CAP 28 - Part 1 - Concept Assessment

[dex]

Guess I'm gonna have to ask this, but I am wondering what people exactly intend when they are saying Stallbreaker, as the term is perhaps the second most broad term in the game (after pivot). You could make a good argument that Taunt + Wisp Mew, CM Reuniclus, SD Gliscor, Sub NP Hydreigon, Band Hoopa are all stallbreakers. Do we intend for "setup mon that resists status" (Glisc, Reun), "taunt mon that has some non-conditional damage" (Taunt Mew, Taunt Tox Heatran), "mon that just hits dummy hard" (Ice-Z Kyurem, CB Hoopa), or some other interpretation?

To refine at least my thoughts on what Stallbreaker should entail for CAP28 should be either the first option (setup that resists status) as that punishes the teleport turn and status spamming of Teleport abusers, or the third option (hits absurdly hard). Both hard punish teleport, as something is gonna get hit DUMMY HARD™ one way or another. I don't see another viable option besides those two while applying the necessary amount of pressure on a pivot team. Taunt just doesn't provide the same amount of momentum that the, ahem, DUMMY HARD™ hit would. One more defensive option I could see working is a Substitute user similar to CroCune , but that's really the only way I see a defensive concept working at the moment.

 

[Mx]

Ok, there's still a few hours to go, but I'd like go over a few points before the deadline.

First of all, at this point I'm inclined to believe that having a good offensive presence is a must (either by high base stats, high powered STAB moves or general offensive bias). This is pretty much required if we want to effectively force out Teleport users without them just using that move to safely run away. I don't think this necessarily dictates whether or not we should we should be primarily offensive or defensive, but this is something I'd always like to maintain when moving forward.

Second, I agree with quziel that stallbreaker is a very broad term, so we need to use it with caution. I think that for the purpose of this concept I'd like to define "stallbreaker" as a Pokemon that is able to win against passive strategies (status, residual damage, etc) most of the time. I also think we should consider shorten this list a bit because I think this might still be a bit too broad, as it includes things varying from bulky set up sweepers to just powerful and hard to switch-in wallbreakers, although we should be able to work around this definition if we want to.

Finally a few notes about our list of strategies to disrupt pivots:

• I'm adding Draining Moves, Resilience to passive damage and immunities to the list, as these have been proposed as decent ways to deal with pivots
• I'm inclined to avoid adding Hazards and Item removal, as many pivots already have decent ways to play around them, and more importantly, we just explored these ideas with Astrolotl so I think it'd not be a particularly exciting route to take
• I'll be keeping Taunt and adding Encore. It's true that these moves are fairly weak ways to punish pivots, but they're also very versatile and could be useful in lots of different scenarios (trying to beat Blissey without needing to be physical would be just one example). For these reason, I believe that they're very useful tools, even if they should never be our main focus.
• I'm not planning on adding Trick Room or Speed Swap, as the first one would require us to build specifically around it to be effective and the second one is way too gimmicky to be a reliable tool.

I'd still like to finish this discussion tonight, but I'm willing to give an extension if people would like some more time to discuss.

 

[Mx]

And now it's time to wrap this up.

First of all, CAP 28 will be targeting primarily Teleport pivots, with a secondary focus on other another kind of pivot to be decided later.
These are the proposed methods to accomplish this goal.

• General offensive pressure
• Substitute
• Phazing (Whirlwind, Dragon Tail, etc.)
• Disruption moves (Taunt and Encore)
• Strong priority
• Draining moves (Giga Drain, Drain Punch, etc.)
• Resilience to passive damage
• Type immunities

This is merely supposed to be a guideline. CAP 28 is not required to use these, but they should be considered useful tools moving forward. The list is also not final, and certain things might be added or removed on later stages depending on how CAP 28 plays out.

Apart from that, CAP 28 should always aim to have good offensive presence, as that will always be important to be able to pressure our targets, but that doesn't mean we need to be primarily offensive in nature (Zapdos and Vileplume are good examples of this that have been brought up). Additionally, CAP 28 should be able to act as a stallbreaker, which in this context means that it should be able to win most of the time against passive strategies like status and residual damage.

Other than that I'd like to keep our options open for the time being, as I think there are many different ways to approach this concept and I look forward to what the next stages might bring us. Without further ado, let's move on to the Typing Stage, which will be leaded by quziel.