Just got a Magician LO Delphox @ Psyshock / CM / GK / FB; magician is kind of uniformly bad unless you want to make magician + dark weak force colbur or a funny item like petaya / weakness policy
wrt sheer force LO: is the only reason there's no check for STAB sheer force moves (which would stop kingler from being caught in that net) just because it would make that line of code look significantly uglier lol
if attack >> SpA (idk, atk > 50+SpA) and has guts and counter < 2, reject sheer force to solve hariyama's case?
wrt spinda: Like in the sense that TR is awkward but at least tries to make the best of a bad pokemon.
rock slide is just bad, especially in comparison to sucker punch which is really, really needs.
wrt rock slide bastiodon: on average it does more damage and it will do less damage 1/3 of the time. this is a very cheap gamble for a defensive pokemon to make, especially considering that it is not doing much damage to begin with
wrt mothim: level balance makes this less bad than it would be in normal play and allows a lot of otherwise bad quiver dancers to flourish. being outclassed by other pokemon in normal play and having some tangentially relevant niche does not matter in randbats, where you have no team choice
wrt spiritomb: I know what you mean, but spiritomb is just kind of perpetually bad in a weird way because it's at the intersection of randbats problems like bad EV investment (it needs max HP), versatile but low BP movepool, and mixed attacks. I'm not going to pretend that this is an easily solvable problem, but it's not one solved by psychic. probably the least bad set is crotomb but the ones with wow that don't end up with life orb (didn't even realize, but this is also gone!!) are also all right. maybe this pokemon will be less awful in general without life orb as it is. I'll play more games where I get it to see if it works or not before I complain too much lol
wrt emolga: spinners are a luxury and you very often don't get one at all. budget zapdos with defog is still a defogger. without charge beam or defog, probably the most useful thing it will do is provide a fastish encore and do about 30% to a pokemon you're trying to flinch with air slash before getting 2HKOed
wrt druddigon: mb kind of sucks (it helps you with magic bounce, fluffy / fur coat, multiscale dnite, and the few levitate users that want to switch into druddigon; that's pretty much it unless GF didn't fix that bizarre glitch where mb dtail makes levitating pokemon take spikes damage lol). rough skin has a lot of utility in comparison by helping you chip pokemon you can't otherwise win against. again, I reiterate - sheer force druddigon isn't bad, specifically sheer force LO druddigon is bad. removing fire punch / gunk shot is a kludge to fix that
taunt doesn't actually let it kill ferro and it's pretty much a free switch in. eq probably fails to 4HKO with leftovers. it cannot deal with most fairy types (short of paralyzing them, which barely counts) without gunk shot or fire punch.
wrt vivillon: the choice between the two is a choice between 3 types each I guess (dark / psychic / elec vs. water / rock / ground), I'll do the same as with spiritomb