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np: UU - Rain Drops Keep Falling on my Head

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What's Rivalry do against ungendered opponents? If it simply does nothing instead of nerfing attack, then Rivalry is one heck of a power against pretty much everyone (except me, because I make sure that my pokes are female so they don't go chasin' the ladies).

I've always found that pointless to be honest. Nobody honestly runs attract due to it's uselessness, (inferior to confuse ray and other statusers) and if they DO run males using attract your borked.

I find that using a specific gender for individual pokemon make the experience for me.

Males: Aggron, Rhyperior etc
Females: Gardevoir, Milotic etc

But to each one's own.

Oy vey....Apparently using Encore is a cheap tactic and makes me an ass of a player. :|

Anyways, I've been using a Nasty Plot/Hypnosis Spiritomb mainly for shits and giggles but it surprised me at how decent it was. Pairs well with Tauros and RP Torterra for some odd reason, and that's half my team right there.

Not on Shoddy I hope...

Speaking of encore, I've been using Encore + Wish with Raichu. Funny thing is, probably the only pokemon capable of pulling that off. I run Shed Shell in case of Dugtrio.
 
Not on Shoddy I hope...

Speaking of encore, I've been using Encore + Wish with Raichu. Funny thing is, probably the only pokemon capable of pulling that off. I run Shed Shell in case of Dugtrio.

Yes on Shoddy. -__-

And Togekiss can do that combo as well, but Raichu is the only one in UU (unless you count Togetic).
 
Speaking of Clefable, how do you deal with it if you are playing full stall? All what I can think of is sticking Hitmontop on my team, but if it dies for whatever reason, Clefable walks all over my team,
 
Look again at the offensive characteristic - it doesn't say you have to sweep a large portion of the metagame, it says you have to sweep "a significant portion of teams in the metagame". The first doesn't imply the second, nor vice versa; they can carry very different meanings. Also neither does it say "little or no support", it says "little effort".

Are you serious?
You said that the first team you looked at had 4/6 pokemon that were swept by Swellow. You then continued by saying that most teams were similar - most of their pokemon could be swept by Swellow.
But I hope you realize that those other 2 pokemon were what we call counters. Swellow is in no way going to sweep a significant portion of this team, or other teams in the metagame, simply because it can beat 4/6 pokemon. Thats actually quite low, as it means that the opponent has two solid counters for Swellow. All their going to do is switch in their Registeel/Whatever, and either kill your Swellow, or make it switch out. They're not going to leave in those other 4 pokemon against it unless they're sacking one.

And please don't say that you can just take down those two counters with other pokemon. 90% of sweepers will take down 4 or so members of a team if their counters are knocked out. That's how it works.
 
Speaking of Clefable, how do you deal with it if you are playing full stall? All what I can think of is sticking Hitmontop on my team, but if it dies for whatever reason, Clefable walks all over my team,

I've been wondering the same thing. Sure Cloyster or Lass can set up spikes on it But what do you do afterwards? It just keeps coming in and doesn't give a shit about how many layers of spikes you have up.

EDIT: how the hell does stall stop BD clefable? I just remember it 6-0'd my stall team and was wondering what on stall can beat it
 
Stall doesn't prepare for BD Clefable because it might as well be a Seedot as far as its usefulness against Offense goes, so most people don't use it. Belly Drummers in general wreck stall if you manage to switch them in on something that can't phaze or paralyze you, but they tend to do rather poorly against other playstyles.
 
Most stall teams carry a Perish Song/Haze user, Milotic and Altaria probably being the most common. Sometimes I like to use pokemon like TrickScarf Rotom on my stall teams to deal with them as well, they come very handy against pokemon like Clefable and Spiritomb that would normally be hard to take down.
 
I was going through the RMT section earlier, and my God this tier has turned to complete and utter shit. Anyone who argues that UU has more variety than OU needs to seriously reconsider uttering those words before they choke on them. The teams dominating the ladder at the moment are all seemingly carbon copies of one another. It's pretty gay.
 
You should reconsider that statement. A lot of the teams high up on the ladder (Jak's, Thund's, Mine...) all use relatively unpopular or "niche" Pokemon (i.e. I use Sceptile and Jynx, Thund uses Steelix and Ninetales, Jak uses Torterra and LickyLicky, etc). Sure, some just abuse Froslass/Moltres/Swellow, but that doesn't mean those teams are representative of anything but spikestack offense. Way more playstyles are viable and successful, and those playstyles lend themselves to much more diversity. Stall in particular has far more options in UU than OU.
 
I was going through the RMT section earlier, and my God this tier has turned to complete and utter shit. Anyone who argues that UU has more variety than OU needs to seriously reconsider uttering those words before they choke on them. The teams dominating the ladder at the moment are all seemingly carbon copies of one another. It's pretty gay.
Everyone who complains about the lack of variety on ladder is full of it, there are way too many Pokemon and strategies to explore for people to start crying wolf about how one type of team dominates the ladder. Make your own team and playstyle, test it, toss it, rinse and repeat. Fuck everything else. If you're not prepared to undergo some serious trial and error to find something that works for you, then this isn't your game.
 
Everyone who complains about the lack of variety on ladder is full of it. Make your own team and playstyle, test it, toss it, rinse and repeat. Fuck everything else. If you're not prepared to undergo some serious trial and error to find something that works for you, then this isn't your game.

But the guy does raise a point. I battled 4 different people today in a row and they all had 3 or 4 memebers the exact same. Can't remember what exactly but I will post it if I remember
 
While you can toss together, say, Froslass, Raikou, Venusaur, Moltres, Registeel, and Milotic (and many have), there are a lot of viable pokes in the tier, and even some NU's that work well. I've got a Sunny Day team that wrecks the ladder with Specs Typhlosion, and I've done well with a team containing Cradily and Rampardos. I've been swept by a Clamperl, and a Primeape is holding up well on one of my teams. Getting the chemistry right can be hard, but a lot of people are using some pokes that make you go "ehh?" at first and "OH CRAP!" later.
 
I see the same thing in every other metagame. Everybody wants to win, so they emulate some of the most successful ideas and stick with them because they work. This is nothing new.

If you don't want to use Froslass/Moltres/Spiritomb/filler/filler/filler, no one's forcing you. There are plenty of ways to get around teams like this, but you'll have to put the effort in to find something that works. This is a very rigorous strategy game, you shouldn't expect for anything to be easy when you're competing with so many different players worldwide.
 
You should reconsider that statement. A lot of the teams high up on the ladder (Jak's, Thund's, Mine...) all use relatively unpopular or "niche" Pokemon (i.e. I use Sceptile and Jynx, Thund uses Steelix and Ninetales, Jak uses Torterra and LickyLicky, etc). Sure, some just abuse Froslass/Moltres/Swellow, but that doesn't mean those teams are representative of anything but spikestack offense. Way more playstyles are viable and successful, and those playstyles lend themselves to much more diversity. Stall in particular has far more options in UU than OU.

Heeyyyy now. I caught that little jab there.

Anyway, the reason that all of UU's "good" teams look the same is in fact because it is not yet balanced. The reason all of OU's "good" teams look the same is because it's OU and you cannot avoid this. At least we have room for improvement in UU.
 
Haha. That totally wasn't addressed at you. Mostly because you're the one who made it first. You'd be surprised at the amount of people running around with minor variations of your team though. Probably because it's in the RMT/Smog7.
 
Uh, I'm tilting like hell these few days. Is it just me playing badly, or does everyone pretty much know my team now (It has been around for a very long time) and how to deal with it?? Should I make a new team??
 
lol...there's always that time of night where my brain doesn't function very well and requires me to sleep. Too bad I only have enough time to play at the latest of hours and my bad connection is making even that difficult. :/

I haven't noticed anything fundamentally flawed about your team, Shrang, but if you're losing too easily, you should either sac it or start alternating with another main team that sees a reasonable degree of success. If neither of those ideas work, that's a good sign you should change your game up entirely.
 
(this post doesn't have much objective content so if you're looking for that, move on!)

regarding diversity:

Flare and SJCrew have basically made all of the general points (which I agree with completely) so I guess I'll just add my personal experience to the mix. this is the first UU round that I've truly enjoyed since the metagame right before Yanmega was banned. what made that metagame so much fun for me was that I played with a ton of different pokemon combined with the fact that I talked with people on shoddy + forums + IRC basically every day about what we had tried and how it worked. then when Raikou/Gallade/Honchkrow were dropped back down my schedule shifted a little and I didn't talk with the same people as much on shoddy cause I'd be sleeping or in class when they were on, etc, and IRC conversation topics weren't about UU as much. this was about the same for the ducks metagame. I also realized in hindsight that the vast majority of the playing I did since maybe November was done with the goal of meeting rating requirements; it'd make me a little nervous every time I hit find match cause I didn't want to get wrecked since my deviation was still pretty high.

this time around, lots of people that I enjoy talking to have started playing UU [again] and I had to test some sets for a C&C project. all of my experience in this metagame so far has been from the perspective of someone experimenting with sets (moreso than Pokemon themselves) that would probably not be considered on a top-tier UU team designed to make the upper reqs. I don't think it is the fact that I'm not aiming for a high rating per se that makes this metagame fun, but there's definitely some correlation between the two.*

the fact that a few people who post their teams for improvement are trying to emulate what they see as the "dominant strategy" has little or no bearing on the importance of diversity. I'm not going to deny that popular opinion seems to identify a specific playstyle as the top playstyle of UU, but we all know how accurate popular opinion can be (especially when it's not even backed up by any sort of polling process lol).

when I look at the UU leaderboard (or the Google cache version of it, as it were) and think of the teams of those near the top that I've seen play (which is ~75%, but keep in mind I just got into the metagame two days ago), lots of them have at least a set or two that aren't used much by the rest of the players. even the ones that have primarily standard Pokemon have a theme or strategy that is unique to that team. god there is even one team pretty much at the top that I don't understand at all because of the random sets that it uses and yet it wins 85% of its games.

* before someone tries to say that the fact that I'm playing around with non-standard sets is the reason I'm not successful -- my rating is perfectly fine and I wouldn't be "ashamed" to say that I got it with a "normal" team. it's not as high as I'm "capable" of, but it kind of makes sense that when my goal is to get a high rating, I end up with a higher rating than when my goal isn't to get a high rating.

tl;dr - the search for diversity in UU is not only possible, but is one of the most enticing parts of this metagame.

@ shrang:

especially in the early stages of a test it seems like the metagame makes minute but distinct shifts even on a daily basis. it's possible that something that recently shifted a bit put things out of favor for your team or that different subsets of players are active during when you're active now. I wouldn't hesitate to make small changes to your team frequently almost as if you're testing a new team and see how it works. but also consider making a new team, sort of what SJCrew said, just because you might be bored with your current team and not thinking as much during battles or something.
 
Whistle, that has probably been the first time I have actually needed the tl;dr at the end.

Guys, if you think all the teams are the same, create an anti-metagame team. For example, the teams that use Lass/Moltres/Swellow have a severe Rock weakness. So abuse Rock-types and you'll fare well against those teams.
 
Speaking of Clefable, how do you deal with it if you are playing full stall? All what I can think of is sticking Hitmontop on my team, but if it dies for whatever reason, Clefable walks all over my team,

Hitmontop and Donphan are usually the best checks for it, or insert another physical attacker, Arcanine perhaps? Take note though that Donphan needs to run 88 Spe to succesfully beat Clefable.

Regarding the current metagame, I still think its a bit unbalanced, albeit not too unbalanced though. I think one more voting session can do the trick (I'm looking at Froslass and Damp Rock in particular). When your building a team, you still get that feeling that you need to check Rain, but you really can't because it will leave you open to other underrated threats. This is the unbalanced feeling I get with this metagame. Other than that, it looks pretty good from this metagame.
 
tl;dr - the search for diversity in UU is not only possible, but is one of the most enticing parts of this metagame.
I agree. In full. But my comments were based on what I have been seeing, which is a severe lack of diversity. I get the feeling that the metagame is incredibly centralised at the moment, and the differences that whistle mentioned (regarding alternative sets) are a result of people holding on to their centralised Pokemon, albeit in an attempt to counter them.

Perhaps "dominating" was a poor choice of words on my part. I meant it as in flooding. I guess I am just needing to come to grips with the fact that once a metagame starts to settle, it's inevitably going to start to feel more and more like OU - which I resent, because Latias is a slut.

So is Froslass.
 
Leman said:
Speaking of Clefable, how do you deal with it if you are playing full stall? All what I can think of is sticking Hitmontop on my team, but if it dies for whatever reason, Clefable walks all over my team

OMG I was about to ask the same question!

franky said:
Hitmontop and Donphan are usually the best checks for it, or insert another physical attacker, Arcanine perhaps?

The problem with the "X beats Clefable" solution is that Clefable can often just switch out, which is especially problematic in Clefable's case because it takes no hazard damage (and this gets even worse if it's passing a Wish). Sure, I can aim a Close Combat at Clefable, but what good will that do?
 
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