On a merely a priori basis, one would expect Roaring Moon to be insanely broken. It's a testament to how strong this stupid thing is that its most commonly cited "weakness" is its 105/71 physical bulk (making it naturally bulkier than Clefable). Since it cleanly lives a +1 adamant Tera Normal Dnite Espeed without any bulk investment, I'm not counting that as a genuine weakness.
Roaring Moon's virtues for a team are immense: the fastest booster energy user in the game, massive damage potential, considerable set variety (including tera type), strong utility/breaking moves in knock and taunt, recovery, and a statline second only to Zamazenta as far as OU mons go. Thus, there's plenty of fair reasons to be concerned about Moon, and I was pretty staunchly opposed to letting it back into the tier long before the suspect test was announced. I believed that Moon's return would pretty much kill balance as a viable playstyle, adding yet another dangerous breaking threat and wincon that would be impossible to wall in combination with the tier's other insane balance killers like Kyurem, Ceru, and Woger. Yes, balance has tools to deal with Moon in defensive Dnite, Moltres, Skarm and Corv, and even rarer picks like Mandi and Dondozo. But would balance structures be able to bear the total load of all of those breakers combined?
All of that being said, we need to go off of empirical data before rendering any decisive judgments on Moon. So in practice, does it actually kill balance? I noticed that a lot of the structures I tend to build really struggle into the Moon meta – not just Moon itself, but the entire ecosystem it creates. In fact, during my suspect laddering run, I noticed that hardly any teams I faced were of any archetype outside of offense, either, making midladder especially feel like a homogenous slog. I will grant that when an offensive mon is reintroduced to the tier, it's not surprising that players will gravitate toward offense to slot the new toy. I will also grant that I saw more variety in my last day of laddering, including two stall teams. Nonetheless, I was shocked to see classic meta staple structures like Ghold-Lu-Dnite seemingly abandoned in favor of near constant offenseslop.
For my suspects run, I wanted to build a balance team that would be able to defensively handle Moon well. The team I ended up earning reqs with is admittedly rather strange, but handles most meta threats fairly well. For the Moon matchup, fully physdef rocky helm Lu with rest and body press trades into pre-Tera Moon, while unaware Dirge can also trade Teras to wall it if necessary. Blissey's heal bell makes Lu reliable enough to potentially trade into several mons in a single game, while also making Rillaboom's knock off less of a risk into Moltres and Zapdos. The six mons together form a strong enough breaking core that I was able to beat an Amoongus stall as my final game to achieve reqs.
Back to Moon, though. Is this thing too broken to allow in OU? I do think that the tier would survive a Roaring Moon meta, but balance will suffer. Yet I also think that it will find ways to adapt. Storm Zone already posted a number of balance teams in the metagame discussion thread that he says work well into Moon, and those are all more conventional than the team I created. It seems that Skarm/Molt/Corv paired with appropriate priority moves to handle matchup-flipping teras (like body press helm Skarm paired with Bolt thunderclap and Weavile ice shard for the tera flying flip) is looking promising. I think my team also shows the value of grassy terrain for dealing with earthquake sets.
Altogether, I don't think Roaring Moon is quite as bad as I expected. There are legitimate trade-offs in each Moon set choice. On one hand, the set variety provides an epistemic advantage to Moon users, but no single set can do everything. In this respect, it resembles many of OU's top tier mons that I would call ultimately balanced, including Woger, Dnite, Zama, and Kyurem. However, I still have strong doubts about this thing's benefits to the tier, besides dampening the strength of the annoying Cresselia. I'm currently leaning in the direction of Do Not Unban.
Roaring Moon's virtues for a team are immense: the fastest booster energy user in the game, massive damage potential, considerable set variety (including tera type), strong utility/breaking moves in knock and taunt, recovery, and a statline second only to Zamazenta as far as OU mons go. Thus, there's plenty of fair reasons to be concerned about Moon, and I was pretty staunchly opposed to letting it back into the tier long before the suspect test was announced. I believed that Moon's return would pretty much kill balance as a viable playstyle, adding yet another dangerous breaking threat and wincon that would be impossible to wall in combination with the tier's other insane balance killers like Kyurem, Ceru, and Woger. Yes, balance has tools to deal with Moon in defensive Dnite, Moltres, Skarm and Corv, and even rarer picks like Mandi and Dondozo. But would balance structures be able to bear the total load of all of those breakers combined?
All of that being said, we need to go off of empirical data before rendering any decisive judgments on Moon. So in practice, does it actually kill balance? I noticed that a lot of the structures I tend to build really struggle into the Moon meta – not just Moon itself, but the entire ecosystem it creates. In fact, during my suspect laddering run, I noticed that hardly any teams I faced were of any archetype outside of offense, either, making midladder especially feel like a homogenous slog. I will grant that when an offensive mon is reintroduced to the tier, it's not surprising that players will gravitate toward offense to slot the new toy. I will also grant that I saw more variety in my last day of laddering, including two stall teams. Nonetheless, I was shocked to see classic meta staple structures like Ghold-Lu-Dnite seemingly abandoned in favor of near constant offenseslop.
For my suspects run, I wanted to build a balance team that would be able to defensively handle Moon well. The team I ended up earning reqs with is admittedly rather strange, but handles most meta threats fairly well. For the Moon matchup, fully physdef rocky helm Lu with rest and body press trades into pre-Tera Moon, while unaware Dirge can also trade Teras to wall it if necessary. Blissey's heal bell makes Lu reliable enough to potentially trade into several mons in a single game, while also making Rillaboom's knock off less of a risk into Moltres and Zapdos. The six mons together form a strong enough breaking core that I was able to beat an Amoongus stall as my final game to achieve reqs.
Back to Moon, though. Is this thing too broken to allow in OU? I do think that the tier would survive a Roaring Moon meta, but balance will suffer. Yet I also think that it will find ways to adapt. Storm Zone already posted a number of balance teams in the metagame discussion thread that he says work well into Moon, and those are all more conventional than the team I created. It seems that Skarm/Molt/Corv paired with appropriate priority moves to handle matchup-flipping teras (like body press helm Skarm paired with Bolt thunderclap and Weavile ice shard for the tera flying flip) is looking promising. I think my team also shows the value of grassy terrain for dealing with earthquake sets.
Altogether, I don't think Roaring Moon is quite as bad as I expected. There are legitimate trade-offs in each Moon set choice. On one hand, the set variety provides an epistemic advantage to Moon users, but no single set can do everything. In this respect, it resembles many of OU's top tier mons that I would call ultimately balanced, including Woger, Dnite, Zama, and Kyurem. However, I still have strong doubts about this thing's benefits to the tier, besides dampening the strength of the annoying Cresselia. I'm currently leaning in the direction of Do Not Unban.
