Metagame Terastallization Tiering Discussion [ UPDATE POST #1293]

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LoseToRU? said:
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I've played around 700 games of Gen 9 pre-Home Terra meta.
-and I've just played my last game of this meta

Essentially, what pushes Terra over the edge is the 50/50's it forces.

Basically- the higher I get on the ladder, the more it comes down to a guessing game- a literal coin flip.

If our goal is to try and make this game as competitive as possible, then we want to limit these scenarios
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I think the thing people forget is that even in a situation like this, while the choice between staying Ghost and going Dark is basically a prediction, there was also a series of predictions which led up to this exact moment, which even started in the teambuilder. Your team did not have any safe answers to deal with a boosting tera mon the way your opponent did. Your decision to go into an extremely offensive team meant that should one of your Pokemon fail to KO for whatever reason, you would have been boned. You did not account for the fact one of your choiced mons might be turned into setup fodder and you're choosing exclusively to blame the last 50/50 rather than the series of decisions you made which led to the game coming down to a 50/50.
Choiced mons have literally always been about prediction. You predicted wrong and lost. There are legitimate grievances to be had regarding terastelization but this is not one of them.
 
Skyuchi said:
I think the thing people forget is that even in a situation like this, while the choice between staying Ghost and going Dark is basically a prediction, there was also a series of predictions which led up to this exact moment, which even started in the teambuilder. Your team did not have any safe answers to deal with a boosting tera mon the way your opponent did. Your decision to go into an extremely offensive team meant that should one of your Pokemon fail to KO for whatever reason, you would have been boned. You did not account for the fact one of your choiced mons might be turned into setup fodder and you're choosing exclusively to blame the last 50/50 rather than the series of decisions you made which led to the game coming down to a 50/50.
Choiced mons have literally always been about prediction. You predicted wrong and lost. There are legitimate grievances to be had regarding terastelization but this is not one of them.
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So basically, your implication is that this meta invalidates all but the absolute strongest of HO teams when it comes to frail offense? Because a team that prediction-reliant cannot truly be viable if what you say is in fact the case. And this is somehow a good thing? And every negative aspect of Tera mentioned in the post you’re responding to can be explained away by saying ‘skill issue’? Yikes.
 
Beaf Cultist said:
So basically, your implication is that this meta invalidates all but the absolute strongest of HO teams when it comes to frail offense? Because a team that prediction-reliant cannot truly be viable if what you say is in fact the case. And this is somehow a good thing? And every negative aspect of Tera mentioned in the post you’re responding to can be explained away by saying ‘skill issue’? Yikes.
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That's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is if you play a choice banded Chien-Pao and then lose because you predicted the wrong attack, that's something that has literally always been around.
Choice banded hyper offense has always been mediocre anyway. There's a reason Life Orb is usually better.
Consider a situation in which Chien-Pao had Life Orb, and after failing to OHKO with Crunch, proceeded to use Ice Shard. Dragapult would be so weak after that anything capable of outspeeding it would have secured the win, but rather than something reliable and capable of doing that, he had what I'm going to assume is another setup mon.
The opponent stopped his sweep by using priority moves. Priority moves are king right now. Tera fighting technician Breloom is capable of doing amazing things. You need to adapt.
 
Skyuchi said:
That's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is if you play a choice banded Chien-Pao and then lose because you predicted the wrong attack, that's something that has literally always been around.
Choice banded hyper offense has always been mediocre anyway. There's a reason Life Orb is usually better.
Consider a situation in which Chien-Pao had Life Orb, and after failing to OHKO with Crunch, proceeded to use Ice Shard. Dragapult would be so weak after that anything capable of outspeeding it would have secured the win, but rather than something reliable and capable of doing that, he had what I'm going to assume is another setup mon.
The opponent stopped his sweep by using priority moves. Priority moves are king right now. Tera fighting technician Breloom is capable of doing amazing things. You need to adapt.
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Why are you even assuming the chien pao was choice banded?

252 Atk Chien-Pao Crunch vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Dragapult: 78-93 (24.6 - 29.3%) -- 99.9% chance to 4HKO

Sword of ruin isn't factored in and doesn't work on the calc, but this is an unboosted crunch vs pure dark dragapult. Sword of Ruin probably brings it up to the 35% damage that we saw on turn 29 of the aforementioned replay. So this doesn't have anything to do with mediocre sets on HO, this is purely a case of tera flipping the outcome of a game because of 1 incorrect guess. The opponent's team wasn't significantly more prepared for the meta or more well built than chiefgreenleaf's, who btw has played 700 games in a little over 2 weeks. This was just tera guesswork deciding another game.
 
Nish the Great said:
Most HO teams avoid choice items bc losing momentum will basically always give your opponent a free kill
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They most certainly do not. Set up sweepers do not run choice for obvious reasons, but HO always run atleast 1 scarfer and 1 band/specs mon for the power. Very few mons are running Life Orb, even the sweepers, because the chip damage is not worth it most of the time unless you have reliable recovery, which is nerfed this gen anyways.
 
Nish the Great said:
Most HO teams avoid choice items bc losing momentum will basically always give your opponent a free kill
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The recoil of life orb has a major trade off due to recoil which is even worse in meta with priority and hazard stacking(if you say "just remove the hazards" it is harder in practice in this meta") even some mons weak to stealth rocks use boots rather than an item that increases any offensive attack
 
Srn said:
Why are you even assuming the chien pao was choice banded?

252 Atk Chien-Pao Crunch vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Dragapult: 78-93 (24.6 - 29.3%) -- 99.9% chance to 4HKO

Sword of ruin isn't factored in and doesn't work on the calc, but this is an unboosted crunch vs pure dark dragapult. Sword of Ruin probably brings it up to the 35% damage that we saw on turn 29 of the aforementioned replay. So this doesn't have anything to do with mediocre sets on HO, this is purely a case of tera flipping the outcome of a game because of 1 incorrect guess. The opponent's team wasn't significantly more prepared for the meta or more well built than chiefgreenleaf's, who btw has played 700 games in a little over 2 weeks. This was just tera guesswork deciding another game.
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Oh wow actually using the calc, it looks like you're right. He wasn't running choice band on this, which only brings up even more questions than it answers.
And again - had he ran life orb with more priority moves, he would have won.
I don't care how many games anyone plays in 2 weeks if they don't adapt to the meta.
 
Skyuchi said:
Oh wow actually using the calc, it looks like you're right. He wasn't running choice band on this, which only brings up even more questions than it answers.
And again - had he ran life orb with more priority moves, he would have won.
I don't care how many games anyone plays in 2 weeks if they don't adapt to the meta.
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Genuinely the level of snark coming from someone advocating for life orb chien pao is astounding.
 
Reviews2D said:
I have seen few run life orb but most common I have seen is probably boots.
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He has a magic bouncer and used it twice throughout the game to switch into a hazard setter and threaten it out. In this situation there's no reason to run boots and life orb is more than affordable.
But again, the bottom line - This is a priority metagame. More of what happens is out of your control than the last generation. You can 100% guarantee something dies regardless of how many free set-up turns it got if you just kill it before it is capable of hitting you with a +1 or +2 attack. Extreme Speed Dragonite is probably the best sweeper/revenge killer in the game. Breloom secures a kill on just about anything that Chein-Pao fails to kill.
The entire reason Palafin was busted was because of a priority move.
If you are running a HO team without using priority, you are leaving it up to coin flips.
 
fluff!! said:
But it's not how it works in random battles on cartridge. If we were to follow VGC rules, then you would have a pokepaste of your opponent's team at the start of every ladder game then, no?
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Can't you have short messages like in XY PPS? You could post your Tera types in there if so.

Also tbh having an Open Team Sheets tournament would be interesting.
 
Beaf Cultist said:
So basically, your implication is that this meta invalidates all but the absolute strongest of HO teams when it comes to frail offense?
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No, HO teams inherently have limited defensive options in exchange for greater versatility in offensive win-cons and pressure. HO teams will often rely on fragile defensive options such as priority, screens and items like sash/choice scarf to respond to offensive pressure. Otherwise, HO teams will rely on predictions and good positioning of their offensive pieces to establish their own offensive pressure first and force the opponent to play defensively. Due to this, HO teams (especially versus other HO or frail offense teams) can easily lose games due to the loss of key offensive/defensive pieces which can result from anything from an incorrect lead to a misprediction on tera. Let's take the HO vs HO replay mentioned above. In this game at turn 1 "ATKerrr" positioned their chi-yu to take offensive pressure early, ChiefGreenLeaf did not account for this and their team lacked an actual chi-yu switch-in (they had to lead with something which could threaten chi-yu) and was immediately forced to sacrifice a potential offensive/defensive option (Iron hands). Losing iron hands may not seem like a big deal here, but as we can see from the end game (turns 29-31), iron hands would have been perfectly able to tank any +1 hit from dragapult ( +1 252+ Atk Dragon Fang Dragapult Dragon Darts (2 hits) vs. 252 HP / 4 Def Iron Hands: 288-338 (56.2 - 66%) -- approx. 2HKO ) and revenge kill it. Aside from a healthy iron hands, Cheif's team had no real counterplay to dragapult if it had the opportunity to setup even if it was a more standard tera type such as ghost. Iron hands also had great offensive pressure, forcing mons like corviknight and chi-yu to switch if it caught them on a free switch/ double switch.

I want to stress that HO teams will naturally have poor matchups or be unable to respond to set-up pressure (e.g. sticky web vs a trick room team or a DD dragapult). Poor positioning/failure to keep your useful offensive/defensive options healthy will cause an early loss, this is not new. Teams which lack reliable defensive options for set-up pressure (e.g. most HO teams) will naturally be forced to rely on preventing the enemy setting up in the first place, or relying saving health on potential defensive wincons in order to prevent suckerpunch 50/50s or tera 50/50s. If HO teams where the only defensive option is indeedee psychic terrain fail reliably cover the rare sucker punch DD dragapult if it has tera available, then so be it, either re-build the team to have a better defensive options such as priority, screens or hazard stack or use a more balanced build with an unaware mon ( skeledirge (with tera) or dondozo) or use a reliable phazer like ting-lu.
 
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Nish the Great said:
Most HO teams avoid choice items bc losing momentum will basically always give your opponent a free kill
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Yes and no. Having a scarfer on HO to clean late game or to prevent an opposing sweeper from snowballing has been a typically good idea, Moxie and things like beast boost are traditionally good on scarfers.

Choice Band/specs similarly can be relevant damage output over LO and the extra longevity can be useful.

Generally , it's nice to use choiced mons with a pivot move , trick to do away with the choiced item and keep momentum, or a snowballing effect.

But generally yes , LO in the past does see use in HO to keep flexibility, and you generally don't want more than 2 choiced mons on a traditional / frail HO.
 
Skyuchi said:
He has a magic bouncer and used it twice throughout the game to switch into a hazard setter and threaten it out. In this situation there's no reason to run boots and life orb is more than affordable.
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Have you played SV OU? Because assuming a MBouncer is enough to keep hazards off the field in this meta is a wild assumption to make. Every viable team needs to be triple prepared for hazards; boots spam is legitimately a viable build style for both offense and fat. Is it really everyone else who’s wrong here?
 
Skyuchi said:
He has a magic bouncer and used it twice throughout the game to switch into a hazard setter and threaten it out. In this situation there's no reason to run boots and life orb is more than affordable.
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kid named gholdengo reading this post

To make this not a one liner, saying you don't need hazard removal because you have magic bounce is just ignorant, as if hazard users can only ever try to get their hazards up once and never again. Not to mention, again, both magic bounce users get whopped by gholdengo, the guy who keeps the hazard in question up. And I also don't see how "more of what happens is out of your control" is supposed to be a compelling argument to keep something around.

Edit to stay more relevant to tera discussion: I don't see the purpose in keeping this around. The way I see it, it's a choice between banning the best abusers that would have been fine otherwise (moon, espathra, annihlape, etc) or just banning the mechanic. Not to mention I feel its ban is inevitable with home coming around and adding even more busted tera abusers (eleki) so why not just rip the band aid off now. The 50/50s tera forces are much more luck based than the other 50/50s that come with the territory of competitive pokemon.
 
Harmless said:
kid named gholdengo reading this post

To make this not a one liner, saying you don't need hazard removal because you have magic bounce is just ignorant, as if hazard users can only ever try to get their hazards up once and never again. Not to mention, again, both magic bounce users get whopped by gholdengo, the guy who keeps the hazard in question up. And I also don't see how "more of what happens is out of your control" is supposed to be a compelling argument to keep something around.
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Yeah, no, I'll go out on a limb and make the declarative statement - if you're running a hyper offense team and have a magic bounce user, it is objectively bad to then throw heavy-duty boots on one of your sweepers.
But I'm not saying Tera should be kept, I'm just saying the argument of "Tera forces a 50/50 therefore it should be banned" is not a valid argument. What *IS* a valid argument is "Tera makes setup sweepers insanely good, especially when combined with Cyclizar, and not even Unaware can save you when it's an Espartha".
 
Skyuchi said:
Oh wow actually using the calc, it looks like you're right. He wasn't running choice band on this, which only brings up even more questions than it answers.
And again - had he ran life orb with more priority moves, he would have won.
I don't care how many games anyone plays in 2 weeks if they don't adapt to the meta.
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Ok ok look, I'm not a very good player so I might be a fucking talking as if I'm the stupidest person alive but...

...isn't the overdependence on priority moves to stand a chance in this metagame a bad thing? I feel like being forced to run at least one, sometimes more, priority move on every team constrains building a fair bit and makes the game less fun to play. Just my 2 cents though.
 
The craziest thing to me is tera has started to become more predictable over time especially higher on the ladder, we're seeing a lot of espathra, dragonite, roaring moon, etc just repeat the same typings and essentially 'meta' them.

..and its still bullshit lol. Tera pushes all of them over the edge when they're likely fine mons without it. Dragonite turning normal removes a ton of revenge kill potential, Espathra requires less setup to sweep since free STAB on dazzling gleam lets it muscle more dark types it would need an extra turn of setup to deal with (plus removes its shadow sneak, first impression, and sucker punch weakness), and we're all familiar with roaring moon being really powerful with flying typing. Even dragapult with its double stab is a massive issue rn that needs looked at. We literally see dominant archetypes because of it, and threats being pushed to S tier, its overcentralizing as fuck. Even Z moves of gen 7 didn't wipe out stall because walls capable of absorbing Z moves held a lot of value and only had to do it once in a whole game, when tera happens either they just win the game or they muscle through everything and hit harder, we're not soaking 1 z-move we're soaking 'rest of the game'.

There shouldn't be a compromise solution, either its broken or its not, and with the more common and well known teras dominating I don't believe showing types ever fixes this from needing to ban 20+ threats. I do think tera can have some creativity in its uses in practice, as well as certain bait moves, which showing types would just take away that creativity and skill in building it while never addressing why it needs to go.

RN Many are just attached to a fresh new mechanic and are grasping for straws to keep it. Either keep it, or ban it, but if we vote for keeping it, its going to eventually get tossed out when we have to retest a fuck ton of other things we banned cause of it half way through the generation.

Bugboy said:
If anyone is still questioning whether showing tera on team preview is breaking cartridge mechanics or “bending over backwards” to accommodate for the mechanic, I’d recommend checking out the vgc tournament going on right now. They are using open team sheets prior to battle, meaning full knowledge of tera types. You can see how smooth and effortless this practice is.
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You can also see thats VGC and an in-person tournament which allows evasion, double sleep, and a bunch of other broken shit. What goes on in VGC is irrelevant to us.
 
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Athyestic said:
Ok ok look, I'm not a very good player so I might be a fucking talking as if I'm the stupidest person alive but...

...isn't the overdependence on priority moves to stand a chance in this metagame a bad thing? I feel like being forced to run at least one, sometimes more, priority move on every team constrains building a fair bit and makes the game less fun to play. Just my 2 cents though.
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I'm not a stall expert by any means but I believe stall can run a phazer in combination with an unaware mon (eg Skeledirge and Ting-Lu) and be mostly fine. It's just an offensive thing where it's priority or bust.
 
As much as it pains me to say this, after observing the meta game evolve a little bit, I think tera needs to go. It sucks cause I really like this mechanic and am having fun with it, but it is not healthy for the metagame. The biggest issue, imo, is the way that offensive threats defensively terastilize. This makes it really hard to stop them, especially with pokemon like Espathra running around. The meta game is too offensive (can't believe I, a VGC player, am saying this) and there need to be a way to slow some of these pokemon like Chi-yu, Espathra, and Gholdengo down. I would like to see a tera OM or something so there is that option, but for the sake of standard Smogon play, no tera is the healthiest option.
 
Gondre19Wedj said:
As much as it pains me to say this, after observing the meta game evolve a little bit, I think tera needs to go. It sucks cause I really like this mechanic and am having fun with it, but it is not healthy for the metagame. The biggest issue, imo, is the way that offensive threats defensively terastilize. This makes it really hard to stop them, especially with pokemon like Espathra running around. The meta game is too offensive (can't believe I, a VGC player, am saying this) and there need to be a way to slow some of these pokemon like Chi-yu, Espathra, and Gholdengo down. I would like to see a tera OM or something so there is that option, but for the sake of standard Smogon play, no tera is the healthiest option.
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In all fairness, chi-yu and espathra are probably going to be banned regardless of whether tera is or not. chi-yu is just an unholy bundle of stats. The combination of speed boost + calm mind + stored power would still be broken, especially as long as shed tail remains in the format, even if priority being more reliable would help. While I won't pretend tera doesn't exacerbate the issue, I think its fair to say tera isn't the main reason these pokemon are broken.

Gholdengo really isn't a problem tera user tbh, he has a lot of other problems going on but i've always found him to be average with tera at best. His natural dual typing is already so fantastic giving it up sucks, and even with nasty plot he doesn't have the speed or bulk to get more then 1-2 kills before dying. The most he can do with it usually is cheese out a single kill on a pokemon before dying himself, and in my experience giving up the tera advantage isn't worth that unless it was a reaaaaaally problematic pokemon for your team otherwise.
 
Outright ban
I see Terastallization as such a creative mechanic and also adds a lot of creativity to the team builder, also how the meta game will stabilize and everymon will only have 1-3 good tera types, making it easier to predict and easier to build. Basically, banning it unnecessary.

Restriction
I don't feel as if the mechanic is over powered anyways and it has never felt unfair, so i dont think any action should be taken anyways but ill still give my thoughts on the options.

Showing Tera type at Team Preview
This option is very interesting, it changes how tera plays completely & it changes the surprise factor that it holds so dear right now. It also may reveal sets of pokemon, or at the very least show if they are running tera blast. Thought i did say how it changes the surprise factor meaning that you could fake your tera type to trick your opponent into thinking you're running something you're not. At the end of the day i don't think it solves anything

Limiting the amount of Pokemon on any given team that have access to possibly Terastallize during a battle
There's two ways to go about this, one where just in the team builder you can only give one of you're pokemon a tera type and the rest just won't be able to Terastallize, which would feel bad to play but you have to play like your opponent can tera anymon so it would just make the game worse, or somehow showing your opponent which pokemon can Terastallize, either only the first pokemon in the team builder can Terastallize or there will be some sort of indicator that would be similar to 'showing tera type at team preview'. this option feel the same as 'showing tera type at team preview' and, again, at the end of the day it doesn't solve anything.

Limiting Tera typing to previously existing STAB types
This will just help the already good offensive teams be better than the defensive ones, only in niche cases will it be used defensively now and many offensive mons will still use it, also this is basically banning tera blast except in a case where the pokemon doesn't have a good stab move.

Banning Tera Blast
Tera Blast is just a restricted, more powerful, hidden power, and that wasn't banned? Like tera blast is different as in when you're using it its used as your 2nd/3rd stab not a coverage move but, its not even used that much and i can't even name a notable mon that uses it.

No Tiering Action
This is the best option imo. i mean in my belief there will only be a problem with Terastallization if the number of good possible tera types for mons don't go down but, it already is so i don't see there being any reason to take action, any way of restricting won't work well and straight up removing it gets rid of the creativity in the builder.

- from someone who is under qualified to be talking

EDIT: A comparison i forgot to make for showing the tera type before the battle was that its like its revealing a move of every pokemon before the battle starts, which sounds insane imo
 
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