I was reading that and had a feeling when I opened the spoiler, the first calc would be against bulkarona, haha!
Have been seeing a surprising level of Bulu, I guess it is a bulkier Rillaboom with a secondary typing that is a double edged sword. Could you please expand a bit more on why you prefer assault vest to other items? I have observed that the aggressive sets tend to cover similar threats, except obvious ones like fire and flying type special attackers. Also, in my experience horn leech AV sounds great on paper but is remarkably easy for any common team to play around, so it makes keeping your Bulu in the critical >70% HP threshold very hard!
The aggressive sets don't need to keep Bulu's hp high to check things, as it threatens 2hko's on some of OU's most common switch ins like Skarmory/melmetal/ferrothorn.
Sure Id love to:
There are many reasons as to why I chose AV as the item for my Tapu Bulu set, but I think they can all be summed up to role compression and creating opportunities for my team. With AV Bulu you acquire a great amount of possible switchins for your team that work for scouting sets, checking and countering a big part of our current metagame.
Let me give you an example: my opponent switches in Garchomp and I have a ferrothorn on my team as my defensive wall, many Garchomps nowadays are running a mixed set that likes to surprise Ferrothorn in the switchin with a fireblast that OHKOs, with AV Bulu I can switch into the chomp, survive comfortably the fireblast (which would toast me if I was banded or a stallbreaker taunt set), setup grassy terrain and react/predict what they do from there, if it SDs instead, I can easily go to ferro and win the 1v1 cause of grassy terrain. There are many, many cases like this where AV Bulu covers most if not all the options that my opponent may have, while also providing utility in grassy terrain.
When I look at the advantages of a set like the choiced one, I see that it is still prediction reliant and guessing wrong is much more punishing, given that you dont have that many opportunities to switch in, so I decided that if I was gonna make predictions, I`d rather make many that are not very risky (that still can have high rewards with focus punch), as opposed to making few predictions that are very risky and can have bigger rewards. It may seem like a thing of preference, and this may be my Fighting game background speaking, but I strongly believe that it is more valuable to have multiple opportunities that are not that risky to understand how your opponent plays and reacts, rather than having the pressure to make the few choices that you have be absolutely worth it.
Maybe it would be different if Bulu got u-turn, as it would be easier to cover multiple options, but I dont think that would be faithful to its design, I like to think of Bulu as a 1v1 that has a typing that allows it to switch into a lot of important types (I really think that the fairy type is a little bit too good defensive wise) and forces its opponent to switch out as it probably wont win the 1v1, and that`s when the true fun begins, as it rewards you for staying and switching out too, cause of grassy terrain (which of course also can help ur opponent, but the idea is that you design your team to get the most benefits).
Moving on to another topic, I would like to know where the popular opinions currently stand on HBD, because I really dislike that item and the type of careless gameplay it rewards, in the 1700s its not rare for me to see teams where there are 3 or even 4 mons with boots. I think hazards are the healthiest they`ve ever been and having boots as an extra option is just a little bit too much IMO. Im not saying banning them completely, but I would really like to explore the idea of a clause.
Having said that, I just would like to know where that discussion is headed and what everybody thinks about them ATM.
Thanks for reading until the end