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I think we're being a bit too harsh on our new "drops", especially Diancie. We haven't seen DIancie in play this gen yet, so we aren't sure of how healthy it is. According to Eyan council hasn't even discussed Diancie yet (let alone quickbanning it).
There's also the fact that the stats we got are potentially incorrect, meaning that we don't get Mamoswine, Amoonguss, Diancie, and don't lose Gliscor. I think we should wait a bit before speculating a mon's affect on the tier.
I'm in favor of quickbanning because I'd rather not create a huge ripple in UU open. Mamoswine is already making waves and I'd rather not exacerbate it with Mega-Diancie, as much as I love that mon
What is the need to quickban on the Monday if we have until the end of Sunday to complete round 1? People should already have their r1 teams ready they’ve had over a week so this is actually an opportunity for the pokemon to get some playtime before a decision is made. If we don’t get to use it till like Friday or whatever I would perhaps agree but I cannot believe people want it quickbanned this early without ever using it because it might “theoretically” cause an issue. If suspects and otherwise cause an issue in open when exactly are we going to retest it? Open doesn’t finish for another 2 months by which time we’re going to be awaiting another set of shifts and we’ll probably find reasons not to test it then aswell. I just don’t think all this please quickban bandwagoning is necessary until the stats get confirmed and certainly not when we’ve got nearly a whole week until r2 in which we could have opportunity to put some of this “theory” into practice. I also do not think one early round with a potentially broken pokemon devalues uu open whatsoever, tier shifts are part of a lower tiers makeup and occasionally that will affect tournaments. If anything it’s more chance to see it in action and evaluate its effect.
I think we're being a bit too harsh on our new "drops", especially Diancie. We haven't seen DIancie in play this gen yet, so we aren't sure of how healthy it is. According to Eyan council hasn't even discussed Diancie yet (let alone quickbanning it).
There's also the fact that the stats we got are potentially incorrect, meaning that we don't get Mamoswine, Amoonguss, Diancie, and don't lose Gliscor. I think we should wait a bit before speculating a mon's affect on the tier.
this tbh
Just because it's threatening on paper doesn't mean it's threatening in practice.
Let the meta dictate what happens to it and then we can discuss banning it.
Here are my thoughts on the drops. First and foremost, Scizor suspect should be postponed indefinitely. There should be 0 conversation about a Scizor suspect with Mega Diance and Mamoswine in the tier. Scizor is the most viable revenge killer to both Pokemon without question. Next, Mega Diance is ridiculous in UU. Fairy's have always been fantastic offensive and defensive Pokemon. Mega Diance + Spike stack wipes through stall completely, and most bulky builds as well. Earthpower allows Mega Diance to be walled by no Steel-type. Even Hidden Power Fire can OHKO Scizor on the switch. A Pokemon with this much raw power and potential, and the ability to fit on most teams should not be allowed in this tier. Diamond Storm really seals the deal as with no investment it still does immense damage to specially defensive Amoonguss, Blissey, and more. Mamoswine is also a broken Pokemon. Ice has always been the best offensive type in my opinion and Mamoswine has the ability to break through bulky Fairy-types unlike Kyurem. With Ice Shard it can damage many RKO'ers and Freeze Dry gives it the ability to break through bulky Water-types. Mamo can run Knock Off and Stone Edge so it is not walled by Bronzong or Rotom-Heat. There is no UU Pokemon that walls every single Mamoswine set. Its versatility makes it an undeniable and near unstoppable threat. I personally can't deal with it being in the tier again and making hyper offense insanely strong. Amoonguss was fine before and it's fine now no question about it. How you're asking yourself how we even ban Mamoswine or Mega Diance without a council vote. Here is my solution: We hold a suspect test using UU Open. We allow people in UU Open to freely use the drops for 2 rounds. That would mean Round 2 and Round 3 Mamoswine and Mega Diance are unbanned. I suggest that after Round 3 is over, the remaining contenders hold a vote. This will be a healthy amount of intelligent players and I think would be a good way of holding a vote. Thanks for reading!
This came up in UU room earlier and I just want to articulate why I really don’t like this idea. Holding a suspect based solely on performance in UU Open is not at all fair because it doesn’t give every potential participant in the vote an equal opportunity to vote. How is it fair that across 4 rounds one user could play 4 SPL caliber players while another could get 2 activity wins and 2 users playing in their first tournament? Yes I’ve drawn the most extreme comparison here to make my point but that is part of suspect tests, that everyone knows beforehand exactly what GXE they need to get and how many games minimum they need to play. Due to the large volume of games and opponents on the ladder, across a 40 game stretch everyone should play a roughly equivalent field of opponents.
The other thing here is that reaching what is a fairly middling round of UU open doesn’t really prove to anybody that you have experience with and against the suspected pokemon enough to make a judgment on whether it stays in the tier. Admittedly this is a potential fault of the current suspect system as there’s no guarantee you play with or against the pokemon but again the much higher volume of games means it’s a higher possibility. You talked about round 5 in the uu room so I’ll use that as the benchmark, assuming Diancie is legal in round 2 by the time they reach round 5 they will have played 6-9 uu open games with the potential of Diancie being involved provided no activity wins. I’m not going to make guesses at what percentage of games Diancie would actually appear in but surely it’s clear that this isn’t enough of a sample to make tiering decisions off of? Fair enough a number of the players involved at this point could be fully invested players in the tier and have played lots of games with and without but by the same stretch they could be tournament players going for classic who don’t play at all apart from the odd test. I get why you like this idea but I just don’t think it’s reasonable.
This isn’t to say I dislike tour reqs, I think it’s a good idea to reward players who’ve reached the latter stages or performed particularly well in tournaments, I just don’t think they should be given out lightly or be the only method available to vote in a suspect. I think to deal with Diancie it should be given a chance in the tier and in open, then if it poses a huge issue, quickbanned and potentially retested after open.
6-9 games is nowhere near good enough to be the official sample size to decide the fate of Mega Diancie for at least the next few months. Remember, it took far more games to decide on officially unbanning Breloom and Azumarill, and it took months, with hundreds, possibly thousands of games occuring on the ladder and in tours at the time, to determine that they needed to be re-banned.
I still think quickbanning Mega Diancie and suspecting it later is the best option for the tier's long-term health. Nobody has convinced me why that ISN'T the best thing to do.
Quick-banning isn't a solution in this case. Frankly Speaking, nobody actually knows how Diancie will actually fair in this meta. a lot of it is just speculation that has to be proven with without least a sizable number of games played.
Tournament-wise, the patch we play on is essentially entirely up to the tournament organizers. Since round one last for 2 weeks, we have ample amount of time as a community see how Diancie affects the metagame and whether or not it needs to be quick banned for round 2. It's a process similar to how League of Legend does it. During the week week that a patch is rolled out, the tournament plays on the second most recent patch (i.e. when patch 8.13 dropped, all major tournament regions played on 8.12).
How you're asking yourself how we even ban Mamoswine or Mega Diance without a council vote. Here is my solution: We hold a suspect test using UU Open. We allow people in UU Open to freely use the drops for 2 rounds. That would mean Round 2 and Round 3 Mamoswine and Mega Diance are unbanned. I suggest that after Round 3 is over, the remaining contenders hold a vote. This will be a healthy amount of intelligent players and I think would be a good way of holding a vote. Thanks for reading!
While I appreciate the out of the box thinking, we will be sticking with the standard suspect and/or quickban system for any possible unbalanced elements that arise from this tier shift.
Let me just tackle something right away. Quickbanning is 100% a valid solution. Whether or not it's the appropriate one has yet to be determined. The likelihood that council is the one that will determine which course of action to take is immensely high. The likelihood that council will do their best to take the action most appropriate for the tier, uu open, and community, is immensely high. The likelihood that we're looking at Quickbanning as one of those actions is immensely high. All this conjecture regarding "this is what I think will happen" is really a waste of your breath - sorry for putting it harshly. Focus instead on our tiering metrics and provide examples and logical argumentation. This legitimately helps us make better decisions. And we want to make the best decisions possible, so stick to the facts and make your arguments sound lest your comments be forgotten in the cold storage void.
Let me just tackle something right away. Quickbanning is 100% a valid solution. Whether or not it's the appropriate one has yet to be determined. The likelihood that council is the one that will determine which course of action to take is immensely high. The likelihood that council will do their best to take the action most appropriate for the tier, uu open, and community, is immensely high. The likelihood that we're looking at Quickbanning as one of those actions is immensely high. All this conjecture regarding "this is what I think will happen" is really a waste of your breath - sorry for putting it harshly. Focus instead on our tiering metrics and provide examples and logical argumentation. This legitimately helps us make better decisions. And we want to make the best decisions possible, so stick to the facts and make your arguments lest your comments be forgotten in the cold storage void.
I worded that poorly. What I was trying to convey isn't that quickbanning isn't an option, but rather we should get a couple of replays of it in action on the ladder before we decide to quick-ban it since the opinion on MD's healthiness is split among community members. What I was trying to get at is that M-Diancie wasn't necessarily a Day-1 quick-ban like Hoopa-U and Manaphy where the evidence of its unhealthiness didn't require some ladder games. Thanks for the clarification in case other readers are confused by my post, though.
EDIT: I was using voice input on my phone to write this post as I was driving, so I didn't get a chance to read over what I wrote.
I'm surprised that absolutely no one has mentioned what I think would potentially be the most problematic set in Substitute. (edit: I lied, someone did but I disagree with his take on it) Whether it'd run Sub + 3 attacks or 2 attacks + Endeavor or even Rocks + Endeavor, this set not only gives Diancie more free turns to fire off its strong attacks with reduced need for prediction, but it also allows it to potentially bypass some of its biggest checks in Bronzong and Hippowdon (just to mention a couple) and, in conjunction with a Pursuit trapper, completely prevent them from setting rocks at all, especially if it's packing Endeavor behind it.
That being said, if these drops are still accurate as is, I look forward to abusing the living fuck out of Mega Diancie before a potential quickban :)
I'm surprised that absolutely no one has mentioned what I think would potentially be the most problematic set in Substitute. Whether it'd run Sub + 3 attacks or 2 attacks + Endeavor or even Rocks + Endeavor, this set not only gives Diancie more free turns to fire off its strong attacks with reduced need for prediction, but it also allows it to potentially bypass some of its biggest checks in Bronzong and Hippowdon (just to mention a couple) and, in conjunction with a Pursuit trapper, completely prevent them from setting rocks at all, especially if it's packing Endeavor behind it.
That being said, if these drops are still accurate as is, I look forward to abusing the living fuck out of Mega Diancie before a potential quickban :)
I think someone did bring up the fact that SubEndeavor MDiancie allows it to bypass AloBliss pretty easily, though I think Hippo will be fine here since it can just Roar Diancie out if it's behind of Substitute.
I think someone did bring up the fact that SubEndeavor MDiancie allows it to bypass AloBliss pretty easily, though I think Hippo will be fine here since it can just Roar Diancie out if it's behind of Substitute.
You can’t roar a pokemon with Magic Bounce, it’s part of the reason the set is effective. I personally think sub endeavour moon hp fire has the potential to be the most punishing set if played well and backed up by good team pressure, although it probably requires more precise play than the other potential sets. If you can generate situations where the opponent is forced to sac against Diancie and punish those with a sub it’s going to be extremely hard for your opponent to regain the offensive momentum given that Moonblast OHKOes scarf Latias / Hydreigon / Krook and heavily damages Ape, while HP Fire pops Scizor. This set looks super scary but we’ll have to see how it plays out in practice.
You can’t roar a pokemon with Magic Bounce, it’s part of the reason the set is so effective. I personally think sub endeavour moon hp fire has the potential to be the most punishing set if played well and backed up by good team pressure, although it probably requires more precise play than the other potential sets. If you can generate situations where the opponent is forced to sac against Diancie and punish those with a sub it’s going to be extremely hard for your opponent to regain the offensive momentum given that Moonblast OHKOes scarf Latias / Hydreigon / Krook and heavily damages Ape, while HP Fire pops Scizor. This set looks super scary but we’ll have to see how it plays out in practice.
To make sure that this doesn't become a one-liner quote, another set that also works quite well is the CM + Rock Polish set. The Double Dance set allows for MD to flexibly provide a team with a way to threaten Balance and Offense. SubCM + Endeavor with just Moonblast also would "theoretically work" since a +2 MD's Moonblast is a 2HKO on MAgg and MLix. MD can just run through the rest of the team with a combination of Endeavor and Moonblast, especially since +0 Moonblast 2HKOs Quagsire, which is cute.
252 SpA Diancie-Mega Moonblast vs. 252 HP / 4 SpD Quagsire: 256-303 (64.9 - 76.9%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery
Since we are likely getting Mega Diancie barring an unforeseen OU ladder surge, I want to share my thoughts on it. I've played some games with and against it, and admittedly that's not a large sample size, but they basically confirmed my fears about it. Its offensive matchup is stellar. Like really really good. Faster Moonblast resists consist of Crobat, Talonflame, Scarf Chandelure, and Scizor, 3 of which get shredded by its secondary STAB and can't touch it lest they run a niche Steel-type coverage move. Unlike Primarina, it clicks Moonblast for absolutely no risk, whereas the presence of things like Nihilego, Nidoking, and Gengar at least made Primarina think twice before clicking it.
Here's a test game I had with Accelgor. We both brought Diancie and it claimed massive damage every time both of ours came in. He even had a sturdy check in Bronzong, which I think is complete shit since it's easily trapped by the best Pokemon in the tier (as this replay demonstrates), but it killed Krookodile and weakened Cobalion and Tentacruel by half.
Unlike other wallbreakers like Mamoswine, it's also got usable typing and decent enough defenses to switch in. Off the top of my head there's Hydreigon, Moltres, Pidgeot, Crobat, Krookodile, Togekiss, and Chandelure it can come in on pretty safely and then proceed to claim a kill. Diancie also maintains an above average matchup against fat with superb mixed attacking stats and Earth Power to circumvent things like Blissey, Amoonguss, and Mega Aggron. CM sets with max attack investments break most slower builds lacking max Spdef Hippowdon or niche bulky Celebi.
Oh, and Diamond Storm cheese is the cherry on top, where random (50% for +2 stages is ridiculous) Defense boosts render revenge killers in Scarf Krook, Infernape, Mega Aerodactyl etc null and void. I know it may seem too early but I truly think Diancie is too strong for UU, and I ask to consider a quickban due to UU open running.
More replays for your viewing pleasure (as I get them):
Hi, I would like to take this moment before the drops happen to share some not very common Pokémon/sets I've been liking to use with you:
Nidoqueen
Nidoqueen @ Black Sludge
Ability: Sheer Force
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SpD
Calm Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Ice Beam
- Earth Power
- Toxic Spikes
- Sludge Wave
Nidoqueen most of the time just works as a worst Nidoking, as it just doesn't have the same amount of power her counterpart has. But lately I've been trying to abuse its better bulk to reliably abuse Toxic Spikes and it has been fairly great at this role. Its typing gives it some nice resistances while also making its STAB moves threaten basically any removal around (including potential Poison-types trying to absorb them). That makes it, imo, have a niche over Tentacruel as a T-spiker and being more reliable in teams that really want it for their strategy to work out. Nihilego kinda can do that too, but still Nidoqueen has unique bulk, isn't as pursuitable, and it's actually a reliable Mega-Manectric answer (in the sense it fits the role of a Ground-type in a team, I'm not saying Nihilego isn't a reliable Mega-Manectric answer):
252 SpA Manectric-Mega Hidden Power Ice vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Nidoqueen: 110-130 (28.6 - 33.8%) -- 0.7% chance to 3HKO
And this damage isn't really punishing it considering it gets two turns of Black Sludge (one as it switches in, one as it is on the field), being able to abuse it to set up T-spikes. I feel like a set with Flamethrower over Sludge Wave can work fine as well as a Stealth Rock set. I just went with max SpDef and max HP because I didn't really feel like I needed to creep anything that wouldn't make me give up on too much bulk.
So, I find it a cool option for teams that want a bulky T-spiker that threatens removal while not being able to afford Nihilego.
It also is one of the few things that resists both of Terrakion STABs which is cool.
This one isn't really unheard of but I wanna say why I think this set can be valuable over the stallbreaker one, which is the one I really see around. First: U-turn makes it a more reliable Serperior answer, damaging it or gaining momentum from that thing. U-turn also grants it the ability to gain momentum as its counters switch-in, such as Blissey, Rhyperior, Empoleon, or anything of the sort. That basically makes it bait in those special blobs/Rock-types and giving physical breakers free turns. I'd recommend a breaker such as Heracross that can abuse any of those. I've personally been using it with Tsareena and it really works out well. Also, just having those physical breakers in the back can lure mons that don't wanna stay in to stay in - just to prevent giving that physical breaker free turns.
Last but not least, Flying + Fire coverage is really solid. That's one of the factors Moltres got so much popularity recently. In Pidgeot, it has the plus of not being as expected: It's not gonna be uncommon to see your opponent switching in a Steel-type hoping you don't have this coverage (and a lot of teams rely solely on Steel-types as their bird resist). That really helps things such as Scarf Latias which really appreciates Steel-types weakened, and Hurricane is still a nuke as always.
And that's why I feel like it still has a good niche that the stallbreaking set doesn't cover.
Those are the two sets I've been trying lately, hope you guys like them too.
