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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v2 [Update on Post #5186]
- Thread starter TPP
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Gambit with tera is broken. Said it since the first chien pao ban. There are counters like iron hands for example but its still over the top. Fighting type went from a mid offensive typing to a mandatory defensive typing just to resist sucker punch. People talk about great tusk being the new landorus because of its usage but let's see how many people use it if gambit wasn't in the tier... sure tusk is good but half of them are there as a gambit check.
this sort of wall of calcs is about as convincing as "look how much damage cb rampardos does with head smash", which is to say, not convincing at all. ursaluna already hits hard enough to tear apart most of the metagame, especially given its offensive nature. seems way more productive to me to run a tera type that lets you switch up your defensive profile so you can force an unfavorable trade for your opponent. example: your opponent switches their specs dragapult into your weakened ursaluna on a predicted facade. if you're tera normal, you are now forced out and depending on how good your opponent's team is at pressuring yours, your ursaluna may not be able to get another kill for the rest of the game. on the other hand, you could also be tera fairy, simply stay in, and eq that pult into oblivion. similarly, it can utilize tera fairy or other useful defensive types like water to turn weaknesses into neutral hits or resistances and turn the tables on a slew of revenge killers. if i were to make a case for ursaluna being busted because of tera id home in on that aspect of it, not on "tera normal big dmg"
now this just doesn't seem true. stall already wasn't great before home. think it has to do with a lot more than the presence of one funny breaker, i.e. with the dearth of clerics (tho at least the pink blobs got heal bell back i suppose), lack of reliable hazard control, severely reduced pool of fat mons w/ useful progress-making tools (i.e. toxic, knock off), tera existing, those sorts of things
stall deals with gambit by switching in a dozo and cursing up
gambit is more reliant on its SD sets to break than luna, who has higher attack, higher base power, and still outspeeds stall lol
as someone running it ironpress garg is decent against it if you can get a turn to set up (and are a tera type not weak to ground)
Ursaluna has been hurt immensely with the ban of Magearna. It's incredible on trick room, and makes trick room viable, but trick room isn't great by any means and Luna is pretty easy to play around. Nowhere near banworthy, and arguably not even suspect worthy
Also, Ting Lu ban? I don't think Fissure is legal in OU, unlike VGC
okay I’m not arguing what Tera is better, I don’t care, I’m just going off usage and if you look at usage Tera normal is what’s being used most, and you can look at the calcs and bring up CB rampardos but the one thing that doesn’t lie is numbers and with Trick room is up there’s no way to stop it unless you Tera which would be a sad waste of a Tera.
stall wasn’t as good as it was in gen 8 but it was still viable and peaked high ladder numerous times. Ursa has invalidated completely imo.
Yeah I’ll break down my opinions on Ting Lu another day but I’ll start the bandwagon
It has lost explosion though, what 4 moves are you running?
usage doesn't determine viability/brokenness. turns out a lot of people dont think very hard about their team composition and just go "tera normal facade go brrrr", who knew?
i dont really know what this part of your sentence is getting at. in any case numbers certainly dont lie but they also require context to be meaningful, otherwise you end up with precisely the sort of cb rampardos nonsense i alluded to
im agnostic as to whether or not ursaluna is broken but i think your argument would be a lot more interesting if you could back this up further, because it's not like this is the first time we've seen a mon that doesnt have solid counters under trick room. thing about trick room is that you still need to set it up and you still need to get your breaker in without taking too much damage and you still need to click the right buttons. there are common immunities to both of ursa's stab moves, so even if your opp gets tr up and gets ursa in safely it's not like there aren't ways to stall those turns out. and tera does exist as a last-ditch method of counterplay, as you already mentioned. if you want to present a serious argument that ursaluna is broken, you will have to show that all the means one has at their disposal to keep ursa under tr in check are not sufficient
yeah but who cares, most ladder players aren't especially good at this game and do not know how to deal with stall (hence the many posts you see every single generation decrying bans on offensive mons because the ou council must have some sort of hidden stall agenda). anyone who can pilot a stall team decently well is guaranteed to do well on ladder, using stall and loading like 4 games at once has been a tried-and-true strat to get ez suspect reqs throughout the generations for a reason. stall's prevalence and success in high-level tournament play is the only metric by which you can realistically determine stall's viability, and afaik its presence there has been marginal this gen, though i've only paid so much attention
Earthquake, UTurn, Stone Edge, then either Rocks, Taunt, Fly, or Bulldoze in niche cases, i e. If your opponent has one Mon left that gets outspeeded by one of your Mon at -1
They hated him because he told them the truth.
I'm not a stall player, so I can't say for sure, but I do know that Protect has become immensely more powerful post-Home in my experience, with a general increase in Choice item usage, TR, and Rain. I'm gonna assume that that's no different on stall. Obviously, it's not a perfect antidote to Ursa, but it does increase its cost of staying in, helps you gauge your opponents tendencies to play around with immunities to its STABs (not reliable, but you take what you can get sometimes), and helps doubly against TR MUs.
From least to most HEAT, I can think of:
Water/Flying/Fire Tera Blast -- #bantera
Crunch -- Meh, but at least it hurts Air Balloon Gholdengo?
Brick Break -- Some people really hate Screens
Grass Knot -- Some people really hate Tusk/Ting-Lu/Dozo (though this would be better on Scarf, since Band EQ goes hard)
Facade -- A decent emergency option on `mons lacking a good 4th option
Fly -- Flying STAB if you don't want to run Tera Flying, but as DNite has shown, band STAB Tera Flying can be scary.
Hammer Arm -- Stronger Fighting coverage than Brick Break, I guess?
Sand Tomb -- Ultimate HEAT: gets buffed to 60 BP with Tera Ground (120 BP after tera), traps any non-flying bulky switch-in to let you respond appropriately, adds trapping damage to make up for the power difference between it and EQ. Notably out-damages EQ against Grassy Terrain teams.
Note: Sand Tomb is not actually a good idea (unless Rillaboom viability booms), but it's a fun theorymon.
Broken things are fun all the time! In fact, the broken things that wind up having the largest resistance to tiering actions are also things a lot of players find fun. The big one here is Tera, but there have been plenty of mons over the years who have either delayed or dodged a suspect at different points in time because people like playing with them.
And, again, something being fun isn't a reason against banning that thing. It's just a reason why people might want to attempt to preserve it. That's the Tera argument in a nutshell, really.
On a more editorial level, though? All the way down to damage rolls, Pokemon is a game about variance. And while you could absolutely create format designed around removing variance? It wouldn't really look anything like the game that we know and love. Actually trying to play a format like that is not something that would have long-term appeal to almost anyone here.
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This is ridiculous, adhering to the same standard as we do for current tiering while OU has been the staple metagame for over 10 years is not a good viewpoint. In the Ubers metagame, niche threats are used as defensive answers to common threats or niche strategies like webs are used since they can support the strong ubers pokemon.
If we were to adhere to a 4.52% cutoff, all these current pokemon would currently be banned:
Iron Treads
Great Tusk
Ting-Lu
Kingambit
Glimmora
Corviknight
Grimmsnarl
Clodsire
Houndstone **
Hatterene
Pelipper
Gholdengo
Cyclizar *
Toxapex
Walking Wake
Dragonite
Iron Valiant
Skeledirge
Masquerain
Iron Hands
Ditto
Garganacl
Iron Moth
Basculegion **
Cinderace
* has Shed Tail in ubers
** has last respects in ubers
Great Tusk
Ting-Lu
Kingambit
Glimmora
Corviknight
Grimmsnarl
Clodsire
Houndstone **
Hatterene
Pelipper
Gholdengo
Cyclizar *
Toxapex
Walking Wake
Dragonite
Iron Valiant
Skeledirge
Masquerain
Iron Hands
Ditto
Garganacl
Iron Moth
Basculegion **
Cinderace
* has Shed Tail in ubers
** has last respects in ubers
That's over half of the pre-home OU roster, by implementing this ruling you're quite literally disrupting every single tier by making OU the "New UU", UU the "New RU" and so on.
For hell's sake, Masquerain, a PU pokemon is being used in Ubers because the metagame landscape is entirely different than it is for any tier from OU to PU.
You can't compare the standard usage tiers to the ubers metagame because they follow different rulesets:
- Ubers allows trapping abilities
- Ubers allows Moody
- Ubers allows Evasion Abilities
- Ubers allows Shed Tail and Last Respects
This is the most laughable "solution" to power creep, and honestly displays that you simply don't understand what smogon is about.
Additionally this post struck me as odd,
Why are you arbitrarily deciding that Garchomp and Tyranitar should always stay OU? You seem to have this attachment to old Pokemon for some reason, and saying that UU "is the real OU now" becase it has more Pokemon you like? Just say that you find UU more fun and move on, go play some gen 6 OU or something if you want to play in a metagame where your favourites are viable.
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These two are completly wreaking my shit (and hazard/moon blast spam+coverage in general).
How can I deal with them while using a balance team with Landorus please?
I mean, you have Raichu in your nick, he is an Electric type, use that logic.
Even post-Home stall has already peaked number 2 and 2100 ELO. Stall still has access to Teras and the likes of Idef Corvi as options for Ursaluna, and at least some techs to deal with Luna under TR. Yes, it may still get difficult against TR, but honestly you'd kinda hope for a style that can bring the strongest breakers and then bring them back to full 1 or 2 times to have a good matchup against stall. I also find it hard to call the decline of stall in the post-Home metagame the fault of Ursaluna, when it was always in such a precarious position pre-Home. Stall used to be able to utilise unorthodox pokes for specific walling efforts, and it used to have a level of versatility in what weird choices it can bring. Since Gen 9 however, the metagame already had stall boxed into a corner where it basically always needed 6 boots and maybe a choice of 7-8 mons, with most of the stall optimizations coming in the form of new tera types for certain mons. If you wanted to call that situation viable in pre-Home (I would), I wouldn't be giving up hope on post-Home stall just yet.
Yeah I'm not saying that Tera Normal is the only thing that makes Ursa broken, but that's what I've seen mostly on the ladder. Agreed tho
Yeah I see what you're saying but what I mean about numbers don't lie is what you see is what you get, sure it might be difficult to get Trick Room up lets say but with the availability of tera in conjunction with team make up (you can put a lot of pressure with sacking mons etc). I think it puts a lot of pressure (Ursaluna / TR) in team building where you have to prepare to have a Flying you have to have a Ghost, okay just run Balloon Dengo (whatever the solution is). Like Cresselia (TR / Lunar Dance) gives Ursaluna multiple lives.
Part of my argument is the sheer power + bulkiness of it naturally is difficult to overcome especially if you add tera to the equation and fix its one weakness which is its speed. Like Melmetal last generation was suspect tested and it was a putting up crazy calcs on the CB set but to be honest nothing of this caliber (To be fair tera probably has something to do with it). I don't want to continue with the Melmetal comparison because there a lot of differences, but Ursaluna (offensively) makes Melmetal look like a joke, which is the reason I'm bringing it up. If there's anything you want me to elaborate on I could, I wrote that post 10 minutes before I went to sleep lol.
Fair point, my point is stall has a place in this meta yeah it's not as it was previous gens but the hype train was alive until post-HOME tbh. (I still think it will have a place tbh) it's just tough to see atm.
Red Raven
I COULD BE BANNED!
Lmao this is the most perfect reply I've seen
Electhor, Rotom and Thundurus are too slow, can't take a hit from any of them (hate knock off from Samurott + 2hko by Moonblast).
If you want defensive checks, Slowking pairs quite nicely against all of Enamorus's sets and is able to pivot out to something that can revenge kill it.
Zapdos should be a decent Samurott check, as you're disincentivizing it from clicking Ceaseless Edge in fear of para. Hisuian Samurott's currently don't commonly run knock off, and if they do they'll usually be clicking Ceaseless Edge more often anyway, just make sure you have decent hazard control just in case you do get knocked.
Pdef Zapdos takes everything from Samurott, Sdef Restalk Rotom-H takes everything from Enamorus. Both pivot out. Offensive electrics that are fast, don't take hits well but pressure offensively.
The best solution to powercreep is simply just not caring about the powercreep itself and focus on what causes problems for the Metagame.
Every metagame can be summed up as using archetypes that best suit your team with the most appropriate Pokemon/move/item/ability. Powercreep is just X archetype having a replacement with Y thing. In the grand scheme of things, does it matter that something like Meowscarada is overall better than Greninja?
Every metagame can be summed up as using archetypes that best suit your team with the most appropriate Pokemon/move/item/ability. Powercreep is just X archetype having a replacement with Y thing. In the grand scheme of things, does it matter that something like Meowscarada is overall better than Greninja?
Nevermind, thank you for the wise words.
Rotom-Heat @ Heavy-Duty Boots
Ability: Levitate
Tera Type: Ghost
EVs: 252 HP / 4 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Will-O-Wisp
- Volt Switch
- Overheat
- Discharge
The solution to power creep is to fight power creep with power creep. Don't like how Abomasnow can't cut it in OU with the likes of Great Tusk and Kingambit running around? Bring Kyogre into the tier. The "meta" picks will buzz off real quick while Abomasnow will rise as a weather setter that can sponge whatever the ogre throws at it.
counterpoint: that would be really fucking funny
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