Survey Results!
Thank you to everyone who answered, I apologise for being a bit late with this one. Hope you all enjoy.
Average: 6.4/10
Average: 7.7/10
These numbers are significantly higher than they were last survey (4.5 and 5.6 respectively), which is amazing to hear but they still a lot of room for improvement, especially in terms of making the metagame more competitive. We hope that as the metagame develops further, these numbers continue to increase.
Average: 3.5/5
Walking Wake is a very controversial mon in the meta right now, between its wide set variety and high damage output with strong stab moves. Choice Specs rips a lot of teams apart, and Substituite + Knock-Off being able to get past even AV Toxapex makes it a formidable foe. The sun teams also enable it to reach even higher levels of potency. We put it on the survey for this reason, and people seem to generally agree based on these quite high numbers. We will continue to monitor Wake, and see if it ends up being too strong for the metagame to handle.
Average: 2.4/5
Raging Bolt on the other hand seems to be more manageable, likely due to being soft-checked by both Ting-Lu and Tyranitar, giving a lot of teams a splashable option of efficiently checking it. Despite this, the Booster Energy + Calm Mind sets are still very strong, and it can be a very dangerous threat on sun teams that grant it access to both Protosynthesis and Life Orb, as well as a strong Solar Beam to cleave through Ting-Lu. We will continue to monitor Raging Bolt if it becomes too much as the metagame develops, but for now we think it is safe to assume that it is not banworthy.
Average: 2.8/5
The purpose of adding this to the Survey was twofold: there are a lot of potentially overwhelming mons roaming the metagame that abuse Surging Strikes, like Urshifu-R and Basculegion-M, that could be seen as overwhelming. The other aspect is that STABmons has already banned a lot of elements that have abused Surging Strikes, mainly Ogerpon-Wellspring, Gyarados, and Rain in the form of damp rock. If Surging Strikes were to go, then one or more of these elements could potentially come back to the metagame. Overall, it seems that there are a lot of mixed opinions on Surging Strikes, so we will continue discussions on it and see what option is best for the metagame. For now however, there will likely not be any action taken on Surging Strikes.
Average: 2.6/5
The reason why we put Meloetta on the survey was because one of the main elements that caused it to be broken, Esper Wing, was banned after Meloetta had been banned, so we wanted to see what the general consensus was on potentially freeing Meloetta back. It would no longer be able to snowball games as well as it did before, and it should be much easier to revenge kill now. Generally, you guys seem to agree, so we will continue discussions on potentially freeing Meloetta in the near future.
We also added a section where we asked you guys if anything should be looked at. The main responses that stood out were freeing Victory Dance and banning Zamazenta. Victory Dance is, frankly, unlikely to be freed due to the already high saturation of strong fighting types in the metagame, which would likely warp the metagame around offense structures abusing them. Zamazenta is a fair shout, as Substitute + Bulk Up sets have been shown to run away with a lot of games, and it can run a wide variety of coverage moves to get past its checks. However, it can't get past all of them, so it always has to make a sacrifice somewhere. It also already has a ton of common counterplay options depending on what coverage moves it decides to run, but that could also be seen as restricting in the builder. Either way, Zamazenta will be discussed more in the future. Any other comments or questions mentioned in this section will be forwarded to the council if deemed important.
And that's it! I hope you guys continue to enjoy STABmons, and I hope that it continues to progress towards a healthy and competitive metagame where all of the truly problematic elements have been dealt with. I know STABmons doesn't have an amazing track record in terms of being a competitive metagame, but I promise that we are doing everything we can to steadily improve upon it. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out and let us know! Thank you and have a nice day.
