Breeding for HP for wifi is maddening!

[Miao]

I've been working on this team for a little while, and trying to build up a team for wifi battling. I'm still testing it on shoddy, and making small tweaks every so often, but I figure posting it here would be a better way to get feedback.

One thing I ask you keep in mind, getting decent legendary pokemon is rather difficult, and although there are several I love, I haven't gotten a hold of many decent ones for my collection. So currently I'm avoiding having them on my team at this time. If you suggest replacing anything, please make it something I can get from breeding. :)

Now, on to the team!

Thank you!
Giving this thread a final update. There aren't really any major weaknesses left aside from HP: Ice Raikus, but those are rare enough, even on shoddy, that I'm not really worried about them. And this team despite being weak to ice in spots isn't that safe to switch in on for electrics either.

Thank you all for the help, and the people who gave me advice on shoddy battle as well, the posts in this thread and the battling advice during matches let me beat out most of the bugs in this team and get something truly solid.

It's stable and doing well enough that I'm breeding for wifi now, dear goddess all these hidden powers are going to drive me insane.

On a side note... dratini, gligar, riolu and sneasel will all be little cup oriented (not going to bother with budew, but I'll have that too) and I'll try to squeeze some higher end moves onto them. Might as well breed two teams in one if I can. ^-~

At a glance:

What's New:
-Roserade in, Mismagus out, taking the lead spot no less.
-Dragonite not a starter anymore and is using Fire Punch.
-Gliscor has Ice Fang.
-Ninetails is out again, so sad. :(
-Weavile is back in, carrying a brand new Choice Scarf.
-Milotic is now running HP: Electric... trippy

In Detail:

EV Spreads are by:HP/Attack/Defense/S. Atk/S. Def/Speed

Roserade @ Leftovers
Ability: Natural Cure
EVs: 6/-/-/252/-/252
Nature: Timid
- Leaf Storm
- HP: Fire
- Sleep Powder
- Toxic Spikes/Leech Seed
After some debate, and giving tangrowth a great deal of testing. And then testing roserade I opted for roserade. It puts a bandaid on this teams gyra weakness, although it doesn't fix it totally the way tangrowth did. So... why opt for roserade?

Most gyras are starters, which roserade takes care of nicely, the ones it has trouble with are the ones waiting in the wings. If it starts roserade can severely cripple it enough that it isn't a threat anymore. It also makes a far stronger starter with sleep powder than dragonite did with thunder wave.

This is pretty much the standard roserade set lately, I dabbled with HP: Ice and HP: Electric, and although both worked, putting a dent in steel types is a strong bonus, especially those opening bronzongs.

I'm going back and fourth between Leech Seed and Toxic Spikes, one wears down more, and the other helps surviveability but dies on switches. I'll probably just go for two separate pokes as it seems like it's really a preference of the moment thing. Both wear down blissey or force it to constantly use aromatherapy, but toxic spikes work better against most teams. Was running Aromatherapy earlier but roserade tends to be too fragile to really put it to good use.

I have to play lightly with it as it's quite fragile, but it can at least take a hit from ice beam and survive to take down the likes of starmie and vaporeon as well. Also suicinine doesn't seem to be an issue with it as most of those seem to be calm minders skipping out on ice beam. Tangrowth didn't handle starmie or vaporeon consistantly either, which is the other aspect that made me pick the flower.

Dragonite @ Yache Berry
Ability: Inner Focus
EVs: 6/252/-/-/-/252
Nature: Jolly
- Dragon Dance
- Outrage
- Earthquake
- Fire Punch/Thunder Wave

After adding roserade, dragonite moved to a back seat and is now hiding in the eaves of the team. Before it would often get slaughtered quickly as my opponents danced around it and threw everything they had at it. Now its sweeping far more and making a far more devistating effect. Although it's far more tricky to get a DD in, but I basically wait to switch into things that don't want to be hit by an Outrage. :)

Currently running Fire Punch to handle bronzongs, and various nuisance ice types on the switch in. If zong usage seems relatively low, I'll go back to Thunder Wave.

Gliscor @ Leftovers
Ability: Sand Veil
EVs:252/80/2/-/-/176
Nature: Impish
- Earthquake
- Ice Fang
- Taunt
- Roost
For the longest time, I avoided gliscor like the plague, but it pairs so well with lucario that I eventually caved in and added it. It works as my main counter to zapdos and various flying pests, and Taunt shuts down many nasties.

Unfortunatelyit shares an ice weakness with dragonite, making it a bit risky, and garchomp running amuk means many people run 2~3 pokes with ice. Previously I was running Aerial Ace over Stone Edge, but it didn't do enough damage for me, even with stab. Removing it has made heracross more of a worry for me, but not so much.

Taunt is there to shutdown blissey and various sleep talkers, as well as many things that dare to try to setup on him.

Ice Fang was suggested by Tangerine, and is working wonderfully to kill pesky brelooms, nuisance ground types, flyers, and garchomps.

Lucario @ Life Orb
Ability: Inner Focus
EVs: 6/-/-/-/252/-/252
Nature: Modest
- Aura Sphere
- Vacuum Wave
- Shadow Ball
- HP: Ice
Your standard SpecsLuke, currently running Life Orb so it doesn't get trapped as the last poke and get crippled. Currently its working amazingly well and takes no time at all to setup, which was previously a major problem with this team (way too slow). It's simply a beast.

Shadow Ball does far better damage than Dark Pulse in most situations, and the flinches proc far too little. I have no idea how well Flash Cannon would work, but I'm liking Vacuum Wave much more right now, especially since it has the potential to take down heatrans in a single hit.

It also works as a backup psychic killer if weavile drops dead for any reason with it.

The biggest threat for him is CMBliss running a boltbeam set, which are much more common on wifi than on shoddy. With some assistance it works as a great counter (and most people switch out bliss when they see lucario come in) but it has failed me at times. Of course anything that has fire or earthquakes kills it quickly if it's outsped, but that comes naturally with it.

Milotic @ Leftovers
Ability: Mirror Scale
EVs: 54/-/252/112/-/92
Nature: Bold
- Hydro Pump
- HP: Electric
- Recover
- Hypnosis
After playing for a long time with one I bred ages ago, extensive testing on shoddy revealed this team needed a solid gyra counter. Adding roserade helped somewhat, but what do you do if it has a DD or two under its belt and is tearing through the team? With this setup gyra and most other bulky waters simply arn't an issue anymore.

I decided to make a big sacrifice and remove one of my main garchomp counters. I experimented with a boltbeam (HP:Electric, Ice Beam and Hydro Pump/Surf) variety for awhile, but the utility of hypnosis is really helpful and needed if I want to force a switch on blissey who otherwise spells death in the long run.

I'm wondering if a wish passing vaporeon might add more utility in this spot however. Right now, I'm thinking Hypnosis is making a stronger choice than Yawn on vaporeon though. Also, marvel scale is fun. :D

Weavile @ Choice Scarf
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 6/252/-/-/-/252
Nature: Adamant
- Pursuit
- Brick Break
- Night Slash
- Ice Punch
After dieing over and over again to flamethrower carrying timid azelfs, as well as having a good chunk of my team being eaten up by deoxys-s I switched over to choice scarf. Short of an aerodactyl or deoxys-s carrying another scarf, pretty much nothing can outspeed her even after a couple dragon dances. Downside is she's locked into moves, but she works very well, and also manages to 2hko blisseys who are foolish enough to stay in. It also takes care of various dragons and makes a great killer for gengar. I'm glad so many suggested adding this lovely poke back.


Removed Pokemon:
ALL of these pokemon have previously been on the team, and been removed. If you suggest adding any of them back, you have to counter the reason I took it out, and tell me how to make it work this time around. They all looked appealing at some time or another, but they ended up falling short and costing me games.

Scarily... I might end up with another team just from the castoffs of this one, trippy.

Skarmory is the oddball out here as I'm just avoiding using it due to being overdependent, and also shifting for a far more defensive style than I want to go with as my main strategy.

Mismagus @ Leftovers
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 120/-/-/150/-/240
Nature: Timid
- Calm Mind
- Shadow Ball
- Thunderbolt
- Will o' Wisp
Note: Has HP Fighting

Ninetails @ Focus Sash
Ability: Flash Fire
EVs: -/-/6/252/-/252
Nature: Timid
- Fire Blast
- Energy Ball
- Hypnosis
- Nasty Plot

Breloom @ Toxic Orb
Ability: Poison Heal
EVs: 6/252/-/-/-/252
Nature: Jolly
- Focus Punch
- Leech Seed/Seed Bomb
- Spore
- Substitute

Skarmory @ Shed Shell
Ability: Sturdy
EVs: 252/94/156/-/-/8
Nature: Impish
- Brave Bird
- Whirlwind
- Spikes
- Roost

That's about it!
Any suggestions are welcome, one of the main flaws is the team lacks a hazer, so has a bit of difficulty handling sub/boosters. But they can often be dealt with by just smacking them upside the head hard enough.

I'm trying to improve my battling skills, and this team is working quite well for improving my prediction, so I'm avoiding going to an all out stall team.

I look forward to any suggestions. :)

 

[Spiritman]

First of all, yeah ninetales can get out of there x).
Both Breloom and Skarmory do well for her. Skarm for that lack of Phazer you have, and always a good option =).
Breloom can work, sometimes u just need patience, cuz yeah, sleep talkers are common, but even though this breloom kiks ass xD!

For the problem you have With lucario of "bliss", you can simply throw in a Close Combat and say bye bye blissey xD!
check out the "mixed" set, it works 2.

For the rest, i like the team. its not so Trustable, or Common. But looks like it works =).

good luck, C-ya!

 

[Miao]

First of all, yeah ninetales can get out of there x).
Both Breloom and Skarmory do well for her. Skarm for that lack of Phazer you have, and always a good option =).
Breloom can work, sometimes u just need patience, cuz yeah, sleep talkers are common, but even though this breloom kiks ass xD!

For the problem you have With lucario of "bliss", you can simply throw in a Close Combat and say bye bye blissey xD!
check out the "mixed" set, it works 2.

For the rest, i like the team. its not so Trustable, or Common. But looks like it works =).

good luck, C-ya!

The main reason I put up the "Removed Members" section was to show what I had considered, and taken out. I love all of them, but... along with the other pokes, they just didn't fit in. I should add a little note explaining that bit, so it's a bit harder to miss. xD Ninetails is currently filling in all the holes that weavile left wide open, I realize it probably isn't the best option, but it's working for the moment. I keep cursing at the bugger when garchomp shows up though.

I hadn't thought of a mixed set on lucario, mostly since I'd have to split my evs for it. Close Combat is good enough I might be able to run it over Aura Sphere, it might mix well with the other attacks too, so, I'll test it for a bit. Might also cover some of those other special walls too. The main question? Can it 1hko heatran if it has no atk evs :)

 

[Tangerine]

Mismagius will never counter Gyarados, since it will be OHKOd easily by a Dragon Dance Waterfall.

So first, lets deal with Gyarados whom your team can't deal with otherwise. I would try getting something like a Tangrowth, who also counters Gyarados, and rips down those Bulky Waters that otherwise wall your team. It also somewhat deals with those annoying Sub Garchomps since it can take a Sword Dance'd Dragon Claw. Maybe you can try getting one with HP Ice? If not, Starmie is another decent option, maybe you can run something like Surf/Tbolt/Ice Beam/Recover

Ice Fang on Gliscor over Stone Edge, I don't see Gliscor doing too much with Stone Edge while it could try and kill Breloom and Garchomp with Ice Fang.

Now your problem is that Gengar laughs at your team and you can't beat Blissey. Meaning I would use that Weavile to revenge kill Gengar with Pursuit and try and dent Blissey. I don't see much Ninetales can do so I'd replace Weavile with it.

Lastly, your team isn't too offensive, your only real offense being Dragonite whom your opponent will be expecting. Perhaps try Sword Dance Lucario over the current Lucario set? It'll give you that offense you desperately want

 

[Kingdrom]

Hello Miao. Here is the rate I promised you:

Dragonite, despite the Yache Berry, is not that great of a lead. Salamence will outspeed and OHKO with a max attack Dragon Claw without an item, if with boosting item, it will always OHKO. Bronzong and Gengar ruin this Dragonite; Gengar won't OHKO with HP Ice, but it will sleep you and if you want to beat it, you'll have to be locked into Outrage.

If you were to keep Ninetales, then put Hypnosis over Dark Pulse, otherwise you're running an inferior Houndoom (no STAB on Dark Pulse, higher sp. atk, HP Ftg as a way to beat Heatran). Hypnosis+Nasty Plot Ninetales doesn't make too bad of a lead with Focus Sash.

Gliscor wants Ice Fang over Stone Edge, as you have no reliable Garchomp counter otherwise. I don't understand Taunt Gliscors, since statusing a Gliscor isn't the best way to beat it. For a form of offense, you could put Swords Dance over Taunt, as with that speed, he could do a number on Heracrosses, especially those of the SD Facade variety.

I'm not sure about the Ev's on Milotic. I would move 52 ev's to HP, as CB tar only runs 207 speed normally. With a mediocre HP Iv, you'll need all the HP you can get.

As Tangerine said- there is no way that Mismagius is countering Gyarados on the switchin, especially the DD LO variety. This is where Milotic comes in. I know it would be painful to replace Milotic, but HP Electric could be helpful in countering Gyarados. Skarmory would probably be best over Ninetales, as with Brave Bird, he can take on Gyarados and between Gliscor and Skarmory, Heracross will be anything but a problem.

 

[Malfunction]

Good team overall, no big weakness to a specific type. However, you might be having troubles against special walls such as bliss. you don't need 3 sp. sweepers. You can switch ninetails (again) with a physical arcanine (they have no much difference). You may need a spiker/stealth layer and a spinner. donphan might be good. Roar+Spin+Stealth= Not bad physical wall. You should also be careful of gengar, as your team lacks a "superfast" sweeper. Hope this helped.

 

[Miao]

Pretty much everyone is telling me, both here and off, to put weavile back in place of ninetails. I missed him, so the two are swapped for now. I'll update my main post later when I have time tomorrow.

@Tangerine: I honestly hadn't considered tangrowth at all.. it seems like an interesting choice. Replacing gliscor and ninetails means I get a nasty hera weak though, right now I'm testing how well that can be played around, as I'm liking tangrowth more as a solid bulky water counter, which I needed desperately. To patch it up, replacing night slash (which doesn't get all that much play) with AA to at least get hera on the revenge kill.

Playing around to see if knock off support is more beneficial than HP: Ice as well, but if it works fairly well I'll just breed it with that anyways... this team is very much living up to my topic. Also... the big green blob seems much more fun to play as far as mind games and prediction. weavile is taking care of blissey nicely, working in tandom with lucario, so as terrifying as it was before it doesn't seem to be a big issue now, especially since mismagus is back to HP: Fight and shadow ball (special fighting? yes, but blissey doesn't have time to cm up, so takes big hits).

I'll try SDluke later, but it seems it would play as entirely different creature, the setup means I'd probably convert mismagus to a perish trapper.

@Kingdrom: The dark pulse bit was just a temporary thing, it'll be back to hypnosising away shortly :) The set at the top is basically a snapshot of what my team was when I was writing this.

As far as gliscor goes, taunt is there more to stop swords dancers and baton passers, it doesn't really care about statusers. It could also deal with suicinine very badly, but I was limping along with it and using it that way was outright suicidal (it only did this when pretty much everything else was dead, I'm not that crazy). I did it a few times, I think the people I did it against were quite surprized. More often than not it taunted garchomps on the switch in (the ev spread is to beat out the standard "bulky" gyra, which many run), or after, and keep them from setting up too nastily. It also did the same to various other stat boosters who tried to setup on it. Also taunt kills sub, which is always a good thing.

For Milotic, I'm doublechecking her EVs and that version is running a sightly different EV spread, I'll update it here, I used the one I was using on shoddy and didn't realize the one I had ingame was different. I'm glad you pointed it out since I honestly didn't notice until I dug out my old notes. Being all lazy and copy pasting I found:
Freyja - Milotic (Bold)
HP 84
Atk -
Def 255
SAtk 104
SDef 7
Spd 60

Geh... not totally ideal... actually... I'm wondering if this is off as well... I'll have to recalculate again later and see where exactly the points are sitting, feeding these in to the calculator yields different IVs than what I came up with ages ago, and I know at least the Special Attack number is wrong since it yields the wrong IV, and I'm trusting the IV man more than a calculator (Special Attack is flawless, a thing of perfection!).

If I rebreed her, she'll probably be running hypnosis over mirror coat, just so I have more of a reason in that regard... boltbeamer milotic sounds trippy.. woa... I bet it would be fun :) There's Surf/HP:elec/Ice Beam too of course, but she'd be bred with hypnosis. ^-~

Might be easier to just to replace her with starmie as tangerine suggested for that set.

I'm very tempted to add in skarmory, I know it would work, but I depended on it too much for too long... This team isn't really all that defensive, but compared to how I was playing, this is a bit of a shift away. This team is an experiment on making myself a better player, and it's been helping a great deal that way. While I'm breeding and putting everything together I might just run them together for wifi, it sounds outright evil. Even if gliscor somehow ends up going in the long run I'm not eliminating it from running just yet. I'm planning on breeding on anyways since gligar sounds very fun for little cup. Actually... most of this team is secretly a little cup breeding project for me.

Weavile coming back neatly fixes the garchomp problem. :) As far as ninetails goes... I'll just have to make a team specifically built around her so she can shine someday. Thanks a lot for coming through on the team rate, I really do appriciate it.

@Amre92: Quite a few people have mentioned donphan, on shoddy the meta is shifting far more towards stall teams with skarm rearing it's head with stealth rockers, which is a nasty strategy. If it keeps up too much, I might have to run it, or something like it. It also brings Ice Shard in, which is never a bad thing.

I like arcanine, it's nice, and on fire. The catch? I'm not all attached and sentimental about it in the same way. It feels kinda like Ninetail's evil twin to me, so I don't play it all that much (although, the pooch is fun as hell to play). I'd rather replace it with something else entirely instead of another fire type. I'm kinda sentimental about it, and she's literally my most favorite pokemon. Thus my horribly stubborn insistance on constantly putting her back even if I know she'll perish. But, I'm finally realizing I can't really make her work with this group of pokes.

I'll be updating my team later, right now I'm testing all sorts of options on shoddy, seeing what works best. Only bit that's definite for now is weavile is replacing ninetails, and milotic's EV spread is off by a few points. I'll update both tomorrow.

 

[Tangerine]

Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that if you're going to replace anything, you should replace Mismagius with Tangrowth.

Sorry for forgetting that.

 

[Jigo]

if you're going to keep ninetales, (i don't reccomend you do), i wouldn;t use focus sash. in today's metagame, there's always spikes and stealth rock going aorund. since you have no spinner, they will make your item useless. as for what you would use, i don't see ninetales often eough to know.

 

[Miao]

I made a ton of changes to the team, testing on shoddy shows it to be much more solid, although it still has trouble with late game gyras, but handles the rest.

I've been trying all sorts of things in the meantime, but testing as shown this is the most potent variety so far.

I'd still like feedback on opinions though, so I can make things even more solid before getting into heavy breeding. :)

 

[Scofield]

You might want to test out focus sash on lead roserade, as it helps it against any leads that are faster, at least, its what I found to be the preferred item.

 

[Miao]

You might want to test out focus sash on lead roserade, as it helps it against any leads that are faster, at least, its what I found to be the preferred item.

I haven't yet encountered anything that 1hkos it first turn :) Anything that can do that is a switch. If I switch it into anything it'll be a 2hko, which ruins sash, but leftovers help a great deal with.