Hello again, everyone!!! It's been a bit! : D
As per usual, this post will be an end-of-submission-phase feedback post and a
roughly 24-hour warning for the current submission phase, in order to give time to respond to the feedback in question.
In case anyone missed it,
a handful of important announcements on things that have happened since my last post
(some of which may be more than obvious than others) -
-
Slate 39 (
) is live and has been for quite a while!! Congratulations again to
jazzmat and
KeroseneZanchu on their respective wins!!
- In response to the recent issues with the teambuilder cleanup and side formats, we decided it would probably be better to have side formats working and the teambuilder temporarily down than the other way around. Still hoping to get the teambuilder back to normal sooner rather than later, but until then,
Mix and M4A currently has the only working teambuilder and you can use that for all of your building needs
(it appears exactly as main M4A's is supposed to; it's actually just a problem with side formats inheriting the code that makes it so only one of them can work at a time, because of how DH is coded, and I have no way to make it prioritize main M4A myself x:)
- We haven't gotten to do the poll on balance changes yet, so we will plan on properly introducing and polling those as soon as possible! I will try to help to get that done now that I've gotten through the vetoes. C:
and uhh, it sounds like we might have one or two more Pokémon to nerf than the last time I announced this, so it's good that we waited! XP
Onward to the vetoes now!!
If I don't mention your sub in this post, it's probably fine balance-wise and you're not required to make any changes! It doesn't mean I forgot!
Also, independently of vetoes, always consider having as few movepool additions as possible! We don't have hard rules on these, but if you have even five or six, you're probably doing something wrong!
- I know I'm only specifically meant to comment on problematic stuff, but please know that I am super on board with these three conceptually : D
That said, one thing that jumps out as concerning--
so the thing about Guzzlord is that it has 223 HP and very low base defenses, which makes it so even small buffs to Defense and Special Defense go
much longer than you'd expect - this is a really easy mistake to make, but I am noticing that this is probably a lot bulkier than you intended it to be and I think it goes too far
For example, this Mega Guzzlord, with only 101 Defense, ranks as the fourth-bulkiest Pokémon of all time uninvested on the physical side
(following Eternamax which kinda doesn't count, Zygarde-C and Mega Steelix, and narrowly edging out Mega Aggron, Avalugg, Melmetal, et cetera),
while having just as much bulk on the special side...
... where it is also the fourth-bulkiest Pokémon of all time, following Eternamax, Blissey and Chansey and edging out Regice, Zygarde-C, Giratina, Lugia, Ho-Oh and so on
In conjunction with the type change, which is
super flavorful and very fun but also one of the most optimal type combinations possible and a
massive upgrade from Dark/Dragon, I am afraid this is probably very broken defensively :')
I am totally on board with Corrosion + Purify here as a concept and I would not mind the type change you have, but I think this is very much a clear veto as it is, unfortunately;;
I would definitely recommend much lower Defense and Special Defense in general (a lot of other subs are hanging in the 83 to 73 range, while also trying to leave a clearer weakness by having non-equal defenses rather than being the same/83 on both sides - these might be good reference points?), and you might want at least one of its defenses to be lower than the average sub if you are going Dark/Poison, although that part is up for debate!
On a related note, while I don't
object to Dark/Poison Guzzlord on flavor grounds and I am okay with you leaving it as-is, I've actually been thinking about Dragon-type Corrosion lately myself, so I thought I might slightly nudge you back in the direction of keeping it Dark/Dragon instead! O:
This part is totally up to you and is
not related to the veto - I just think it could be really cool to have a Pokémon with STAB Draco Meteor that has such a unique way to punish Steels, which might be something you hadn't considered since it seems so obvious to make a Corrosion user Poison-type.
You could also probably get away with slightly more bulk on a Dark/Dragon-type than you can on a Dark/Poison-type because it's a lot more exploitable.
Hi! This is prrrobably allowed and not a veto, but just using this opportunity to share an opinion since I wasn't around to discuss this with you on the Discord -
uh, so one thing I would usually try to avoid is having a "lookup table" like this as part of an Ability? I feel like it's a lot less intuitive to have an Ability like this with potentially four completely different effects depending on the circumstances. I would probably be more comfortable with it if it were more like Gravitational Pull, which has the
same effect as the hazard it removes (this one could be more like an offensive Gravitational Pull - compounding extra effects and extra damage on the target of its move when it makes contact, that is).
As an alternative, do you think you could at least match the effect of each hazard more closely to its original effect, like making Toxic Spikes cure poison specifically, making both Stealth Rock and Spikes heal by the same amount that they would damage the user
(currently Stealth Rock is healing Guzzlord twice as much as it should compared to Spikes, and it isn't accounting for type effectiveness while you have Spikes accounting for layers)? I think that kind of consistency is important to making the Ability easy to grasp.
Or uh, speaking of Gravitational Pull, Guzzlord is based on a black hole and no one appears to be using that, so just using Gravitational Pull is also on the table depending how you feel about that! but I respect the differences between your goals and that, so it might be a longshot - I just thought it was a flavorfully cool option that had a lot in common with your sub that you may have overlooked!
Hi! Uh, so this is one I wasn't totally sure how to feel about on account of Articuno's inherent drawbacks, so I conferred with other members of the council to make sure I didn't make an unreasonable judgment, but we agreed it would be unhealthy to allow this - instant 100% and status curing makes it unreasonably hard to break this or make progress against it once it's in, and it seems probable that it would just be degenerate and frustrating to deal with.
(Weather is not an effective drawback because it's not something every matchup will prepare - a team simply either has weather up all the time or doesn't, so relying on weather as counterplay makes this a matchup fish at best.)
It might help if you tried to justify it more or gave more detail on why you think this kind of Pokémon would be beneficial for a metagame, but I am not inclined to allow it as it is; the Ability seems in some ways fundamentally hard to work with, and the binary of "KO in one move or not at all" is not really great for the game?
Okay, so this
is not a veto and is mostly just a minor thing
(consider it just like anyone else giving you feedback! it just happens to be in the veto post because I like having stuff in one place P:), but I am
moderately and lightly opposed to these for reasons other than balance?
To me, it seems kind of awkward and unrealistic to introduce Abilities themed after stealing items -
almost the same effect as a regular one - but elevated to a much more complex effect
specifically because Megas can't hold items. It feels like, if the primary purpose of making a custom Ability is only to circumvent the innate limitations Mega Evolutions are meant to respect and to execute a concept that would be substantially simpler on any non-Mega, it's maybe something that's not right for the scope of M4A in the first place and would probably just be better off in another mod?
For comparison, the last similar Ability that won
(Forgery) has some awkward hard-coding in place to work
(most people are surprised to learn that, like Disguise or many similar form-changing Abilities, the Ability is hard-coded to Mega Zoroark, can't be copied or suppressed, and doesn't work on other Pokémon in AAA-like formats - this is also kind of an optically weird break from canon precedent), and the way that Ability worked was... debated at length after it won for not behaving realistically enough or respecting the behaviors of Mega Stones, too - held item-based Megas are a concept I was kind of hoping not to let through a second time :')
StarFalcon555 in particular: for an idea similar to yours that doesn't have the same problems, you might be interested in voting for
jazzmat's Guzzlord (I can vouch that they had it on the Discord well in advance! it's not based on yours or anything), which also plays with the idea of eating other Pokémon's items but does it without "holding" (or "pseudo-holding") them, instead focusing on consumable effects.
Again, it feels inappropriate to
disallow these while another Ability like it has been let through and hasn't been changed, but this is one of those cases where past precedent is less "proof that it's okay" and more "something we've learned from?" so I would lightly encourage you to reconsider this if you can, but I understand if you don't and there's no real pressure! They both seem fine in terms of balance and playability, just less so in terms of optics and realism cx
HUH I love this actually and the name is really cute .w.
This is a really creative way to recontextualize Guzzlord's existing flavor and make the most of it mechanically - I am super on board O:
There is actually nothing wrong with this at all, but the one thing I thought might be worth adding: I think it would be okay to tone down the added damage from Spikes a bit! Either making them do 1.25x times as much as usual like Ground moves or... even just, like, doubling the damage taken would be okay - I was just struck when you said you meant for it to take a full 75% from three layers of Spikes when the most regular Spikes can do is 25%
(they go 1/8 -> 1/6 -> 1/4, which you could replicate with 1/4 -> 1/3 -> 1/2 rather than 1/4 -> 2/4 -> 3/4). This is totally your choice and not at all a problem either way!! I just wanted to put it out there in case it was useful input C:
Ack, I can't allow this because Articuno has Sheer Cold! While Sheer Cold is banned in standard M4A OU, it is conventionally legal in official formats like BSS and VGC, which means two things: first, Articuno would obviously be broken in our VGC format and we'd have to ban it there without a doubt, but second and perhaps more importantly, it's something we can safely say
would be completely off the table for an official Mega because it would be comically overpowered in all formats, and that makes it an
optics problem (we abide by in-game rules, like not raising HP or always doing +100 BST or not having stats over 255 248, even in cases where Showdown or our own formats could get around them - a stat of 270 is completely possible for us, but it wouldn't be possible for an official Mega, so we don't allow it).
Sorry if this is disappointing, but there's really no way around it and it's something we've consistently disallowed before for the same reasons - No Guard is completely off the table for anything with OHKO moves x:
I am pretty uncomfortable allowing Gutless as a concept because it's a combination of so many other Abilities - Poison Heal
(already an incredible Ability in its own right, if one that takes more skill to execute properly on a Mega), but an upgrade that sometimes becomes Guts and Quick Feet when Poison Heal itself wouldn't work, and with residual healing that can get
very out of hand and become unreasonable to deal with if Articuno manages to get badly poisoned by switching in on a Toxic.
You will definitely have to change this, and the simplest thing would be to give it just one of the aforementioned Abilities that already exist - Guts, Quick Feet
or Poison Heal, depending on what's most important to you about it; it seems like Poison Heal is the one that has the most to do with your intended role?
I'm having a little bit of a hard time understanding what makes you feel Articuno is the Pokémon for this anyway, but that's at least something I would be willing to allow, while this is really not
Uh, two things!
First is that I'm not allowing Eternabeam on optics (flavor) grounds - the move is so fundamentally specific to Eternatus that even its in-game description is simply "This is Eternatus's most powerful attack in its original form," so there is no way it could be justified on any other Pokémon.
But second, I'm really not willing to allow this anyway because it's...
incredibly implausible to me that this concept is workable - Truant overcompensates far too heavily for its stats
(which are not that impressive compared to base Guzzlord with a better item, especially with the massive cut to Defense), and there's basically no way I can see us being able to buff it into relevance after the fact through balance changes without changing its Ability.
Basically, the concept revolving around Truant makes me not want to entertain the concept; Truant on a Mega is almost never a good idea, and Guzzlord is definitely not a good time for it - I just don't think that this is something we could allow in good faith.
LAST THING-- for a handful of
Guzzlord:
Last thing!! Ultra Beasts have prime-numbered stats, which I know is challenging for some people to work with!
I am always happy to make suggestions for people who need help, and I went over the subs so far to offer minor corrections where I noticed people had composite-numbered stats.
I won't veto these, but I would like to reserve the right up front to fix these in non-intrusive ways myself if they win rather than having to leave them exactly as they were submitted, in case people don't have a chance to edit!
-
Clasmia: Guzzlord's Attack is not prime! The smallest change would be to make it 149 (+2) and to lower its Special Defense to 71 (-2) to compensate.
-
StarFalcon555: Guzzlord's stats are not prime! The smallest change would be 127 Attack (+6) / 113 Special Attack (-4) / 61 Speed (-2), which changes all three from composite numbers to the nearest prime numbers.
(Its Defense and Special Defense are already prime.)
-
ARandomPerson: Guzzlord's stats are not prime! The smallest change would be 127 Attack (+4), 127 Special Attack (-2) and 47 Speed (-2), which changes all three from composite numbers to the nearest prime numbers.
(Its Defense and Special Defense are already prime.)
-
depressed lion: Guzzlord's Attack and Special Attack are not prime! The smallest change would be 127 Attack (+6), 113 Special Attack (-4) and... uh, I guess the last two points would come out of 41 Speed (-2) if that's okay with you!
-
DarkFairy: Aaah shoot I feel bad because I know you were very purposeful with all of these stats :') but Guzzlord's Speed is not prime!
There are some UBs that make slight exceptions for Speed specifically because it's much more specific than the other stats, so I'm okay leaving it as-is if you prefer! That said, if you want to make Speed prime, the smallest changes would be either 89 Speed (-2), which you could put into Attack or Special Attack (both 107 -> 109), or 97 Speed (+6), which you could actually take out of any one other stat (either of the 107s -> 101, 73 -> 67 or 67 -> 61 all work) or split across them to minimize the difference (either of the 107s -> 103, 73 -> 71). C:
-
XzvzX: Your Guzzlord is most likely vetoed either way, but in case you make any changes, I thought I should let you know that its stats also aren't prime! The smallest changes that come to mind would probably be to give it 149 Attack (+8), 113 Special Attack (-4), 101 Special Defense (-2) and 61 Speed (-2), or you could do the same to Special Attack and Special Defense and give it 139 Attack and 71 Speed.
(Its Special Defense is already prime either way, but taking two points out of it makes it much easier to fix Attack, Special Attack and Speed, all of which are composite numbers.)
I believe that should be everything!! Can't wait for voting : D
As usual, submissions will close and voting should begin in 24 hours or a bit later, and the council will make a compilation of all of the legal entries then! If you've gotten feedback here that you want to address, it would be best to do that as soon as possible with that in mind. C:
(As usual, though: no worries if you can't quite make it by then! If you decide to make changes based on this, then as long as you can do that before voting closes
just leave enough time for people to vote for you! and please make sure to check which council member made the compilation post for that Pokémon and get in touch with them, such as by pinging them or DMing them here or on Discord, we'll be happy to edit the compilation to include any amendments you made!)
Bonzai Mode:
BANZAI Mode (stat changes from Bonsai/from base form):
