Do you believe the standard process order/my placement of Threat Discussion is fine? If not, what would you suggest instead, and why?
No qualms with the presented order. Don't really have anything else to say here :]
At what point are a certain Speed tier and resources too much for a wall? What factors can contribute to a fast wall being potentially too influential or too much to break? How about the other way around?
I think the breaking point for this CAP will be if we go a little too overboard on this CAP's ability to always be going first. In my view of this CAP, which I will elaborate on more in the answer to the third question, our primary way of checking the threats we aim to check will involve directly out-speeding them. While this is just my view of what this CAP could be, I think one of the biggest limits is that we need to decide which threats we plan to outspeed, and how. Are we beating them with priority, or are we investing certain amounts of speed in advance? In that regard, I think our stats stage will be just as instrumental to the process as typing, if not moreso, since it's at this stage where we will outright decide the speed of our creation, and therefore, how much it can check without any investment in speed. I do not think we should be naturally outspeeding Dragapult, but we should definitely be getting pretty close to that speed, in my opinion.
And as I noted previously, I think that having any significant offensive presence is too far in the other way for this process. We will need to be very focused on avoiding more offensive coverage and presence than is necessary to check threats. I understand that CAP will almost never want to make a mon they don't want to play against, but this CAP will already be fast, this is something that has been dictated by the concept. Therefore we have to consider how speed plays a part in creating bulk, which is, in my opinion an artificial form of defense. I would hate for this process to fall into the mindset of "a good defense is a good offense", as while it is a solution, it's a pretty cheap one imo. I would be perfectly content with little-to-no offensive presence, perhaps by giving this CAP one single, relatively applicable/spammable STAB or coverage move to handle some of its general threats.
Is the idea of more moveslots being dedicated to utility more valuable than utilizing STABs and/or good coverage? Are there situations where we would want more than one offensive move to succeed at being a fast wall over more utility?
It is one-hundred percent better to have a surplus of utility move and one or two splashable offensive moves than it is to utilize STAB and good coverage here, in my opinoin. I think to mons like Ubers Lugia that rely on three status moves , and a singular coverage move to hit some of the most prominent metagame threats. Consider this set DPP Ubers:
Lugia @ Leftovers
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 252 HP / 64 Def / 192 Spe
Timid Nature
- Roost
- Reflect
- Whirlwind
- Ice Beam
In this set, Lugia creates pressure against its checks by establishing its bulk either through immediate recovery or added bulk, can phaze out foes by forgoing the first action, or it can click an attack so that it doesn't immediately become Taunt bait. Ice Beam is of note here as the attack is not chosen only because there is a surplus of Ground and Dragon types in DPP like Groudon and Rayquaza, but also because there are no Pokemon immune to it while still having a high PP. Lugia would love to run Areroblast, but that has 8 PP maximum, and it would love to run Psychic but it has to consider that Darkrai, a common metagame threat, is immune to the move, and Mewtwo and Giratina both resist it. Therefore, Ice Beam is chosen because of its broader set of use cases, when Lugia needs to get chip damage on its opponents.
Having more than one offensive move is valid in my opinion so long as this offensive move has a very specific purpose on the set, rather than being used strictly for general coverage. If having a second direct attack is necessary to prevent one specific Pokemon from wreaking havoc, then I think that this would warrant a secon attacking move. However, this move would likely prve to be more at the user's discretion when considering the team composition, i.e. "you COULD run this move on CAP33 to check a certain mon, or you could just choose another teammate that checks this specific threat, so that CAP33 can run a more standard set and have a more general wall presence". I think it would be alright for us to give this CAP multiple similar BP moves with specific type coverage, so long as we can craft the mon in such a way where this CAP would have to choose which of the two attacking moves to run (for example having both Flamethrower and Ice Beam, where if you want CAP33 to threaten more Steel types you have it run Flamethrower, but if you want CAP33 to threaten Dragon types, you would have it run Ice Beam etc.). Furthermore, I think the offensive moves ought to be quite predictable: you should be able to suss out from team composition that this mon might be running more than one attacking move if they, say, lack a good way to handle a threat that is otherwise checked by having CAP33 run two attacking moves (like how one might be able to tell if Equilibra is Levitate or Bulletproof depending on what partners in the team it has,
y'know information you should be able to get from doing a careful team preview analysis).
Ultimately though, I genuinely think that at MAXIMUM two of the moveslots are attacking moves, with more than one attacking move in a moveslot happening only maybe 5% of the time. This Pokemon's defensive potential stems form its ability to move first and disrupt its opponents, not because it moves first and hits with a moderately powerful STAB and extra coverage attack.