I would like to start off this post by saying that this suspect should've happened (at the very least) a couple weeks ago, there is no excuse. A majority of our top players have expressed that Drampa is an issue and this suspect just didn't happen. Had a good chat about this on discord with a lot of our SCL starters, builders, and community members. I think the conversation ended positively at least in my mind. I will be working to make our guidelines wrt what qualifies for a suspect more clear, and communication between mine and other council members opinions more clear. All in all I would like to thank everybody who did criticize what was going on in a healthy way. You're all passionate about this tier and I am too, I'll make sure we work together better to make everything the best it can be. With all of that said, lets get into the real reason you're reading this:
With many of the Dragon type breakers gone now in one way or another, Drampa has soared to the top of the PU meta game as a top wall breaker. A combination of high base power STAB moves, incredible coverage options, and a solid defensive typing resisting common types in Water, Fire, Grass, and a handy immunity in Ghost it isn't hard to see why it is such a massive threat. Drampa also punishes the very slow cores we've been seeing quite often. It's able to get in on weaker attacking foes such as Weezing, Jellicent, Ferroseed, Quagsire, and the now more popular Coalossal.
Set diversity have also been a hot topic. CM sets have come up a good amount being able to boost up, abuse Drampas coverage options more because it isn't locked in, and also get past otherwise offensive checks like Whimsicott and Ribombee, while also taking considerably less from special breakers like Charizard, Mesprit and Articuno-Galar. CM in combination with Berserk can be just as powerful in the short term as Choice Specs sets, albeit is generally a bit more awkward to fit on teams. Defog also has some value in the meta, with the good resistances mentioned earlier. This set however isn't even close to problematic and is actually nice to have in the meta.
Drampas' presence in the builder is probably its biggest issue in the tier. The lack of true defensive answers is very concerning. You can prepare as much as you can for Drampa and it still might get 2 kills just from predicting right. Protect spam works well into choiced sets but can fail to account for CM sets. It's not exactly easy to mitigate its breaking power from the building side of things. It is potentially the reason a lot of teams look and play very similar, and could be limiting meta development because of that.
Drampa is not without its flaws. It is extremely slow, making it so while it does have excellent resistances it isn't able to abuse them to the maximum. While it can hard in on slower, weaker opponents, it struggles to hard in on anything faster. This can be mended by say having a volt turn core on your team and only getting it in on slower foes, this still does mean Drampa doesn't have an amazing match up vs a majority of Pokemon on the other side of the field. It can still make a worthwhile trade vs one of them though during a match and potentially get value from its good bulk and amazing attacking power to fire back after eating something. From my personal experience the tier has also gotten faster and more offensively based, so that could be a downside for Drampa.
There will be no suspect ladder. Instead, we will use the normal PU ladder, which will remain open for the duration of the test. A message will pop up at the beginning of ladder games to indicate that the suspect is going on (Kris - thank you!!). Anyone who wishes to participate in this suspect test will use a newly-made alt with a suspect-specific tag to indicate that you are trying to achieve reqs.
The requirements for this suspect test are the following:
- All games must be played on the Pokemon Showdown PU ladder on a new alt with the following format: 'PUDS [enter nickname here]'. For example, I might register the alt 'PUDS pls ban' to ladder with.
- Do not impersonate other people in your ladder alt (ex. someone other than myself making the account 'PUDS Specs').
- Do not use any usernames that are offensive, flame-baiting, or targeting specific users.
- Do not use usernames that could be interpreted as breaking any of the username rules on Pokemon Showdown!; failure to abide to this will result in you being barred from voting in this suspect and potential infractions.
- To qualify for voting, you must obtain a minimum GXE of 80 with a minimum of 35 games played.
The suspect test will last for 14 days, ending on Monday, November 15th at 12am EST.
Please feel free to post below and let us know how you'll be voting and why. Good luck qualifying, everyone!