This a teambuilding guide brought to you by G Wiz, Gingy, Orda, Yuttt, AJ and a thanks to DICE for his ho guide although he doesnt know he had anything to do with this. This is just a basic guide and I would follow it too much but it is a great guide to get your feet in the doors an get a grasp on team building. If you have any questions regarding this guide just pm G Wiz, Gingy12345678, or Orda-y. I already spoke to Gary2346 about posting it but if anyone has any problems let me know and I'll take it down.
Also If anyone could help me upload pokemon sprites to this post I would be so grateful, I'm rather new to posting on here :)
Playstyles
Balanced
A ballanced playstyle is generally a team that is a mixture of defensive and offensive mons not neccesarily 3 of each can have a defensive pairing, often uses cores too.
Hyper offense
A playstyle focused on pure attacking power often includes a variety of sweepers and usually uses a suicide lead and rapid spinner but not always.
Volt - turn
A Playstyle that focuses purely around the moves volt switch and u-turn, it uses these moves to gain safe switches into your sweepers etc whilst dealing decent damage in the process.
Bulky offense
Similar to balanced although the mons used tend to be slower bulky mons capable of dishing out large damage every time they come in and focuses more on overall synergy instead of defensive and offensive cores.
Stall
A playstyle that focuses on defensive mons used to counter most of the metagame and its main form of dealing damage is hazzards, phazing, residue damage, and status.
Semi Stall
A playstyle that is a mixture of offense and stall, tends to include dual cores, or it can be full stall with one or 2 setup sweepers. ( One offensive, and one defensive)
Important Points
Synergy - Synergy is pretty much the overall typing of your team, having as few weaknesses as possible and mons that assist each other extremely well. Good synergy is mons that resist each others weaknesses deals with each others threats.
Cores - A group of 3 + Mons that have extremely good synergy, defensively or offensivley. An example of a good core is the infamous Heatran, Amoongus, Slowbro core. The good synergy here is the typing, as the Fire, Water, Grass typing of the core lets a member of the core come in on most of another members weaknesses. An example of a good offensive core is one I thought of myself which is Lucario, gyarados, and garchomp the points remain the same here about resistances its just that the mons used have more of an offensive pressence.
Pair - 2 mons that have good synergy together. A good pair with excellent synergy is Mega gyarados and Tflame, the synergy here is that tflame checks all of mega gyarados's threats and most of tflames counters mega gyarados can set up on.
Suicide leads - A mon that is generally used on the hyper offense playstyle. The mons role is purely to set up hazzards or screens. They are often paired with a defiant user to make defoggers think twice about defogging.
Cleric - A mon commonly used in balanced, stall or semi stall. This mons role is to stop your team gettign worn down by status by using moves such as heal bell, and armotherapy. This generally isn't there only role but is there main one.
Wall - A mon used commonly in balanced, stallm or semi stall. This mon is used defensivley to stop alot of attackers in there tracks by wearing them down with status or consistent damage from seismic toss etc. The usually have some way of self healing too to make them stick around longer. The most common walls used are skarmory and chansey.
Tanks - A mon that can take heavy damage whilst dishing out heavy damage, commonly used on bulky offense and hyper offense. A perfect example of a tank is Landorus Therian, this mon has great bulk and great attacking stats and intimidate so it can take most physical attacks in the game whilst dishing out a pretty powerful attack in return.
Sweepers - There are 2 types of sweepers, a setup sweeper and a sweeper that doesnt need to setup. Setup sweepers usually use a move like dragon dance to gain a higher attack and speed stat and they will require less help generally to sweep than a sweeper that doesnt set up. An example of a setup sweeper is Charizard mega x, this mon tends to come in on a resisted attack after its very few threats are taken care off or are weakened. An example of a non setup sweeper if Greninja, non set up sweepers tend to have more threats and are faster and generally hit harder off the bat than setup ones, although they tend to be extremely frail so can't come in as often as setup ones.
Pivot - A bulky mon that can switch into a few mons and force them out and use the moves volt switch or u-turn to gain momentum. Commonly used on bulky offense or volt-turn playstyles.
Lures - A lure is a mon that is designed to check something that would be it's counter. An example of a lure is headsmash aegislash, since mandibuzz is a well known counter to aegislash most people would switch a mandi into an aegi without a second thought. So aegislash uses head smash to ko the mandibuzz in order to clear the way for a setup sweeper like charizard x.
Revenge Killer - A mon that is usually scarfed or has some form of priority and can come in after an ally has been ko'd and proceed to ko the opposing mon in return.
Important points for building
Knowing the meta - This point is all about experience, and is only really obtainable by playing. It is important to know the meta when teambuilding because it makes it easier to identify threats to your team if you have a good grasp on the current meta game. Atm the top threats you NEED to have an answer to when team building are Bisharp, Mega Charizard x and y, Mega Venusaur, Rotom wash, Talonflame and Mega Pinsir.
Testing - Alright lets be honest you're not gonna shit gold every first attempt at building a new team, so because of this testing is probably the most important part of teambuilding. A great way I've found to test is play around 5-10 games with a newly built team, save the replays then review them and write down all your threats you come across and who put the most work in of your team each game and who drags there feet. Then after about ten games or so review your notes and make changes to the team accordingly. I sometimes repeat this process about 4-5 times before coming to a finished version.
Remain calm - If you don't remain calm when testing how are you supposed to truly recognize your threats when in reality you will just be playing trash because you're angry.
Building with an Archtype / Template
A few people like to teambuild using an archtype or a template, personally I have never used this method although gingy has. There are many availible all they require is a quick google search.
An example of an archtype / template is commonly used on charizard y teams, there is 2 more templates further down the guide at the hyper offense section.
1 - Charizard mega Y
2 - Pusuit trapper - to get rid of most of zard y's threats
3 - Stealth Rock setter
4 - Hazzard remover
5 - Water Resist
6 - Pivot
Building Around a sweeper:
Playstyles ideal for: Ballanced, Bulky Offense, Volt-turn
Difficulty level: Easy
An example of a team built with this method: http://pastebin.com/D9iUjf1c
Ok so the main process I go through when building around a sweeper is I choose a sweeper who I want to build around. I then gather together all its common checks and counters and add around 2-3 mons that can counter these threats. After I have about 3-4 mons I start to look at the overall weaknesses of the team and add mons to nulify these weaknesses. You ideally want to include stealth rock, hazzard removal, and some form of priority/revenge killer on every team built around a sweeper.
Building around a core / pair:
Playstyes ideal for: Every playstyle pretty much
Dificulty level: Moderate due to the process of creating a pair / core of the top of your head
An example of a team built with this method: http://pastebin.com/w2budS4Z
Ok so a lot of the aspects of building around a sweeper remain the same here such as identifying your core / pairs weaknesses and nulifying them and including stealth rocks and hazzard removal were possible. But the actual process of building a good core / pair makes this approach a little bit harder.
The best way to build a pair is again pick something that you want to use and pair it up with a mon who when both are together make each others jobs easier. Like say for example mega gyarados, so I got together all its threats and used talonflame to handle them but another good thing about talonflame is that it lures in alot of stuff that mega gyarados can set up on rather easily so they have great synergy as in handling each others threats and talonflame luring out setup fodders for mega gyarados. A really well known defensive pairing is VenuTran this pair focuses on resisting each otheres weaknesses to form great synergy defensivley and is really tough to break.
A core is pretty much the same process an offensive core should be 3+ mons designed to handle as much as each others threats as possible such as Lucario Gyarados and Garchomp. A defensive core is thhe same process except focused more of defense, and example of a good defensive core is Heatran, Amoongus, and Slowbro.
Building Stall:
AJ's rmt with a guide and building process is also linked at the bottom with more details.
Seeing how stall looks to beat (almost) the entire metagame with 6 pokés, every member of a stall team will have to do multiple jobs. Failing to cover even one can often mean an easy 6-0 sweep.
To start off, get a list of all threats in ou. I like to use the list from viability rating as it's somewhat ordered by what you care about most. As a rule of thumb, you can ignore anything below A- or B rank in teambuilding and still be decently prepared for it.
http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...ng-thread-b-and-c-pokemon-discussion.3495992/
Besides countering nearly everything from that list, you also have to fill the following roles:
- heal beller (Chansey, Sylveon, Clefable, Audino, Togekiss, Mew, .. the list loses viability to the right)
- status absorber or immunities (Cansey, Heatran, Megasaur, Aegislash, Skarmory, mega Scizor, ..). Important to relieve pressure from your heal beller
- defoggers (Mew, Latias, Skarmory, mega Scizor, Zapdos, Mandibuzz)
- hazard setters (spikes setters are Skarmory, Chesnaught, Ferrothorn. Not listing sr setters because there are too many)
One of the best ways to quickly reduce the number of threats to your team is building it around a strong defensive core (e.g. megasaur + heatran). Then you add pokémon to cover everything that still beats the team, while also filling the above roles. For example
- some threats to megasaur + heatran are Landorus-i, Charizard-Y, mixed Kyurem-b
- can add chansey, it counters the above while also acting as a status absorber and a heal beller
- now we're especially weak to hazards because both chansey and saur don't have lefties and it is especially easy to force switches against stall
our next step might be to focus on beating opposing hazard setters with our defogger
or to put spikes so our opponent is hurt even more (which is more situational in my opinion, because cores like lando-t + rotom-w don't get hit by them anyway)
- Latias + Skarmory duo beats a lot of rock setters, dual defoggers is a strong anti hazard option
- it's constraining though, so better not add defoggers that redundantly cover threats
Building Hyper Offense:
Ok so hyper offense is probably one of the few playstyles I would ever use a template for to be honest. DICE made a really good guide for building hyper offense the link is at the bottom of he page with other useful teambuilding tools.
1 - Lead
2 - Wallbreaker #1
3 - Wallbreaker #2
4 - Sweeper
5 - Revenge killer / something to stop setup sweepers
6 - Utility ( Hazzard removal that still hits hard such as excadrill and latios)
The same points remain here about synergy albeit it is a lot less important in hyper offense as your main strategy is to pressure the opponent with a barage of powerful attacks but it helps if you have mons that have a little bit of synergy of course.
Building Hyper Offense Weather:
1 - Weather Starter
2 - Wall breaker / Abuser #1
3 - Wall breaker / Abuser #2
4 - Sweeper
5 - Revenge killer / something to stop setup sweepers
6 - Utitlity (Rocks/hazzard removal if you cant fit them somewere else)
Obviously when building weather it is really difficult to get good synergy with it as most of the abusers some abusers are swift swim mons, fire weak mons, or just generally mons who greatly benefit from the 1.5x dmg increase to water attacks.
Building Volt - Turn
Volt turn is best played slow imo, this gives u safe switches to a wall breaker / frail hard hitting mon such as mega medicham. The way to build this is similar the building around a sweeper except you impliment a volt - turn core to assist the mon your building around doing its jobs. An example of a decent volt turn core is the infamous Rotom - wash, Lando T and Scizor core. Each of these mons are bulky enough to take a good few hits and handle alot of the meta game on there own. they provide safe switches to other mons and force alot of switches on there own.
Usefull links:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/stall-terrible-triremes.3501651/ - AJs rmt with a stall building guide and process
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/frameworks-and-redundancies-in-ou-teambuilding.3484607/ - DICES guide
http://sweepercalc.com/swc/ - lets you know your teams weaknesses
Also If anyone could help me upload pokemon sprites to this post I would be so grateful, I'm rather new to posting on here :)
Playstyles
Balanced
A ballanced playstyle is generally a team that is a mixture of defensive and offensive mons not neccesarily 3 of each can have a defensive pairing, often uses cores too.
Hyper offense
A playstyle focused on pure attacking power often includes a variety of sweepers and usually uses a suicide lead and rapid spinner but not always.
Volt - turn
A Playstyle that focuses purely around the moves volt switch and u-turn, it uses these moves to gain safe switches into your sweepers etc whilst dealing decent damage in the process.
Bulky offense
Similar to balanced although the mons used tend to be slower bulky mons capable of dishing out large damage every time they come in and focuses more on overall synergy instead of defensive and offensive cores.
Stall
A playstyle that focuses on defensive mons used to counter most of the metagame and its main form of dealing damage is hazzards, phazing, residue damage, and status.
Semi Stall
A playstyle that is a mixture of offense and stall, tends to include dual cores, or it can be full stall with one or 2 setup sweepers. ( One offensive, and one defensive)
Important Points
Synergy - Synergy is pretty much the overall typing of your team, having as few weaknesses as possible and mons that assist each other extremely well. Good synergy is mons that resist each others weaknesses deals with each others threats.
Cores - A group of 3 + Mons that have extremely good synergy, defensively or offensivley. An example of a good core is the infamous Heatran, Amoongus, Slowbro core. The good synergy here is the typing, as the Fire, Water, Grass typing of the core lets a member of the core come in on most of another members weaknesses. An example of a good offensive core is one I thought of myself which is Lucario, gyarados, and garchomp the points remain the same here about resistances its just that the mons used have more of an offensive pressence.
Pair - 2 mons that have good synergy together. A good pair with excellent synergy is Mega gyarados and Tflame, the synergy here is that tflame checks all of mega gyarados's threats and most of tflames counters mega gyarados can set up on.
Suicide leads - A mon that is generally used on the hyper offense playstyle. The mons role is purely to set up hazzards or screens. They are often paired with a defiant user to make defoggers think twice about defogging.
Cleric - A mon commonly used in balanced, stall or semi stall. This mons role is to stop your team gettign worn down by status by using moves such as heal bell, and armotherapy. This generally isn't there only role but is there main one.
Wall - A mon used commonly in balanced, stallm or semi stall. This mon is used defensivley to stop alot of attackers in there tracks by wearing them down with status or consistent damage from seismic toss etc. The usually have some way of self healing too to make them stick around longer. The most common walls used are skarmory and chansey.
Tanks - A mon that can take heavy damage whilst dishing out heavy damage, commonly used on bulky offense and hyper offense. A perfect example of a tank is Landorus Therian, this mon has great bulk and great attacking stats and intimidate so it can take most physical attacks in the game whilst dishing out a pretty powerful attack in return.
Sweepers - There are 2 types of sweepers, a setup sweeper and a sweeper that doesnt need to setup. Setup sweepers usually use a move like dragon dance to gain a higher attack and speed stat and they will require less help generally to sweep than a sweeper that doesnt set up. An example of a setup sweeper is Charizard mega x, this mon tends to come in on a resisted attack after its very few threats are taken care off or are weakened. An example of a non setup sweeper if Greninja, non set up sweepers tend to have more threats and are faster and generally hit harder off the bat than setup ones, although they tend to be extremely frail so can't come in as often as setup ones.
Pivot - A bulky mon that can switch into a few mons and force them out and use the moves volt switch or u-turn to gain momentum. Commonly used on bulky offense or volt-turn playstyles.
Lures - A lure is a mon that is designed to check something that would be it's counter. An example of a lure is headsmash aegislash, since mandibuzz is a well known counter to aegislash most people would switch a mandi into an aegi without a second thought. So aegislash uses head smash to ko the mandibuzz in order to clear the way for a setup sweeper like charizard x.
Revenge Killer - A mon that is usually scarfed or has some form of priority and can come in after an ally has been ko'd and proceed to ko the opposing mon in return.
Important points for building
Knowing the meta - This point is all about experience, and is only really obtainable by playing. It is important to know the meta when teambuilding because it makes it easier to identify threats to your team if you have a good grasp on the current meta game. Atm the top threats you NEED to have an answer to when team building are Bisharp, Mega Charizard x and y, Mega Venusaur, Rotom wash, Talonflame and Mega Pinsir.
Testing - Alright lets be honest you're not gonna shit gold every first attempt at building a new team, so because of this testing is probably the most important part of teambuilding. A great way I've found to test is play around 5-10 games with a newly built team, save the replays then review them and write down all your threats you come across and who put the most work in of your team each game and who drags there feet. Then after about ten games or so review your notes and make changes to the team accordingly. I sometimes repeat this process about 4-5 times before coming to a finished version.
Remain calm - If you don't remain calm when testing how are you supposed to truly recognize your threats when in reality you will just be playing trash because you're angry.
Building with an Archtype / Template
A few people like to teambuild using an archtype or a template, personally I have never used this method although gingy has. There are many availible all they require is a quick google search.
An example of an archtype / template is commonly used on charizard y teams, there is 2 more templates further down the guide at the hyper offense section.
1 - Charizard mega Y
2 - Pusuit trapper - to get rid of most of zard y's threats
3 - Stealth Rock setter
4 - Hazzard remover
5 - Water Resist
6 - Pivot
Building Around a sweeper:
Playstyles ideal for: Ballanced, Bulky Offense, Volt-turn
Difficulty level: Easy
An example of a team built with this method: http://pastebin.com/D9iUjf1c
Ok so the main process I go through when building around a sweeper is I choose a sweeper who I want to build around. I then gather together all its common checks and counters and add around 2-3 mons that can counter these threats. After I have about 3-4 mons I start to look at the overall weaknesses of the team and add mons to nulify these weaknesses. You ideally want to include stealth rock, hazzard removal, and some form of priority/revenge killer on every team built around a sweeper.
Building around a core / pair:
Playstyes ideal for: Every playstyle pretty much
Dificulty level: Moderate due to the process of creating a pair / core of the top of your head
An example of a team built with this method: http://pastebin.com/w2budS4Z
Ok so a lot of the aspects of building around a sweeper remain the same here such as identifying your core / pairs weaknesses and nulifying them and including stealth rocks and hazzard removal were possible. But the actual process of building a good core / pair makes this approach a little bit harder.
The best way to build a pair is again pick something that you want to use and pair it up with a mon who when both are together make each others jobs easier. Like say for example mega gyarados, so I got together all its threats and used talonflame to handle them but another good thing about talonflame is that it lures in alot of stuff that mega gyarados can set up on rather easily so they have great synergy as in handling each others threats and talonflame luring out setup fodders for mega gyarados. A really well known defensive pairing is VenuTran this pair focuses on resisting each otheres weaknesses to form great synergy defensivley and is really tough to break.
A core is pretty much the same process an offensive core should be 3+ mons designed to handle as much as each others threats as possible such as Lucario Gyarados and Garchomp. A defensive core is thhe same process except focused more of defense, and example of a good defensive core is Heatran, Amoongus, and Slowbro.
Building Stall:
AJ's rmt with a guide and building process is also linked at the bottom with more details.
Seeing how stall looks to beat (almost) the entire metagame with 6 pokés, every member of a stall team will have to do multiple jobs. Failing to cover even one can often mean an easy 6-0 sweep.
To start off, get a list of all threats in ou. I like to use the list from viability rating as it's somewhat ordered by what you care about most. As a rule of thumb, you can ignore anything below A- or B rank in teambuilding and still be decently prepared for it.
http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...ng-thread-b-and-c-pokemon-discussion.3495992/
Besides countering nearly everything from that list, you also have to fill the following roles:
- heal beller (Chansey, Sylveon, Clefable, Audino, Togekiss, Mew, .. the list loses viability to the right)
- status absorber or immunities (Cansey, Heatran, Megasaur, Aegislash, Skarmory, mega Scizor, ..). Important to relieve pressure from your heal beller
- defoggers (Mew, Latias, Skarmory, mega Scizor, Zapdos, Mandibuzz)
- hazard setters (spikes setters are Skarmory, Chesnaught, Ferrothorn. Not listing sr setters because there are too many)
One of the best ways to quickly reduce the number of threats to your team is building it around a strong defensive core (e.g. megasaur + heatran). Then you add pokémon to cover everything that still beats the team, while also filling the above roles. For example
- some threats to megasaur + heatran are Landorus-i, Charizard-Y, mixed Kyurem-b
- can add chansey, it counters the above while also acting as a status absorber and a heal beller
- now we're especially weak to hazards because both chansey and saur don't have lefties and it is especially easy to force switches against stall
our next step might be to focus on beating opposing hazard setters with our defogger
or to put spikes so our opponent is hurt even more (which is more situational in my opinion, because cores like lando-t + rotom-w don't get hit by them anyway)
- Latias + Skarmory duo beats a lot of rock setters, dual defoggers is a strong anti hazard option
- it's constraining though, so better not add defoggers that redundantly cover threats
Building Hyper Offense:
Ok so hyper offense is probably one of the few playstyles I would ever use a template for to be honest. DICE made a really good guide for building hyper offense the link is at the bottom of he page with other useful teambuilding tools.
1 - Lead
2 - Wallbreaker #1
3 - Wallbreaker #2
4 - Sweeper
5 - Revenge killer / something to stop setup sweepers
6 - Utility ( Hazzard removal that still hits hard such as excadrill and latios)
The same points remain here about synergy albeit it is a lot less important in hyper offense as your main strategy is to pressure the opponent with a barage of powerful attacks but it helps if you have mons that have a little bit of synergy of course.
Building Hyper Offense Weather:
1 - Weather Starter
2 - Wall breaker / Abuser #1
3 - Wall breaker / Abuser #2
4 - Sweeper
5 - Revenge killer / something to stop setup sweepers
6 - Utitlity (Rocks/hazzard removal if you cant fit them somewere else)
Obviously when building weather it is really difficult to get good synergy with it as most of the abusers some abusers are swift swim mons, fire weak mons, or just generally mons who greatly benefit from the 1.5x dmg increase to water attacks.
Building Volt - Turn
Volt turn is best played slow imo, this gives u safe switches to a wall breaker / frail hard hitting mon such as mega medicham. The way to build this is similar the building around a sweeper except you impliment a volt - turn core to assist the mon your building around doing its jobs. An example of a decent volt turn core is the infamous Rotom - wash, Lando T and Scizor core. Each of these mons are bulky enough to take a good few hits and handle alot of the meta game on there own. they provide safe switches to other mons and force alot of switches on there own.
Usefull links:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/stall-terrible-triremes.3501651/ - AJs rmt with a stall building guide and process
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/frameworks-and-redundancies-in-ou-teambuilding.3484607/ - DICES guide
http://sweepercalc.com/swc/ - lets you know your teams weaknesses
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