I've got a few things I want to go over. At this point I feel like most people are starting to make adjustments to the Home meta. Obviously it has only been out about a week, and tons of things will change but that initial shift of "hey I should probably account for Keldeo when building" has taken hold. With that in mind there is one new home mon that has already gotten plenty of attention in this thread that I want to address.
The first handful of times I went up against this thing on the ladder I was honestly less than amazed. I thought it came across a little underwhelming and was going to end up back in UU like last gen. After actually building a team utilizing Zeraora my opinion has changed. While the power is still less than ideal, 423 speed is just flat good. effectively being the fastest relevant mon in the meta is something that will always aid a mon. Dragapult is on what feels like every other team, so sitting there faster is something that just makes me smile every time I send this thing out.
Aside from an incredible speed tier Zeraora has access to really nice coverage for the current tier we find ourselves in. Between Close Combat and Grass Knot pretty much all the relevant ground types have to somewhat fear switching in. On top of this Zeraora has Knock Off which helps against some common switch ins like the Rotom variants, so they're at least losing their item. On top of this Electric stab is just really cool right now. With the exception of Rotom a lot of electrics have seemingly digressed with the loss of Hidden Power, so it's nice to see one still going strong (Tho Zera will feel it when it can't HP Ice a Lando after one of the expansions).
Now onto the
bigger topic I wanted to talk about, being some thoughts on how OU should move forward with suspects and why the tier feels kind of odd building wise for a good number of people.
As some of you know I lead the RMT section here on Smogon, so the process of building teams and making teams as close to perfect as they can be has always interested me. With this in mind I have spent countless hours over the past few years scrolling through the OU section of the builder trying to find the perfect mon for a number of teams. After looking at Sayuze's post I opened up the builder and scrolled through for a little while trying to see if there was something I could come up with, as I have honestly found this meta less than amazing.
I firmly believe that currently someone can open up their builder, find some interesting mon with some sweeping/cleaning potential like a Cloyster, throw on a Dugtrio, add a couple strong breakers on there like Conkeldurr or Hydreigon, and as long as the last few mons make a decent backbone you'll be alright.
Personally I am not the biggest fan of being able to pick a sweeper, and just input the corresponding Dugtrio set to achieve success. There are a lot of arguments swirling around about whether or not trapping is competitive or healthy for the metagame, so I wont go into it that much. More or less just wanted to point out that I feel the removal of Dugtrio from the tier would be a positive step before I get into the meat of my post.
My bigger takeaway was what the meta looked like, when comparing this generation to last (I know this isn't the best thing to do). From a current gen OU perspective we've never really had to deal with losing toys, only learning how to play with new ones. SS OU honestly looks like some weird mess of SM UU mixed with a handful of SM OU mons. I think the OU community has gotten a little bit spoiled with some very strong overall mons. Not looking to fuel a legends are for noobs argument, but not having mons like Tapu Bulu, Landorus-T, Magearna, Heatran, Zapdos, and Tornadus-T (on top of a lot of other non-legends like Garchomp, Gliscor, M-Scizor, Volcarona and others) that provide some very real defensive presence on top of being mons that can also stand firmly as offensive threats to opposing teams has made building awkward. The power curve that OU has followed in the past has been thrown for a bit of a loop as the tier still has plenty of strong mons that are more than enough offensively, but more or less lack real defensive utility. Losing that mon like Tapu Bulu where you could be running an SD set, but still rely on it to help check an Ash-Gren level offensive mon hurts.
We still have some mons that hit hard and provide solid help defensively like Excadrill and Hydreigon, but not nearly to the same level of quantity. Obviously the overall power level of current gen OU has fallen, but some of those stronger mons from gens prior remain, leaving us in a weird void where seeing a balanced metagame seems difficult. Do we go wild and ban a ton of things? Do we just say screw SS OU stage 1 and wait for the expansions knowing we'll move onto a remake or some SS2 not to long after? Honestly I don't know. I have tried to look at old gens, since obviously they made it work with fewer mons, but they also had to deal with less in terms of moves/items/and in some cases typing. Since I don't even want to think about how something like DPP would have dealt with Primarina as it's just to different.
I honestly look forward to seeing how Finch and the other council members decide to deal with SS OU, since it's in a very interesting place in my eyes. All this being said I wouldn't expect anything in terms of a suspect in the next few weeks since it would definitely be premature, and as a builder I still like the idea of mastering this meta. If I had to throw out some sort of plan I would probably look at Dugtrio,
maybe stop and look at the multi hit flinch shenanigans, and then after taking a breath look at either testing something else that makes itself known as potentially broken or even try and retest Melmetal as I believe that was something mentioned for the council's future plans. I definitely feel this generation will probably need more suspects than SM did, but at the same time I don't want to see the tier running one test after another in an endless fashion. While action will be necessary to get this meta where it needs to be, we as a community will need to show a
smidgen of patience allowing for people to have time to actually develop the meta before we jump on a suspect bandwagon.
My bad for going off on a bit of a tangent on this, but after looking at Sayuze's post I just got to thinking, and knew I wouldn't stop thinking about it unless I made some kind of rambling post. Sorry if this much suspect kind of talk is frowned upon in this thread (really unsure on that), if it's gotta be moderated in some fashion I understand.
