This reminds me of when I had a similar opinion with salamence a few months ago, mainly due to it having solid resistances, access to dragon dance, having two good abilities in intimidate which allows it to find more chances to set up against physical attackers and moxie which is known for enabling snowballing and having a high attack stat of 135 paired. This was after the ban of roaring moon and gouging fire so I was hoping to make this new dd sweeper work since I was so keen on using a moxie mon that wasn’t quaquavual (I’m sorry, but that mon is basically a double dancer a good amount of the time), I have had some success with moxie sets that have even been able to snowball from a singular use of dragon dance, the main issues with it are that its weaknesses are either too common or too severe for it to be a consistent mon and its often overwhelmed by the tier’s defensive mons.
its fairy weaknesses means that a booster energy iron valiant or a defensive clefable (a max hp and defense clefable only has a 0.2% chance of being 2kho’d by a 1+ boosted dual wingbeat) will instantly force it out, its rock weakness means that it needs to run boots without the, being knocked off and its ice weakness means that anything that can hit it with an ice move with almost always annihilate it (any use of ice shard cancels its sweep) so weavile and kyurem will be hugely problematic. Unlike dragonite, it lacks multiscale or a great movepool to help it with these issues.
These problems are severe enough, but the mons that offensively counter salamence are also accompanied by a variety of defensive mons which have their own ways of throwing salamence out of the game like a baseball (i mean it evolves from a spherical-). Clefable as mentioned before can switch in 0.2% of the time and either chunk it with moonblast or ruin it with thunder wave, ting lu tanks dual wingbeat even after a boost and can use whirlwind to send it flying away (if it were still a bagon, it would be grateful for that), Corviknight completely walls and clicks iron defense whilst salamance racks up rocky helmet damage trying to break through it, moltres avoids a 2hko and threatens to burn it on the spot, gliscor can switch in and use toxic to try and stall out of as much hp as possible (physically defensive sets embarass it especially), Zapdos not only walls it like corvknight but also threatens to para it and end any chance of it doing anything in the game, Alomomola can easily scald burn it whilst shrugging off its boosted attack and dondozo is well, dondozo
.It struggles with alot of these pokemon because of dd sets mainly run dual wingbeat and earthquake with roost due to its dragon stab either being a waste or too risky, so between its main stab being 80 bp in total and outrage being too risky, the sets I used lacked power.A few other issues include raging bolt and kingambit being able to switch in and threaten with priority moves that can pick off a weakened salamence and an overall weakness to priority. Whilst its not the worst, Salamence ultimately didn’t work as I hoped due to these issues.
However, this isn’t to entirely count out gyarados, which has a few traits that can help succeed where salamence may not such as ice neutrality, I hope you can hopefully experiment with it and see how it goes!
