CAP 17 CAP 6 - Part 4 - Primary Ability Discussion

[nyttyn]

Why Sand Rush is bad:

1. Forced to use Sandstorm teams.

I don't see why this is a problem. Plenty of pokemon are forced to be used with a specific other pokemon, or under a specific weather if they want to be usable. And sand, in and of itself, already has a wide variety of pokemon viable on it (just off the top of my head I can think of volt-turn, stall, balanced, and offensive), so it isn't nearly as constraining on team building as you make it out to be.

2. Heavily reliant on sand to sweep.

3. Lose the weather, lose the sweeper.

Uh...true. I'll go "true". Huh, that was easy. I'll be honest, I might have heard that one before, though; sort of cheating. This is an entirely intentional part of why I chose to support Sand Rush in the first place - it isn't a perfect, always-works solution. You have to work for and to keep your doubled speed, and it provides counter-play to CAP6, something that many of the goodstuff suggestions lack. The two combined means we can be more liberal with stats and movepool then we otherwise might has been, which again are far more reliable and consistent ways of addressing CAP6's problems with setting up. And through all of this, it still patches up a core flaw with CAP6 that is extremely difficult to handle in the stats stage (being outrun by Choice Scarf users, which would require disgustingly high, deo-s levels of base speed) and is impossible in the movepool stage (nobody is going to be mental enough to run Agility AND Belly Drum) while at the same time being a factor that is controlled by the user, rather then the opponent (yes of course you 9.5 times of of 10 WON'T switch in Tyranitar to Keldeo, but that doesn't mean you suddenly can't).

4. Sand Rush is only an amazing ability on the right Pokemon.

Well, yeah. ANY abililty is only amazing on the 'right' pokemon. I don't understand why this is a concern - a pokemon with only unSTABed mach punch will not get much out of iron fist, a pokemon with flying type isn't getting anything out of regenerator, so on and so forth. This isn't really a valid criticism - every single ability that has been brought up will only be amazing if CAP6 has the right tools for the job (with the exception of maybe the immunities).

Help setting up and help sweeping once set up. Sand Rush does the latter in a very limited fashion, and does nothing for the former, which is the one I think is generally seen as more important.
There really is simply very little that Sand Rush does that is actually beneficial when it is functioning, and makes us incredibly one dimensional in order to do so.

Double speed is very benefical and there is no way in hell you can argue otherwise. It is literally 2x speed. TWICE. The speed. That is a very large multiplier.

Also none of the other abilities add any depth to CAP6 whatsoever. It will Belly Drum, and it will attempt to sweep. Period. That's about as one-dimensional as it gets man. It doesn't matter if you absorb water, or recover HP when you switch out, CAP6 is still going to be, regardless, hyper-one-dimensional.

Granted, Sand Rush will help absolutely balls all in setting up, but as I already said, this frees us up to pursue other, more reliable avenues to help CAP6 set up.

 

[Nyktos]

So I've been busy lately. I've sat down to try and compose an epic post about why Unburden rules and everything else drools a few times recently, but I haven't really had the time especially given that I was having trouble expressing exactly why I feel that way. This isn't quite that post, but I guess it's something.

Basically, I think that abilities which do nothing besides making setup easier are a mistake. This category includes the likes of Intimidate and immunity abilities. (I'm sure you can think of one at least other ability that fits the description, too.) The reason for this is: there is no point in attempting to mitigate risk when the reward is not there. No matter how reasonable we make setting up a Belly Drum, it still takes away 50% of our health in exchange for a +6 attack boost. Even Regenerator does not come close to fully removing the downside, and as long as there is a downside to the move that it doesn't share with Swords Dance, there is a problem. The difference between +2 and +6 is smaller than it seems, especially as most people seem to be envisioning CAP 6 as a late-game sweeper whose targets will likely have taken a bit of damage already.

Given that Belly Drum's drawback cannot be removed entirely, and its upside is not by itself enough to justify that drawback, we need to give this CAP something beyond a bigger Attack boost that actually makes it a scarier sweeper than other things, thus making it worth taking a risk at all to set up. Only once we've done that should we consider taking steps to manage the amount of risk involved. I submit that both the easiest and the best way to accomplish this is with an ability that allows it to gain a Speed boost in addition to its Attack boost. Unburden is the best choice because it allows the use of Sitrus Berry (unlike Gluttony), doesn't tie us to a specific weather (unlike Sand Rush and friends) and yet is relatively "controllable" (unlike Speed Boost). However, I think any of these abilities is a better choice than the risk-mitigation abilities.

tl;dr: The question we should be asking is not "How can we make Belly Drum less risky?" but rather "How can we make Belly Drum worth the risk?"

 

[Sonic The Hedgedawg]

I don't see why this is a problem. Plenty of pokemon are forced to be used with a specific other pokemon, or under a specific weather if they want to be usable. And sand, in and of itself, already has a wide variety of pokemon viable on it (just off the top of my head I can think of volt-turn, stall, balanced, and offensive), so it isn't nearly as constraining on team building as you make it out to be.


Uh...true. I'll go "true". Huh, that was easy. I'll be honest, I might have heard that one before, though; sort of cheating. This is an entirely intentional part of why I chose to support Sand Rush in the first place - it isn't a perfect, always-works solution. You have to work for and to keep your doubled speed, and it provides counter-play to CAP6, something that many of the goodstuff suggestions lack. The two combined means we can be more liberal with stats and movepool then we otherwise might has been, which again are far more reliable and consistent ways of addressing CAP6's problems with setting up. And through all of this, it still patches up a core flaw with CAP6 that is extremely difficult to handle in the stats stage (being outrun by Choice Scarf users, which would require disgustingly high, deo-s levels of base speed) and is impossible in the movepool stage (nobody is going to be mental enough to run Agility AND Belly Drum) while at the same time being a factor that is controlled by the user, rather then the opponent (yes of course you 9.5 times of of 10 WON'T switch in Tyranitar to Keldeo, but that doesn't mean you suddenly can't).



Well, yeah. ANY abililty is only amazing on the 'right' pokemon. I don't understand why this is a concern - a pokemon with only unSTABed mach punch will not get much out of iron fist, a pokemon with flying type isn't getting anything out of regenerator, so on and so forth. This isn't really a valid criticism - every single ability that has been brought up will only be amazing if CAP6 has the right tools for the job (with the exception of maybe the immunities).




Double speed is very benefical and there is no way in hell you can argue otherwise. It is literally 2x speed. TWICE. The speed. That is a very large multiplier.

Also none of the other abilities add any depth to CAP6 whatsoever. It will Belly Drum, and it will attempt to sweep. Period. That's about as one-dimensional as it gets man. It doesn't matter if you absorb water, or recover HP when you switch out, CAP6 is still going to be, regardless, hyper-one-dimensional.

Granted, Sand Rush will help absolutely balls all in setting up, but as I already said, this frees us up to pursue other, more reliable avenues to help CAP6 set up.

I really REALLY don't want this CAP to rely on sand to work. Belly drum is risky enough as it is without being hard-countered by politoed who will halve our speed as well as resisting our priority STAB which would be the only way to get around our bad speed. Having "rain teams" be a counter is not a good thing. I really don't want that at all for our CAP.

 

[vyomov]

I don't see why this is a problem

.
I do.
The problem with Sand Rush is that, as earlier mentioned by Fuzznip, it works well on pokemon that can sweep from the start rather than pokemon that have to set up.

Imagine the scenario: you switch in CAP 6 and forcing out xxx choice locked Dragon, you Belly Drum. Now what if I switch to Ninetales? Not ONLY is your sand boost gone like the wind, but Ninetales beats it one on one:
+6 252+ Atk (custom) Bullet Punch vs. 252 HP / 120 Def Ninetales: 131-154 (37.42 - 44%) -- guaranteed 3HKO
(Assuming CAP 6 has a base atk of 100, which is VERY unlikely)

0 SpA Ninetales Flamethrower vs. 4 HP / 0 SpD (custom) in sun: 300-354 (96.46 - 113.82%) -- guaranteed OHKO after Stealth Rock

This is assuming 100 HP/100 SpD, which is possible for CAP 6

So even with NO investment, Ninetales handily beats CAP 6. So do most other weather inducers at 50%:

252 SpA Politoed Hydro Pump vs. 4 HP / 0 SpD (custom) in rain: 264-312 (84.88 - 100.32%) -- 81.25% chance to OHKO after Stealth Rock

(Scarf Politoed here)
So where in the world is Sand Rush helping CAP 6? It only ensures that most weather inducers beat it one-on-one!

This is why I support Unburden, which DOES NOT RELY ON ANY WEATHER, giving us versatility.

 

[Stratos]

Okay, it's been 24ish hours since my 24 hour warning and i have not seen compelling evidence to keep it open. I'm closing and announcing the slate now.

Regenerator
Unburden
Magic Bounce
Intimidate
Water Absorb
Sand Rush
Motor Drive

If any of the items I have left off the slate come as a surprise to anyone, I apologize. I attempted to get all of the abilities that had multiple pretty intelligent posts of support (ie more than just "throwing it out there") and I did opt to include all of the abilities I was on the fence about—better to do so than not do so, and just let them come to a vote.

It's worth noting that I don't think all of the slated options are equally legitimate choices. I don't even think all of them are good, or even that all of them take a step in the forward direction with the concept. I simply think they are the ones that it wouldn't be a waste of time to make you vote on. (Besides, between 4 and 7 it's three days of voting anyway so what the hell you know?) You've already read my and everyone else's points on all these abilities, so there's no need to restate them here. With that said, I'll leave it up to the community to pick what they want for this CAP; here you go.

 

[capefeather]

I'm taking out Magic Bounce.

What this discussion has told me about Magic Bounce is that it's really hard to tell what it will do in practice on a Pokemon that's attempting to be a Belly Drum sweeper. There are only two evolutionary families in the entire game with the ability, and as we all know, a sample of size 2 is a terrible one. Although it's a staple in Balanced Hackmons, that metagame is so fundamentally different from OU that it seems foolhardy to use it as an indicator of what an arbitrary Magic Bounce user would do in OU. That's actually what makes me really nervous about Magic Bounce. Even if we get this to work just fine, Magic Bounce is such a perfect combination of hype and unknowns (not to mention it could double as a source of speculation on Mega Absol) that I fear it would overshadow the concept and concept assessment just by being such a potentially interesting experiment in itself.

The effort made to support Magic Bounce was certainly a valiant one. Ultimately, however, this very thread has shown how dominating it is as a "concept" in itself. Had CAP 6's concept been more along the lines of DougJustDoug's late game sweeper concept, we'd have been in a more flexible position and Magic Bounce might have been a perfectly fine choice for an ability. Alas, this is not the case. Oh well, there are other abilities that are along the same lines on the slate.