Metagame RU Metagame Discussion Thread [October 2025 Shifts! Gyarados and Volcanion Quickbanned] [#27]

[Elec-ant1234]

ALRIGHT so lets go through this one by one.

It usually opts to run stabs taunt and then one of fire spin earth power body press or focus blast. If it is the common set, you can send in your Noivern and just hardwall it (rip mence)

so right off the bat we're lying
252+ SpA Volcanion Steam Eruption vs. 252 HP / 0 SpD Noivern: 118-140 (31.5 - 37.4%) -- guaranteed 3HKO after burn damage
in what world is this "hardwalling". Your noivern is getting 3HKOed. Aside from noivern's other jobs this damage makes it incredibly hard to do anything else aside from clicking roost over and over. It cannot meaningfully damage or threaten volc, and the volc player can just like. Switch out and preserve volc so they're usually in a good position if vern switches in directly. And just like in general this is nowhere NEAR hardwalling, what are you even saying man. The ONLY thing that can be considered hardwalling in this matchup is that fact that volc eventually will run out of steam eruption PP, but like again the volc player has things they can do aside from mindlessly clicking steam

If it is this tera fairy blast set it uses it and then is checked by Jirachi, MukA, Gardevoir (who always checks it)

Again just yapping with literally nothing to back your claims up.

JIRACHI. JIRACHI THE STEEL TYPE. AGAINST A MON WITH FIRE AND WATER COVERAGE IS A CHECK TO VOLCANION.

Muk I can see, that's a complete given, hell it's the most important job it has on stall teams, check volc so that it doesn't kill blissey.

but Garde? 252+ SpA Tera Fairy Volcanion Tera Blast (80 BP) vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Gardevoir: 127-151 (45.8 - 54.5%) -- 53.1% chance to 2HKO
THAT Garde?? 252+ SpA Tera Fairy Volcanion Flamethrower vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Gardevoir: 144-169 (51.9 - 61%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
THIS GARDE???

Fat waters can also typical trade with it

are the fat waters in the room with us right now? The list of what could reasonably be considered "Fat Waters" in RU atm are:
Volcanion, Slowbro, Quagsire (debatably), Empoleon, Suicune, Swampert (again debatably), Vaporeon (MIA for months), and if you're crazy Milotic. Out of all of those, who the hell trades with volc? Slowbro has to slowly chip volc down while having to stave off earth power after earth power, Empo can really only knock, Volc ofc will trade with itself, and everyone else pretty much cannot switch in, damage, or trade reliably with volc. Again I ask, are the fat waters in the room with us right now. And going into teras doesn't reveal much else, like, Hippo? That's who you're expending tera on to trade w/ Volc?

Also over 140+ uses in tournaments, it has a lowish 47% winrate, which when compared to something like Mamoswine who's also being considered for a ban, is very low. If it was broken, surely it would be consistently helping its team win, no?

The big thing with volc is the pressure it puts on the teambuilder. All of these players built for volcanion, so naturally it would have a lower winrate. Also nearly 50% is like still really good. That level of consistency over 140+ games is not something to dismiss.

Gyarados was likely broken, but like Guldkatt said, you don't tier on hypothetical metagames.

"likely broken" it's BEEN broken. The hypothetical metagame here is one with it's most splashable check gone. We know what SV RU with gapdos and gyara looks like, so it's not exactly rocket science to piece together a rough estimate of what the tier would look like without gapdos and with gyara. If it was broken before, and one of it's main checks is gone, I sure wonder what that means for the brokenness of a previously broken mon.

bringing up stuff from what could be about a year half ago in the case of the latter post to say someone is wrong rather than counteracting the argument does not make your argument look better.

tbh my intent was to weaken his argument, but fair enough

I also don't know where this 24/7 bickering is. To me, it is just LBN and the occasional other person complaining.

I'm sorry, but the 24/7 bickering is happening in the RU discord, which you are currently banned from. To be fair, these forums HAVE been very silent, so going off of that information alone, you have been running behind the rest of the community due to that, so given the limited information available, to you, I can't blame you for feeling like you haven't seen anything, which you haven't tbh. And I just wanna say that like, I have been kinda tearing into zause here, but I don't wanna make it seem like he's a bad player or anything. I believe, given the circumstances, that zause is more or less uninformed, going mostly off of his own experiences to form his takes. He just ended up interpreting said experiences in a way that I (frankly) disagree with, but again he ain't a bad player or anything.

anyways feen, tiering council, I call on you to retest volc in 2 weeks in order to placate the masses
lowkey keep that shit outta RU keep em banned

 

[Lyra]

I'm not sure what y'all are going back and forth on, these mons were going to be suspected on and they were going to get banned if they didn't get qb'd. The only part that annoyed me A LOT was that this didn't happen sooner. But it's okay I'm glad it happened at LEAST. I think the qb was fine cuz atleast this gives the metagame time to develop. I understand where the others are coming from but like, please let us have a healthy metagame for a longer time before UU or OU shit on us again like.
Please DO NOT retest Volcanion that mon is genuine cancer idgaf.
(Maybe next time try listening to the peeps is all I can say girl)

 

[zause]

Gonna respond to this because my original post may not have as clear as intended

in what world is this "hardwalling".

You can just Roost off the damage, I'm pretty sure every Noivern bar Specs (uncommon) runs roost so yea. Pretty much hard walled like you said because it can't outdamage roost and loses pp first as a result.

Again just yapping with literally nothing to back your claims up.

I am correct. The definition of check is "Pokémon A checks Pokémon B if, when Pokémon A is given a free switch into Pokémon B, Pokémon A can win every time, even under the worst case scenario, without factoring in hax." Jirachi is, in fact a check because Iron Head flinch is 60%, so not getting it is hax. Besides that, flamethrower doesn't kill so yea Jirachi is 1000% a check. Same with garde. You don't have to switch into the pokemon to be a check. That is not what I am claiming.

are the fat waters in the room with us right now? The list of what could reasonably be considered "Fat Waters" in RU atm are:
Volcanion, Slowbro, Quagsire (debatably), Empoleon, Suicune, Swampert (again debatably), Vaporeon (MIA for months), and if you're crazy Milotic. Out of all of those, who the hell trades with volc?

I've used Water Absorb Quag in the past in tournaments to success (2024 Fall Sznl iirc), Volcanion obviously trades with itself lol but that's not a good argument ofc, Slowbro trades with it, Empo trade with this Tera Fairy set, and Swampert can kind of but wasn't really what I was thinking of.
e: Gastro too ofc lol we both forgot

The big thing with volc is the pressure it puts on the teambuilder. All of these players built for volcanion, so naturally it would have a lower winrate. Also nearly 50% is like still really good. That level of consistency over 140+ games is not something to dismiss.

Nearly 50% is OK. Reminder that ties do not exist in Pokemon. Over such a high usage percentage however, 47% is quite bad because a lot of games are mirror matches, so the clean winrate is probably closer to 40%, which is awful (wish I mentioned this in original post).

For the bickering part, I now understand that, thank you. I do not particularly agree with listening to discords for information, but overall at least now I know where the bickering is coming from. Like you said, I mostly just get my information from playing mons and scanning the forums so my takes are usually a bit different because I value how I experience how I engage with the mon in practice rather than in the builder. I have built most of my own teams recently, and still have been able to combat Volc effectively, but I can see how it would be frusturating. I still don't think it's enough to justify a quickban however, given the survey and inability to let the tier settle. Thank you for posting so I could clarify my post.

 

[TheFranklin]

I'm gonna shed a bit of light on the tiering process in the last few months.
The last survey was held mid July. The results were indecisive, as nothing got a majority supporting for tiering action. The overall sentiment did not point at something being particular broken. Everybody had their own opinion on who was broken, and there was a lot of disagreement on whether certain mons were broken (for example, player A thought Salamence was broken and Volcanion wasn't, while player B thought vice versa).
After initially doing nothing, the council nevertheless felt a Salamence suspect was warranted. This lead to Salamence's ban at the end of the first week of August. After this, the council wanted to give the tier time to develop, as nothing really stood out at the time (though i should note there were already people calling for a volcanion and gyarados ban).
In the month that followed, the perspective on certain pokemon slowly shifted. More and more people got annoyed by the overwhelming potential of Volcanion, Gyarados and Mamoswine, both in the builder as in the game. This was clear from an increasing amount of discussion regarding these pokemon in the RU discord server. All three pokemon have the potential to pick what checks them by customizing their (move)set.

• For Gyarados that is sub DD tera dark, tera fly chesto, and also tera ground EQ or even tera fairy sets.
• For Volcanion that is between fire spin, taunt, tera blast fairy, earth power, body press and choice specs sets.
• For Mamoswine that is between boots, never melt ice, and choice band sets

From these gyarados has the highest sweeping/cheese potential which is also why it was the most obnoxious and had the most support for tiering action.

Mid september it was clear to the council that it was time for tiering action. However, with shifts around the corner, a suspect test ending days before potential drops would be pointless. So unfortunately there was not much to do at that point but to wait for shifts and see if anything major changed with the shifts. We also decided that we would hold a slate on these three pokemon, unless something dropped that would drastically influence one of the three.
Since the only relevant change was Gapdos leaving, which Gyarados would very much appreciate, we went through with the slate.
We felt the slate was needed based on our own opinions on these pokemon, as well as various discussions in the RU server and calls for action both in the server as on the forums.


Now onto my own votes in the slate: I believe all three are broken. Gyarados is the most obvious one, but I think both mamo and volc are also too much. Looking back, I wish we had tested both gyarados and volcanion or even mamo earlier, somewhere end of August/start of September. It was a tough call however, since the overall community opinion shifted slowly over the course of the month. A bit more proactive approach, keeping in mind the upcoming shifts in October, would perhaps have been better here.
Now, with the increasing amount of support for action on Volcanion and that action being a bit overdue due to the shifts, together with my own opinion that Volcanion is broken, I felt comfortable voting for QB. However, I did not want to QB 3 pokemon without any direct participation from the community so I voted suspect on the, in my opinion, least broken of the three: Mamoswine.

I think these bans are a net positive for the RU tier and I hope the tier can develop positively. I'm curious to see the meta developments of the coming weeks/months!

 

[EviGaro]

Honestly I agree this is bad.

Look, I get it from both sides here. This community has been particularly trigger happy this gen, and sometimes it was very frustrating to be around. Then again, I'm sure they felt the same way about me! After all they were happy when feen took over and look now...

But old pettiness aside, there's a process for a reason. I distinctly hated how quickbans had to be used over a whole goddamn year and more because of the DLC schedule, but at least you could argue the exceptionally difficult state this put us in. But quickbans more than a year after this was settled? Because of a shift that ended up moving two mons, one of which is very inconsequential? At no point was this a reasonable way to invoke a quickban process in the past, and it is very hard to justify here.

Which as I was writing Franklin posted to justify, but to me this just compounds on the issue. You don't justifiably go from "fine" to "slowly shifting into unanimous quickban" with the way the process is agreed upon. That still needs to be put forward as a suspect. Furthermore, this isn't even something the community agrees with, as Franklin also stated. If that's how the tier developped, then something somewhere fucked up.

Which to me leads to some actually pressing questions here:

- What's the point of a Council? Is it to hold off community complaints? Is it to address issues with haste once they view action as needed? Is it to lead discussions and be able to contribute to the consensus regarding the state of the tier? Is it to lead innovation across it, so that newer people in the community - or, well, not as talented ones - are able to see other ways to work around the major threats? I honestly think you could make an argument for any of those or even a combination of, but something needs to be clearer to the community because this is confusing for people.

- Is the suspect process actually working? I agree with GoldCat on a point, if you think those mons were quickban worthy, something was messed up big time somewhere. And as Franklin just said, the suspect process was too cumbersome for what leadership viewed as needed. And there's genuinely a point to be made here that maybe things aren't working out, but I don't think you should be able to circumvent the process this way. Either stick to it and tell people look, we fucked up, but this is the process, and then make it an open policy review call to let out your grievances with how the process is failing the tier and how you can take beneficial steps. But don't invent a new category of actions that frankly is not helpful at all for the consistency of the tier moving forward.

- Are surveys actually useful for anything? To me it's been so counterproductive. On one hand the people who champion actions tend to be far more outspoken, which leads to more public complaints, and on the other hand it makes it really rough for Council to not just be something that tries to interpret the consensus that comes out of a survey. Problem is, both sides are talking about completely different things in those cases. I personally really dislike this role for Council, as genuinely I think anyone involved in the community could do this, and cheapens why you want those users in what should be an important role. But regardless, if you can have one three months ago, and eventually view points just "evolve" outside of that consensus, what the hell was the point of the survey? It's just antagonizing at that point.

Anyway, maybe SV was just the worst who knows!

 

[LBN]

This is gonna be a follow-up post now that I'm actually home and feel like typing up a storm, so this will be both a mix of my own throwaway opinions regardless of the Pokemon, and actual metagame discussion after. This is LBN here, not council unanimous speaker of the house or anything, so expect my usual level of.. "professionalism". Basically I'll be swearing whenever I think its funnier =D

Suspect process

For one thing, Evi's post above raises some good points, and some points that go nowhere. On the suspect front, this is something I agree with, but RU council alone has no power to actually change. If it was purely up to me, every SCL starter automatically has reqs tommorow for that Mamoswine suspect test, among others with notable tour results. Suspect process has been lame for a long time, but that's a change that'd need to be made on the policy review front, something way above just one council's paygrade.

Surveys

As for surveys, I think they are a guideline, and little else. It's worth noting that 1) Gyarados wasn't even on the forefront of that survey as an option, and 2: Salamence was called "fine", but after talking internally, actually prompted again by the post Feliburn made here, we agreed that one of the dragon dancers had to go. I think my personal biggest issues with surveys is they lack the ability for players to input any nuance. Rank broken 1-5, state of tier 1-10, its all very cookie cutter and while not everybody would elaborate too heavily, the mediocore ability to do so tends to fail to give a good picture internally. I don't personally know how I'd go about fixing this, if only because I dont really use google sheets whatsoever, but I do think improvements could be made on that front.

"What does council do?"

"What does council do?" This is probably the question I don't really care for, mainly because it feels like a bad faith question when you were literally the former tierleader, YOU know why council exists. Actually responding to this point, I don't really know how to answer it in a proper statement. We just have tasks that get done sometimes, and otherwise the role just exists as salad dressing. Council has always, in my eyes atleast, been an oversight commitee to me that does specific tasks, most of which you listed. I don't personally think the difference between me, a council member, and someone like Daharan, not a council member, is that big. Each person's voice matters, and the weight of their voice is held up by results within tournaments, discussions within forums and what have you.

This is just me airing personal sentiments, but I feel like, if I was pushier in council chat maybe Volcanion/Gyarados could've been swung on sooner. I've been on council for like, what, 3 months now? I don't really know how hard I should specifically push against, or for a certain direction in the face of someone being like "naw, just do x" Sure, I may be flippant in casual discussion, but I try to reign that in for stuff like tour-hosting or council stuff, whether proper or on the VR. Obviously that's in the past now, and a lot of the complaints are the road that was taken to get here as opposed to the end result. The complaints of tardiness were heard, and this was the solution we thought of. It wasn't perfect, but I do believe it got us to the exact spot we would've gotten to otherwise.

Now, onto more fun stuff. I won't go over every winner and loser or what have you, because Heatranator beat me to that. I will highlight some toys that'd gotten better though, in a more casual manner.

These are the three fighting types aiming for a piece of Gapdos's pie, and I think all 3 have merit. Flamigo is the most 1:1 comparison as being pretty much a bargain bin Zapdos-Galar, but the tools it lacks, namely knock off, is a massive hole. Not being able to self-remove helmets and the like is a huge blow, and the weaker bulk means its utility is far far worse. I will note Scrappy is a great tool for Tera Bisharp though, I love that alot. Mienshao is likely the best one of these three, as Regenerator is a broken ability and Life orb sets have always been scary. As a scarfer, its faster than even Gapdos but as a consequence, its the frailest of the three options and has next to zero defensive utility. Infernape is the fastest of our options, and the only one who gets a proper jump on a boosted H-Lilligant, which is a valuable thing. It also has Knock off for value, but I think Switcheroo is worth discussing as well to instead, cripple Slowbro/Hippo/Noivern hard, while having superior synergy with attackers like Golurk.

Every water type pretty much got better with Volcanion gone, so that tends to not be very interesting to discuss. Weather though, now you have my attention. Volcanion was a scourge to both Rain and Sun, as was Gyarados to a lesser extent. Removing both makes both of these far more appealing, and I am curious to see how much they can improve/how their usage will change. I think Sun in particular is fairly unexplored, though Rain is as well with pokemon like Ludicolo. Shit'll be fun to see.

 

[lighthouses]

If council is active in the tier and comprised of some of its most knowledgeable players then shouldnt that matter at least a little bit more than the tiering surveys? I feel like it just adds to the sloweness of it all.

Also i would urge people to consider a lot of the points made here with regards to tiering being too slow in this tier even if the posts are made by 'contentious' people. It truly makes no sense that these mons are quick ban worthy yet still somehow were allowed to stay like that for months, clearly something within the process is not working.

I think that council should be able to more aggressively step up on things like this, its quite obvious this happened this way because of the spotlight in the tier due to scl.

Its good to have tiering surveys to get a feel for how everyones feeling and its good to have discussions on discord but lets not pretend like all the endless debate lording that goes on in there doesnt also provide to things moving too slowly.

If the council is chosen carefully and eveyone is active and knows their stuff then i think you guys should just decide on things more without fearing making mistakes, as things can always just get retested and everything right? like we just quickbanned mons that were allowed for months.

tldr council discussion > tiering surveys or discord debating, people will complain no matter what happens anyway