I know I already talked to you on PS about it, but I figured I would share some thoughts on this here too.I took this team, which consists of 5 gale wings users, and easily laddered from 1050 to #1 on the ladder, going on a 13-0 winstreak. The thing is, all of their usual checks (regirock, zapdos, skarmory, doublade, etc.) can be defeated by the special gale wings users or Rotom-Wash. In the end, the gale wings pokemon whittle down their counters so quickly, that those counters can hardly be considered counters anymore.
While I'm not pushing for a straight-out ban right now, I'm going to try to start some discussion; how do you people check/counter gale wings? Because clearly, if these ladder players had counters, they didn't do their job.
The first problem with the team itself is that it's 5 pokemon relying on 1 pokemon to remove a common check they all have, but that 1 pokemon doesn't have a trapping mechanic. One of the big reasons something like gen 5 dragspam was as good as it was is because magnezone could eliminate every steel type bar heatran, which wasn't hard to wear down. The prominent checks to galewings aren't easily trapped. Rock and Electric types, as well as doublade can't be trapped with magnet pull, and arena trap and shadow tag are banned (outside of gothitelle). Honch's pursuit can still be dangerous if played well, but the checks to gale wings aren't necessarily weak to it, per say. Trapping magnifies how potent any threat can be (look at the Gene-Duggy and Lando-i/TTar/Keldeo cores of gen5), this problem is not present with gale wings, which makes it substantially less threatening (albeit still so).
I'd also like to mention Poison Heal Diancie as another very strong hard counter to gale wings users, as it can handle Braviary, Honchkrow, Staraptor, and Tornadus by itself courtesy of it's fantastic typing that resists their Normal, Flying, and Dark stabs, their uturns, the heat waves, and is neutral to their fighting coverage. It's high mixed bulk means it can take both physical and special gale wings users, and poison heal lets it stay healthy throughout the match. Countering galewings is what it is there for and what it does best, but it is hardly dead weight against teams without it.
In regards to chatot specifically, it's not completely unmanageable, as long as you have a few checks to it if your primary check gets haxed. Common Unaware walls usually have a few opportunities to attack it, as do dedicated special walls, as do faster pranksters or faster priority, as does your primary gale wings check. It also really doesn't like losing it's sash to sand or SR. As long as you don't play with the mindset that you have a "chatot counter" and rather a couple "chatot checks" you will probably do a lot better against it.
Now someone did mention that it's no different than prankster confuse ray which is extremely false. Chatter deals respectable damage with a very good offensive type, and is alot harder to just switch out of the confusion because of that. Chatter works very similar to swagplay, which causes confusion and boosts damage with 1 move (swagger) and deals damage with another (foul play), chatot just switches up the roles of the moves a bit causing confusion and dealing damage with 1 move (chatter) and boosting with another (nasty plot), in essence they both do the same thing, except that you can't just switch out of chatot and make it all go away. Honestly Chatot's move layout is, imo, quite a bit more effective than that of swagplay. The reasoning behind swagplay's ban can very easily be made precedent for a chatot or chatter ban, and I would support it because of this. It's the same thing, promoting play based on luck rather than skill.
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/almostanyability-188245266 - just an extra replay i had on hand for curiosities.
edit: Just to make it clear though, I would be very against a gale wings ban, as it is just a very strong ability, not a broken one.
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