Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v2 [Update on Post #5186]

[bigasschungusboi]

calc doesn't mean a lot if u remove the context, maybe that damages come after u got trapped with tox from a magma storm; in the end, u are doing that damage because the opponents WANT to stay in and epower you, killing tox otherwise heatran is free to switch to a non-fire mon

i want to ALWAYS burn the pokemon: i prefer a pokemon with wow
i want a spammable move: i go with scald, but i don't get a lot of damage when i need it (rather than surf or hpump), and i might not get the burn when i need it

a 30% burn maybe can solve me the match or maybe is just chip damage
a 20% priority close combat on the face of the only rkiller of my opponent can make me win the game

since my english sucks i won't make other examples but for ME scald in any gen was viable was really strong but not broken, impossible to compare to quick claw

in THIS gen it would help a lot on scary strong physical attackers and maybe it would balance things (or maybe make even more this meta a joke, scald dozo might be annoying)

thank you

The notion that a move like WoW that has 85% accuracy, complete immunities, and few viable users, Is in any way comparable to the 100% accurate, widespread Scald is disingenuous. The calc that Pika Pal shows here is that a mon like Pex doing that much to a mon like Heatran is to show that the move is not weak and does considerable damage to what should be a perfectly good switch considering the fact that mons that are not Fire cannot reliably switch into Scald without risking the chance to incur a burn.


(Nitpick here, but whenever people decide to defend scald, they always fucking bring up Surf and Pump as if there was any reason to use Surf when scald exists, and having a defensive poke rely on an 8 PP move that has horrible accuracy compared to a perfectly accurate 80 BP move that statuses lmfao.)

 

[tigers jaw]

snip

- i agree with you on tera being the top priority. much of what i have said would probably change were it to not exist.

- "do NOT allow the awful lines of argument such as "we can't ban gambit because of pult!" to slide. yes. yes we can. we can then ban pult, if necessary. this is how it works. like i'm seriously disappointed that the zeitgeist has taken a turn away from a consistent view of tiering & tiering pokemon based on their merits alone, rather than trying to cobble together some state of broken-checking-broken. such an approach has been invalid since the jump of smogon laying down what is & is not good tiering." you are doing the thing, like, constantly. it is of no relevance if gambit checks pult, or val rkills whatever - if they are broken (for the sake of argument), then they deserve to be treated as such, & from there deal with the ramifications.

- main thrust of listing those pokemon was that there is currently an impasse in the meta due to the inflated nature of offence & that something needs to be done.

- you overstate the want valiant has for more moves. cc+knock+sd+encore or moon+cc+knock+encore does pretty much everything it needs to, with any sort of tera necessary depending on the team (dark, fighting, steel, fairy, elec, whatever) patching most of the holes you listed. furthermore, it is not necessary for a pokemon to be able to have 12 moveslots or whatever. never liked that argument, people tried it back when gren & volc were banned & it was bad then - the point is that it can run these moves & does have these options, making reliable preparation for it a sizeable task. full disclosure, not really decided on whether or not val is or is not reasonable in this regard, though i lean towards it being unreasonable.

- ya i think ghold is actually excellent in terms of offensive prowess & you understate this massively. if not played like a dunce, even just plot+recover is one of the better breakers in the tier imo due to its typing+bulk+servicable speed vs slower threats - especially with tera allowing it a free kill after a sack once it gets one of the many advantages it does to plot. also, yeah, good as gold is bullshit lol.

- fuck dnite but for sure it's just tera with this thing.

- you provide no real arguments speaking to gambit's power level. see: point 2. shit is broken lol.

- enam is what lele wished it could've been, lol. enam is silly strong with perfect coverage bar like, molt, and even then taunt & sub cm allow it to break past if played correctly. scarf & specs are not the only sets: cm+taunt/sub tera ground/steel, ebelt taunt, mixed contrary, etc. all invalidate gking+ground immune to varying degrees.

- garg is seeing a resurgence for good reason, & no, gking is not enough lol. without gknot, which still loses to tera ghost, gking has to come in on a potential +1 garg, which outdamages regen esp with hazards, go for future sight, & then either hard switch out on another salt cure or eat it & chilly. you're essentially hoping that you can burn it out of recovers with the combination of gking+another neutral hit on the turn fs hits, all the while it is getting off salt cures.

- idk bro zapdos is kinda hard to deal with unless you dedicate a tera elec to something, even more so than last gen due to the cut of toxic. it's not about being haxed by cane, lol - rather, there isn't that much in the way of dealing with volt+cane in the first place considering the best & most common ground-type gets crushed by cane. just not an easy mon to play against.

- sam/ceaseless is just a super braindead way of getting layers. like, more than anything i've ever seen since deo-sharp days. falls more under my qualms with the hazards game in general though.

- spikes lol. "if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike".

- idk g offensive tusk is silly strong lol. can't count the amount of times in this meta i've got a spin off with max atk booster cc/headlong/spinner/spin and just... won? with practically no brainpower needed. i guess this is a niche set though so whatever. point is it is strong as fuck.

- "relevant fairy mons" is the key part. all of those you listed get bodied by the most common sets or are bad. not the argument you think it is.

- thund lol.

 

[ianlazerbeem]

Mfs advocating for item clause like "you know what could use a buff? Hazards"

 

[HeartfulKitty]

Item clause feels like a particularly bad idea in this current hazard-infested meta. The lack of removal means that many teams, not just stall teams, will be running multiple heavy duty boots mons just to get around the omnipresence of hazards, and a lot of these team structures fall apart when you remove the one consistent way to deal with hazards. It wouldn't even solve the quick claw problem, if it's fundamentally uncompetitive like people say it is, since you could still fish for that chance on just Ursaluna or Kingambit or G-Slowbro or whatever. Quick claw teams no longer existing wouldn't remove the RNG aspect people talk about with it, and I genuinely don't see a point to an item clause beyond people hating quick claw teams and hating stall teams with six heavy duty boots.

Suspect tera, then evaluate from there. That should be the main priority.

 

[SnackWasTaken]

4/6 of the team is from gen 9, and all 4 of those mons would be UUBL, at worst, in pretty much any other generation. It's always kinda been a problem, but it's the specific density of high quality, slow offensive threats that's really made it more than just a curiosity.

Saying Kingambit would be UUBL in any other gen is interesting considering how is was the second best mon in the most power crept generation to date months before people even started using quick claw. Ain’t no one that’s gonna take you seriously saying stuff like this.

 

[Froctopus]

Yeah my b for saying that idea was a good one, i didn't see the long term problems with an item clause

 

[bigasschungusboi]

Well ND tera suspect just ended with an insane amount of people that don't really care about the health of the tier coming in and flooding it with DNB. When our eventual resus happens, we really just going to let the same thing happen or are we going to implement some actual footmarks beside and easily accruable GXE and ELO?

 

[Rootb]

Saying Kingambit would be UUBL in any other gen is interesting considering how is was the second best mon in the most power crept generation to date months before people even started using quick claw. Ain’t no one that’s gonna take you seriously saying stuff like this.

Tha's at worst, not at best. As in, this core set of threats would be OU-by-power at pretty much any point in the game's history. Which, as the rest of your post seems to suggest, you agree with.

It's an obnoxious amount of new power added simultaneously.

 

[Karxrida]

Mfs advocating for item clause like "you know what could use a buff? Hazards"

From a design standpoint I do actually find it an interesting thought experiment. I've played a lot of video games (not necessarily ones with PVP for the purposes of this example, but alas) and have found that too much freedom can paradoxically create homogeneity. Mostly thinking of Final Fantasy V, where every character has similar stats and access to every job and that leads to all of them playing literally the exact same in high level scenarios outside of extremely minor slight optimizations. If the party members had more drastic stat distributions or limited jobs to make them play differently then the game wouldn't get bogged down by monotony for me.

I feel like implementing Item Clause with our current item selection wouldn't be that bad. This isn't Gen II, where the list of viable items can be counted on one hand.

 

[Rootb]

From a design standpoint I do actually find it an interesting thought experiment. I've played a lot of video games (not necessarily ones with PVP for the purposes of this example, but alas) and have found that too much freedom can paradoxically create homogeneity. Mostly thinking of Final Fantasy V, where every character has similar stats and access to every job and that leads to all of them playing literally the exact same in high level scenarios outside of extremely minor slight optimizations. If the party members had more drastic stat distributions or limited jobs to make them play differently then the game wouldn't get bogged down by monotony for me.

I feel like implementing Item Clause with our current item selection wouldn't be that bad. This isn't Gen II, where the list of viable items can be counted on one hand.

I think we're like.. one, maybe two legitimate defensive items away from Item Clause being workable. We've got Leftovers, Black Sludge (kinda), and Assault Vest (also kinda), but past that, it really is a wasteland. HDB is a generic utility item at this point, Cloak is strong-but-unexciting, and then.. what?

Safety Goggles? Red Card? Berries?

Compared to offense's growing list of options, it's not really an inspiring top 6.

 

[G-Luke]

I'm of the opinion that it's a problem everywhere, but it's also probably not good anywhere else:






4/6 of the team is from gen 9, and all 4 of those mons would be UUBL, at worst, in pretty much any other generation. It's always kinda been a problem, but it's the specific density of high quality, slow offensive threats that's really made it more than just a curiosity.

No way blud said Super Bisharp and URSALUNA would be UUBL in any other generation.

 

[DaddyBuzzwole]

Quick claw teams no longer existing wouldn't remove the RNG aspect people talk about with it,

except that no one was even talking about the rng aspect before the team popped up. the problem is solely a matter of quantity, not quality

 

[pika pal]

calc doesn't mean a lot if u remove the context, maybe that damages come after u got trapped with tox from a magma storm; in the end, u are doing that damage because the opponents WANT to stay in and epower you, killing tox otherwise heatran is free to switch to a non-fire mon

i want to ALWAYS burn the pokemon: i prefer a pokemon with wow
i want a spammable move: i go with scald, but i don't get a lot of damage when i need it (rather than surf or hpump), and i might not get the burn when i need it

a 30% burn maybe can solve me the match or maybe is just chip damage
a 20% priority close combat on the face of the only rkiller of my opponent can make me win the game

The context of the Calc was not Toxapex staying in on Heatran, it was to show Heatran is not a safe or healthy switch-in to Scald as it would be to WoW to absorb the Burn (which is the only reason a defensive mon clicks Scald), as I pointed out the extremely narrow options to handle a Water-Type Burn move prior. So the purpose of the scenario as stated was to show your primary counterplay to Burn infliction is invalid against Scald since this damage is taken on Heatran's switch-in, not the following turn. Scald burns are not reliable on one fire, but the entire point of the move was being spammed multiple times given "Bulky Water" is arguably the most bloated type-role in the entire Pokedex across every tier. Scald has ~50% chance to inflict a burn within two uses, and even the initial 30% chance is considered relevant enough on things like Focus Blast/Hurricane missing for players to avoid using them whenever possible.

The % comparison is also a questionable equivalence to draw because Quick Claw having no active reliability means it shouldn't be dictating plays anyway. It's RNG nonsense sure, but you can't know Ursaluna is going to go first this turn anymore than the opponent, whereas with Scald, the best play you can make is most options being bad and your best one still leaves a 30% chance to get screwed by a move your opponent has no reason not to make. These facets aren't problems for the same reasons.

 

[Mega Breloom]

I'm still just fascinated by this sudden revelation generation 9 is the generation we're talking about fucking item clauses and RNG item bans

More than the claw is screens + bulky mons. People are losing to that team not for QC itself, but because stuff like Gambit with screens support and tera is just too much, if you put quick claw on shitmons like Luxray you quickly will notice that the item wasn't problematic ever. It is just like static/flame body, a based luck element that can help you in some scenarios but it isn't reliable at all, however if you remove static from Zapdos it is still a good Pokémon just like removing quick claw from that team doesn't change how good the team is (potentially it even becomes better).
There are people saying that static is skillful but nah, is the exact same fishing for hax like QC but in a different way, but people often tries to sell it like it is a no rng strategy, while for me Delibirb Heart team is a good expression of teambuilding skill since bulky mons + screen already beat the offensive counterplay those mons have.

 

[SnackWasTaken]

Damn I just realized the true power of Garg, look at this

252+ Atk Black Glasses Supreme Overlord 5 allies fainted Kingambit Kowtow Cleave vs. 252 HP / 156+ Def Tera Ghost Garganacl: 362-428 (89.6 - 105.9%) -- 37.5% chance to OHKO

That’s right, even a super effective max SO Kowtow Cleave from max atk KINGAMBIT, a threat that is banworthy in its own right, has to run Black glasses to POTENTIALLY get a OHKO. Not only this, but this isn’t even max def Garg, this has sp. Def investment as well. Which even though it’s a physical megawall, it also has strong special bulk. I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it could get statused, if you could toxic stall it out I’d be fine with it. The thing is, Garg shuts down Hyper offense AND stall. It’s a complete shut down to everything. And I haven’t even mentioned the stupidity of Salt Cure. Garg can stall through even super effective hits, and with purifying salt and Tera ghost, only dark can hit it super effective.

 

[pulsar512b]

No way blud said Super Bisharp and URSALUNA would be UUBL in any other generation.

read the post its 'uubl at worst' i.e. uubl as the absolute minimum (which i think is fair, we've had big ridiculous slow wallbreakers end up not in OU before)

 

[Alternator]

Well ND tera suspect just ended with an insane amount of people that don't really care about the health of the tier coming in and flooding it with DNB. When our eventual resus happens, we really just going to let the same thing happen or are we going to implement some actual footmarks beside and easily accruable GXE and ELO?

Sure. Since we're discussing limiting voters to control the results, I propose anyone who has made anti-tera comments should be excluded.

...or we can not be dumb and continue to let anyone who can make reqs vote.

 

[bigasschungusboi]

This is twisting what I said never said that we should ban people for voicing their opinions just the fact we need to make sure something happens, and the ou suspect doesn't end up being DNB spammed.


Don't care if you despise tera with every bone in your body or think its the best addition to the meta ever

But what happend to the ND suspect should be avoided if we want these suspects to mean anything if a group of people can just make new accounts and spam the ladder to influence the tier for months or years we shouldn't just condone it and say "oh well they got reqs"

 

[artificialdeath]

read the post its 'uubl at worst' i.e. uubl as the absolute minimum (which i think is fair, we've had big ridiculous slow wallbreakers end up not in OU before)

tbh if Gambit didn't have sucker punch or tera it would be a little less threatening considering its low speed and weaknesses to some common offensive types, but even then it'd still probably stay in the A ranks in OU. unless it released during early XY where we had fucking Lando-I KyuB and Manaphy in UU and regular Donphan in OU thanks to low ladder

 

[SpritePony]

This is twisting what I said never said that we should ban people for voicing their opinions just the fact we need to make sure something happens, and the ou suspect doesn't end up being DNB spammed.

If people are unironically voting DNB, and you're wanting to "make something happen", that would constitute as voting suppression. You WANT to force action against Tera, but the majority says "No, I don't want anything to happen to Tera" -- you'd have to willingly discard all their votes.

 

[Rootb]

But what happend to the ND suspect should be avoided if we want these suspects to mean anything if a group of people can just make new accounts and spam the ladder to influence the tier for months or years we shouldn't just condone it and say "oh well they got reqs"

I mean.. they did. You don't need to have a Smogon account registered to play on Showdown, and if you're a foreign-language player, you might have your own community that you'd prefer playing in, anyways.

If a group of such players finds out that a suspect test is going to change the way they'd prefer to play, why shouldn't they make Smogon accounts to post that they're good enough to have an opinion?

 

[bigasschungusboi]

This implies that the suspect test was perfectly normal and that this sort of stuff should just be condoned from here on out

 

[Alternator]

This is twisting what I said never said that we should ban people for voicing their opinions just the fact we need to make sure something happens, and the ou suspect doesn't end up being DNB spammed.

People play Smogon metagames without also posting in the forums, and some decided they cared enough about a suspect to join the forums. They were skilled enough to make reqs, so why should they not have a say in the metagames they play?

Your post boils down to, "Ban this group that doesn't agree with me from voting." I offered a (satirical) example of that to show why it's bad policy.

This implies that the suspect test was perfectly normal and that this sort of stuff should just be condoned from here on out

Yes, yes it should. There is no problem here other than you not liking how they voted.

 

[Da Pizza Man]

This is twisting what I said never said that we should ban people for voicing their opinions just the fact we need to make sure something happens, and the ou suspect doesn't end up being DNB spammed.

Funny how you accused Alternator of twisting your words because that's exactly what you did to him. At no point did he ever even suggest that you said that people who voiced pro-tera opinions should be banned from the website, he just said that you implied that they should be excluded from the vote. Also, there is no such thing as "Do Not Ban" spam, that's simply just people voting "Do Not Ban" in line with how the system allows them to.

Besides, as somebody who was there to see the XY Ubers Shadow Tag suspect, I can't overstate just how catastrophic that whole fiasco was. We don't need a repeat of that, especially not in the main tier that Smogon focuses around. It's bad for the process, it's bad for Smogon's image, and it's bad for pretty much everyone who was involved with the vote.

 

[bigasschungusboi]

Alright on further reading of these posts Alternator I apologize for twisting your words, what you wrote implied to me that I was advocating for the ban of people just for voting DNB.

IMO the suspect should have went down better considering internal review is now happening and ND now has to alter the tier permanently for the forseeable future