Hi, just been thinking about this beautiful metagame again recently and had some scattered thoughts
I'm way more inclined to agree with
Hogg on the suggested changes in his previous post.
Rose is a metagame defining force and is, at the very least, at or above the level of Sableye as it's far and away the best Spiker because of its ability to exploit the omnipresent waters of the tier. S- is perfect for it.
Tang sucks cause it isn't a real water resist. Its only real niche is as a good check to Ground-types since most Grass-types are either specially bulky or don't even resist Ground (rose) but it's not an especially relevant niche because strong grounds aren't especially common and there's other stuff like Wailord that can do the job efficiently enough while compressing other roles. Not to mention how stuff like Pilo and Whiscash can potentially beat it anyways with Ice Beam. I think B+ is appropriate.
Wailord is the face of this tier now, by the way. I was skeptical when Hogg brought it up in his original post, but I've played with and against it a ton and it's amazing. Wailord covers for all of the threatening Fire- and Water-types in the tier and its existence puts a very real opportunity cost on what used to be a very low cost sweeper in Huntail. What bolsters its viability well above the ceiling of Dewgong is its access to Roar which is completely invaluable in the Spikes-centric metagame that is ADV NU. Not instantly dying to chan helps as well. I know it has a lot of other deadly sets aside from the resttalk set, such as sub toxic and even curse. Wail should be A+ minimum or even S- I think it's that's amazing for the tier.
252+ SpA Deep Sea Tooth Clamperl Ice Beam vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Roselia: 261-308 (85.8 - 101.3%) -- 87.5% chance to OHKO after 1 layer of Spikes and Leftovers recovery
252+ SpA Deep Sea Tooth Clamperl Hidden Power Electric vs. 0 HP / 252 SpD Wailord: 289-340 (60 - 70.6%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after 1 layer of Spikes and Leftovers recovery
Clamperl is far more viable than some garbage like Machoke put it in like B-. Sub three attacks has the ability to dismantle just about every defensive core by exploiting mons like Sableye, Chime, and Wailord.
What's Pelipper doing so high again? I don't think it's especially threatening in a tier saturated with more powerful Waters. The defensive resttalk set is cool as a hitmon check, but I think there are more splashable hitmon checks that offer more for a team than resttalk peli.
Agree with Vig in A+ too. I think it's far more difficult to prepare for than something like Pidge as it seems to have a set to beat just about every one of the traditional Normal checks sans like Reli/Sudo. Also agree on Kec dropping. On paper the spdef set is cool cause it can soft check a whole lot, but in practice you'll probably find that most stuff will outlast you and, at the absolute worst, just trade with you.
Pika and Plusle should just outright swap positions (I think someone on this page said that but I don't remember). Pika is a very reliable source of front loaded damage for a team and it's not like Plusle is really offering much in the way of defensive synergy over Pika. Plusle is just so much weaker that it's hard to justify it nowadays in a tier where stuff like Rose and Flareon are so powerful. The only significant niches it has over pika is outspeeding Murk/Pidge (useful for more offensively inclined teams for sure) and BP, which I think can be done better by bulkier passers.
And man, I don't want to really go in depth on the lower ranks, but it feels like even stuff at b and below is really messed up. Maybe we could organize some guys to get together to just completely redo those at some point because damn stuff like Quilava, Dustox, Spinda, Ledian, and just the majority of the ranked stuff there does not seem like it should be. EDIT: It might actually be a better representation of the metagame if we just UR a ton of shit and then restructure the list like how the ADV OU list does it without any subranks. I actually think we're at a stable enough point in the metagame where we could rebalance the list to correctly represent this. It just feels like the current version of the list is trying to include too much and it does a lackluster job of representing the current meta as a result. Would be cool to hear opinions on that.
Gonna add an
Oglemi tag at the end here since it's been a while since this thread has seen any love.