Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v2 [Update on Post #5186]

[Finchinator]

I feel freeing everything within reason would make more sense after DLC2; that will be a more “permanent” metagame while this metagame will only be between DLC1 and DLC2 for a couple of months. I do think a grander type of reset with some OU trial-by-fire will be warranted come DLC2.

People have to realize that if we were to free everything within reason*, that’s 8-12 Pokemon total (Volcarona, Zamazenta-Hero, Urshifu-Rapid, Chien-Pao, Magearna, Regieleki, Espathra, Annihilape, Shed Tail, and probably a few more). There have never been more than a 2-3 rounds of quickbans in an initial phase of a metagame and even that is sometomes pushing things to extreme; quickbans cannot be applied with reckless abandon. Even if that encompasses 5-6 bans, it can take up to 2-3 weeks and doesn’t cover more than half of what’s dropping down, disregarding potentially new Ubers from DLC1 drops. From there, there is still a chance that multiple other Pokémon need potential bans and would require suspects, which even by conservative estimates take 3 weeks a piece with ideally a week between for spacing. We wouldn’t even be able to clean up the mess freeing everything could cause by the time DLC2 would be released.

*everything that has previously been OU

Only one Pokemon has much community support to be unbanned right now, so one would have to imagine that the bulk of the Pokemon free’d would at least require a suspect. This is why we are looking at smaller scale drop downs now with the most recent bans being targeted and then we will circle back on a larger scale in the future.

 

[ianlazerbeem]

I voted 3 on Volcarona and 1 on the rest (or maybe 2 on Urshifu.) Vote sort of felt like a guess since I've never played the DLC1 meta game and have no idea what will and won't be broken in it - with that in mind I'm curious about the quality of data that will be gleaned from this survey

also thank you for not even considering dropping chien pao

 

[LoseToRU?]

There's no reason to waste time unbanning things on the off chance they might be ok this time around. We know what mons are coming in both DLCs and none of them make these Ubers less broken. Volc included. We shouldn't strangle the DLC1 meta and stop some of these new mons from shining.
As far as I know there is no concrete way to handle DLC in regards to official tiering policy, but letting the bottom drop out of the Uber tier and have those mons plague OU for a month or longer isn't the answer. A meta should be allowed ample time to settle and then when things are stable we can experiment with drops one mon at a time. That Uber should have vocal community support and council should also weigh in on if a drop is warranted- and all drops should launch with a suspect day 1. Let both DLCs play out, give the meta a month or two, then proceed with the aforementioned testing.
Frankly, looking at the DLC leaks, I can't see any Uber being healthy in OU as long as Tera remains legal. Since there is no official tiering policy we need to use some common sense. The broken wild west that occurs when a new game is launched doesn't need to be repeated with every update when we get a handful of viable OU mons.
Even if there are some on paper situations, doesn't mean we need to waste a month on a broken mon. Just because we're getting Tentacruel doesn't make Urshi-R fine. Comfey doesn't make Pao healthy, etc. Many Ubers have some niche lower tier check but in battle you just have a low or mid tier mon that only works as a specific counter for something broken. Even if you put weight onto this logic, Tera just invalidates any real argument for these DLC mons making our Ubers healthy in OU.
We need to let these DLCs play out, suspect mons that feel broken in those metas, then lastly, almost as an afterthought, test an Uber or two to see if that optimizes the meta somehow.

 

[pika pal]

Did you know I have the same birthday as All Might?
(This is a subtle reference to the fact that I voted One for All)
(No seriously this tier is fucked as is nobody should be coming back)

4 - QB was a mistake in the sense that it should have been suspected. That being said I don't like this mon.

4 - This mon deserved a suspect more than Volcarona tbh. We complain about there being no Gambit checks, Ting-Lu and Hammy being annoying, blah blah blah but then ban a mon that checks all 3? I'll admit that Trailblaze set could be annoying, but even then that set just seems like a worse BU Tusk to me (weaker STABs, worse Defense, way less coverage options and its speed boosting move doesn't clear hazards, Tusk gets all its moves boosted in Sun, etc.). If Scald is coming back in the DLC, then this mon unquestionably becomes weaker. SD + Taunt lets can't just set up on Pex for free like it can currently can without running Cloak and if it runs Cloak it becomes fodder for many of the Rocky Helmet mons.

4 - I was not convinced this mon was OP the first time around, but probably a skill issue lmao. Could stay banned now that I think about it more, but I already voted. Still, a mon that can't run PP vs Zap / Moltres + struggles vs some Gholdengo / Pult Variants doesn't seem like the best to me but maybe Tera pushes it over the edge.

4 - I deadass didn't see this mon at all when it was legal which is why I want to test it again. Pretty confident it is still broken, but on paper, the set that broke it (Taunt / Bulk Up / Jet Punch / Drain Punch) doesn't seem like its that much better than Urshifu-RS to me. Probably still banworthy, but having it in the meta for a week doesn't seem too bad.

1 for All and All 4 One! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

 

[G-Luke]

1 for All and All 4 One! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

rip SRN

 

[Dhrabb]

Instead of unbanning stuff let's ban when DLC drops instead
Anyway I voted 1 on every option besides . Even then I thought Volc was pretty damn broken before it got banned, but I'd say it deserves a chance given community sentiment and some of the good traits it brought to the meta

 

[BolTingBlazie]

Instead of unbanning stuff let's ban when DLC drops instead
Anyway I voted 1 on every option besides . Even then I thought Volc was pretty damn broken before it got banned, but I'd say it deserves a chance given community sentiment and some of the good traits it brought to the meta

Yeah I would love to get bax out before we start voting on tera again

Voted 4 on Volc, since I think a quickban was definitely questionable despite being a bit much.

Other 3 can have a 1. I don't want any of those 3 near the tier

 

[yomaalt]

Kingambit teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This OU tier now without a phys def mon to wall it seems neither sterile nor fertile. Each quiver of that dance, each mineral flake of this +1 252 sp.atk Tera Ground Volcarona Tera Blast, alone forms a world. The struggle itself to the heights of Light screen + reflect is enough to fill a Espathra's heart.

One must imagine Srn happy. For when faced with the absurdity known as "dropping a tera abuser", what else could he do but laugh?


(Dawg please don't drop volcarona literally nothing changes for him across dlc else from "Oh hey I got a burn on kingambit after I died! Now my valiant has a 6.3% chance of winning this encounter!"

 

[Wooloomax]

What's the point of a re-suspect? if something outrageously busted like Kingambit didn't get ban, there's no way Volcarona would leave OU. Volcarona is unwallable with Tera Blast and snowballs teams quite easy as Quiver Dance is the stupidest move in a Tera meta, it's presence will only increase the usage of busted checks like Bax and the busted-checks-busted ordeal.
This meta needs less power creep instead of reintroducing more of it.

 

[Pando067]

I voted 1 or 2 for all of them except watershifu, which I voted 3 for. I think volc qb was a good idea. Volc has been deleting everything in OU by abusing tera. Palafin seems like it might fit but let's be real it's just slaking but with pretty much no drawbacks and zama-c is just zama but pumped full of steroids. Steel is great defensively and it's a lot bulkier, it might not have lefties recovery but it doesn't really need it, it just needs to click bp. I think watershifu would be fine mostly because it destroys stall but stall is already really uncommon. Shifu doesn't match up well into HO unless it's scarfed, which is pretty much non-existant.

 

[TCTphantom]

I gave it a 4. I think that while Volc is one of the dumbest sweepers in the tier, it can help with staving off stuff like Valiant and Enamorus. It has a unique defensive profile which I think is pretty useful for the tier. It also is the only drop I feel is a very worthwhile one due to how controversial Volc’s ban was.

I actually gave this a 2 after a lot of thought. I do think with home and DLC1, the meta has shifted just enough to keep palafin a tad restrained. Taunt BU is gonna have a harder time setting up than it used to, and choice is going to be slightly worse given our better water resists in the meta. Is it going to be dumb? Maybe, it probably is. I just see more value in testing this than things where I don’t think the needle has moved as much. I’d have rather dropped Annihilape if any early QB was on the radar, but I do think Palafin has a slim window to be OK.

I actually gave this a 1. Tera Water Punching Glove is just such a disgusting breaker. It would be a good Gambit check, but god this thing would be so dumb to let back into the tier. It’s just too consistent of a Pokémon. I wouldn’t be mad if it came back and I see the arguments for it, but I’m still skeptical.

If this was DLC2, I’d give this a higher score. Rn I don’t think anything is going to move the needle for us to want to bring Zama C back. I do think its dominance was a symptom of Chien Pao being broken as well as it being dumb. But it is a dumb mon. Unlike Hero, Crowned being toxic spikes immune and having that juicy steel typing means it actually can set up easier. I could give it a 2, but I’m giving it a 1 for now. Maybe if we look into it for DLC2 I’d be considering it more.

 

[P3DS]

1 - the QB was the right decision I think in hindsight. Otherwise, we would have ended up in a similar situation we are in now. People were attached to Volcarona being OU for so long, and it would be another Tier Tera Vs Ban broken Mons. Last gen, it nearly went, and it was one of the mons who caused Gems to be banned in BW OU. If tera isn't being actioned until the new year, volc will be banned early, and we only have around 3 months of the format.

1 - SD+Tera Water Surging Strikes just shreds teams. Keep it gone.

1 - it's too much. It's not urshi level, but it's too much now.

4 - I think it's on the edge of being broken. Format changings are good to test it, however, I think it's got broken aspects, but ita worth the test.

 

[xavgb]

A POST ABOUT SPIKES (KINDA) ​

(Quick disclaimer: I originally planned for a much longer post with more issues mentioned, but I'm not gonna have the will to finish that post so I've shortened it to a post about two mons. If there's any sentence that's completely out of place in the text, it was probably something from the old post that I didn't catch in the edit, sorry in advance if that happens)

With the Home meta coming to a close in a few days, I wanted to talk about a topic that has been bothering me for a while with this metagame - the addition of two uniquely strong Spikers. It's no secret that removal is a tough task in this metagame especially with the lack of options, but instead of focusing on Spikes itself as a move (one that will probably never face any sort of tiering action), I felt it was better to talk about why these two mons are so different to the rest of the pack.

Ting-Lu

To help me get started on why I've singled out Ting-Lu here, I'd like to focus on something Finch said in the Tera thread:

"I find Ting Lu stack management to be an interesting feature of the metagame and it makes finding openings and generating momentum to force switches an important skill akin to BW spikes patterns. I don’t think any of that is an imminent issue." - Finch, 2023

In short, I disagree with this statement in a few ways, but it does remind me of a more optimistic time of building, before the last few rounds of WCOP and OLT. Over the course of the Home meta, I've built a lot of teams that intend to compensate for weak removal options by piling offensive pressure onto setters, Ting-Lu in particular being one of them. After trying this type of strategy a lot, I eventually realised that even with so much focus on adapting to Ting-Lu's defensive profile, I'd still find Ting-Lu to be one of the most likely pokemon I'd struggle with on matchup. Typically what would happen is that you'd reach a point in the builder where you realise that a couple of your mons can either barely touch Ting-Lu AT ALL, or they can only "cripple" it with status, in which time the Lu just went and put up all the hazards for easy value. After that, you'd look to compensate for the weakness in game by giving the Lu less time to operate (i.e. going into something that hits it hard as it sets hazards). This usually creates a catch 22 for the player against Ting-Lu - rushing the strongest breakers in to trade HP with the Ting-Lu can be a risky play long-term, but sitting back and allowing hazards is also a risky play. Often in these situations, the Ting-Lu can both take the hazards and the chip because lol imagine OHKOing a Ting-Lu. On top of this, its practical typing and ridiculous bulk means that chopping half of Lu's HP is nowhere near as punishing as you'd expect it to be - this doesn't open up Zapdos, or Glowking, or Specs Shadow Ball.

Throughout all of these sequences, one thing usually remains true - you have to predict the Ting-Lu several more times than it has to predict anything you're doing. If your opponent wants to take 60 from Valiant because they cant be bothered to figure out a way to switch around it, there's a good chance they haven't even put themselves in the mud by doing so. It's often very difficult to tell whether your low ladder opponent is leaving Ting-Lu in on everything with a plan in mind, or whether they're just doing it because they can - either way, from your side it really does feel like you can't ever predict a Ting-Lu to switch out, unless there's a case where Ting-Lu just can't do anything worthwhile back. I don't think these traits are the mark of a nuanced pokemon - ultimately, having a pokemon that takes somewhere between almost nothing and ~60 percent from the ENTIRE metagame, while being able to make progress itself every time it does get a free turn is already pretty crazy. The fact that most of the 1400s I have come across can emulate the plays needed to do this (because they're easy) is possibly a bad sign.

So, if trying to push through Ting-Lu as quickly as possible isn't the right idea, what do the good players do vs Ting-Lu nowadays? The simple answer is to never have a below average matchup against Spikes. Out of the teams commonly brought on OLT high ladder in the last few weeks (teams brought by multiple OLT players), we have:

Samu Lando Bootspams (BOOTS)
Stall (6 Boots)
Various Nat balances (all of these have plenty of Boots and Levitators)
Vert Sun (Sun is the only weather/"cheese" playstyle that can carry two Spinners, one of which is a Speed Boosting Tusk)

Notably, pretty much any other type of offense (like the anti-Court Change HO, Shocks Wake HO etc) started to suffer the longer OLT went on. This isn't only down to the Ting-Lu matchup, but the amount of HO win conditions that just dont get past basic fat + speed control cores is getting really high. Between Ting-Lu/Dozo/Birds/Gking and then the priority users like Gambit/Dnite, you can have such a high portion of "top" threats in the meta hard-walled, with a lot of the frailer options being pretty unviable due to how strong prio is. The only mons that seem to escape this decently are the brokens (Val/Bax/Gambit/Ghold) and some slow, frail mons that you'd never want to use over the brokens. I think that this is partially why a lot of offense players are resistant to the idea of banning the top tier offensive mons - they recognize from their own building that there's just not a whole lot out there that can dent the current crop of fat mons. Again, this isn't exclusively a Lu issue, BUT if we ever do get to the point where we start tackling the broken offensive mons and looking at the fat cores, Ting-Lu should probably be first on the chopping block, since it's not a truly passive mon like Dondozo and its Spikes have a major impact on teambuilding across the board.

I've focused a lot on the meta implications of Ting-Lu's ridiculous bulk so far, but really everything in the above paragraphs is meant to convey one thing - the best competitive strategies require you to assume you're dealing with multiple layers of Spikes every single time you build in this meta. Now, I'd like to quickly talk about the ways people try to deal with hazards in this metagame:

Cinderace can use Court Change to deter excessive hazard setting, but it doesn't directly come in on Ting-Lu so there's often progress to be made in getting up one (1) hazard, or simply using Ting-Lu's attacks to force certain plays. Also, Cinderace basically always needs a Tusk to accompany it for removal, otherwise 6 boots super fats or 6 boots stalls will likely try to beat your team by repeatedly setting hazards until they're up on both sides.

Bootspam with a solid Knock absorber allows you to play a lot more calmly vs Ting-Lu since you can afford to waste turns. This is a pretty common metagame approach and well-proven, but these structures don't have that many variants since it's not so easy to cover every threat without much item freedom (things like bulky NP Gholdengo often punish these teams due to the lack of initial power).

Speed booster elephants (Tusk/Treads) can be used on offensive styles as a way to execute the "punish the Spiker, spin in the middlegame and win" plan. Again, these cant fit on every type of team, but there are some good team options in this style. Vert sun also fits under this category since the Tusk is speed boosting.

Hatterene is a somewhat risky and low usage option that can help with Spikes matchups. However, Hat becomes pretty awkward to use if it ever comes in on a Ting-Lu Ruination (it needs its hp), can be punished by more offensive variants of Ting-Lu (Heavy Slam), and doesn't block Samurott's hazards or Cinderace's Court Change (unless you want to play hazardless which is always risky imo). All of these factors point to Hatterene ideally being used with an actual hazard remover.

Defensive Tusk as sole hazard removal is something I see a lot in ladder and tours, and I don't think it is favoured whatsoever when interacting with Spikes teams. Once you identify that Tusk is the only hazard removal and that there isnt a large portion of Boots mons on the team, the Tusk becomes easy pickings in a few different ways. The simplest of these methods is to just Tera Ghost your Lu or Gholdengo, but it's worth explaining that defensive Tusk just doesn't interact with the Ghost types well enough to win the hazard interactions more than like 20 percent of the time. Something I've considered to be a staple on every variant of Gholdengo is having at least 88 hp EVs (or 60 def EVs) as this ensures you always live an EQ from defensive Tusk. This means def Tusk always needs to predict the Gholdengo at least twice, even in a best case scenario where I just choose to throw it out. Typically it's very hard for Tusk to get three switchins vs a Spikes teams, since it doesn't switch directly in on a lot of threats that Spikes teams carry, and often will have to interact with a Ting-Lu Ruination first before even getting into any of the 50/50s. Speedy Tusk can solve some of these issues, but it's still pretty poor in these situations when you factor in the fact that it usually needs to correctly predict two turns to get to a point where it can spin the NEXT TIME it comes in - and of course it still loses to Tera Ghost as well.


In summary,
Cinderace and Hatterene (especially Cind) want to be paired with Tusk, which is a pretty large team commitment.
The most splashable Tusk set is a terrible solo remover.

The result of this is a deceptively small pool of teams that can handle Spikes in the current metagame, which forces me to question whether Ting-Lu stack is a healthy style for the meta in the long run. Obviously, much of this will depend on what our DLC options look like in terms of hazard immunities and hazard removal, but the current situation is very not good imo, speaking as someone who brought Spikes to 13 consecutive competitive matches in this tier (and about 70 percent of my comp matches total).

Samurott-Hisui

Hrott forms the other half of my issues with Spikes in the current metagame. Samu's Ceaseless Edge feels a lot harder to deal with your average offensive Spiker due to a few interactions, including:

- Being able to fit with extra coverage or utility options that can dramatically improve its usefulness outside of Spikes
- Bypassing Hatterene
- Creating free chances to get up Spikes vs mons like Gking
- Forcing defensive mons to Recover, buying you more time to get up multiple layers

Samurott is also just super well-positioned to threaten the entire meta, with its water STAB hitting almost every common mon that wants to come in on Ceaseless Edge (barring Zapdos). In particular, going into mons like defensive Lando or Tusk can swing between being the best option on the field if your opponent clicks Ceaseless, to one of the worst options on the field if they SD instead. This type of uncertainty heavily encourages players to deal with Spikes from a full scale teambuilding perspective, rather than a playing perspective (similar to Ting-Lu).

Another aspect of Samu-H that I find pretty annoying to deal with is the types of teams it is commonly used on. Samu-H glues together the common style of Boots spam + Helmet Lando-T, providing it an easy catch all progress-maker that can run Boots easily. These teams can usually get away with having a lot of walls to common threats (Zapdos Gking cores etc) and even failsafe options like Fairy Gambit, and as such they are some of the easiest teams to pilot "decently" at a high level. Due to the limitations placed on the metagame with poor removal options, it's pretty hard to find a way to consistently skill gap weaker players using these teams. Usually, the nature of the metagame will force you to engage the Boots spam teams with a largely similar style, and in many cases where the style matchup is so symmetrical, small mon changes can make a huge difference. For example, there was a point in OLT Cycle 4 where the top ranked player at the time (leng loi) sniped the second ranked player (Kebab) while both players were using Samu Lando-T bootspam teams. After winning the game, leng loi explained in the OLT chat that the reason she decided to load a game then was because Kebab's team was "super weak to NP Ghold". To me this begs the question - how do you consistently win a mirror style matchup (regardless of how good you are), if the adaptations within that style essentially lead to some mons being way more unkillable than everything else in the game. If both players are playing full on Spikes + Boots and one player also has a mon that is pretty close to winning the game on its own, then the natural response for a very good player would be to try and avoid the style altogether (even though it is overall a great style). This is an issue that I've been running into a lot in the builder - I feel like I'm forced to experiment so that I can actually make use of the knowledge gap, but any experimentation may just lead to using something outright worse in the meta because the parameters of what actually works are so limited. Although I don't think that this situation is close to egregious enough to warrant tiering action, this type of thing lowers my opinion of the generation a lot - having one of the most reliable styles also be one of the most clicky is never an ideal situation imo, and this gets even worse if there's a very limited pool of reliable styles in the first place.

Like I said at the start of this post, this was originally planned to be a much longer post airing my issues with more of the top mons in the meta, but I decided to hold off on that and focus on these two instead as they've been responsible for a lot of my issues in practice. Obviously, I don't expect anything to happen before the DLC, but I thought it was worth talking about this for a bit as it may be a useful retrospective if we run into similar issues in the future. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get a chance to talk about the other asshole mons in this metagame and the potential consequences of removing them, but for now I'll leave it here. Thanks for reading if you did get this far lol, writing is not my forte.

 

[658Greninja]

4 - I think it's on the edge of being broken. Format changings are good to test it, however, I think it's got broken aspects, but ita worth the test.

252+ Atk Choice Band Tera Water Palafin-Hero Wave Crash vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Toxapex: 135-159 (44.4 - 52.3%) -- 78.5% chance to 2HKO after Stealth Rock and Leftovers recovery

Hell no

 

[RoyalDispenser]

- 5, never should've been QB'd and had a fair chance of surviving a suspect test anyways. Volc has solutions for it, and the versatility was mainly due to the fact there are so many solutions that it needs to shift between them so frequently. Volc when it was banned wasn't in the home meta very long where it was infact being forced to run ground/water more often than its other teras due to heatran and rather than seeing that as a negative for it, they banned it as a 'oh I guess this can't check it either now' sentiment.

Now that the dust has settled, there's far more reason to believe it would be a healthier addition given that kingambit survived a test (and thus you can't say broken checking broken), and volc helped manage it and iron valiant.. and likely zamazenta now too. There was a necessary evil to volcarona if you considered it problematic. Anyone claiming its a quiver dance 1 turn then 6-0 speaks more about themselves and how they team build than what realistically happened with volc.

- 2; truthfully I felt it was a 1 but since it was banned alongside volc in a forced vote influenced by WCOP it should also get the right to at least be talked about. Its easier to agree with that QB but that entire vote was scuffed as fuck given the timing and incentive, but I'm sure it would've been banned anyways.

- 1; nope.

- 2 (tbh i can't remember if I voted 1 or 2 on this..); I think its overrated, but not enough to be OU. DLC2 I'd like to see it after some tier changes and more pokemon to pressure it, but DLC1 I don't think its ready yet. You can give me all the calcs about how its dracovishv2 but it ain't like wallbreakers don't exist right now, just some might do it slower.

____

Unrelated but;

- I really hope this thing gets toxic in the DLC, its already got good matchup vs. steels, the ability to spread toxic more reliably would be so good for its viability against would be harder matchups.

 

[ant4456]

(and thus you can't say broken checking broken)

Yes you can. In fact, you can say that Kingambit is in fact statistically broken, from the fact that a majority of 55% of the qualified playerbase voted it was broken.

where it was infact being forced to run ground/water more often than its other teras due to heatran

Fun fact, Heatran isn't even that good right now. Most people don't want to run it because it doesn't do much, so if anything, this is more evidence that Volcarona would just add another pressure in the teambuilder. Now your idea is just run Heatran which also loses to Tera anyways? But Heatran isn't even that good to begin with this Gen?

volc helped manage it and iron valiant.. and likely zamazenta now too.

frankly, these two Pokemon are not even that major of problems to check, especially Zamazenta. Iron Valiant is super powerful, but Glowking forces a worse set that loses to most other Pokemon for Iron Valiant to break it, or mixed which also only somewhat gets past Glowking sometimes. Glowking also checks Zamazenta very well, pivots, and doesn't click Quiver Dance and start a sweep.

Similarly, Moltres also exists as a Flame Body check.

Anyone claiming its a quiver dance 1 turn then 6-0

considering frosmoth is able to do this in gen 9 in tournament, tone down the volcarona "skill issue" argument. also, considering the council voted ban and most people in surveys said volcarona was problematic in qualified playerbases, that kind of says that you are underrating it haha

 

[RoiDadadou]

A POST ABOUT SPIKES (KINDA) ​

(Quick disclaimer: I originally planned for a much longer post with more issues mentioned, but I'm not gonna have the will to finish that post so I've shortened it to a post about two mons. If there's any sentence that's completely out of place in the text, it was probably something from the old post that I didn't catch in the edit, sorry in advance if that happens)

With the Home meta coming to a close in a few days, I wanted to talk about a topic that has been bothering me for a while with this metagame - the addition of two uniquely strong Spikers. It's no secret that removal is a tough task in this metagame especially with the lack of options, but instead of focusing on Spikes itself as a move (one that will probably never face any sort of tiering action), I felt it was better to talk about why these two mons are so different to the rest of the pack.

Ting-Lu

To help me get started on why I've singled out Ting-Lu here, I'd like to focus on something Finch said in the Tera thread:

"I find Ting Lu stack management to be an interesting feature of the metagame and it makes finding openings and generating momentum to force switches an important skill akin to BW spikes patterns. I don’t think any of that is an imminent issue." - Finch, 2023

In short, I disagree with this statement in a few ways, but it does remind me of a more optimistic time of building, before the last few rounds of WCOP and OLT. Over the course of the Home meta, I've built a lot of teams that intend to compensate for weak removal options by piling offensive pressure onto setters, Ting-Lu in particular being one of them. After trying this type of strategy a lot, I eventually realised that even with so much focus on adapting to Ting-Lu's defensive profile, I'd still find Ting-Lu to be one of the most likely pokemon I'd struggle with on matchup. Typically what would happen is that you'd reach a point in the builder where you realise that a couple of your mons can either barely touch Ting-Lu AT ALL, or they can only "cripple" it with status, in which time the Lu just went and put up all the hazards for easy value. After that, you'd look to compensate for the weakness in game by giving the Lu less time to operate (i.e. going into something that hits it hard as it sets hazards). This usually creates a catch 22 for the player against Ting-Lu - rushing the strongest breakers in to trade HP with the Ting-Lu can be a risky play long-term, but sitting back and allowing hazards is also a risky play. Often in these situations, the Ting-Lu can both take the hazards and the chip because lol imagine OHKOing a Ting-Lu. On top of this, its practical typing and ridiculous bulk means that chopping half of Lu's HP is nowhere near as punishing as you'd expect it to be - this doesn't open up Zapdos, or Glowking, or Specs Shadow Ball.

Throughout all of these sequences, one thing usually remains true - you have to predict the Ting-Lu several more times than it has to predict anything you're doing. If your opponent wants to take 60 from Valiant because they cant be bothered to figure out a way to switch around it, there's a good chance they haven't even put themselves in the mud by doing so. It's often very difficult to tell whether your low ladder opponent is leaving Ting-Lu in on everything with a plan in mind, or whether they're just doing it because they can - either way, from your side it really does feel like you can't ever predict a Ting-Lu to switch out, unless there's a case where Ting-Lu just can't do anything worthwhile back. I don't think these traits are the mark of a nuanced pokemon - ultimately, having a pokemon that takes somewhere between almost nothing and ~60 percent from the ENTIRE metagame, while being able to make progress itself every time it does get a free turn is already pretty crazy. The fact that most of the 1400s I have come across can emulate the plays needed to do this (because they're easy) is possibly a bad sign.

So, if trying to push through Ting-Lu as quickly as possible isn't the right idea, what do the good players do vs Ting-Lu nowadays? The simple answer is to never have a below average matchup against Spikes. Out of the teams commonly brought on OLT high ladder in the last few weeks (teams brought by multiple OLT players), we have:

Samu Lando Bootspams (BOOTS)
Stall (6 Boots)
Various Nat balances (all of these have plenty of Boots and Levitators)
Vert Sun (Sun is the only weather/"cheese" playstyle that can carry two Spinners, one of which is a Speed Boosting Tusk)

Notably, pretty much any other type of offense (like the anti-Court Change HO, Shocks Wake HO etc) started to suffer the longer OLT went on. This isn't only down to the Ting-Lu matchup, but the amount of HO win conditions that just dont get past basic fat + speed control cores is getting really high. Between Ting-Lu/Dozo/Birds/Gking and then the priority users like Gambit/Dnite, you can have such a high portion of "top" threats in the meta hard-walled, with a lot of the frailer options being pretty unviable due to how strong prio is. The only mons that seem to escape this decently are the brokens (Val/Bax/Gambit/Ghold) and some slow, frail mons that you'd never want to use over the brokens. I think that this is partially why a lot of offense players are resistant to the idea of banning the top tier offensive mons - they recognize from their own building that there's just not a whole lot out there that can dent the current crop of fat mons. Again, this isn't exclusively a Lu issue, BUT if we ever do get to the point where we start tackling the broken offensive mons and looking at the fat cores, Ting-Lu should probably be first on the chopping block, since it's not a truly passive mon like Dondozo and its Spikes have a major impact on teambuilding across the board.

I've focused a lot on the meta implications of Ting-Lu's ridiculous bulk so far, but really everything in the above paragraphs is meant to convey one thing - the best competitive strategies require you to assume you're dealing with multiple layers of Spikes every single time you build in this meta. Now, I'd like to quickly talk about the ways people try to deal with hazards in this metagame:

Cinderace can use Court Change to deter excessive hazard setting, but it doesn't directly come in on Ting-Lu so there's often progress to be made in getting up one (1) hazard, or simply using Ting-Lu's attacks to force certain plays. Also, Cinderace basically always needs a Tusk to accompany it for removal, otherwise 6 boots super fats or 6 boots stalls will likely try to beat your team by repeatedly setting hazards until they're up on both sides.

Bootspam with a solid Knock absorber allows you to play a lot more calmly vs Ting-Lu since you can afford to waste turns. This is a pretty common metagame approach and well-proven, but these structures don't have that many variants since it's not so easy to cover every threat without much item freedom (things like bulky NP Gholdengo often punish these teams due to the lack of initial power).

Speed booster elephants (Tusk/Treads) can be used on offensive styles as a way to execute the "punish the Spiker, spin in the middlegame and win" plan. Again, these cant fit on every type of team, but there are some good team options in this style. Vert sun also fits under this category since the Tusk is speed boosting.

Hatterene is a somewhat risky and low usage option that can help with Spikes matchups. However, Hat becomes pretty awkward to use if it ever comes in on a Ting-Lu Ruination (it needs its hp), can be punished by more offensive variants of Ting-Lu (Heavy Slam), and doesn't block Samurott's hazards or Cinderace's Court Change (unless you want to play hazardless which is always risky imo). All of these factors point to Hatterene ideally being used with an actual hazard remover.

Defensive Tusk as sole hazard removal is something I see a lot in ladder and tours, and I don't think it is favoured whatsoever when interacting with Spikes teams. Once you identify that Tusk is the only hazard removal and that there isnt a large portion of Boots mons on the team, the Tusk becomes easy pickings in a few different ways. The simplest of these methods is to just Tera Ghost your Lu or Gholdengo, but it's worth explaining that defensive Tusk just doesn't interact with the Ghost types well enough to win the hazard interactions more than like 20 percent of the time. Something I've considered to be a staple on every variant of Gholdengo is having at least 88 hp EVs (or 60 def EVs) as this ensures you always live an EQ from defensive Tusk. This means def Tusk always needs to predict the Gholdengo at least twice, even in a best case scenario where I just choose to throw it out. Typically it's very hard for Tusk to get three switchins vs a Spikes teams, since it doesn't switch directly in on a lot of threats that Spikes teams carry, and often will have to interact with a Ting-Lu Ruination first before even getting into any of the 50/50s. Speedy Tusk can solve some of these issues, but it's still pretty poor in these situations when you factor in the fact that it usually needs to correctly predict two turns to get to a point where it can spin the NEXT TIME it comes in - and of course it still loses to Tera Ghost as well.


In summary,
Cinderace and Hatterene (especially Cind) want to be paired with Tusk, which is a pretty large team commitment.
The most splashable Tusk set is a terrible solo remover.

The result of this is a deceptively small pool of teams that can handle Spikes in the current metagame, which forces me to question whether Ting-Lu stack is a healthy style for the meta in the long run. Obviously, much of this will depend on what our DLC options look like in terms of hazard immunities and hazard removal, but the current situation is very not good imo, speaking as someone who brought Spikes to 13 consecutive competitive matches in this tier (and about 70 percent of my comp matches total).

Samurott-Hisui

Hrott forms the other half of my issues with Spikes in the current metagame. Samu's Ceaseless Edge feels a lot harder to deal with your average offensive Spiker due to a few interactions, including:

- Being able to fit with extra coverage or utility options that can dramatically improve its usefulness outside of Spikes
- Bypassing Hatterene
- Creating free chances to get up Spikes vs mons like Gking
- Forcing defensive mons to Recover, buying you more time to get up multiple layers

Samurott is also just super well-positioned to threaten the entire meta, with its water STAB hitting almost every common mon that wants to come in on Ceaseless Edge (barring Zapdos). In particular, going into mons like defensive Lando or Tusk can swing between being the best option on the field if your opponent clicks Ceaseless, to one of the worst options on the field if they SD instead. This type of uncertainty heavily encourages players to deal with Spikes from a full scale teambuilding perspective, rather than a playing perspective (similar to Ting-Lu).

Another aspect of Samu-H that I find pretty annoying to deal with is the types of teams it is commonly used on. Samu-H glues together the common style of Boots spam + Helmet Lando-T, providing it an easy catch all progress-maker that can run Boots easily. These teams can usually get away with having a lot of walls to common threats (Zapdos Gking cores etc) and even failsafe options like Fairy Gambit, and as such they are some of the easiest teams to pilot "decently" at a high level. Due to the limitations placed on the metagame with poor removal options, it's pretty hard to find a way to consistently skill gap weaker players using these teams. Usually, the nature of the metagame will force you to engage the Boots spam teams with a largely similar style, and in many cases where the style matchup is so symmetrical, small mon changes can make a huge difference. For example, there was a point in OLT Cycle 4 where the top ranked player at the time (leng loi) sniped the second ranked player (Kebab) while both players were using Samu Lando-T bootspam teams. After winning the game, leng loi explained in the OLT chat that the reason she decided to load a game then was because Kebab's team was "super weak to NP Ghold". To me this begs the question - how do you consistently win a mirror style matchup (regardless of how good you are), if the adaptations within that style essentially lead to some mons being way more unkillable than everything else in the game. If both players are playing full on Spikes + Boots and one player also has a mon that is pretty close to winning the game on its own, then the natural response for a very good player would be to try and avoid the style altogether (even though it is overall a great style). This is an issue that I've been running into a lot in the builder - I feel like I'm forced to experiment so that I can actually make use of the knowledge gap, but any experimentation may just lead to using something outright worse in the meta because the parameters of what actually works are so limited. Although I don't think that this situation is close to egregious enough to warrant tiering action, this type of thing lowers my opinion of the generation a lot - having one of the most reliable styles also be one of the most clicky is never an ideal situation imo, and this gets even worse if there's a very limited pool of reliable styles in the first place.

Like I said at the start of this post, this was originally planned to be a much longer post airing my issues with more of the top mons in the meta, but I decided to hold off on that and focus on these two instead as they've been responsible for a lot of my issues in practice. Obviously, I don't expect anything to happen before the DLC, but I thought it was worth talking about this for a bit as it may be a useful retrospective if we run into similar issues in the future. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get a chance to talk about the other asshole mons in this metagame and the potential consequences of removing them, but for now I'll leave it here. Thanks for reading if you did get this far lol, writing is not my forte.

A very great post. I've been discussing this with my friend Herv a lot, as we both think this is one of the key aspect which can make the metagame unpleasant to some degree. The complete nothingness that is the Defog-pool of Pokémon also plays a big role in this regard, but we believe those two make the issue severly worse.

 

[Just A Shroom God]

I'm curious why it seems the common sentiment is that is more busted than . On paper, they perform similar roles: water types that set up and then blow past teams. They have similar bulk and speed, and both use Taunt to stifle defensive counterplay. However, Palafin has a few significant advantages over Shifu. It's more powerful offensively from the base, and although after a setup Palafin is a bit weaker, it's not a huge difference and Palafin's priority is still stronger anyway. Bulk Up also means that Palafin is much less prone to revenge killing, as things like ESpeed from Dragonite just bounces off even at just +1, and its higher SpDef means that it can take faster special threats like Specs Pult or Valiant (+1 Jet Punch doesn't kill lmao) much more easily. Both abilities are essentially a non-factor, slightly favored towards Shifu but really not an argument. Palafin can even run Grass Knot (off of a surprisingly respectable base 106 SpA stat) or Zen Headbutt to get past Brozo and Big Stall™ respectively, neither of which Urshifu can break through at all (even with a boosting item). Urshifu's only advantage is its lack of a drawback on its most powerful STAB, which can be negated on Palafin with Drain Punch or even just Leftovers, and its faster setup, which does not matter AT ALL for what is really going to be stopping these two, water-type walls and faster revenge killers. Palafin even has more set diversity- it can run a pretty good Choice Band set in rain with Wave Crash, Flip Turn, CC, and Jet Punch. Overall, I just cannot see why you would use Shifu over Palafin in any capacity.

A POST ABOUT SPIKES (KINDA)


(Quick disclaimer: I originally planned for a much longer post with more issues mentioned, but I'm not gonna have the will to finish that post so I've shortened it to a post about two mons. If there's any sentence that's completely out of place in the text, it was probably something from the old post that I didn't catch in the edit, sorry in advance if that happens)

With the Home meta coming to a close in a few days, I wanted to talk about a topic that has been bothering me for a while with this metagame - the addition of two uniquely strong Spikers. It's no secret that removal is a tough task in this metagame especially with the lack of options, but instead of focusing on Spikes itself as a move (one that will probably never face any sort of tiering action), I felt it was better to talk about why these two mons are so different to the rest of the pack.

Ting-Lu

To help me get started on why I've singled out Ting-Lu here, I'd like to focus on something Finch said in the Tera thread:

"I find Ting Lu stack management to be an interesting feature of the metagame and it makes finding openings and generating momentum to force switches an important skill akin to BW spikes patterns. I don’t think any of that is an imminent issue." - Finch, 2023

In short, I disagree with this statement in a few ways, but it does remind me of a more optimistic time of building, before the last few rounds of WCOP and OLT. Over the course of the Home meta, I've built a lot of teams that intend to compensate for weak removal options by piling offensive pressure onto setters, Ting-Lu in particular being one of them. After trying this type of strategy a lot, I eventually realised that even with so much focus on adapting to Ting-Lu's defensive profile, I'd still find Ting-Lu to be one of the most likely pokemon I'd struggle with on matchup. Typically what would happen is that you'd reach a point in the builder where you realise that a couple of your mons can either barely touch Ting-Lu AT ALL, or they can only "cripple" it with status, in which time the Lu just went and put up all the hazards for easy value. After that, you'd look to compensate for the weakness in game by giving the Lu less time to operate (i.e. going into something that hits it hard as it sets hazards). This usually creates a catch 22 for the player against Ting-Lu - rushing the strongest breakers in to trade HP with the Ting-Lu can be a risky play long-term, but sitting back and allowing hazards is also a risky play. Often in these situations, the Ting-Lu can both take the hazards and the chip because lol imagine OHKOing a Ting-Lu. On top of this, its practical typing and ridiculous bulk means that chopping half of Lu's HP is nowhere near as punishing as you'd expect it to be - this doesn't open up Zapdos, or Glowking, or Specs Shadow Ball.

Throughout all of these sequences, one thing usually remains true - you have to predict the Ting-Lu several more times than it has to predict anything you're doing. If your opponent wants to take 60 from Valiant because they cant be bothered to figure out a way to switch around it, there's a good chance they haven't even put themselves in the mud by doing so. It's often very difficult to tell whether your low ladder opponent is leaving Ting-Lu in on everything with a plan in mind, or whether they're just doing it because they can - either way, from your side it really does feel like you can't ever predict a Ting-Lu to switch out, unless there's a case where Ting-Lu just can't do anything worthwhile back. I don't think these traits are the mark of a nuanced pokemon - ultimately, having a pokemon that takes somewhere between almost nothing and ~60 percent from the ENTIRE metagame, while being able to make progress itself every time it does get a free turn is already pretty crazy. The fact that most of the 1400s I have come across can emulate the plays needed to do this (because they're easy) is possibly a bad sign.

So, if trying to push through Ting-Lu as quickly as possible isn't the right idea, what do the good players do vs Ting-Lu nowadays? The simple answer is to never have a below average matchup against Spikes. Out of the teams commonly brought on OLT high ladder in the last few weeks (teams brought by multiple OLT players), we have:

Samu Lando Bootspams (BOOTS)
Stall (6 Boots)
Various Nat balances (all of these have plenty of Boots and Levitators)
Vert Sun (Sun is the only weather/"cheese" playstyle that can carry two Spinners, one of which is a Speed Boosting Tusk)

Notably, pretty much any other type of offense (like the anti-Court Change HO, Shocks Wake HO etc) started to suffer the longer OLT went on. This isn't only down to the Ting-Lu matchup, but the amount of HO win conditions that just dont get past basic fat + speed control cores is getting really high. Between Ting-Lu/Dozo/Birds/Gking and then the priority users like Gambit/Dnite, you can have such a high portion of "top" threats in the meta hard-walled, with a lot of the frailer options being pretty unviable due to how strong prio is. The only mons that seem to escape this decently are the brokens (Val/Bax/Gambit/Ghold) and some slow, frail mons that you'd never want to use over the brokens. I think that this is partially why a lot of offense players are resistant to the idea of banning the top tier offensive mons - they recognize from their own building that there's just not a whole lot out there that can dent the current crop of fat mons. Again, this isn't exclusively a Lu issue, BUT if we ever do get to the point where we start tackling the broken offensive mons and looking at the fat cores, Ting-Lu should probably be first on the chopping block, since it's not a truly passive mon like Dondozo and its Spikes have a major impact on teambuilding across the board.

I've focused a lot on the meta implications of Ting-Lu's ridiculous bulk so far, but really everything in the above paragraphs is meant to convey one thing - the best competitive strategies require you to assume you're dealing with multiple layers of Spikes every single time you build in this meta. Now, I'd like to quickly talk about the ways people try to deal with hazards in this metagame:

Cinderace can use Court Change to deter excessive hazard setting, but it doesn't directly come in on Ting-Lu so there's often progress to be made in getting up one (1) hazard, or simply using Ting-Lu's attacks to force certain plays. Also, Cinderace basically always needs a Tusk to accompany it for removal, otherwise 6 boots super fats or 6 boots stalls will likely try to beat your team by repeatedly setting hazards until they're up on both sides.

Bootspam with a solid Knock absorber allows you to play a lot more calmly vs Ting-Lu since you can afford to waste turns. This is a pretty common metagame approach and well-proven, but these structures don't have that many variants since it's not so easy to cover every threat without much item freedom (things like bulky NP Gholdengo often punish these teams due to the lack of initial power).

Speed booster elephants (Tusk/Treads) can be used on offensive styles as a way to execute the "punish the Spiker, spin in the middlegame and win" plan. Again, these cant fit on every type of team, but there are some good team options in this style. Vert sun also fits under this category since the Tusk is speed boosting.

Hatterene is a somewhat risky and low usage option that can help with Spikes matchups. However, Hat becomes pretty awkward to use if it ever comes in on a Ting-Lu Ruination (it needs its hp), can be punished by more offensive variants of Ting-Lu (Heavy Slam), and doesn't block Samurott's hazards or Cinderace's Court Change (unless you want to play hazardless which is always risky imo). All of these factors point to Hatterene ideally being used with an actual hazard remover.

Defensive Tusk as sole hazard removal is something I see a lot in ladder and tours, and I don't think it is favoured whatsoever when interacting with Spikes teams. Once you identify that Tusk is the only hazard removal and that there isnt a large portion of Boots mons on the team, the Tusk becomes easy pickings in a few different ways. The simplest of these methods is to just Tera Ghost your Lu or Gholdengo, but it's worth explaining that defensive Tusk just doesn't interact with the Ghost types well enough to win the hazard interactions more than like 20 percent of the time. Something I've considered to be a staple on every variant of Gholdengo is having at least 88 hp EVs (or 60 def EVs) as this ensures you always live an EQ from defensive Tusk. This means def Tusk always needs to predict the Gholdengo at least twice, even in a best case scenario where I just choose to throw it out. Typically it's very hard for Tusk to get three switchins vs a Spikes teams, since it doesn't switch directly in on a lot of threats that Spikes teams carry, and often will have to interact with a Ting-Lu Ruination first before even getting into any of the 50/50s. Speedy Tusk can solve some of these issues, but it's still pretty poor in these situations when you factor in the fact that it usually needs to correctly predict two turns to get to a point where it can spin the NEXT TIME it comes in - and of course it still loses to Tera Ghost as well.


In summary,
Cinderace and Hatterene (especially Cind) want to be paired with Tusk, which is a pretty large team commitment.
The most splashable Tusk set is a terrible solo remover.

The result of this is a deceptively small pool of teams that can handle Spikes in the current metagame, which forces me to question whether Ting-Lu stack is a healthy style for the meta in the long run. Obviously, much of this will depend on what our DLC options look like in terms of hazard immunities and hazard removal, but the current situation is very not good imo, speaking as someone who brought Spikes to 13 consecutive competitive matches in this tier (and about 70 percent of my comp matches total).

Samurott-Hisui

Hrott forms the other half of my issues with Spikes in the current metagame. Samu's Ceaseless Edge feels a lot harder to deal with your average offensive Spiker due to a few interactions, including:

- Being able to fit with extra coverage or utility options that can dramatically improve its usefulness outside of Spikes
- Bypassing Hatterene
- Creating free chances to get up Spikes vs mons like Gking
- Forcing defensive mons to Recover, buying you more time to get up multiple layers

Samurott is also just super well-positioned to threaten the entire meta, with its water STAB hitting almost every common mon that wants to come in on Ceaseless Edge (barring Zapdos). In particular, going into mons like defensive Lando or Tusk can swing between being the best option on the field if your opponent clicks Ceaseless, to one of the worst options on the field if they SD instead. This type of uncertainty heavily encourages players to deal with Spikes from a full scale teambuilding perspective, rather than a playing perspective (similar to Ting-Lu).

Another aspect of Samu-H that I find pretty annoying to deal with is the types of teams it is commonly used on. Samu-H glues together the common style of Boots spam + Helmet Lando-T, providing it an easy catch all progress-maker that can run Boots easily. These teams can usually get away with having a lot of walls to common threats (Zapdos Gking cores etc) and even failsafe options like Fairy Gambit, and as such they are some of the easiest teams to pilot "decently" at a high level. Due to the limitations placed on the metagame with poor removal options, it's pretty hard to find a way to consistently skill gap weaker players using these teams. Usually, the nature of the metagame will force you to engage the Boots spam teams with a largely similar style, and in many cases where the style matchup is so symmetrical, small mon changes can make a huge difference. For example, there was a point in OLT Cycle 4 where the top ranked player at the time (leng loi) sniped the second ranked player (Kebab) while both players were using Samu Lando-T bootspam teams. After winning the game, leng loi explained in the OLT chat that the reason she decided to load a game then was because Kebab's team was "super weak to NP Ghold". To me this begs the question - how do you consistently win a mirror style matchup (regardless of how good you are), if the adaptations within that style essentially lead to some mons being way more unkillable than everything else in the game. If both players are playing full on Spikes + Boots and one player also has a mon that is pretty close to winning the game on its own, then the natural response for a very good player would be to try and avoid the style altogether (even though it is overall a great style). This is an issue that I've been running into a lot in the builder - I feel like I'm forced to experiment so that I can actually make use of the knowledge gap, but any experimentation may just lead to using something outright worse in the meta because the parameters of what actually works are so limited. Although I don't think that this situation is close to egregious enough to warrant tiering action, this type of thing lowers my opinion of the generation a lot - having one of the most reliable styles also be one of the most clicky is never an ideal situation imo, and this gets even worse if there's a very limited pool of reliable styles in the first place.

Like I said at the start of this post, this was originally planned to be a much longer post airing my issues with more of the top mons in the meta, but I decided to hold off on that and focus on these two instead as they've been responsible for a lot of my issues in practice. Obviously, I don't expect anything to happen before the DLC, but I thought it was worth talking about this for a bit as it may be a useful retrospective if we run into similar issues in the future. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get a chance to talk about the other asshole mons in this metagame and the potential consequences of removing them, but for now I'll leave it here. Thanks for reading if you did get this far lol, writing is not my forte.

also, very true

 

[Rootb]

I'm curious why it seems the common sentiment is that is more busted than .
<snip>
Overall, I just cannot see why you would use Shifu over Palafin in any capacity.

The big one is that, despite appearances, having to switch to enable Hero Form is actually a significant cost. Yeah, the form is busted, and it's totally worth using a turn to turn it on, but Urshifu doesn't need that turn. You can send it out from the back, and click Surging Strikes, and that's going to come off of the full 130 base attack, compared to regular Palafin's less-than-stellar 70.

This applies double to its fighting STAB, which even a full-strength Palafin can't really compare to.

I think they're both very stupid designs, for different reasons, but Urshifu in the back is an absolute menace, while an zero-form Palafin in the back is.. not.

 

[Froctopus]

But that’s not what I’m saying. Are you actually cherry-picking those two words or are you that incompetent that you can take a post that’s about “Here’s a time I got called out by something, doesn’t mean it’s good but it’s kind of funny” and make it “Irrelevant calc, bad theorymon.”
on a more fun note: I might write up something quick on DuskRoc later. That mon is horrifically strong with Tera Fighting Close Combat, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it.

He actually that incompetent. I’m here for the Napoli downfall

 

[Pando067]

He actually that incompetent. I’m here for the Napoli downfall

lmao, that happened so long ago.

 

[LoseToRU?]

What's the point of a re-suspect? if something outrageously busted like Kingambit didn't get ban, there's no way Volcarona would leave OU. Volcarona is unwallable with Tera Blast and snowballs teams quite easy as Quiver Dance is the stupidest move in a Tera meta, it's presence will only increase the usage of busted checks like Bax and the busted-checks-busted ordeal.
This meta needs less power creep instead of reintroducing more of it.

Exactly dude. I've said for months now that the only way to have Tera and a competitive meta is to bring the meta's power level down to an acceptable baseline. If we as a community decide that Tera is more important than keeping mons then we need to run that logic to its natural conclusion. Things like Gambit, Bax, Val, Enam, Wake, Gold, etc. need to be seriously looked at post DLC2. Let the meta settle like I said, then these mons and more should be the main focus, not dropping Ubers.
If a mon is so strong that 1 turn of Tera can let it set up and sweep teams, and we aren't banning tera, then the mon needs to go. If a mon has so little checks/counters that once it Tera's past those checks/counters and can then win from there- then again we need to either ban the mechanic or the mon.
Roughly speaking, Tera can make a mon go from B+ to A-, or even A+. So what it does to mons that are already A and S tier is a major pain on the meta. We either keep Tera or ban enough mons to make the baseline power level acceptable for a competitive meta. Not saying do this tomorrow, but once all DLC is out the next step is making a stable meta we can come back to years from now.
As much fun as some of these new powerhouse mons like Val, Gambit, Bax, Gold, etc. are I wouldn't be mad if OU's power level got brought down one big ass notch. I don't really care if Gliscor or Sandy Shocks teras and snatches a KO or whatever, I don't insta lose like I would with Bax or Gambit. Just something to think about; but we have several months to think about what we actually want out of this meta, and what our priorities are.

 

[ant4456]

Maybe we wouldn't be calling to ban so many high tiers in the metagame if we started as a reasonable level to begin with.

 

[DaddyBuzzwole]

Any Arceus form is going to be far too difficult to handle in OU. Its bulk is one thing, but this gen especially, Arceus having access to Tera and Taunt as well as several set up options mean that it'll always be in Ubers.

On the flip side, I thought outside of the box and found our savior who will save us from Kingambit and Baxcalibur:

Only 1 week until DLC comes out, so let's have fun and not get too carried away. As ausma previously said, theorymonning is fine, but if you wish to discuss leaks or potential leaks, then visit this thread in the Orange Islands forum. If you're looking for something to discuss then here's some ideas:

1. What new mons are you looking forward to seeing the most?
2. What new mons are you not looking forward to seeing?
3. How do you feel about the current survey and if you would like to share your response, then how do you feel about those Ubers returning to OU?
4. Are there any other Ubers you believe could have a chance at returning to OU that were not listed in the survey?
5. Are there any mons currently in OU that you believe will get even stronger with DLC?
6. Are there any mons currently in OU that you believe will get weaker or less viable with DLC?
7. Today is September 7th, so I'm ending this on question #7 and will ask, are you are having a nice day?

Either way, I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day and cheers to making it this far in Gen 9.

1. in terms of the new new mons, i'm excited to see what the loyal three can do even though i think their presence will tip the meta even further towards offense. for returning mons, i'm incredibly hyped to see one of my favorite pokemon, snorlax, coming back. i'm also glad to see clefable and gliscor returning, primarily for balance reasons
2. the thing i dread most hasn't officially been revealed yet, but i'm also scared of whatever ogerpon's new tera mechanic is. for returning mons, i am absolutely terrified of the havoc that the two forms of ninetales will wreak with their weather setting, especially with the massive buff to hail snow and the continued existence of baxcalibur
3. i've already made my feelings on this known; i'm not a fan of dropping ubers while the meta is in a state of flux. retesting each one individually once things have settled will prevent this from becoming a repeat of crown tundra, a meta so chaotic that the entire c&c team completely abandoned it
4. i don't believe any ubers deserve to have a chance at dropping, but i have a gut feeling that chien-pao will be the "how many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man" mon of this generation
5. defensive and balance teams in general are really going to benefit from magic guard clef being able to shrug off hazards and salt cure. also, these mons aren't actually in ou but if—if—chansey and blissey do end up getting toxic back, then one of them will be
6. i expect tera fairy dirge (fuck you, it's still ou to me) and dozo stocks to fall somewhat now that there's a natural fairy with access to unaware in town, but the mons themselves will remain relevant, just running tera fairy less frequently. i also think that lando-t is likely to lose usage to gliscor, but how much usage depends on whether gliscor keeps roost or knock off or defog, or gets spikes, or whatever the fuck they do to movepools these days. if gliscor ends up getting the entirety of the defog/roost/knock suite, it's gonna be one of the most splashable mons in the tier and lando might genuinely be done
7. my day's been all right, i was in a car accident this morning but the car wasn't mine so it balances out

 

[Pando067]

defensive and balance teams in general are really going to benefit from magic guard clef being able to shrug off hazards and salt cure. also, these mons aren't actually in ou but if—if—chansey and blissey do end up getting toxic back, then one of them will be

According to this short from aim, chansey is getting toxic again, but I'm not really sure. Also rillaboom get's glide again.