Stall in BW2

So I tried out some Nightshade/Seismic toss sets and they weren't successful in the slightest

I went back to trying Harvest stall and needless to say Ive been having QUITE a bit of success with Blissey and Dugtrio supporting Exeguttor and Tropius.

Exeguttor takes physical hits pretty damn well and recovers practically all the damage with leech seed and sitrus berry in the sun, likewise for tropius when not getting hit by Ice type special attacks.

Dugtrio gets rid of those fire types, and those 2 stall successfully
 
While sitrus berry and harvest let's you create infinite substitutes is there any merit to lum+rest with harvest? With lum you get a full heal and beat status but lose to any attacks that OHKO you. With sitrus you can get them into a substitute loop and then it doesn't matter how strong the hits you take are but you lose to status. Also I'm surprised that tropius is strong enough to pull anything in OU off successfully, good to hear sun stall goes beyond sableye beating starmie and tentacrual and cresselia having full moonlight.
 
I thought about that and then realized that I would have to

A. Waste a slot for Rest

B. Not get immediate heal if the opponent is faster and risk getting killed in the second turn after casting leech seed because both Exeguttor and Tropius have <100 defensive stats and take high damage from Non-stab HP Fire under sun

and with the combination of leech seed + Harvest sitrus you can survive a VERY long time while toxic'd and you could also run Aromatherapy on Blissey
 
... havest crap is not stall, in fact its the opposite of stall, its a stall breaker, and a shitty one at that

stall is about stacking up the hazards, basically countering all your opponents pokemon and forcing them to switch or picking there pokemon off one by one, making making a late game sweep with something if you are semi-stall

I know some people here are fans of quick stall strategies, and have even used them to some effect, but honestly, I don't like them. You know what I do when a sub seeder come by way? I switch 16 times, they run out of leech seed PP, its then a useless piece of shit. I guess you can call leech seed stall sort of pseudo-psuedo-phazing because it does force switches, but its overall though its pretty meh. I can't imagine myself dedicating an entire slot for what? Pissing off people? No thanks I am going to have a useful pokemon.
 
you act like there's only 4 slots in a stall team and Im not running entry hazards at all.

5th slot Ninetails

6th Slot Forretress


you switch 16 times? Ok Switch another 16 times cause I have 2 leech seeders in my team? Ok


Oh and Btw, I'm not running Substitute at all
 
@EtherDrive

That makes sense, I forgot it's difficult to pull off subseed or subsitrus in this case with a low base speed. Not to mention that they could switch in an enemy weather starter and take that all away from you.

I started trying out sub seed recently as well, specifically in the form of Cottonee. He has better defences and lower health than Whimsi so he gets more out of leech seed. I ran 252def/252spdef with eviolite and the guy takes hits decently well. The only thing he really fears is genesect and scizor's STAB u-turn. I also dropped encore for protect in case I need an extra turn of recovery, now his moves are substitute, leech seed, protect and taunt. He does decently with rocks up and burn support.
 
But the point of using Leech Seed is also using hazard support to punish switches.

Harvest is in fact a nice ability, but the only who have this ability, one is awful and the other has an awful sp def, very slow and 7 annoying weaknesses. We need decent abusers of this ability.

However in lower tiers both Exeggutor and Tropius have SubSeed sets with the aim of abusing Harvest 50% regeneration rate.

Abuse of U-turn in OU also does not help to abuse SubSeed with Harvest in OU.
 
I don't play stall, but I want to say something here. I don't know if this is the right thread to post this, but this problem has to do with stall, although it can theorically also occur with offensive teams (but this problem, as I said, is mainly with stall).

Every time that I play against stall, if you have a spinner, it seems that they always switch their spinblocker against your spinner, even if you don't intend spin. Even the most experienced of stall players seems to be seriously DESESPERATE to not let those hazards be spinned. For this reason, I learned a good lesson: If you are going to use a spinner, ALWAYS use a Pursuitter. Unless your spinner is a Starmie, but remember that Starmie can't really win against all defensive spinblockers, for example: a specially defensive Jellicent isn't going to be 2HKOed by Thunderbolt anytime soon, and your opponent can simply stall out Starmie. So I learned that the best way to deal with this problem is pairing your spinner with something with Pursuit, although Starmie isn't my spinner anyway.. I solved this problem pairing it with a CB Tyranitar. CB Tyranitar can checkmate all spinblockers with Pursuit or Crunch, and thanks to my Forretress having Volt Switch, it's very easy to scout and bring Tyranitar safely, without it having, for example, to be burned by Jellicent's Scald.

I stopped having this sort of problem when I did this. No longer their spinblockers are completely safe, thanks to Tyranitar getting rid of all of them. Seriously, it's very boring having their spinblockers switching-in even if you don't intend to spin, and even if you predict correcly, you must have a way to punish them from switching-in, otherwise they can simply escape safely and you can't Rapid Spin ¬¬

CB Tyranitar solved my problems, but I want to know if there are alternative ways to deal with this situation, and how you, stall players, deal with a spinner paired with something packing Pursuit.
 
i haven't run a proper spinblocker, in the classical sense, since the start of bw2, and that is not about to change. there are so few ghosts to choose from, so trying to make room for a spinblocker is incredibly restrictive on teambuilding.

i find it's much more productive to simply force the spinner to come in repeatedly and let it kill itself trying to spin. i don't waste my time stacking hazards repeatedly when a spinner is still alive, better to just keep putting them back up and not invest too many turns at a time. if your team isn't getting flattened by offensive pressure, this is more than reasonable (and if your team is getting flattened by offensive pressure, you won't have hazards down in the first place). most hazard stackers can fare better against spinners than the meager spinblockers themselves. standard shit like ferrothorn will destroy standard spinners like starmie every time while also not being pursuit bait. the one thing you have to watch out for here is tentacruel because cruel in rain basically never dies to residual damage alone (either you smash it apart or it goes on forever). it can be a bloody nuisance to go about killing tentacruel, when you're running stall and generally don't have any invested STAB electric/ground attacks to crush it with.

jellicent straight up loses to CBtar obviously but i find it very inadvisable to switch jelli in blind on most spinners in the first place, especially when you see a tyranitar on the team somewhere - you're just asking to get pursuited, seriously don't do it. if i do run jellicent on a team, i care more about being able to switch in on fighting types for free, than i do about spinblocking. besides if you switch in on starmie tbolts too many times you're gonna lose your jellicent, and tentacruel beats you with toxic unless you're a rest jelli trololol. for what it's worth though, physically defensive jellicent can take a pursuit from CBtar to burn it, and then start recovering off the damage - however if you're physically defensive, you lose to starmie. in addition you might lose outright if bandtar outpredicts you and just crunches right off the bat, which is a solid OHKO on any standard jellicent.

gengar is not really a good choice for most stall teams - it doesn't last long enough =/ but it can crush tyranitar with focus blast and naturally outspeeds (0/0 tar in sand OHKOed by non-LO gengar focus blast every time). if you wanna do it this way that works alright. it's only really worth considering on more offensive or balanced teams though

the god of spinblockers, sableye himself, is the one that can take tyranitar one-on-one and come out on top. if you're obsessed about hazards, sunstall is where you need to be. on top of beating every spinner 1v1 in sun, sableye is also NOT pursuit-weak, and no tyranitar in its right mind will ever switch in on a sableye (gets burned by prankster wow and then stalled out of its stone edges/crunches by recover. if it's not CB, it can't even 3hko once it's been burned).
 
I actually tend to be one of those guys that is pretty desperate to keep my hazards. Generally, I only refrain from doing so if all I have is SR vs a non-SR weak team and I'm up against a Forretress who treatens to set up Spikes. Hazards are just really important in wearing stuff down, punishing switches, and removing some risk in prediction as I will at least have racked up some hazard damage if I mispredict a switch. My Jellicent set is also kind of responsible for this as it beats most Starmie and can even beat CB TTar if I predict the Pursuit/Crunch correctly (The spread is 404 HP/ 36 Def/ 108 SpDef/ 112 Spd IIRC).
 
Out of curiosity, do people actually run toxic spikes on non rain stall teams? I mean, I know they are useful but I find it difficult to work a toxic spikes user onto my hail stall. I have had a little success with Tentacruel but in the end he can't survive very long. I have had more luck with Forretress but that's about it... (Nidoqueen has its fair share of issues too...)
 
i used to use hail stall in black and white 1 and now i tried hail stall in black and white 2 so i have some input

back in black and white 1 stall really had no "bad team matchups" or any of that shit. it was consistent. if u wanted to break stall u had to use a specific pokemon like life orb infernape with earthquake or choice banded terrakion since nothing wants to switch into it not even skarmory which was prime on rain stall...

but now it rly does depend on team matchup. i mean with all these new powerhouses u cant check everything. u need a specially defensive steel type for tornadus since chansey doesnt like superpower but then u lose to stuff like choice band terrakion since u may not run skarmory anymore idk. it rly depends on what youre prepared for vs what ur opponent has. therefore its not as consistent as black and white 1
 
tspikes suck right now lol. a whopping 20% of all rain teams carry tentacruel anyway because it spins forever (check toed teammate statistics if you don't believe me) so already a significant chunk of teams are basically immune. in addition many of the top threats ignore them (genesect, dragonite, rotom-W, genies), and the tspike setters themselves generally have better things to do. cruel should be running toxic these days and forry/roserade should be running spikes.

i have heard that toxic spikes are useful against boosting HO teams, but honestly if you have the time to even set them up, you shouldn't be having issues against those kinds of teams in the first place; it's something i've never really understood. other than that tspikes are only useful for crippling things like pink blobs, starmie and celebi that have natural cure, and that's not exactly a huge concern for most teams. the vast majority of teams should not be running tspikes at all in this metagame
 
alkinesthetase said:
tspikes suck right now lol. a whopping 20% of all rain teams carry tentacruel anyway because it spins forever (check toed teammate statistics if you don't believe me) so already a significant chunk of teams are basically immune. in addition many of the top threats ignore them (genesect, dragonite, rotom-W, genies), and the tspike setters themselves generally have better things to do. cruel should be running toxic these days and forry/roserade should be running spikes.

i have heard that toxic spikes are useful against boosting HO teams, but honestly if you have the time to even set them up, you shouldn't be having issues against those kinds of teams in the first place; it's something i've never really understood. other than that tspikes are only useful for crippling things like pink blobs, starmie and celebi that have natural cure, and that's not exactly a huge concern for most teams. the vast majority of teams should not be running tspikes at all in this metagame
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Cool, thanks so much for your input ^^. I also read what you said about not having a spinner and I may try something like that out
 
The worst part about t-spikes is the fact that you can't selectively apply status. Sableye for instance is an amazing spinblocker who shuts down a ton physical threats with priority WoW, but they can just bring in there terrakion or whatever and they get poisoned on the and suddenly you can't deal with that CB terrakion, a pokemon who doesn't mind toxic that much because he switches in and out a lot and resists stealth rocks. You need to know when to toxic and when to burn/para (Even though para is more often used for support for offensive teams looking to beat +2 speed boosters.) and they can just bring in a pokemon on the first layer to be regular poisoned, the worst status in the game. If there was an alternative that burned the pokemon there would be the same problem so it isn't wholly in part to the abundance of steels and poison types either.
 
alkinesthetase said:
tspikes suck right now lol. a whopping 20% of all rain teams carry tentacruel anyway because it spins forever (check toed teammate statistics if you don't believe me) so already a significant chunk of teams are basically immune. in addition many of the top threats ignore them (genesect, dragonite, rotom-W, genies), and the tspike setters themselves generally have better things to do. cruel should be running toxic these days and forry/roserade should be running spikes.

i have heard that toxic spikes are useful against boosting HO teams, but honestly if you have the time to even set them up, you shouldn't be having issues against those kinds of teams in the first place; it's something i've never really understood. other than that tspikes are only useful for crippling things like pink blobs, starmie and celebi that have natural cure, and that's not exactly a huge concern for most teams. the vast majority of teams should not be running tspikes at all in this metagame
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Seconding all of this. Not only is it exceedingly hard to actually set up Toxic Spikes, but most teams won't even carry anything too harshly affected by them. Maybe I just got lucky with my team composition, but with my current HO team, the only Pokemon even affected by TSpikes are Deo-D, who should never have to worry about them because he should be dead before they're set up, and my scarfed Keldeo, who doesn't normally stay in long enough for them to be an issue. Every other Pokemon I have is either not grounded or immune to Poison.
 
alkinesthetase said:
tspikes suck right now lol. a whopping 20% of all rain teams carry tentacruel anyway because it spins forever (check toed teammate statistics if you don't believe me) so already a significant chunk of teams are basically immune. in addition many of the top threats ignore them (genesect, dragonite, rotom-W, genies), and the tspike setters themselves generally have better things to do. cruel should be running toxic these days and forry/roserade should be running spikes.

i have heard that toxic spikes are useful against boosting HO teams, but honestly if you have the time to even set them up, you shouldn't be having issues against those kinds of teams in the first place; it's something i've never really understood. other than that tspikes are only useful for crippling things like pink blobs, starmie and celebi that have natural cure, and that's not exactly a huge concern for most teams. the vast majority of teams should not be running tspikes at all in this metagame
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I disagree that tspikes are bad right now. If you're not running a spinblocker then, sure, I can see why you might say that. Without a spinblocker, you're going to be constantly worried about keeping rocks up, leaving you little extra time to ensure that tspikes stay on the field.

Tentacruel is mostly seen on rain teams, who are typically not very weak to tspikes anyway. Tspikes are most useful against Sand Balance/Offense teams, who very frequently carry important threats that are affected by them. Notable examples are Tyranitar/Hippowdon themselves, Terrakion, Keldeo, Breloom (Technician), Garchomp, Jellicent, and Starmie. Having tspikes on the field + a spinblocker that can beat starmie 1v1 puts sand (or weatherless) teams like these at a significant disadvantage.

I do agree with you, though, that, to an extent, tspikes are generally not as impressive against several HO teams, but they're not so mediocre against these teams that they aren't worth setting up. The best example I can think of is having to deal with something like an outraging haxorus/kyurem-B/Garchomp on a drag mag team. Skarmory isn't going to be extremely reliable against those teams, and having a pokemon who can recover stall an outrage locked dragon (in the case of my Defense of the Titans team, Quagsire) is really important.
 
I disagree Lady Alex about T Spikes being good. The main problem with them is that they work against you when you only have one layer up, which is fairly often as most players aren't going to sit back and let you set up something that will wreck their team. Out of the pokemon you listed: Tyranitar benefits from TSpikes to avoid a burn from your pursuit weak spin blocker. Hippowdon likes not worrying about a burn or Toxic poison so it will benefit from the single layer. Jellicent benefits from Toxic poison protection like Hippowdon and also won't have to worry about the Tentacruel packing Toxic. Terrakion, Garchomp, Breloom and Keldeo are pretty aggressive Pokemon so they shouldn't be letting poison bother them much (except SubCM Keldeo). Starmie, however, does fear TSpikes as Nat Cure prevents it from milking the temporary presence of the single layer.
 
And I slightly disagree with everyone :P

I think Toxic Spikes are kind of good and kind of awful at one and the same time, and this is entirely dependent on team match-up. The problem (as posters above have said) is that so many pokemon these days are immune to Toxic Spikes that it is not uncommon for a team to have at least 3 members that are unaffected by them. This isn't because people are intentionally planning it that way; it's just that the pokes which are good in this meta just so happen to be immune to them - i.e., Genesect, Therians, Tentacruel, Heatran, Rotom-W, Lati@s, Dragonite, Salamence, Ferrothorn, Skarmory, Forretress, Jirachi, Gliscor, Gengar... Off the top of my head :p

That said, if by chance your opponent's team has several members susceptible to T-Spikes and no spinner, then they quickly go from being pretty bad to mildly terrifying. Against offensive teams, even one layer can be enough to really put the brakes on a Terrakion or Garchomp sweep, and can pretty badly neuter choiced pokes like Cube and Keldeo. That is, even though regular poison may not be as good as a burn or some such, that residual damage will nevertheless add up quickly, and considering stall teams which are designed to take up time, offensive sweepers become far less effective. They'll often succumb to a combination of poison + hazards + life orb, maybe sand, as well as protect stalling - before they actually get to run through a team.

Of course, T-Spikes are really good against defensive teams, but those will more often carry spinners - and if that spinner is Tentacruel, then T-Spikes becomes a waste of a move slot. Just to be clear though, I don't really think that Toxic Spikes is worth it right now; if you're running the likes of 'Cruel on a rain team, you're honestly better off with toxic, as T-Spikes is mostly situational. As I said, how good they are entirely depends on team match-up, and as so much of the meta right now is immune to them, it really is hard to justify using them.
 
Honestly, even if there are multiple Pokemon suspectible to Toxic Spikes you are better off spending your free turns shooting off a Toxic, a Scald, or a layer of Spikes (depending on if you are using Forry, Tenta, or Roserade) than giving your opponent the option to choose a lesser evil (ie normal poison). T Spikes are actually the least effective against defensive teams who often pack a spinner and appreciate having the normal poison that won't completely ruin their purpose of Stalling. I am always happy when I see a Tenatcruel packing T Spikes over Toxic.


Edit: Ignore that Jellicent spread, for some oddball reason I thought CBTyranitar run 100 speed EVs (I knew that looked wierd to outrun base 73s with 4 speed EVs...). I'll get back to you with an even better spread but Jellicent is definitely capable of spin blocking everything but a Toxic Tentacruel while foiling attempts to Pursuit trap it.
Edit 2: Sadly the 24 extra EVs don't do much as far as dealing with LO Sand Starmie's Thnderbolts or stomaching burned Tyranitar's CB Pursuits better so it's leftovers you can use to speed creep to force higher rolls for the former or coming out a bit healthier from the latter.
 
interestingly, jelli and CBtar are in a constant war of speed creep lol. every time i see a spread recommended for jelli i swear it's faster than the last one i saw... jelli wants to burn tar before it gets hit (lest it eat a crunch which OHKOes any jellicent) and tar wants to crunch before it gets burned. jelli has the slightest advantage since its speed tier is a bit higher, but if it overinvests in speed its bulk can become severely compromised

as an aside, fast jellicent are also nice for outspeeding slowtoeds and taunting them before you get toxiced (toed specs modest HP grass is like 12% chance of 2HKO on 252/0 jelli lol). yee has told me about the rest jellicent he runs for dismantling defensive rain cores (it's literally just rest>taunt and otherwise standard) so that you can take toxic... i think it's a bit weird but definitely worth considering if you despise tentacruel that carry toxic, because with rest you always beat it (barring extreme PP stall) but without it you basically always lose

anyway one more word on tspikes - sometimes they're usable, but sacrificing a moveslot every match in exchange for utility in a small portion of my matches (and basically zero utility everywhere else) is an expensive opportunity cost, especially when i could be doing something else that turn... limited flexibility is the kiss of death for what was already unarguably the weakest of the three hazards we have right now. i agree though that balanced/offensive-leaning sand is the team they tend to fare best against, although amoonguss exists T_T
 
Yeah, Defensive Politoed and CBTar (as well as speed creeping CB Scizor and opposing Jellicent) were the reasons I decided to go with a faster spread. The current utility Jelicent spread is just simply outdated (the one in the super old analysis anyways). Although you mixed up TTar with Jelli in the speed tier, TTar has 61 base speed and more aggressive natured set that can sacrifice bulk while Jellicent has only 60 base speed and needs its bulk to stop Starmie and outlast burned Pursuits.
 
I just read through this entire thread, and despite the main meta being OU, the post is just titled "Stall in BW2" so I figured I'd give my two cents, cause I've tried stalling in every main tier.

-In OU, I just generally can't find/haven't come across a stall team yet that would give me a better advantage to win than a balanced/bulky offence team would. I've tried rain stall, sand stall, weatherless, and after reading this thread, sun stall :P To me, sun seemed the most anti-meta, and possibly the most effective if played correctly - but it could be said that any stall team would be effective if played correctly.

-NU is where I probably have the most attempts at stall, and if the sheer number of potential threats in OU is worrysome (which it is) NU is truly a nightmare. There are a number of pokemon that just break right through stall regardless (bulkup, sub, roost braviary - which I have run before on stall - literally laughs at everything if it's saved for last) and even offensive based things like banded emboar, scarf sawk, sub golurk, lifeorb cinccino, specs emolga, etc, etc... So many threats. The hardest thing to overcome about NU stall, is that there are just SO MANY POKEMON. It is literally impossible to counter even the main threats with your team of 6, let alone the other 200+ pokemon in NU.

RU - bleh, I really haven't played much of RU lately. I used to at least try, but ever since nidoqueen decided to carry life orbs and run max special attack, mixed in with hitmonlee and sceptile, I just gave up :/

UU is a different story though. Some defensive powerhouses that just wouldn't work in today's OU meta, have fallen down to a place where the offence doesn't hit as hard and as fast as standard. There are still threatening attackers in UU, but generally you CAN counter pretty much any relevant threat in a team of 6, fully defensive, shuffle-stalling pokemon. Here's a team I've had amazing success with - feel free to critique it:

http://pastebin.com/PRs9uiUS

Plus a few matches:
One that went well - http://pokemonshowdown.com/replay/uususpecttest4736186
One that required improvisation - http://pokemonshowdown.com/replay/uususpecttest4737286

I feel stall works best as an option in UU, soley due to the lack of overwhelming power, and number of offensive pokemon. Just my opinion, feel free to yell at me for anything I did wrong, I wrote this late an tired :P
 
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