1) Characterize your involvement in the test. Did you play consistently throughout the month, or did you gain all your experience at the end of the test? Did you use the suspect avidly yourself or concentrate on observing it in battle?
I feel I played quite regularly throughout the testing period. I didn't have an opportunity to play right at the start of the test, and I only started playing on suspect four or five days into the testing period. At first, I used my standard OU team on the suspect ladder. This was really for two reasons: to get some foundation experience against Latios and see what sets it commonly ran, and to get an idea of how a pretty good standard OU team fared against it.
Quite quickly the popular sets became apparent: Choice Specs (Draco Meteor/Surf/Thunderbolt/Trick), Memento (Reflect/Light Screen/Draco Meteor/Memento), Dragon Dance (Dragon Dance/Outrage/Earthquake/Draco Meteor), and offensive CM (Calm Mind/Dragon Pulse/Surf/Recover). Once I got a basic grounding of how Latios worked, I started making teams around it, trying to use all its sets to their maximum.
With a team built around taking advantage of the incredible Sub Charge Beam Rotom weakness so many teams on suspect had, I quickly got to voting eligibility in the first three or four days of me seriously laddering. I tried out all four of these Latios sets quite extensively, but I found the Specs set easily the most efficient out of them, and settled on using it on my team. After having reached lower requirements, I tried to play regularly to decrease my deviation and to gain further experience with Latios. Maybe someone would come up with a new set now that Latios had been around for a while. I think I played an average of three games a day, everyday, since I reached voting requirements.
In the last week of the testing period I was nearing upper requirements, having a rating of 1750 and a deviation of 55.5 at one point. However, I was unable to play much in the last five days of the suspect test since my school work was really piling on. Nevertheless, I feel I played very consistently throughout the rest of the month, and have a considerable amount of experience with Latios now.
2) Describe the criteria you will be using to cast your vote. For you, what aspects of a pokemon should be judged when determining its tiering between OU and Uber?
Having used Latios' most common sets quite extensively, I have to say I found all but one of them able to be dealt with. I don't feel Memento Latios is uber under the support clause - while the screen support it provides is greatly effective in a team built around it, many other Pokemon can carry out the same task as, if not more, effectively. Speed is not the biggest concern on a Pokemon whose primary purpose is to take hits while setting up support - high defenses are. Speed is the only department in which a Memento Latios can be considered superior to a similar Uxie, who itself has a very useable base 95 Speed. The Dragon Dancer set is only viable because of its surprise value, as otherwise, there is very little reason to not run Salamence instead of it. The CM sweeper is actually done better by Latias, as with her superior defenses, she can actually weather weak attacks and in the end accumulate more CMs than her twin.
It is the Specs Latios set that I feel to be too much for OU. This was one of the most common Pokemon on suspect - the Latios set that I used and had used against me. People realised early on in the test how the sheer power of a Specs Draco Meteor could blast through a team. The real difficulty when facing this set is how hard it is to prepare for. There are only a handful of Pokemon on a team that can survive a Draco Meteor, and even fewer can outspeed Latios or survive a second. What makes the set so hard to deal with is that you are required to have one of these Pokemon on your team or pack a revenge killer with Pursuit, as otherwise Latios will continue to come in over and over to Meteor your Pokemon away one at a time. While this is quite heavily centralizing, that is the not the main point here. The point is that even with these Pokemon on your team, Specs Latios can still pose a big threat. I'll expand on why this is so.
For the first category, these are Latios' 'safe switchins', Pokemon such as Bronzong, Blissey, Empoleon, and Cresselia. They can take two Surfs or Draco Meteors comfortably and can so threaten Latios out. The problem is, only Blissey has reliable recovery, meaning the others will not be able to do this repeatedly. Therein lies the other problem. Latias has a plethora of resists to switch in on - resistances to Fire, Grass, Water, and Electric with a base 110 SpD to switch in on them, as well as passable Defense and resistance to Fighting and immunity to Ground. An immunity to Spikes and Toxic Spikes, along with SR neutrality, only helps it. The ease with which it can switch in means it can come in and hit its counters over and over again and weaken them significantly over the course of the battle.
In this list, all but Empoleon hate being Tricked a Choice Specs, and Trick is a standard move on specs Latios, meaning none of them can switch in on it without fear. And Empoleon will not be able to take Specs Thunderbolts, and if the Latios turns out to be a CM Latios instead, Empoleon is once again in big trouble, as its Ice Beams will fail to leave a mark after Latios has a CM under its belt. In short, Latios has no safe switch in. While this is not grounds on which it can be declared uber, when Latios' potential to repeatedly switch in and damage its checks again and again is considered, I feel it holds a lot more weight. Latios continued to be an excellent sweeper on suspect despite the metagame revolving around it. People used Specs Latios on their team not only to gain more experience with it, but because it was one of the best choices availavle. It was not a matter of the opposing teams being ill-prepared to deal with it. Rather, it was Latios being an incredibly difficult Pokemon for them to do so.
Because it can just switch out of anything else and easily come in later on in the game, Pursuit users are the other method of dealing with Latios. No Pursuit user can switch in directly into specs Latios:
Timid Surf vs 252 HP Scizor: 54.4 - 64.2%
- Guaranteed 2HKO.
Timid Surf vs 252 HP Tyranitar: 51.5 - 60.9%
- Guaranteed 2HKO.
If they choose to run more SpD than this, they will fail to KO Latios with their respective Pursuits if it stays in:
252HP/216SpD Careful CB Tyranitar Pursuit vs Latios (non-switching): 71.8 - 84.4%
This Tyranitar will survive 2 Latios Surfs, but then will not guarantee the kill on it.
Weavile is the other Pursuiter in OU, and it has many other problems holding it back, namely SR weakness and complete susceptibility to Scizor, meaning the only reason it would be run would be to take down Latios. It cannot afford to switch into any attacks at all, so the only way it can kill Latios is if it comes in on the revenge kill. That means that Latios has already killed one of your Pokemon, and so its job is complete. If a Pokemon has no reliable switch ins whatsoever, and the only way it can be taken out is to let a Pokemon die and revenge kill it, I feel it should be considered uber under the Offensive Clause.
I consider Latios to also be uber under the Support Clause. Not the Memento set, which is great at supporting in its own right, but actually the Specs set once again. Because of its lack of switchins and reliable answers, Specs Latios is nigh on guaranteed to do big damage to an opposing team member every time the Draco Meteor button is pressed. This creates gaping holes in the opponent's defenses which are incredibly easy to exploit with other Pokemon. Latios' wallbreaking power consistently sets up a situation that makes it considerably easier for other Pokemon to sweep. That is the very definition of uber under Support, and Latios fits it perfectly.
