Exotic64 has used Fairyblast Gouge with Stone Edge which can be a really annoying set for many Moltres teams as seen here.
For my own quick thoughts since I don't really have the time to do the suspect. Gouging Fire is the easiest ban out of all the threats in the metagame for me. In terms of its fundamental tools it's a bulky sweeper with access to DD + Morning Sun and at least two really efficient sets of two move coverage (both dual STAB coverage and Fire + Ground coverage barely miss out on any of the metagame). This type of set poses a lot of practical problems to the metagame as it takes a lot of playing options off the table. For example if you stay in to chip a Booster Gouge into priority range because you're expecting it to be 3 attacks and then it DDs twice and starts clicking Morning Sun you're in huge trouble. These types of conundrums exist all over the place when dealing with Gouging Fire. Another common case happens when you go into a Ground type as your initial switch to Gouging Fire, which is a very natural play if they can't Tera, but immediately becomes very dangerous if they still have their Tera button as they can Tera for a free second DD, and even keep going for a third DD or heal before killing the Ground type and forcing a reactive Tera (if that will even stop Goug at that point). There is regularly a lack of good safe plays to make when coming up against a Gouging Fire, and that's why even the most successful players from our current official tournament are putting this above a 4 on the survey.
One point that I want to stress when it comes to Gouging Fire is that its set variety doesn't really come in the form of true 4MSS. As I said earlier, Gouging Fire's STAB coverage alone is almost perfect into the metagame, and its main checks in Ground types can lose to all of the main Gouging Teras (Fairy/Dragon/Ground) instead of needing a specific Goug set to lose. Most of Gouging Fire's extra sets are invented as ways to make the process of winning against 1 or 2 counterplay options a bit smoother so that you have a higher chance to fully sweep, rather than being a necessity for Goug to put in work in the first place. A good example of this is Outrage vs FairyBlast - everything that Tera Blast Fairy beats can also be beaten by Outrage, the difference between the two sets is literally just that FairyBlast does slightly more damage to Tusk/Lu and doesn't lock you in after beating the Ground type. Notably these extra set adaptations can still be relevant even if you're not planning to Tera most games - I spent a while using Raging Fury + Dragon Claw + Morning Sun on my Booster Gouging Fires with HP investment, and this allows you to beat every Ground type on the switch without even Teraing. Since Raging Fury is non-contact and non-recoil, while consistently being 120 BP, you can use it to burst through the Ground types in a similar fashion to Outrage except there isnt even a hard stop to Raging Fury spam outside of Heatran, and you get to run Dragon Claw over Outrage to boost your sweeping chances. On a basic level, Gouging Fire will still provide most of its regular role on a team without even needing to pick the right set, and the variations that we see popping up are there to optimize its chances of 6-0ing.
Another thing that I want to bring up quickly because people seem to get confused about this over both suspects - no one is "forced" to use a specific Gouging Fire variant on account of Dondozo - there's no reason to think this would be true. Gouging Fire has plenty of good matchups against teams from all playstyles, while Dondozo is almost entirely locked to stall at this point if you watch any recent tournament games whether it's WCOP/OLT high ladder or the current OLT swiss round. You don't need to always run Tera Dragon Outrage and time it correctly against Dondozo, because the entire point of prepping for stall in general is that 1-3 mons are gonna do all of the heavy lifting anyway. There are many ways to build teams with other Goug sets, without losing to Dondozo teams.
The last thing I want to say is that the narratives we've created about adapting to Gouging Fire are pretty flawed. To an extent, you can point to the steadily increasing Lando-T usage across the first Gouging Fire suspect and say "yeah we've got it under control" but realistically this was always a bandaid solution that only really worked because Intimidate makes it easier to revenge Gouging Fire after it breaks through Lando. Throughout Goug's existence in the meta, the response to Gouging Fire has always either been "we throw a Ground type at it and pray, and then if that fails due to Tera we throw a counter-Tera at it and pray" or "we throw a Zamazenta at it and pray". It's practically impossible to squeeze any more development out of the metagame on this front, and now that everyone is on the same page about the range of Gouging sets that are possible, and no one is labouring under the impression that defensive Breaking Swipe is the only DD set, we can clearly see that the best players still aren't able to handle Gouging Fire consistently. For some people it may be easier to sweep Gouging Fire's impact under the rug because it doesn't affect building as much as the other top tier threats - the Ground type and Tera prayer strat I mentioned is something that is already on basically every team which means you basically have near optimal Gouging Fire counterplay whenever you want, and there's very little room to run "even better" Gouging Fire counterplay. The problem here is that near optimal Gouging Fire counterplay is still kinda bad into Gouging Fire - the situations im describing range from outright sweeps, to general destruction, and even towards the worst outcomes for Gouging Fire you can still break a Ground type without Teraing or get a kill on the Ground type + a Tera trade if you're willing to go that route. Regardless of which crop of Gouging Fire sets are popular at any given time, the way the mon works won't change, and the "counterplay" won't meaningfully change either - it'd be foolish to think that anyone could be ahead of Gouging Fire trends regularly and load ideal matchups against it all of the time, and it's also foolish to think that most teams will have access to counterplay for all Gouging Fire variants.
There were some other things I wanted to touch on like the fact that Gouging Fire's already flimsy counterplay happens to coincide with most of the general counterplay to the other top tier mons (Raging Bolt, Kingambit, Zamazenta) and having a metagame in this state is just bound to lead to disaster situations where some teams just overwhelm others through their natural offensive cores, but this post is getting very long so I'm gonna leave it here. It's time to kick this cheeseball out of the tier - frankly it's already overstayed its welcome.
