when i came back a few weeks ago and started playing around with LC a few weeks ago, i realised how all my teams were drifloon weak as fuck. so i thought of a few checks which i could easily edit into some of my teams, and thought boomburst taillow would be awesome.
so i get my boomburst taillow team, and come across a floon team, and send in taillow when floon comes out... obviously I just force it out a couple of times, until the floon user has subbed enough until it activates unburden and full power acrobatics. if rocks are up it's a OHKO, or if using LO taillow, the recoil has usually weakened it enough to OHKO. or if floon uses acrobatics once predicting the switch in before it's a OHKO.
Yeah, taillow's a cool check, but it's a very weak check. It can only handle a set-up drifloon at when it's at full health. realistically all it does is force floon out and get worn down until it dies. It can add a little bit of early game pressure to the floon user and that's about it
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I'm not sure what @RayJay is saying with his Scraggy comparison... Playing with Scraggy itself doesn't require skill but playing with a Scraggy team still involves getting chip damage on its checks/counters until it's able to sweep. And anyway, I feel like Scraggy is the most broken shit in BW, and so do quite a few BW players, and if we're making comparisons to it, imo Drifloon should be banned... (basically I don't think Scraggy is a good comparison since many say it's broken, many say it's not, so you can easily argue 'drifloon is like scraggy so it isn't broken' or 'drifloon is like scraggy so it is broken')
But about the 'skill' thing... Having played with Floon on ladder, I actually don't think it does require too much skill as long as you know how to play with it. It's an unusual strategy which most new or non-LC players won't be used to, but once you do get used to it, does drifloon really require much skill? 95% of the time there's an optimum move to click.
If no sub, click sub,
if facing a physical attacker whilst itemless (cos knock off), click wisp,
if below 50% without item, click recycle,
if you get a free turn click acro
if threatened, switch out and wait till you can come in again and repeat the process
obviously there's a select few occasions when this isn't the case, but it's not hard to work out when these are.
Tbh, I don't know if it's broken or not... I honestly haven't experienced the meta enough to say so, and haven't fully explored all the possibilities. I haven't been active for weeks since Drifloon first came to prominence around LCPL time and built teams with new ideas of how to handle it and I don't feel like a simple ladder run to COIL is enough. From my short ladder run (18-5 record, 2245 coil) and a few other battles with LCers I would have said it's broken but I don't trust myself to make a call on it.
There is a lot of truth in Ray Jay's post about how metagames develop due to new threats, but has Ray Jay himself been active enough to see if the metagame can truly develop and adapt like how we adapted to Fletchling? But I would like to urge voters to consider the point that he makes carefully, because look how broken people thought fletch was at one point.
Having said that, people like TCR and Mambo who pride themselves on inventive teambuilding and finding new anti-meta strategies and have been around for ages are saying it's broken so yaknow...
oh and as for the encouraging new players thing... diglett discourages me from returning to LC much more than floon does. I really wonder if we'd be having this suspect if diglett got banned last time around..
not really a conclusive post haha, just a few thoughts from reading the thread.