn't give a message every time it prevents you from getting cheesed.
Tbh, preventing from being cheesed is like 10-30% of the times the item works, and 70-90% of the time it doesn't.
Also it just prevents the secondary effect kind of hax, but not missing, stat boosting effects for opponent (Fiery Dance) and...everything else.
It's like running Sheer Cold, but instead of being an insta win button, it does nothing.
I saw Zapdos-Galar is chilling down in RU. As fighting / flying seems like it could find something to do. Has anyone tried it?
I forgot this mon was still in the game. Fell off the face of the earth.
I forgot this mon was still in the game. Fell off the face of the earth.
Ting Lu the goat is usually enough. Without it, gking + any ground, even stuff like tusk is good. Spdef gliscor and is also pretty solid, especially if you pair it with tinkaton.
IMO, Flamingo suits a bit better in OU. At least it can click STAB Close Combat against Ghold.
Raging Bolt is just always hard to switch in to. It's a great mon that will almost never do nothing. Ground + Fairy mons is the classic offense way of handling it, but healthy Glowking can take a hit and pivot out to a Ground type or even beat it after Tera Fairy. Great Tusk really fears switching in, but even Tera Fairy doesn't save Bolt from taking a huge 60ish from Headlong. Encore and Phazing also help minimize the threat Bolt can pose to a team. Ting Lu is course the sturdiest answer to Bolt. SpDef Gliscor does well into it too. The big thing about handling Bolt and every tera user is to have a gameplan for handling a Tera. Great Tusk+Glowking means it either dies to Headlong or gets 1v1d by Sludge Bomb. Similarly, offense can threaten a kill to bait Thunderclap, then encore to force it out.
Mold Breaker Hawlucha and the Terrain Seed sets I feel also outclassed it. The one thing I feel it does have going for it though is it's access Knock Off
Not really. You yourself mention the secondary effects. Well, this includes the ones that are 100% of the time like Psychic Noise, Mystical Fire, Nuzzle, or Mortal Spin. There are so many moves with secondary effects. Fiery Dance is just Moth. Aqua Step is just Quaq, which is uncommon in OU. Meteor Beam is 2 turns or Power Herb. These moves are rare and have the different counterplay of Unaware.
Saying Cloak does nothing isn't really true, either. As I said before, it just doesn't tell you every time it helps you. With strategic use, you can counter certain things while also having a generally more stable team.
On the matter of Kyurem, I'm just... incredibly disappointed in how this entire suspect played out. This was a giant shitshow. I don't just want to pretend as if I dislike the DNB crowd, although there was a plethora and arguably dominance of poor argumentation, although near the end this was eclipsed by some more solid and even some very strong arguments. There was also some very poor conduct on the pro-ban side as well, both in terms of some incessant posting and fearmongering of its own, but also in terms of some pro-ban posters feeling the need to prefer being civil over actually disagreeing with prominent dnb posters. It is hard to describe my frustration at seeing some very prominent Ban posters make posts on the line of 'omg [insert DNB poster here] those are some very strong arguments even if i disagree' rather then actually taking the time and effort to disagree and rebut these posts, which they very well should've! Given how influential some of these posters were, the fact that they did not bother countering these arguments at all is tantamount to throwing, and I'm incredibly disappointed in that conduct when this suspect test had real ramifications and was very important. I'm also disappointed at the number of people who allowed DNB posters to essentially flood the latter half of the suspect thread, especially considering that it was still a very sound majority that voted to ban Kyurem. I understand the hesitance; this thread was the worst thing I've ever seen on this site and has radically influenced the way I view smogon, but given that some ban voters were literally willing to cheat to see Kyurem banned, I am beyond frustrated that these people never actually voiced their thoughts. Even Akalli put in ridiculous amounts of effort to do this and never actually mentioned his support for or against Kyurem, which is ridiculous when if the prominent players who cheated actually put in the effort to combat a lot of the DNB posters, we may not be in this scenario today. That there was cheating was ridiculous, especially from people skilled enough to get reqs. I'm as pro-ban as the next asshole and I think it's borderline disgraceful that a lot of these people not only didn't bother sucking it up and laddering like the rest of the voters, but didn't bother posting or voicing their support, especially in the wake of such a large DNB movement.
Similarly, the fact that this suspect devolved into being about anything other then Kyurem, from shitty smogon politics to whatever the fuck CTC had going on. This suspect was hijacked yet again and became the CTC show. I respect that influential players will always have disproportionate influence but CTC's in general is just ridiculous, especially considering that unlike in the Gouging suspect he was probably the worst of the prominent DNB posters this time around while also being the worst in conduct of them. I guess he died for another mon's sins. I can't wait for Kyu to get suspected again like last time he got banned so a mon stayed in the tier.
I think there's a lot that could be done to change things in the wake of this, namely reducing the threshold for a ban needed. It's pretty ridiculous that a clear majority voted for a ban and yet still lost by 1 vote, and maybe not now, but close to gen 10, this is what needs to be looked at. I also think there's a pretty big culture of deference to influential players that should be looked at. I wholeheartedly recognize and appreciate that good players are going to have better insights on the tier then most others, and I also agree that these viewpoints need to be respected but I think this got taken to pretty extreme degrees here; people seem pretty quick to forget that good players disagree literally all the time and that good players are not objective gods or whatever. People are very afraid to disagree with influential voices and i think that needs to be remedied. There are definitely other cultural problems with Smogon that need to be looked at, as well as other tiering problems, but I don't have any other answers.
In the wake of this, what happens? Well, as much as I am disappointed, and honestly way moreso then i would've been if Kyurem just wasn't banned in the first place, there's nothing that can be done. Maybe in the future it will get looked at but I'm not going to hope for anything and given how awful this test was in the first place, I'm very happy to wait awhile. In the near future, I would pretty heavily support a tera blast ban (watch ausma's video) and potentially a volc retest. Both would have the capacity to keep kyurem in check pretty nicely given that especially near the end of the suspect, I thought Kyu's best set by far was actually physical dd w tera blast.
I'm also very against a gliscor suspect test. I was on the fence on scor when Kyu was gone, but now that it's back I think a suspect on scor is a non-starter and I actually think would make the tier much worse, esp given that tera spdef scor is one of the best counters to subtect in the tier. Other then that, I'm not sure. Kyurem didn't really limit that much -- the stuff that Kyurem beats was still very good with it in the tier (grounds, zapdos, grasses like pons, teapot and apple) and was very good before it got banned so they're not getting worse. Stuff that was used to beat it like moltres, gking, tinkaton and steels in general were very good even with it gone too, so as to how much actually changes, I'm not sure besides stuff running more niche teras to check kyu and more explicit teching (i.e, pnoise gking, alluring voice clef, whatever).
It's a shame this went down the way it did. I barely mentioned the cheating but I'm more upset at the cheaters then most other folks because um, what the hell. OU will move on and i thought the meta was alright with Kyurem in it, but would be better without it. I'm just incredibly disappointed with a lot of people here however, and I think a lot of the folks involved should really look at themselves.
Similarly, the fact that this suspect devolved into being about anything other then Kyurem, from shitty smogon politics to whatever the fuck CTC had going on. This suspect was hijacked yet again and became the CTC show. I respect that influential players will always have disproportionate influence but CTC's in general is just ridiculous, especially considering that unlike in the Gouging suspect he was probably the worst of the prominent DNB posters this time around while also being the worst in conduct of them. I guess he died for another mon's sins. I can't wait for Kyu to get suspected again like last time he got banned so a mon stayed in the tier.
I think there's a lot that could be done to change things in the wake of this, namely reducing the threshold for a ban needed. It's pretty ridiculous that a clear majority voted for a ban and yet still lost by 1 vote, and maybe not now, but close to gen 10, this is what needs to be looked at. I also think there's a pretty big culture of deference to influential players that should be looked at. I wholeheartedly recognize and appreciate that good players are going to have better insights on the tier then most others, and I also agree that these viewpoints need to be respected but I think this got taken to pretty extreme degrees here; people seem pretty quick to forget that good players disagree literally all the time and that good players are not objective gods or whatever. People are very afraid to disagree with influential voices and i think that needs to be remedied. There are definitely other cultural problems with Smogon that need to be looked at, as well as other tiering problems, but I don't have any other answers.
In the wake of this, what happens? Well, as much as I am disappointed, and honestly way moreso then i would've been if Kyurem just wasn't banned in the first place, there's nothing that can be done. Maybe in the future it will get looked at but I'm not going to hope for anything and given how awful this test was in the first place, I'm very happy to wait awhile. In the near future, I would pretty heavily support a tera blast ban (watch ausma's video) and potentially a volc retest. Both would have the capacity to keep kyurem in check pretty nicely given that especially near the end of the suspect, I thought Kyu's best set by far was actually physical dd w tera blast.
I'm also very against a gliscor suspect test. I was on the fence on scor when Kyu was gone, but now that it's back I think a suspect on scor is a non-starter and I actually think would make the tier much worse, esp given that tera spdef scor is one of the best counters to subtect in the tier. Other then that, I'm not sure. Kyurem didn't really limit that much -- the stuff that Kyurem beats was still very good with it in the tier (grounds, zapdos, grasses like pons, teapot and apple) and was very good before it got banned so they're not getting worse. Stuff that was used to beat it like moltres, gking, tinkaton and steels in general were very good even with it gone too, so as to how much actually changes, I'm not sure besides stuff running more niche teras to check kyu and more explicit teching (i.e, pnoise gking, alluring voice clef, whatever).
It's a shame this went down the way it did. I barely mentioned the cheating but I'm more upset at the cheaters then most other folks because um, what the hell. OU will move on and i thought the meta was alright with Kyurem in it, but would be better without it. I'm just incredibly disappointed with a lot of people here however, and I think a lot of the folks involved should really look at themselves.
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What I was going to say a few days back was:
I like Gliscor. I think it's perfectly balanced.
When I use it.
Other people's Gliscor is such a pain to deal with. It's funny, no other Pokemon feels quite this way to me. I find myself missing Bloodmoon at times at least games will actually progress.
I like Gliscor. I think it's perfectly balanced.
When I use it.
Other people's Gliscor is such a pain to deal with. It's funny, no other Pokemon feels quite this way to me. I find myself missing Bloodmoon at times at least games will actually progress.
Gliscor has always been like that. Whenever I use gliscor it feels like it dies super easily but when other people use it it feels like a completely unbreakable wall that even sponges up ice hits.
What’s your favourite team this gen?- With Kyurem back, I can say I’ve been loving this Blimax Core Specs Kyu team a ton https://pokepast.es/1281503fd3c31fbb
Coincidentally, I'm wathing his video now. His team uses 3 Ice moves with Earth Power, no Draco