Venusaur + Specs Heatran Sun
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Description:
Yo, MilkyWay. Got your sun team here. This was interesting to tinker with, but I feel like this is ultimately the best version of what I've constructed thus far despite some obvious flaws, but that's pretty much inevitable with sun. My original idea was Dugtrio + Volcarona + Torkoal, but it's relatively annoying to account for the scarfers that Volcarona is RK'd by—that idea was scrapped. I moved onto the idea of Chlorophyll sweepers soon after after I remembered having success with a troll sun team TDK pasted that featured Venu + Victreebell.
I honestly kind of forgot how I built this version, but the starting point here was—I think—Torkoal + Dugtrio + Cresselia. Sun is inherently going to be a very janky playstyle that is going to be strapped for threat coverage, so something capable of massively blanket checking the meta, like Cress, is practically mandatory. From there, I added the best Chlorophyll sweeper, Venusaur, Specs Heatran, and Scarf Terrakion to round out threat coverage. I apologize for this being particularly non-descriptive teambuilding process—this was the product of lots of tossing together a bunch of possible builds and seeing what worked best in theory and in practice. I ultimately decided that the pressure a Chlorophyll sweeper exerted + something to wallbreak with sun up was best to optimize offensive pressure output, so that's why 'Tran + Venu are there mainly.
Ash Gren is a massive headache and your only ground resist is Cress (!!) so be careful there. Stall will also be a major frustration but I don't think a viable sun team could get around that well. My sun teams did well in testing so hopefully it works well for you! Do note that there is a slash in Venusaur's moveset; you'll have to manually change that in the paste before actually importing if you want it to properly register in PS!.
Yo, this is a sweet team and I'm gonna start testing with it as soon as I have some time (gotta relive those BW glory days), but I have a couple of questions about the sets you chose that I was hoping you could answer following your own tests. First, has going max/max Modest on Venusaur instead of using the BW2 standard spread (252 SpA / 180 Spe Timid) netted you enough KOs that a Timid spread wouldn't have to be worth missing out on outrunning the +1 base 108-110 speed bracket? Scarf Gengar in particular looks like a headache for this team, although since its usage is likely gonna drop once Pheromosa gets the boot I'm not sure how much weight to give that. Second issue concerns consistency in relying on Solarbeam Venusaur on a team with a single sun setter that's trying to provide its own hazard control. The extra power's definitely super attractive, but when I worked with other sun builds at the beginning of SM it was difficult to maintain steady enough pressure and keep sun up reliably enough for it to be worth it over Giga Drain's consistency on teams that didn't either have a reliable method of hazard control outside of Torkoal itself or a secondary emergency sun setter (granted, I didn't have Lunar Dance support and performance might have been negatively impacted by being rusty after taking last gen off and not having much time to play recently). Has Solarbeam been consistent enough to be worth the risk for you, and if so, was this on a build with Growth or Earthquake in your fourth moveslot? Lastly, what's the purpose of the SpA and Spe EVs on Torkoal? My first instinct would have been to throw those in one of its defenses (probably SpD), since it's already super slow and hits like a wet paper towel.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Got those questions answered and figured I should repost here so anyone watching sees where I went wrong. From user dk:
"Hey, I don't want to clutter the Teambuilding Workshop thread with non-request/team posts so I'll respond here:
Sun is inherently a janky and extremely matchup based playstyle and the decisions I made with the team were designed to provide as much pressure as possible given the constraints of using a sun team + chlorophyll sweeper. I'll just address the stuff you asked about in order:
1. Venusaur is super weak so modest is absolutely necessary (Sludge only does like 60% to Latios for example which is Venu's best way of hitting it no way in hell can I fit Pursuit support on a sun team)
2. Sun is up a ton because other weather is rare and Torkoal pivots into a surprising amount of things so I can afford to run Solar Beam (I'm also largely just copying what TDK ran on his sun HO); again, Venu is super weak so I feel like the extra power of Beam is necessary as well.
3. I actually never had the opportunity to use EQ or Growth in my testing so IDK about that; honestly Dugtrio is pretty hard to trap a decent player's Tran with, so I'd just use EQ for the sake of RKing Gengar.
4. The Def investment + nature hits a jump point so I just dumped some into SpA for a slightly harder-hitting Plume. You could easily just run max HP max Def but idk. Doesn't really matter."
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