Roserade

[Princess Bubblegum]

Hey I was wondering if anyone has used a specially defensive Roserade in this metagame. I have pulled up a few old Roserade sets but they are all pretty outdated and meant for the BW1 meta. I am not sure specifically what is the optimal ev spread, I know you want some defense so you don't get eaten by pursuit, but how much? Also how fast should it be, what is the best speed tier to hang around?

In general I am looking for an ev spread that can utilize giga drain / spikes / rest / aromatherapy on a defensive team.

 

[alkinesthetase]

standard spread in arcticblast's revamp of 120 / 136 is pretty good (bold or calm, you can put it 120 def or 136 def, fiddle and see what happens). you take about 60% from either of genesect's +0 ice beam or +1 uturn with that spread. it's nice that it's about even between those two, i wouldn't wanna take less from one in exchange for taking more from the other. i've run 252 / 252 def bold before because its physdef is SO bad but meh, you sacrifice a lot of sdef to do that obviously. i don't tend to invest in speed because you really need all the defensive EVs you can; any EVs in speed could be doing work in physdef instead for taking random uturns.

also don't forget stun spore so that you can troll genesects getting lured in, just like celebi's thunderwave

 

[Ithilanor]

I tried using Roserade as a spiker on my Dark Horse team, and was not impressed. Sure, it can take water hits well, but it gets murdered by Ice/Flying attacks that are pretty common. The poison typing doesn't help, since with its terrible Def it's not taking even resisted fighting attacks well.

 

[cmurph]

Roserade's one of my favorite pokemon and I think she is very viable in OU. I have always used a specially defensive spiking set (simple max HP, Max SpD spread) and found that it gets ample opportunities to set up its hazards and rest off the damage. Examples of pokemon that it can set up on include: Leftovers/Black Sludge Gengar, Rotom-W, Politoed, Blissey/Chansey, Celebi, Ferrothorn, Jellicent, and Vaporeon. If you give it the right support, such as Politoed to neuter fire attacks and something like Sableye or Jellicent to burn physical attackers, the list of potential set up targets grows massively and includes pokemon such as Hippowdon, Defensive Heatran, and Ninetales.