Does anyone else find it near impossible to construct a team that deals with stall, bp, and webs at the same time while still not getting blown up by more convential teams? Im being forced to run stupid shit like haze fini to try to circumvent losing straight up to bp without making my team ass against other stuff. Taunt is actually useless vs bp via espeon and all it takes is one wrong read and you lose. Its super frustrating. Like webs/stall at least the counterplay is found on decent sets like magnet koko and shed lele that can fit on teams and actually get work done not playing the mu they are designed to counter. But its like either you have the out with bp or you dont. And it wasnt too much of a issue at lower ladder but for whatever reason the 1600-1800 range is filled with these trash bp players :/
Tldr; anyone who have sucess with making solid teams against all the playstyles? I didnt say beat because thats not entirely feasible but I could make teams in oras that could outplay anything by the end of the meta
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/baton-pass-in-sm-ou.3604290/ <-- bp has been discussed for the past week or so in policy review. I wouldn't worry too much since it is certainly going to be taken care of before World Cup starts, which is going to be within the next few weeks.
To make this post something of substance I'll weigh in on the starmie/hazard remover convo that's been going on for a bit. Yeah, I'm gonna have to agree with my bug avi bro
bludz on this one. Although spinning is objectively better than defogging, the two "best" spinners are either countered by a ton of the common setters (excadrill) or just lose a ton of momentum/utility from giving up some other move (starmie). I'll focus specifically on starmie since exca is just god awful in this meta and I've honestly only ever built one team where i felt that exca fulfilled the niche that I needed, and that is also a team that I wouldn't bring to a serious game lol.
I'm referring to the life orb/water-z set w/ spin in this post as it's really the only reason to use it. The problem with starmie is that, in order to keep the hazards off, you want to be able to pressure as many setters as possible which is difficult to accomplish due to a classic case of 4mss. I honesty believe 4mss kind of doesn't exist as much as people say on certain mons, simply because all move set choices are based off of the team's needs more so than the meta itself, but holy fuck starmie has this shit BAD lol. The niche it has over gren is that it has that similar insane coverage and can check, or counter, scarf keld(as well as spinning of course). However in order to consistently keep keld, and other waters mie can check, at bay you need recover, which means you only have two slots left for offensive moves and one of them has to be able to do something to said waters. This just leaves mie way way too open to giving in free switch ins to a lot of mons in the meta with this lack of coverage. The biggest problem that arises is that ferro, one of the most common defensive pivots and hazard setters atm for the more common builds, can switch in freely and set the hazards back up, OR you run hp fire and now can't even touch keldeo lol. I honestly feel like starmie may have a better niche in using a 3 atk + recover or AoA set as an alternative for gren if you need that offensive, fast water, but also need a strong check to scarf keld (and most variants of protean gren since most do not have dark pulse, but gunk does like 83 max so lmao, you can still soft check it if healthy tho and fire off an analytic boosted attack). Sad that the best spinner in the meta may have sets that are better without having spin lol...
This is basically why I feel that starmie is really only viable on more offensive teams. It's just easier to drop recover and just abuse it's coverage, saving the spin for crucial points in the game when hazards absolutely need to be removed. The loss of recover isn't
toooo bad (still kinda sucks tho see next sentence) on faster paced teams compared to just about any other build since you're gonna rely on offensive pressure to handle threats, rather than having a switch in for everything. The loss of recover is ass though regardless since having a mon that completely counters scarf keld on offense would be lit, but whatever consistent hazard removal is so hard to come by that you kinda have to work with what you have.
Unsurprisingly, Starmie experiences similar issues to spikes gren in this meta where ,a lot of times, you would just rather have an extra coverage move to smack damn near the entire tier with their amazing coverage + speed. Both can also be pressured to do their jobs (spiking/spinning) because of their frailty in certain scenarios as well which is also annoying af, but hey at least when gren gets spikes up there's a better chance they'll stay up as opposed to starmie keeping them off lol. Anyways, I honestly would just use a defogger 99% of the time especially now with the increase of mew and zapdos usage(altho 3 atk + roost zap is very dirty and far better than defog). Starmie is, again, honestly only useful on more offensively oriented builds where you only need to spin like once in the late/mid game for volc or something. In doing this you can fully abuse mie's coverage + analytic by predicting around the opponents responses to the "obvious" spin. The recover + 2 atk set can be used on certain builds where letting in whatever can come into your coverage isn't that big of a deal, but I don't think this is a niche that will be too common and is generally just a momentum drain.
As for other spinners, the only one that I can even see doing anything is forre, but it does not look too appealing at first glance :/ Haven't used it or even thought about using it so maybe it's a hidden gem (Most definitely is garbage though lmao).
Edit: Also can echo S18 here and say that Pinsir is a god abuse that boi
