OU Sleep Moves in ADV OU

[Gilbert arenas]

Brelooms rise to prominence in OU has made me realize just how stupid sleep is. He completely invalidates a lot offensive teams because they can't afford to sac something to sleep+switch into a focus punch/hidden power+a lot of teams only have 2/3 mons faster than Loom. Against stall/balance teams you are going to have at most 2/3 fighting resists who are easily handled by other members of the team. Pokemon like jynx/venusaur/hypnogar have a similar impact but less so because they don't hit as hard, have better counters, don't have 100% accurate sleep, and (other than jynx) value their hp a lot more than breloom. These other sleepers also lack something infinitely valuable that breloom has, the ability to come in ttar and essentially force a kill. Because of the nature of the tier, a sleep is as good as a KO in a lot of situations, especially when you get 3/4 turn sleep. If anyone has any opinions on this please post below. I'll eventually make a bigger post with replays and stuff. I do think this tier would be a lot better without sleep.

 

[MarceloDK]

Agreed, let's ban sleep in adv and Lucario in dpp yn

 

[LuckOverSkill]

Get rid of sleep entirely in all gens. It works sort of like Freeze as in it's random when it goes away (if you manage to find enough free turns to wake up your sleeping Pokémon), and often you are forced to accept playing 5v6 for the rest of the game. To add to the issue, often the Pokémon who you are ok with sacrificing to sleep aren't necessarily good switchins to the sleep user.

Having a long sleep has huge costs in a battle, and Sleep Talk is not an answer to Sleep, as it adds even more randomness: you have to guess correctly when the enemy Pokémon is going to use sleep move (relatively easy: most people will burn their sleep move right away), you have to hope the Sleep Talk rolls don't fuck you up (good luck with that), and guessing the correct wake up turn can also make a huge difference in the game (completely RNG dependant).

Natural Cure is not an answer either, as you are still giving free turns to your opponent regardless of what you do.

 

[Triangles]

Well, it's taken 4 years since the gutting of sleep talk for people to start abusing Breloom (shoutouts UD for being the first Breloom wielder in recent history I can recall). Other than Spore's 100% accuracy, what really sets Breloom apart from other sleepers is the fact that it's a physical fighting type. The other sleepers are all special mons, and special mons are never immediate offensive pressure generators vs Blissey teams, you have to break things with physicals or spikes or trapping before they become truly dangerous. Hypno will often even be a side note on a Gar set whose main goal is to Boom on bliss. Jynx can have great matchups where it kills 2 things from lead but it can also do Fuck All a lot of the time. And it goes without saying that other non spore sleep moves are very very dangerous to press vs offense in particular because miss into die is a huge losing swing.

However Breloom, like other fighters, has a naturally strong matchup vs TSS and can pressurize defensive cores from the get go, especially aided by 100% accurate sleep. Focus Punch is a monster move for chunking, even resists like Mence hate getting Punched. Another thing worth mentioning is Loom's elite synergy with pursuit tar. Tar can punish Gengar (particularly when gar is forced to take sleep), breloom's chief switchin on most TSS. There is also of course the mach punch into Tar pursuit reverse trap AA locked Dug which is an excellent mid game powerplay and can open up other dug weak mons on the breloom user's team to threaten.

All that said... sleep's very strong but breloom is still a squishy, slow, and trappable mon with a lot of bad qualities so there's the counterplay. Breloom is a nice offensive tool but its certainly not too centralizing. There will be bad matchups for Loom where it's hard pressed to actually get itself in safely to do its thing. Another thing worth highlighting is that a double natural cure core of Celebi and Starmie shuts it down pretty hard - celebi needs to be more used in general as it's a fantastic response to meta trends.

Is Breloom good? Yes. Do we need to do anything about it? No (other than freeing Restalk )

 

[no longer here]

As per stall teams natural cure is quite good against loom, a classic celebi+starmie can easily stop it and spikes+sand support can slowly finish the loom. I think that from one point of view fpunch+seed+protect/substitute+spore is for sure an offensive combo but as fpunch is the only offensive move it can be easily dammed. restalk zapdos is a total counter (+pressure abuse) if loom hasn't hp rock (if not, loom without sub/protect is fucked pmuch by every move)
As per offensive teams breelom could be destructive but i guess everything could be faster then a 262 max speed pokemon. +dugtrio.


It would be stupid to not consider breelom as a good mon with his 100% spore but I personally won't consider it as an unstoppable threat, especially in a meta where dugtrio, zapdos, starmie, aerodactyl, celebi, flygon (I can still go on) are top usage mons.



As per Hypnosis/Sleep Powder users just consider the miss rate+they are all p much frail (Exeggutor exluded?)

 

[Cowboy Dan]

Is Breloom good? Absolutely. Is it ban worthy though? No. Breloom is a pokemon that is designed to make positive trades in the mid game to move your offense forward. Once it blows its sleep its power drops immensely. I think of it kind of like a light explosion. It can put a pokemon or two out of commission but after that it's not contributing too much to the game. This strategy is very effective against standard TSS teams who often have a hard time giving up something to sleep and taking focus punches but the thing is Breloom is a new toy right now. When new strategies are added to a metagame, the fact that it's good against old strategies even if it completely invalidates them (which I don't think it does in this case) does not make it broken it just means the metagame has to adapt to it. If Breloom becomes a staple, those teams that consistently let breloom get 2 for 1 trades may have to fall by the wayside. This is not a bad thing it just changes they way you have to approach teambuilding.

All this being said, when it comes to sleep as a whole I think there is one pokemon that is actually problematic and that's Hypnosis Gengar. When used in the early game Hypno Gar is not a huge deal, you just let something take sleep and then move on to something else to counter it just like any other sleep abuser. The issue with Hypno Gar is the coinflip scenarios it creates if saved for the late game. I can't tell you how many games I've played where if Hypno Gar hits, the gar user wins and if it misses they lose. For a move that has only 60% accuracy this is a bad thing and it's very hard to create counter play scenarios to this in the late game as Gengar is extremely fast and the fact that it misses 40% of the time means you often can't afford to try and fodder something to sleep half the time because the tempo gets thrown back in the Gar's favor if it misses.

Overall my vote would be Hypnosis Gengar Complex Clause>No Changes>Sleep Ban

 

[sumwun]

What if we banned only hypnosis? Would that have any effect other than making Gengar (and Milotic) more predictable?