OU RBY OU Discussion Thread

[Leader of the Rockets]

i'd be curious to hear a further elaboration on why you feel teambuilding is a more delicate and challenging skill to cultivate than mastering optimal plays using the standard teams, leader of the rockets.

Well, on one hand, it's true in a statistical sense. There are far many more people in the game's history that learned to played optimally, and far fewer people who actually made a team that actually mattered to the meta or was even just good. On the other hand, it's true, because it necessarily has to be. As Amaranth was saying earlier, the knowledge we have of the game obviously comes from our experience playing it (that's where it starts anyway), and the experience only matters to the extent that you know what is happening and why it is happening. If you don't, then you gain only frustration as opposed to knowledge from the experience. So, you have to be good at the game before you can gain the knowledge you need to make any meaningful contribution in the team builder. So, competent team building, by definition, is a higher order operation.

Some people will disagree with this, and say, "But I totally get why someone would arrange a team in such a way, and I'm not that great at the game." And I'd just say we, one, probably have different standards for understanding a team and all its functions, and two, creating something and then understanding it afterward are two very different things and the former is much harder than the latter.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

The other thing I'll point out is that "sub-optimal" pokemon and/or team structures aren't nearly as far behind "optimal" ones as you might think, in large part due to the fact that deviating from perceived optimal play has its own advantages. If you're using a less used strategy, you're basically always going to have a superior understanding of what it takes for you to win than your opponent, because you've thought it through and tested it, whereas they seldom see it or they might flat out not know what to do (in extreme cases). This is especially compounded by being able to manage information. And lastly, if you only stick to what's "optimal", it's very difficult to truly innovate and challenge the meta

I can't be the only one to fantasize about what would happen if someone rich with way too much time on their hands ever offered up a 10 million dollar prize pool in a pokemon gen 1 tournament and marketed the crap out of it to get as many players as possible to enter, and gave everyone like a year to prepare. I've always wondered what strategies would be used, and I came to the conclusion that it'd probably be this. It would probably be trying to exploit the element of surprise as much as possible. Playing the standard teams would, ironically, be too risky.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

If you imagine an average game, it can go something like this: First turn Jynx mirror. You press lk. So do they. 50/50. They get the sleep. You can stay in expecting them to blizzard, you can switch to chansey, etc. Let's say you switch to chansey. They fish for freeze. You press sing. You sleep them. Now what? You have options, but let's say you press thunderwave so you para whatever comes in. They switch in chansey and the chansey is paralyzed. Let's say you think that they'll press ice beam instead of thunderwave to try to fish for freeze, so you throw in snorlax to catch the ice beam, so you now can put pressure on with lax. They throw their lax in to take the body slam. Maybe you press body slam again here, maybe reflect. But regardless, you eventually both end up pressing reflect. As you can see here... nothing interesting is happening. A lot of
stalemate-y moves. There isn't a lot of room for taking a lot of leverage here. You'll have to gradually fight for it unless you get lucky (such as the jynx that gets the sleep first freezing whatever pokemon that comes in afterward. That's two pokes down in a couple of turns). If you try to fight a mirror, throwing a right punch just causes the reflection to throw the same punch. You're not getting very far fighting your reflection. To be clear, the better player is going to make marginally better plays here which, while marginal, will lead to big rewards (the win). But that leverage is gained MARGINALLY, if the other player isn't bad. Stalemate moves gradually become winning or losing moves.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen1ou-2250410097-xvg3ghb391dlafzxa8n49nahry3iygdpw

I've posted this elsewhere, but if you watch this game, it is a fight to the death from the very beginning, though the beginning is a little boring. Our team structures are so different that we can't throw the same punch. Pressure is on from go. This means you are making game winning moves or game losing moves (as opposed to stalemate moves) the majority of the game, and the player who plays the most intelligently is going to win (it goes without say that this goes out the window when rng rears its ugly head.) But hopefully this is slightly clearer in conveying what I mean.

Sorry to be so monotonous about this player, but it isn't too often that we get someone so different from the norm, and I think it is important. In a reply I made months back in this thread on the topic of the benefit of using a viable team structure that varied from the norm (such as cless), I posted a replay between Cholaski and I. Cholaski is famously NOT a rager. What he says at the end of this game is very interesting. He says, "Good game for study." What is so interesting about it is that it reveals to us that he doesn't just play. He obviously rewatches his replays for "study." And why that is interesting is because he does things in game that you would think are sub-optimal. Famously, as I pointed out earlier, he will, with very little exception, always throw out an ice beam as a paralyzed Chansey against normals if his Chansey is at full health. Most top players would never do this. Yet this man (who studies!!!) has come to the conclusion that this strategy is not just worth doing from time to time, but it is worth doing it every time. But it isn't just that. He has other weird quirks. He is the only top player I have ever watched where I literally dk why he did a move, and I'll literally be saying to the screen, "Why in the hell would you do that??? Are you trying to lose???" .... and then he wins! And why allllll this is so interesting is that this man was consistently beating the top players in late 2016 and early 2017 with not just these unorthodox strategies, but with two teams of his own creation that no one had ever seen before. It'd be one thing to think that he simply was a good player with great natural intuition but didn't think too much about the game, and that's why he made the weird plays. But no, HE STUDIES! Everything is done for a conscious reason that he has thought about.

This is interesting to think about. Because maybe what we think of as "optimal" is in and of itself a block to our creativity.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

By the way, here is part of an interview with GGFan and Sceptross just to give you an idea of how competitive the ladder was in 2017 and just how much audacity and confidence you had to have to make an account called 90 Plus GXE and then top the ladder with 90 Plus GXE.

 

[Sabelette]

The fact that GXE is lower now is an indicator the ladder is more skilled because people can no longer maintain GXEs of 95% or whatever by stomping all the scrubs on ladder. GXE is your win chance against any random ladder player, if the top players no longer have expected winrates of 95% without the tier gaining more RNG or losing development (such as a tier with shifts might), then lower GXE means the ladder has improved skill-wise relative to the people at the top. One could argue this means there's fewer skilled players at the top but if RBY Ladder Tournament is an indicator this seems to hold even when all the top players are laddering.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

Just one more thing: look at these teams

Jynx/Chansey/Cloyster/Tauros/Golem/Starmie

Gengar/Chansey/Cloyster/Tuaros/Alakazam/Zapdos

Cloyster over lax is what people would see as the obvious innovation. It is. But that is looking at it superficially. The real innovation here is avoiding paralyzing any of the opposing pokemon that you don't want paralyzed in order to make room for sleep and freeze, and then being more liberal with paralysis. In some sense, keeping that in mind, the Golem team is the more "pure" team, and the second team, it seems to me, was obviously made afterward as an evolution of the first team, in order to try to plug a few of the weaknesses of the first team, but it becoming a little less pure as a result. That's what it feels like anyway after playing both a lot. Keep in mind these were made in 2016, yet the strategies that they are made for are extremely modern. We've all caught up to him now though.

 

[Gerbungis]

What is the argument here, that Golem and Rhydon should be evaluated in a vacuum and we should pretend Thunder Wave isn't a move other Pokemon click in RBY to support them? I guess Tauros and Snorlax are bad against Chansey because to beat it they need it paralyzed.

but snorlax can paralyse with thorlax !!! (amnesialax +tbolt)

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

The fact that GXE is lower now is an indicator the ladder is more skilled because people can no longer maintain GXEs of 95% or whatever by stomping all the scrubs on ladder. GXE is your win chance against any random ladder player, if the top players no longer have expected winrates of 95% without the tier gaining more RNG or losing development (such as a tier with shifts might), then lower GXE means the ladder has improved skill-wise relative to the people at the top. One could argue this means there's fewer skilled players at the top but if RBY Ladder Tournament is an indicator this seems to hold even when all the top players are laddering.

Obtaining a high elo seemed much harder back then. I remember watching Peasounay hit the 1700s live in 2017 and it seeming very impressive. Now getting 1700 doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

The extreme niche top GXE lowered as a result of the feature implemented allowing players to click the "do not allow watchers button". This wasn't there in 2017, as well as in 2017, the aggressor in a draw scenario if explosion was used as the last move, has the exploding player win if it was 0vs0 at the end....niche I know, but now that's a draw. Also the fact crystal found about not paralyzing normal types with body slam was new back then, thus players who were already good, had to slightly re learn the entire game.

Taking away the ability to hide ladder matches would be amazing for the ladder scene. Ladder had more of a sense of community when everyone was hanging out in chat watching good matches together.

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

This is interesting to think about. Because maybe what we think of as "optimal" is in and of itself a block to our creativity.

Just a little further elaboration here, because this was a bit vague. The philosopher, Sartre, has a famous line that he is known for that goes, "Existence precedes essence." What he meant by that, basically, is that in his opinion, nothing has a purpose until we give it purpose. We exist first, and then must find purpose. That doesn't really matter for this discussion. I only brought that up, because my point is the opposite. It's that maybe regarding team building, Essence Precedes Existence. Meaning that maybe the right way to think about team building is thinking about strategy first. The essence of the team first before the team even exists! Which might seem obvious at first. As if it, of course, must be so logically... but psychologically, most of us do not think this way. Most of us who have gotten really good at this game let the team we are using dictate how we play. We think of the optimal way to play that specific team.
But the great team builders probably think of how they want to win primarily, and if the team they are using does not comply, then it isn't up to them to learn to play the team the way it wants to be played (which is what most of us do after we lose), it is instead the team's onus to change, not the player. When I use the Cholaski team, I do not play like Cholaski. In fact, when I posted the team in the Rate My Team threads, I urged the reader to not play like Cholaski. I, mathematically, probably play a bit more "optimal" than Cholaski (though take that word with a grain of salt because gxe-wise, we probably don't differ much), yet the reason Cholaski does play the way he plays, is probably because he has an ideal way of winning, and it is this ideal way of winning that birthed those teams. The ideal, as opposed to mathematical rigor, is his driving motivator. And probably the driving motivator of all foundational team builders and meta game changers.

 

[Kaz]

tié l'essence qui fait démarrer le moteur

 

[Bohrier]

Taking away the ability to hide ladder matches would be amazing for the ladder scene. Ladder had more of a sense of community when everyone was hanging out in chat watching good matches together.

Dyt ppl actually watched ladder matches even back in the day idts--ppl watched Replays of ladder matches cuz there were more guys voluntarily playing good elo ladder

Obtaining a high elo seemed much harder back then. I remember watching Peasounay hit the 1700s live in 2017 and it seeming very impressive. Now getting 1700 doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

you'd think it's a big deal when the current number 1 is 80 points lower rated than 1700....




I remember Roudolf 13 had a 97.6 GXE
That will never happen now . Rn the highest GXE is 90.8 which is crazy low if you compare it with the days of old-- This leads to 2 conclusions that either the top end has gotten weaker or the bottom end has gotten strong
The first is obviously not true which you will realise if you go watch a 2016 SPL RBY replay and come back to a modern time to realise that even the best player of that time Tiba is not as good as a lot of even journeyman RBYers(I mean no offense by this term Just throwing it out there to emphasise skill diffs)
So it must be that the bottom end has gotten strong and this is very easy to identify
Back in the day there were 0 resources for RBY in smogon which was still the premier site--if you needed help you went to PP which many guys didn't even know about
Now you have VR Samples threat list speed tiers this that whatever
Lots of resources have come up even in the past year and a bit--the most significant of which being Marco's guide on youtube

So 95% will never happen?Yes that is indeed true
However we have this thing now called a ladder tournament which makes ladder mean so much more than it ever used to so if anyone says ladder is somehow worse than in the past idk man

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

Bottom has definitely gotten stronger. Top is the same in terms of relative skill to one another. The top players, on an experiential level, were tough to beat back then, they are just as tough to beat now, because everyone grew together, more or less. BUT, there is definitely less matching with top players than back then. When I'm high on the ladder, I would say I match with more people not on my skill level than I did back in the day. And sometimes when I do get someone on my skill level, I play them over and over, which signals that there just aren't enough good players playing. This changes from time to time. Sometimes I do get a good variety of skilled players. But, it does seem to me, just from my experience playing on ladder this year, there aren't as many great players playing as often as back in the day.

 

[Amaranth]

The first is obviously not true which you will realise if you go watch a 2016 SPL RBY replay and come back to a modern time to realise that even the best player of that time Tiba is not as good as a lot of even journeyman RBYers(I mean no offense by this term Just throwing it out there to emphasise skill diffs)
So it must be that the bottom end has gotten strong and this is very easy to identify

Something to mention here is that a lot of stuff that is common wisdom now, was not common wisdom back then. So you look at replays and think "oh yeah this is obviously unoptimal, these guys must've been so easy to beat and relatively low level" - and there's some truth to that, but I also think if you went back in time, you would have to figure out why that shit was unoptimal on your own first.

This is still largely the same way you beat the top players today: figure out what they're doing, then figure out how to beat it. But the stuff in 2017 was certainly beatable by a lot more angles of attack than the meta we have today. So it was "easier" because there were more angles where you could pull ahead of them, but I don't think they were especially further ahead or further behind relative to common wisdom compared to the top players of today. It's just that the common wisdom from back then was much, much less complete.

 

[Bohrier]

Something to mention here is that a lot of stuff that is common wisdom now, was not common wisdom back then. So you look at replays and think "oh yeah this is obviously unoptimal, these guys must've been so easy to beat and relatively low level" - and there's some truth to that, but I also think if you went back in time, you would have to figure out why that shit was unoptimal on your own first.

This is still largely the same way you beat the top players today: figure out what they're doing, then figure out how to beat it. But the stuff in 2017 was certainly beatable by a lot more angles of attack than the meta we have today. So it was "easier" because there were more angles where you could pull ahead of them, but I don't think they were especially further ahead or further behind relative to common wisdom compared to the top players of today. It's just that the common wisdom from back then was much, much less complete.

This comes back to the resources point and the community growth point--Common wisdom is more complete when top players begin talking to non top players and also the fact that the resources have grown exponentially in the past 4ish years I'd say
Scouting is also so much more complete--back in the day you only knew vaguely what players played like-- and much more in depth overall

 

[Leader of the Rockets]

It's funny how we use the term "stronger" when we are referring to the bottom here. Because while it means that they play more optimally and consistently, it also does mean that they play more predictably. I am far less scared of the bottom now. I remember when playing the top players years ago, they were always a lot easier for me to read than the bottom. The less skilled players were like crazy psychos who would just pull off some wildcard, unreadable moves that could really unsettle you sometimes when you were trying to climb the ladder. Their lack of what the optimal option was would sometimes play in their favor. This is still true to some extent. But it was more true then.

 

[Maris Bonibell]

Hiya, just wondering if any moltres fans (or theorists given the low tour usage) consider any different teambuilding for moltres in comparison to articuno

 

[Amaranth]

Hiya, just wondering if any moltres fans (or theorists given the low tour usage) consider any different teambuilding for moltres in comparison to articuno

Worse into Rhydon and worse into Zapdos at a time where 80% of your run of the mill mainers have a scout of 40% rhydon and 40% zapdos usage, no thanks. I consider myself a Moltres theorist, but I cannot see the argument at all into a majority of possible opponents. If we start seeing more Egg+Cloy together, or even just backzams/gars/anything else as opposed to zap/don, then Moltres will be back I reckon

Don't really think your builds change too much, one combo I like is Golem+Moltres as you can pretend that you aren't comically weak to rhydon/zapdos but honestly I don't think it's the right approach - I think you'd be better off just accepting you're unfavored there, and run solid structures (lead + big4 sort of stuff for ex) to make your MUs more solid everywhere else

 

[Eeveeto]

As I said one year ago or so, personally I don,t even consider Moltres to be the best Fire type. It uses 3 offensive moves... and all of them have below 100% Accuracy. Thats the definition of unreliable. On top of that its weak to Electric and Ice. The Ground immunity doesn,t matter much because all Mons with EQ have something to hit Moltres. Out of 12 OU Mons, the only 3 whose most common sets don,t have a super-effective move vs Moltres are Snorlax, Exeggutor and Alakazam and all 3 are capable of crippling the bird in other ways. If it at least was capable of OHKOing Egg from full, it might have been better, but 77,8 is the maximum damage.

Flareon is better. It has Body Slam (best RBY move even without STAB, though Flareon happens to have 130 Attack too) and doesn,t have the Electric and Ice weaknesses. It also has a stronger Hyper Beam and Quick Attack to finish some things. Flareon has a better match-up than Moltres vs the following Mons: Chansey, Starmie, Alakazam, Zapdos, Jynx, Gengar and Jolteon. Flareon doesn,t rely on hitting Fire Spin to kill Starmie and while it will still have a bad match-up vs it, at least it paralyzes it and can take several hits unless its Surf (the less common STAB) Starmie. Flareon has a 100% (minus misses) chance to OHKO a 50% HP Chansey with Hyper Beam, Moltres needs Chansey at 41% to do the same and it can,t wear it down with other physical moves (because it doesn,t have them), while Flareon can use Body Slam on the switch or 1vs1 if Chansey has been paralyzed. Flareon won,t be doing a sweep 10% of the time like Moltres does, but Flareon will do consistent damage in almost 100% of the battles if well used. Flareon has its all share of problems, it has low Speed, bad physical bulk and 4 slot syndrome (wants to have Fire Blast, Body Slam, Fire Spin, Hyper Beam and Quick Attack, but can only have 4 of them), but it learning Body Slam and not being weak to Thunderbolt, Ice Beam and Blizzard compensates all that.

Fire types are bad in RBY, all of them, there is no way around that fact. But between the mediocrity they are, Flareon for me is miles ahead of Moltres due to being far more reliable at dealing damage and taking it too.

A Flareon team, not perfect by any means, but has won some RBY Cup battles in the past: https://pokepast.es/42e26f3528968767

 

[violet river]

Does anyone have any good recommendations on what to do turn 0 for Jynx vs Tauros? Tauros leads typically have T-bolt an atypical amount of the time too I've noticed. I'll take advice from the standpoint of any team.

Well the options are either:
1 - Lovely Kiss
2 - Blizzard
3 - Switch out
3 seems misery to me, letting tauros walk all over you is exactly what the tauros wants.
2 is interesting - the damage on tauros is Super Relevant, and it risks tauros critting you sure, but landing a blizz on ros is just so good when jynx is a worse mon than ros. Afterwards you have to swap lax anyw, so its risking some luck and also you sack lax hp but I generally quite like this line, ESPECIALLY because ros lead teams want to sleepsack the ros some of the time anyways, it puts them in a super awkward midgame often i find. 48% jynx unpar is perfectly good at absorbing sleep from egg or singchans midgame anyw so if you get the good outcome its very good.
Lovely Kiss is just a generally safe click.
I like blizzard a lot, because it messes with what those teams want to do. It basically just depends on how tauros-resilient my team is. Blizz means you have to swap t2 into tauros anyw, so you better have a backmie or backcloy at least, not just lax.

 

[pac]

Does anyone have any good recommendations on what to do turn 0 for Jynx vs Tauros? Tauros leads typically have T-bolt an atypical amount of the time too I've noticed. I'll take advice from the standpoint of any team.

lower the Defense EV a little and use Counter Jynx if you're a true gamer

 

[LHF]

I don't like running counter on Jynx for the 1% of the time it's a tauros lead im facing though. Its too rare of a thing to want to change the set for, I'm not even sure if them leading Tauros even favors them, because they won't have a Tauros for late game oftentimes.

Tauros is very capable of leading and applying pressure to a team in the early stages of an RBY OU match. Rest is an option in slot 4 to help it recover off stray damage it might take in the process, but also 4 atk as you know it can help do some major damage. Plus, just because you use Tauros as a lead does not mean it won't stick around to help potentially clean up the match later on.

 

[Thare Rain]

Tauros is very capable of leading and applying pressure to a team in the early stages of an RBY OU match. Rest is an option in slot 4 to help it recover off stray damage it might take in the process, but also 4 atk as you know it can help do some major damage. Plus, just because you use Tauros as a lead does not mean it won't stick around to help potentially clean up the match later on.

What attack would you give up on Tauros in order to have Rest? I'm interested on trying this out

 

[violet river]

What attack would you give up on Tauros in order to have Rest? I'm interested on trying this out

usually blizzard -> body slam + hbeam + eq hits everything fine enough, quake is strong enough to not be walled by rhydon, slam slam beam kills exeggutor and zapdos in the same amount of time as blizzards, etc.
body slam + hbeam + blizzard can cleave past rhydon more, but tauros walled by gengar is not desirable.

 

[Thare Rain]

usually blizzard -> body slam + hbeam + eq hits everything fine enough, quake is strong enough to not be walled by rhydon, slam slam beam kills exeggutor and zapdos in the same amount of time as blizzards, etc.
body slam + hbeam + blizzard can cleave past rhydon more, but tauros walled by gengar is not desirable.

Makes sense, I thought of maybe running Tbolt/Thunder as Tauros lead might make enemy Starmie/Cloyster to come in but that would require giving up Beam or not using Rest at all D: