Slurpuff in ORAS UU

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Hi all - if you've been keeping up with ORAS UU games within the past couple of months, you'll have noticed that hyper offense has reached an all time high in usage. Froslass as a lead is very consistent in commanding the first few turns; unless you have Mega Absol, the Froslass user is essentially guaranteed a spike, and there are very few responses that the opponent can have t hat isn't disadvantageous in the long term given it being able to Taunt basically every Defog user barring Crobat, and DBond / Cursed Body making it so that any move clicked is essentially walking on egg shells. Alongside that, rockers like Nidoking and especially Krookodile keep up offensive momentum and, more importantly, can consistently maintain hazards up, which is then usually followed by any number of offensive wincons like Slurpuff, Gyarados, Venomoth, Cloyster, etc. to wreak havoc.

Now all this is the usual for this type of framework; however, what has pushed it over the edge imo and has drawn the ire of pretty much everyone who has played the tier and loves it otherwise is Slurpuff. In simplest terms, it's the backbone of what makes these teams so dominant. The sequencing required for the Slurpuff user to get it into an optimal position is fairly minimal, because it has just enough bulk and just enough speed to where getting a Belly Drum off and cleaning up shop happens more often than not. Of course, this isn't to say that there's a lack of dedicated answers to it. A lot of mons that are great / splashable otherwise can handle it one on one, mostly bulky steels that aren't Empoleon. However, the issues with this lie in that you are shoehorned into using them ONLY for Slurpuff, because even a marginal amount of chip from anything else means they become much more at risk for getting nuked straight, which opens up the rest of the team to Slurpuff's partners. Beyond that, games pan out such that even if Slurpuff itself dies, then there's something else waiting in the wings waiting to finish the job - this replay that happened just last night displays this perfectly.

There might be an argument to be made for alternative courses of action, such as banning Froslass, who is the facilitator of these teams and is flat out better than any and every suicide lead by itself, or other sweepers like Venomoth that have also been shown to snowball similarly to Slurpuff. That being said, I think banning Slurpuff cuts off the largest part of the issue immediately for a few reasons. Firstly, Slurpuff doesn't need spikes as badly as other mons in its place, and screens offense teams have been used here and there (albeit much much less because the screens setters can't actually prevent Defog and their utility pales in comparison to Froslass). I guess one way to put it would be that the non Slurpuff mons need it much more than the other way around. Aside from that, Slurpuff's defensive utility is a big part of why these games end up going the way they do. It can set up on mons that would otherwise thrash hyper offense like Mega Aero, and Scarf Hydrei / Mienshao. Its presence by itself essentially makes scarfers a liability, which leads to revenge killing it being an option that is rarely if ever actually available. The other teammates have it much worse in terms of their openings, and the ones they do get are bolstered by what Slurpuff does on its own. When it comes to the presence of the other mons, I think keeping Lass HO and other core win conditions is a good thing for the tier, because having something to punish standard balances is never a bad thing on its own. but what Slurpuff does pushes it far beyond that to the point where the tier is nigh unplayable.

On a personal level, in both UU Snake last year and UUPL this year me and my teammates spent an obscene amount of time, basically hours, brainstorming how exactly to play the matchup against one specific team, scrapping ideas if they didn't pan out even slightly favorably. Almost every matchup is skewed to where if you are using teams like this, the lines to victory are very linear and you barely have to put in any thought while the other side has to dance around multiple different scenarios just to get to a point where they might not get cleaned on the spot. This is not the sign of a good metagame, and I think a ban on the cupcake is sorely needed in order to save what is otherwise a very fun tier. I implore anyone who has played ORAS UU within the past few months to share their thoughts, because I think it's evident that we are headed in a very bad direction if this isn't voted on soon.
 

Pak

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Alright I've been trying to formulate thoughts on ORAS as a whole for a little while now and I'll probably go on 40 tangents in this post. The first thing I want to say is I think this thread should be more focused on HO as a whole, rather than Slurpuff specifically, even though it would likely be the fall guy if something were to happen. It is less so about the mon itself than it is about the oppression of HO as a whole in recent times.

Okay so I was originally planning on making a super emo post in my thread about this, but I'll just get the gist down here. Frankly, ORAS UU quality in tournaments lately has only gotten worse and worse. A year ago it really was enjoyable with more people experimenting and obviously things were much more fresh with Conk finally gone. Naturally, some of the freshness wore off over time and people just wanted to play other things, myself included. It's not that I thought ORAS was particularly bad; there is just only so much to do, as it is still a fairly restricted tier, even with Conk gone and I had played it non stop for basically a year. I would imagine this has applied to a solid amount of the active playerbase as well, and it kind of culminated in the on-going UU snake 3. I'm not trying to be a dick, but overall, the quality of the tier in this tour has been really really bad. I know player activity and tier quality for a tour are bound to go hand in hand in some capacity, but still it has been a nightmare. A quick tldr is that very few people are actually building, if any honestly. Now in this context, take a wild guess what the default team style is for people without much experience in the tier - could be anything. I'm not sure what the actual usage stats are, but HO has been spammed an obscene amount and most games involving it are either decided immediately at matchup one way or the other, or the HO user is incredibly advantaged and they throw it out a window, which has also happened a good amount.

Yeah yeah I know I'm usually the guy who hates all cheese in general, but the fact its so prevalent in this tier specifically makes it even more unenjoyable to deal with or play against. ORAS UU has always been relatively matchup based, although that aspect had improved a lot in Conkeldurr's absence. It is not necessarily that every game is 100% decided at preview - there is simply less room to play around really strong threats than other metagames. There is a lot to cover, and you aren't going to be fantastic against everything. You can obviously mitigate these issues with good building and preparation, as consistency has shown to be possible over the years even with the issues the tier has always had in some capacity. The thing is that HO takes this problem and exacerbates it to an unrealistic extent. A big reason I have always enjoyed UU team tournaments is its serious enough of a setting to spur new ideas and innovations when thinking of how to approach each opponent on a week to week basis. This has essentially disappeared, and I sorta want to say this is the worst it has ever been in that aspect. The gist is that the majority of weeks it felt much more like "okay how do we not lose to this cheese bullshit while still being half decent overall" than it is about tackling the greater metagame with new approaches that breed development and growth. There was already a little too much to cover before HO got so big, but now you're simply spread too thin the builder. It is increasingly difficult to come up with fresh approaches if you have to stick to the same pool of mons to not lose to whatever bullshit is running around, then another pool of mons prey on reliance on the most consistent stuff, etc. It is a very unhealthy dynamic and I don't really give a shit if it's seen as "lmao pak just hates cheese." Yeah I guess I do hate it when games are decided at preview way more than they should be. Also disclaimer: I did play 1 week of ORAS this tour and did lose to HO. I expected HO and dropped Dragon Tail on my Slowking anyway and insta lost to Gyarados. That is my own fault and all these complaints have much more to do with the metagame overall.

Now onto HO more specifically. I will say: I do not think HO is broken in a vacuum, just like I don't think anything else in the tier is broken in a vacuum. Like I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of things that add up and limit what you can do, and I see HO's new prevalence more as the straw that broke the camel's back. HO is obviously incredibly strong still, hence this thread existing, and to me it is by far the most unhealthy element and also the easiest to address with the least amount of collateral damage. HO has a lot of things going for it in this metagame specifically. First off, hazard removal in ORAS UU sucks ass and always has. Not quite to the extent of say, BW tiers, but for the most part the removers are pretty exploitable. If the HO is good and the user knows what they are doing in any capacity, then chances are they are getting at least a rock and a spike for the duration of the game. Froslass in particular is really hard to punish. The tier is also pretty slow as a whole. It Spikes Ghost is very likely to outspeed 5/6 mons and priority is incredibly uncommon as well. The only real combination that doesn't leave the foe entirely on the backfoot is like slow U-turn/Volt Switch + Mega Aerodactyl, which is very good in its own right, but you would be surprised how many generally good teams have a hard time coming out of this sequence in a decently favorable position. The Lass will always get a hazard at least, and also very often take something with it. People have even thrown around that Froslass itself may be the biggest enabler of these rampant HO frameworks. I personally do not think banning it could be reasonably justified, but that even being on the table honestly says enough.

Onto some of the threats themselves, which are all but guaranteed to have a massive hazard advantage before they even hit the field. Cloyster is hardly worth mentioning. In general the mon sucks and lets Empoleon in for free to get them off. People experimenting with King's Rock to make this matchup and others a non-lost cause is pretty infuriating, but its far from an issue. Venomoth, which could probably be referred to as the UU matchup moth, has perhaps the highest ceiling of any sweeper in the tier. Things can get out of hand hilariously fast, but ultimately it has some issues that hold it back. Yes, it does pull off its fair share of sweeps, but I do believe this is due to the team environment it finds itself on more than anything. Every combination of its viable 5 moves, being Bug Buzz, Psychic, Roost, Quiver Dance, and Sleep Powder, has some issue that holds it back a lot. Sure, if the right combination hits the right matchup it can be off to the races. However, the possibility of hitting the wrong matchup makes it harder to rely on than you would prefer. Sets that drop Psychic are straight up fishes, as Safety Goggles Crobat is one of the most common staples in the tier. In general, mono Bug coverage has more issues than you would prefer. Psychic circumvents this issue and is the most prevalent overall, but the lack of recovery lets bulky mons such as Mandibuzz check it much better than they would otherwise be able to. Sleep Powder is what presents Venomoth with a lot of its gamebreaking potential. Without it, it has much fewer set up opportunities and is more susceptible to Empoleon Roar, among other things. Lastly, it a good mon on HO, but it is far from a staple. There are plenty of viable approaches without it, and I do not think it is the issue. Gyarados is one that I see thrown around by a lot of people unexperienced in the tier. I get why, as it's traditionally seen as one of the most powerfully designed sweepers ever, but that has never been the case in ORAS. I just realized how much I wrote about Venomoth movesets, so I'll avoid doing that here. The gist with Gyara is that it does not have enough moves to beat all of common mons like Mandibuzz, Dragon Tail Slowking (which should be the standard set), Roar Empoleon, Hydreigon, and Seismitoad on a consistent basis, topped off by the fact that it is still revenged at +1 Speed by Mega Aerodactyl.

This brings us to the man himself, Slurpuff. Slurpuff is the engine that makes HO go, and it is not even close. For those that want to play devil's advocate and say HO is Good and Consistent without Slurpuff; that's cool, I don't care. The reason new age HO is this consistent is Slurpuff. The amount of games this thing is either on the winscreen, or denting something for a teammate to win is asinine. Bouff alluded to this in the OP, although I don't think the listed replay was the best example of it, but the point is, even if there is sufficient counterplay to Slurpuff itself, its presence goes far beyond sweeping itself. Don't get me wrong, easily the most limiting factor of HO is literally not losing to Slurpuff, but even if you have counterplay to it individually, it is far from a guarantee that your matchup into HO overall is good. A loose example off the top of my head would be an HO team playing against a team with Scarf Hydreigon and Mega Aggron, two mons that should theoretically be good into a lot of HO mons. Well, throw down some Spikes, get up Rocks, any time Hydreigon clicks a move, it is set up fodder. Any time it gets in, Aggron is eating hazards on either a possible double switch or just a Drain Punch to chip it for later. Especially with the context that hazards are a near certainty AND they are unlikely to be on the HO team's side makes these sequences only advantage the HO user more. The ball feels in their court more often than not, and I do not see how these are healthy interactions. Again, the presence is felt even more in the builder. There is only so much to do in the context of an already very fucking constrained metagame. Want to use Empoleon as your only Steel-type? Ah looks like you're getting 6-0d by Slurpuff since priority doesn't exist and it heals off all chip anyway. There are only a handful of mons that are real checks to it and soft checking literally doesn't exist beyond not mega evolving your Aerodactyl for Unnerve.

Ultimately, I do not think Slurpuff is broken in of itself, but it enables so much bullshit that would otherwise not be possible. It only exacerbates existing ORAS matchup issues to the point where preparing for tournaments against people who don't know what is going on just feels like a literal guessing game. If it were not around, covering HO would be a much much much easier task, especially considering how many HO mons struggle to deal with Hydreigon of all things. Slurpuff is the one thing that can flip that matchup entirely, where the Hydreigon user is suddenly the one on the defensive. Lastly, I just want this tier to be playable again and my mentality with tiering has always been: if this mon or element adds nothing positive and only makes issues worse, as I've written 50000 words about, then what's the issue? I fucking despise the idea of "we don't want to nuke the playstyle though" when nerfs or whatever else along those lines like the Quag ban in SM are seen as unjustified. I have no regrets about getting Conk banned no matter how things have progressed since then. I just want games to come down the battle themselves again, and HO and the general playerbase mentality as it stands is going to prevent that from ever being the case again if nothing is done about it.

edit: before someone says lmao use Absol. I literally theorized the standard Absol set due in large part to this development and so that it would be solid overall, but still in of itself it is very hit or miss with its matchups. Sound familiar with everything i've said to this point?
 
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dingbat

snek
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to preface my post, if this vote were to happen immediately, i'm not 100% confident i would vote ban on puff for admittedly tacky reasons. however, i do agree that slurpuff is the head of the snake here, and i would absolutely support a vote for it if it comes down to that.

A quick tldr is that very few people are actually building, if any honestly.
i think this is by far the biggest initial factor, but this is further exacerbated by the fact that the aforementioned bouff ho has seen WIDELY consistent success throughout these past uupls/uusds and even in the recent invitational. as one of the current builders out there, i've found myself worrying a LOT more about getting cheesed by opponents looking for an easy, straight forward win, which immediately limited the scope of builds i had to begin with. i'm not ashamed to admit that most of the builds i've loaded lately have been tailored towards farming the shit out of bouff/other puff ho team loaders (p.s. roar suicune is good af); even then, i've still been caught slipping up on the team loader as recently as my oras uu cup quarterfinal match vs pif when i did decide to load one of the more matchup-risky teams. on the flip side, i myself have loaded slurpuff exactly once across all tourney games i've played the last five or so years (i am most certainly known to almost never run hyper offense in oras), and that was in my uupl week 7 matchup vs lily that just about didn't matter to the overall playoff picture.

that being said, i'm quite disappointed that has become the state of hyper offense, because i still think there's some shit that can be explored, even within this glaringly top-heavy meta. i quite honestly cannot trust anyone to not load puff ho vs me in any given match. anyways, i think it's quite fitting that the ho mastermind himself would be the one to spark this discussion.
 
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pinorska

Banned deucer.
Thanks Bouff for making this post-- I agree substantively with what you've said. I would be in favor of a vote on Slurpuff, probably inclusive of oras UU council, players who made it deep in classic, people who played it and won x (3?) number of games in UU Snake Draft and UU Premier League.

I have recently developed a bit of a passion for ORAS UU, making the finals of an ORAS UU roa tour, building and testing it for snake and playing in UU classic.

One added dimension of HO in UU that I'd like to focus on is that the tier's revenging options are generally poor-- priority in ORAS UU has been severely nerfed since Conkeldurr left, which has also helped enable HO. The best priority in the tier right now is probably adamant choice banded Entei, whose extreme speed can sometimes pick off a Slurpuff depending on rolls, bulk and if it got drain punch health back. I was surprised not to see a bigger uptick in its usage given the prevalence of HO recently. The poor revenging options make Slurpuff very hard to revenge but also allow it to abuse the revenger killers of its setup sweeping partners. Therefore, Slurpuff finds an insane number of opportunities to set up, especially on scarf Hydreigon which is a popular revenge killer on balance builds.

I've found that the HO matchups in serious tour basically necessitates Doublade in the builder due to its quad resist to Venomoth's bug buzz and resistance to Slurpuff and its coverage moves. Doublade is great into Slurpuff, but melts to Venomoth's HP Fire after 1 switch-in if there's a spike up. Doublade is also generally exploitable due to its bad special bulk and lack of recovery options and limits you in teambuilder pretty significantly because it can be practically dead weight if you don't run into HO. I was often forced into double steel with Empoleon and a stealth rock setting ground type to have any consistency against HO. This style is then very weak to the common Slurpuff partner of Gyarados. My point being that HO is very hard to contain due to cascading threats, of which Slurpuff is insane at enabling, because there are so few Pokemon that check it, you can bring partners that rips through those checks which, if not present, often result in Slurpuff autowin. I thought I'd add a replay demonstrating Slurpuff HO against balance. https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen6uu-1630919590-a11htu9tf26ug2giyt37uhufa3hhf0rpw.

Several teams I was given I was told that the counter-play to Slurpuff was "go hard Aerodactyl and pray" which, as we can imagine, is not great for a variety of reasons, least of all that Slurpuff can bulk to live Stone Edge, then Drain Punch and get back to full, and sweep. The mere presence of Slurpuff forces you not to bring Aerodactyl in or mega evolve it to try to prevent a sweep, leaving the non-HO player with 5 mons they can effectively use to counter the other team. This also assumes you're using your mega slot on Aerodactyl.

TL;dr Slurpuff is quite restricting and I'd love to see a vote
 

Lily

wouldn't that be fine, dear
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Slurpuff is stupid, not necessarily in a vacuum but as a catalyst that makes this tier far too fishy.

Slurpuff, in a traditional sense, is a bit difficult to argue as "broken". It does have a number of hard walls (Impish Metagross, Escavalier, Doublade, Mega Aggron) and some softer checks (Klefki, Unnerve Aerodactyl, CB Metagross, BP Lucario and, extremely situationally, very bulky Crobat). These Pokemon are, for the most part, pretty good and not impossible to fit on teams by any means. Teams that use Empoleon or Cobalion as their Steel-type are obviously at a pretty significant disadvantage against Slurpuff, but this is not necessarily unhealthy on its own - some Pokemon will just have good and bad matchups, that's how they are.

Now to me, the issue is that containing Slurpuff is insanely difficult because of its teammates. One thing you'll notice about all of the hard answers to Slurpuff listed above is that they're pretty much fodder for other very common hyper offense staples - Gyarados sets up on all of them bar Dragon Tail Mega Aggron, Doublade laughs in the face of most, and given they're slow and relatively weak they can even be fodder for Venomoth other than Escavalier). This creates this awkward warped dynamic where you're left in a catch-22; you either use a specific Steel-type that leads to you losing to Gyarados, or your Steel-type loses to Slurpuff to begin with. It doesn't help that Slurpuff's matchups are so polarising that you basically *need* your Steel-type to deal with it, because there really is nothing else shy of extremely bulky Crobat (which still needs rocks to be off, a tall task against HO considering your Crobat is possibly your Defogger to begin with) that can tank a Slurpuff hit. The only Pokemon I can think of that tanks one singular boosted hit is Rhyperior, which can't even do anything back since Slurpuff just uses it to recover to full (or KOs it outright if it has taken... I don't know, a single hit of Spikes.)

Slurpuff finds too many setup opportunities. Its bulk is good and its typing is amazing, so you're going to find setup on staples like Hydreigon, Florges, Mienshao lacking Poison Jab (a pretty decent amount of them) and I mean shit if they already Mega Evolved their Aerodactyl earlier in the game so that they don't just straight up get popped by Venomoth then you can set up on that too. It warps every game it's in into an extremely awkward eggshelly mess where you have to make every single perfect play possible in order to not lose your lunch to the cake dog and in doing so you'll probably lose to its teammates as well, as shown by the absurdly high winrate of hyper offense in team tournaments lately.

Ultimately I'm not certain that removing Slurpuff from the tier would be enough to neuter hyper offense to a more desirable state, but I think it's a good starting point, and if it ends up not being enough then other alternatives can be explored. For now, I'm in support of a ban of Slurpuff instead of any of its teammates due to the ease of setup and the difficulty in finding consistent checks that match up well enough against the rest of the metagame.
 

Sulo

pure heroine
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I really don't want this thread to die, because I think this tier is so close to being good and not the snooze-fest some people perceive it to be. Everyone has pretty much echoed my views on Slurpuff, but I think I'd wanna pitch in my two cents anyways. This ship might have sailed to be fair but I don't think anything is stopping us from taking action when other issues are dealt with in CG UU / other Old Gens.

Slurpuff is dumb in that it punishes you for doing the right thing in most situations. You try to check x HO Pokemon with Mega Steelix, and now you lose to Slurpuff. The pressure that each one emits is truly, incredibly dumb, with all of them slowly creating situations that make it easier for Slurpuff to win. I think another issue with it is that it punishes you for using sets akin to Choiced Hydreigon and the like. While it is common for Pokemon to take advantage of Choiced attackers and set up in retaliation, Slurpuff abuses this to a major degree on a game-to-game basis. By the time its out, there is a pretty good chance that the Steel-type is weakened (which goes back to the whole "teammates abuse Slurpuff checks" thing) and it is pretty much game. Its effect on the tier couldn't be stressed more, with people above mentioning the consistent success of team(s) it has been used on. Stacking multiple checks to it just makes you weaker to x threat (e.g. Unnerve Aerodactyl + Metagross; at this point, you're pretty hard-pressed to not lose to something like Doublade, which can also weaken Steel-types for Slurpuff), further constraining the builder and forcing awkward games and situations.

Not much else to say because everyone got thoughts out before I could. Please get it out of the tier.
 

Lily

wouldn't that be fine, dear
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Hi, we're looking to go forward with this thread, so here's a form to gauge interest on what we should do.

https://forms.gle/coR2xTE63k2CLrPV7

tagging some recent oras uu team tour players to answer this when you have time - anyone is free to answer though, you don't have to be tagged ofc. not an exhaustive list, im just eyeballing. apologies if i missed you.


thanks for your time :D
 

Killintime

Time not so well spent
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I've always considered HO to be fishy to some extent, so when the playstyle gets a bit too consistent I start to really feel the heat when it comes to teambuilding. I can't say for sure from the few times I've played against puff whether its the culprit or not, but I am willing to see a vote through alongside seasoned ORAS players with differing opinions.

Being a mon that takes advantage of someone's offensive momentum like dropping a draco, means that team will likely be stuck with either a u-turn bot, dead weight, or in the worst case scenario a revenge killer that causes you to lose the game for performing its role in an already tight 12-20 turn match versus HO.

Reality is, ORAS steels are expected to carry a team on their back and even an inch of damage on them apart from the heavier ones like mega aggron or doublade (who is liable to pursuit damage) will result in in a plethora of openings. This result can easily be ascertained from trading your puff or some other mon in so that puff can clean up. I think some may say that "well isn't that its whole deal in every tier its been in so far?", and while I can agree to some extent, slurpuff can setup on quite a few mons, some of them being S-tier pokemon and above and our options for revenging it are mostly limited to defensive counter-play rather than priority.

So all in all, I think its just another mon that adds needless strain to building, but I personally don't find it all that bad as a pretty defensive player, that being said every side of the coin should be looked at.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
I don't have much to add, my main experience of using Slurpuff was losing to Dingbat in this ORAS cup game last year: https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6uu-642979

It didn't kill a fat bat after BD which was rather pathetic. Obviously it constrains teambuilding a lot and banning it should make building easier. I don't really see that as the goal of tiering though so I wouldn't ban Slurpuff on this basis. Particularly in old gens. Why should it matter if building is very difficult now, it could just mean this tier has produced all the viable styles/common cores that existed in the past several years.

The typical "is it broken" is closer question for me though so maybe I'll vote to ban it based on that.

Actually I'm like 87% sure I'm not going to be allowed to vote anyways unless I'm forgetting about some qualifying method unless going like 1-5 or something pathetic like that in UUFPL lets me vote which would be weird but sure.
 

Pak

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I don't have much to add, my main experience of using Slurpuff was losing to Dingbat in this ORAS cup game last year: https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6uu-642979

It didn't kill a fat bat after BD which was rather pathetic. Obviously it constrains teambuilding a lot and banning it should make building easier. I don't really see that as the goal of tiering though so I wouldn't ban Slurpuff on this basis. Particularly in old gens. Why should it matter if building is very difficult now, it could just mean this tier has produced all the viable styles/common cores that existed in the past several years.

The typical "is it broken" is closer question for me though so maybe I'll vote to ban it based on that.

Actually I'm like 87% sure I'm not going to be allowed to vote anyways unless I'm forgetting about some qualifying method unless going like 1-5 or something pathetic like that in UUFPL lets me vote which would be weird but sure.
Old gens arent just frozen in time when they're no longer the current gen. ORAS has seen a ton of development since gen 6 ended and people stopped using the same do nothing Sylveon balance. Conk could not be any better of an example of how a tier can shift for the worse over time after a gen ends. It was the most egregiously broken mon in the tier by a wide margin, but because the tier was never explored to the point where that was ever really apparent during its main run, it was never even looked at during gen 6 itself. Just because something unhealthy rises to the top, that doesn't mean that should just be the tier for the rest of time.

There will always be metagame developments. There's never a perfect team, so there will always be ways to capitalize on what is popular at a given time, meaning there will literally always be a reason to keep building. ORAS has always been a very constrained tier by nature. The thing I have always hated the most about it its matchup issues and the lack of room to play around threats as much as you do in other metagames, such as SM. Conk was a much more obvious example, since it had like 3 passive answers, and every other team was very likely to just lose the long game to Bulk Up. HO is not as egregious as Conk was, but the issue is that it too is incredibly difficult to cover while also covering the broader metagame.

There are techs and ways to handle HO threats, but they only leave you with so many viable approaches left when trying to make an actual good team in the overall tier. Covering HO in the builder has increasingly felt like playing rock paper scissors. You can use one of the few defensive checks to Slurpuff and tech out to be safe(ish) into some of the other main threats, but that requires being distinctly worse in most other matchups. I get there will always be a tradeoff in building teams; you will naturally always be better into xyz than abc, but HO pushes it to a new extent in this tier. Absol has seen a lot of usage recently and it has been due in large large part because of its matchup into HO. I theorized the current popular set because of this and to try and maximize its effectiveness in other matchups. It's still a flawed mon that would not see nearly as much play otherwise. Another common example is Doublade. Doublade has only been seeing the usage it has because of its matchup into some of these HO mons. Otherwise, it often finds itself thudding into ever present mons like all the bulky Waters and Mandibuzz. This extends into smaller examples like Payapa Crobat for Psychic Venomoth and Metal Burst Rhyperior that I have tried recently, which would quite literally not ever be optimal otherwise. There are obviously more examples but you get my point.

I definitely started rambling at some point, but here is the gist. ORAS building is incredibly strained as is. Slurpuff is the latest example of if you dont have one of 4-5 things that can theoretically reliably deal with it, then chances are you are losing immediately if it gets one setup opportunity. Getting one opportunity in this tier is not a tall task. Half+ the teams in the tier should not be invalidated purely because they lose to 1 mon from preview. As I touched on more extensively in my other post, it isn't as simple as "check Slurpuff, win". It has teammates that can just as easily net a free win that requires roughly 6 brain cells to claim. Prepping for a game shouldn't involve asking "alright do I risk the autoloss to Slurpuff and the boys so I can be semi creative against the rest of the metagame that I can actually interact with". It's consistent and spammed enough that it is rarely ever feasible at this point, especially compared to cheese in other tiers. Again, I am mostly pointing at Slurpuff because it is the clearest 'win button' mon at the playstyle's disposal, and it would be a thousand times easier to realistically cover the other threats without Slurpuff sitting there ready to claim its free setup opportunity/win if your team isn't perfectly equipped to handle all HO.
 
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pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
Old gens arent just frozen in time when they're no longer the current gen. ORAS has seen a ton of development since gen 6 ended and people stopped using the same do nothing Sylveon balance. Conk could not be any better of an example of how a tier can shift for the worse over time after a gen ends. It was the most egregiously broken mon in the tier by a wide margin, but because the tier was never explored to the point where that was ever really apparent during its main run, it was never even looked at during gen 6 itself. Just because something unhealthy rises to the top, that doesn't mean that should just be the tier for the rest of time.

There will always be metagame developments. There's never a perfect team, so there will always be ways to capitalize on what is popular at a given time, meaning there will literally always be a reason to keep building. ORAS has always been a very constrained tier by nature. The thing I have always hated the most about it its matchup issues and the lack of room to play around threats as much as you do in other metagames, such as SM. Conk was a much more obvious example, since it had like 3 passive answers, and every other team was very likely to just lose the long game to Bulk Up. HO is not as egregious as Conk was, but the issue is that it too is incredibly difficult to cover while also covering the broader metagame.

There are techs and ways to handle HO threats, but they only leave you with so many viable approaches left when trying to make an actual good team in the overall tier. Covering HO in the builder has increasingly felt like playing rock paper scissors. You can use one of the few defensive checks to Slurpuff and tech out to be safe(ish) into some of the other main threats, but that requires being distinctly worse in most other matchups. I get there will always be a tradeoff in building teams; you will naturally always be better into xyz than abc. Absol has seen a lot of usage recently and it has been due in large large part because of its matchup into HO. I theorized the current popular set because of this and to try and maximize its effectiveness in other matchups. It's still a flawed mon that would not see nearly as much play otherwise. Another common example is Doublade. Doublade has only been seeing the usage it has because of its matchup into some of these HO mons. Otherwise, it often finds itself thudding into ever present mons like all the bulky Waters and Mandibuzz. This extends into smaller examples like Payapa Crobat for Psychic Venomoth and Metal Burst Rhyperior that I have tried recently, which would quite literally not ever be optimal otherwise. There are obviously more examples but you get my point.

I definitely started rambling at some point, but here is the gist. ORAS building is incredibly strained as is. Slurpuff is the latest example of if you dont have one of 4-5 things that can theoretically reliably deal with it, then chances are you are losing immediately if it gets one setup opportunity. Getting one opportunity in this tier is not a tall task. Half+ the teams in the tier should not be invalidated purely because they lose to 1 mon from preview. As I touched on more extensively in my other post, it isn't as simple as "check Slurpuff, win". It has teammates that can just as easily net an free win that requires roughly 6 brain cells to claim. Prepping for a game shouldn't involve asking "alright do I risk the autoloss to Slurpuff and the boys so I can be semi creative against the rest of the metagame that I can actually interact with". It's consistent and spammed enough that it is rarely ever feasible at this point, especially compared to cheese in other tiers. Again, I am mostly pointing at Slurpuff because it is the clearest 'win button' mon at the playstyle's disposal, and it would be a thousand times easier to realistically cover the other threats without Slurpuff sitting there ready to claim its free setup opportunity/win if your team isn't perfectly equipped to handle all HO.

I agree with you when you say things don't freeze once it stops being current gen, but my main point was that after a while, you have built with all the good cores in the tier and all the playstyles and there isn't much left. You can recycle thing, old things from, as I said, a few years ago, might seem new in the moment but they were probably used a decent bit before.

Now that you got me thinking more critically though I don't really see why Slurpuff is the issue anymore. I feel like Froslass could be a bigger culprit enabling HO since it does keep the Spikes up that critically weakens Steels.
 

Pearl

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Now that you got me thinking more critically though I don't really see why Slurpuff is the issue anymore. I feel like Froslass could be a bigger culprit enabling HO since it does keep the Spikes up that critically weakens Steels.
i would not entertain this because (aside from the obvious reasons) a while back i built a pretty solid team for this tier featuring slurpuff that abused screens over spikes and it honestly felt just as oppressive as spikes stacking HO in most match ups

Particularly in old gens. Why should it matter if building is very difficult now, it could just mean this tier has produced all the viable styles/common cores that existed in the past several years.
where was this sort of discourse when we banned quagsire of all things from sm uu lol

as for the topic at hand i honestly want a bit more time to think about it, but in a way it feels like a reasonable course of action when taking into account the way the tier has evolved and how ill prepared it is to deal with offensive threats stacked on top of eachother (at least when compared to SM, where HO is also strong, but also way less restraining for teambuilding purposes) after the departure of the strongest prioity user around, and slurpuff further narrows down the list of things that can be put onto teams to deal with this. no matter the conclusion i personally come to, i wouldn't mind using the upcoming uupl as testing grounds for a slurpuffless meta (pak can just build everyone teams if we get lazy)
 

dingbat

snek
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnus
the way i see it right now is that hyper offense as a whole is not the core of the issue in this meta as opposed to slurpuff itself. as pak implied in his post, puff leaves quite possibly the least room for error out of any threat in the builder, and that's saying a lot for something that wasn't even in the a ranks as of the last vr update (speaking of which i'm down to throw in my personal one at some point). when i prep against hyper offense, it almost always comes down to making sure that i (1) deny slurpuff setup opportunities and (2) have a couple of backup plans if it does manage to set up; by the time i have those two boxes checked, i probably already have ways with dealing with its teammates, save maybe venomoth which i'll explain in a bit. however, that leaves me considerably less room to account for other consistent, prominent threats (specs/LO hydra being a huge example) which have ultimately made my builds a bit more predictable than i would have desired. finally, as for my current opinion on a potential vote, i mentioned in my previous post that i wasn't 100% on voting ban, but i've now made up my mind that i'd rather see it go than let it stay.

regarding the rest of hyper offense in this meta, venomoth brings its own set of characteristics to the table and is considered by some of us to be another problematic threat on hyper offense. not only does it synergize extremely well with puff due to sleep powder and its ability to break down puff's best switch-ins, it can also sweep unprepared teams in its own right. as a standalone component, however, it's nowhere near the level that puff is at. sleep + qd is objectively less potent than belly drum + unburden despite tinted lens being a huge gift, and it has a far worse defensive typing and worse bulk; add these up and we have a threat that is ultimately a lot easier to account for on the builder. gyarados can be viewed on a similar vein with numerous cases of it inexplicably 6-0ing in uupl/snake, but once again it holds nowhere near the level of offensive gravity that puff has. as for everything else, i believe froslass has always been balanced and, dare i say it, fun to face in this meta, and nothing else really screams overbearing here.

tl;dr puff should be the sole focus atm; the rest of hyper offense is perfectly fine as is.
 
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