Pokemon Game Discussion 2.0

[Tim85]

Lol.

In all seriousness, 4th and 5th gens might as well be retitled, "How can we screw over Blissey?" The advent of far stronger fighting attacks/mons, Stronger and faster pokemon overall, Outrage becoming physical, Magic Guard, Mach Punch, Shadow Tag Gothittele, Psyshock, Voltturn, Eviolite Chansey, and Secret Sword are just wrecking Blissey... And what has she gotten in return? Diddly squat since 3rd Gen... The day that Blissey got OHKO'd by a special attack in OU... I bet back in 3rd Gen, people would have laughed at the notion...

In the Battle Subway, I OHKO'd a Blissey with Manectric using Thunderbolt because the stupid thing kept using Thunder Wave on it and it has Lightningrod for its ability. After five or six Thunder Waves Manectric plowed through it.

[Demon Lord Gira]

I think a LOT of things changed, and not just Blissey. My Infernape and Electivire were main staples in one of my Gen IV team, and they wrecked a lot of things; OHKO'ing Swamperts, Electivire never getting OHKO'd, never fearing Psychics or Grounds, etc, etc... now, for whatever reason, neither one of these guys can do the same thing in Gen V. I've never used Blissey, so I can't comment on how she got wrecked.

Alot of things have changed. Electrivire in now RU instead of OU (to the joy of many Smogonites.... They felt Ele was dead weight in OU.) And Infernape... is jut a tad too frail and has the Latis breathing down his neck. Being 100% wall'd by Jellicent doesn't help... Rain dominating the metagame certainly doesn't help either... Atleast Swift Swim/Drizzle's banned... The horrors of facing down those damn overpowered Ludicolos...

[THE GODZILLA]

Alot of things have changed. Electrivire in now RU instead of OU (to the joy of many Smogonites.... They felt Ele was dead weight in OU.) And Infernape... is jut a tad too frail and has the Latis breathing down his neck. Being 100% wall'd by Jellicent doesn't help... Rain dominating the metagame certainly doesn't help either... Atleast Swift Swim/Drizzle's banned... The horrors of facing down those damn overpowered Ludicolos...

I used Infernape for awhile on Battle Simulators with a lot of success, usually running Mixape. I ran Grass Knot (Thunderpunch when playing DW due to Iron Fist) for predicting the bulky water switch-in. Mixape was a helluva fun Pokemon to use and did work every time I used him. Being immune to Will-o-Wisp is nice too.

[SJM925]

Got some weird stares today....

Gonna work on these two tonight. Not quite sure how I wanna use this bugger yet....

[Demon Lord Gira]

Nope. All Dream World starters are male...

[MothraRocks]

I am SO annoyed right now. I'm trying to get into the Dreamworld, but I forgot my password, so I select "Reset Password". But it keeps saying I need my Player ID...where would I find that? It won't let me do anything, any suggestions?

[Demon Lord Gira]

Try heading out to the Game Sync Settings in the main menu of your pokemon Black/White, then connect to Nintendo WFC to see your Game Sync ID... atleast, that is how you recieved it... So you should be able to see it there.

In other news, Garchomp is being retested for OU... without it's ability Sand Veil. So forall of you who want to reuse Chomp, but hated the hax he utilized with Sand Veil, now's your time to run amock with Rough Skin Chomp... THen again, Chomp is hardly a menace anymore, what with all the ice priority, STAB Hurricanes, and faster sweepers dominating OU...

Kero kero kero~

[SJM925]

dafuckisthis

Where the hell are all the people that clamored that you can't use Blaze Blaziken because the ability is a part of the pokemon?


This is why I don't bother to follow smogon's bullshit.

[MothraRocks]

O_e

I only have 940 dream points?? Ugh...Imma have to do this a lot to get some decent Pokes...

Flygon, where exactly did you find the Magnemite? I wanna try it out.

[Demon Lord Gira]

I found it in the Rugged Mountains... It comes with the Analytic ability...

dafuckisthis

Where the hell are all the people that clamored that you can't use Blaze Blaziken because the ability is a part of the pokemon?


This is why I don't bother to follow smogon's bullshit.

Well, there are people over there who feel like trying Blaziken out... but the thing is, Speed Boost would have to be banned, and Speed Boost isn't broken on anything else... and getting rid of it would turn Ninjask into a completely useless pokemon... Wheras Sand Veil doesn't bring any good, but only more hax... Plus, everything with Sand Veil now has a more useful ability, even Cacturne... though that last bit is debatable...

[Bentley]

Sand Veil is just a different version of Snow Cloak though, I think it can be a fair ability, Smogon just whines too much about hax abilities.

And yes, Speed Boost is a decent ability, they should go ahead and ban the Blaziken + Speed Boost combination, since they already banned Swift Swim + Infinite Rain. Sounds lame, but they already went into a lame path when they banned SS + Poly.

[Demon Lord Gira]

Sand Veil is just a different version of Snow Cloak though, I think it can be a fair ability, Smogon just whines too much about hax abilities.

And yes, Speed Boost is a decent ability, they should go ahead and ban the Blaziken + Speed Boost combination, since they already banned Swift Swim + Infinite Rain. Sounds lame, but they already went into a lame path when they banned SS + Poly.

Damn internet ate up my long rant, kero... And I forgot to save it... SO here's the shorter and sweeter version of it.

Here's the thing, though. Smogon shrikes away from Mon+ability bans... they want to keep things as simple as possible, with as few things banned as possible... As such, Exadrill and Blaziken as a whole are banned, and not their combinations.... The issue with Snow Cloak was delt with in th elower tiers by banning hail as a whole. As for Sand Veil, all the mons that run it can now run other abilities, so it's Sand Veil that's being targeted now. And now, there's talk of banning Tornadus-T and Genesect, for various reasons... Endless Hurrucanes in the rain and Download-boosted U-turns might be the reason...

Edit: Here's some quites I found pertaining to those two in particular:

Genesect on the other hand needs to be sent directly to uber until we have the chance to bring some ubers down to OU (which is a later discussion as you said) and new DW releases (Chandy).

Nearly impossible to trap and kill with our current pokemon, hard to find out which set it is using without losing a lot, near perfect coverage and good typing aided by rain. Also having a good ability in Download which semi-allows it to bypass Multiscale among other things and great offensive stats as a mixed pokemon (120/120/99?) that doesn't hurt either

I believe Tornadus-T is the biggest threat at the moment. Without a way to eliminate Rain or a specially defensive Steel type who is also neutral to Fighting (Jirachi) it's really hard to stop it from spamming Hurricanes all over the metagame.

Tornadus-T is by far the most broken Pokemon of BW2 to date. Even Blissey and Tyranitar fail to counter securely, it's Life orb set allows it to run Superpower that can break the blob alongside with the dino. Regenerator suits it perfectly, retrieving its health from Stealth Rock as well as from life orb. Jirachi stands out as its safiest switch in,(that lacks reliable recovery bear in mind) this forces many teams to build around it or another common check, Mamoswine. Furthermore pushing lower base speed Pokemon to the depths of OU and making priority a must. Knowingly not everything works by slapping on a Scarf and throwing it in your team.

As for non-weather-related threats, I feel Genesect is the only one worthy of consideration. A U-turn of such power makes merely countering it inadequate, and it's already an extremely difficult pokemon to counter; with one or two checks weakened by repeated U-turns and hazards, or trapped by Dugtrio, Gothitelle, or Wobbuffet, Genesect can cause untold havoc to your team. But since when has volt-turn been broken? The answer is, we've never had a volt-turner any where near approaching the power of Genesect. For me, it's too much.

EDIT 2: Oh, and it looks like the weathers are being discussed for bannage... something about rain allowing Tornadus-T to spam Hurricane...

[Bentley]

Here's the thing, though. Smogon shrikes away from Mon+ability bans... they want to keep things as simple as possible, with as few things banned as possible... As such, Exadrill and Blaziken as a whole are banned, and not their combinations.... The issue with Snow Cloak was delt with in th elower tiers by banning hail as a whole. As for Sand Veil, all the mons that run it can now run other abilities, so it's Sand Veil that's being targeted now.

Precisely, because things have to be kept simple, they should ban as little as possible. They banned Drizzle + Swiftswim, when in truth they should've banned Drizzle directly; I assume they kept Drizzle because otherwise Drought would be harder to counteract but one way or another, they dropped the facade of simplicity long ago. Now, if you want to ban ability combinations, pokemon and abilities... Is that really simple? I mean, the Blaziken ban is only active on a single pokemon, so you only have to know that rule in the case you face or wish to use Blaziken, that's not a lot; but if you are there already, you also know why Blaziken is banned in the first place, so it is not more complicated to aknowledge ability+pokemon combinations than just pokemon, it's the exact same thing.

Now... What they didn't want to do is to have the tiers entirely divided in which pokemon with which ability should be on it. If Pressure Lugia is OU but Multiscale Lugia is uber, then there is a problem there. The practical cases are next to non-existant though, there are almost no abilities that make that much of a difference -the few examples, Sand Rush, Drizzle and Speed Boost are the only thing in contention, nobody even cares about Shadow Tag anymore-. I do think they didn't want people to argue about mixed bannings, because the discussion would be endless and mostly pointless.

I suppose they should simply allow Garchomp back into the fold and keep mostly as they are, because changing the rules drastically would only make a big mess. We already learned this set of rules and changing them would only be a bigger mess than it was before. I do think that ability+pokemon combinations will be unavoidable at some point as the pokemon pool continues to grow.

[SJM925]

That's why I don't bother with smogon 100%. Some of their bannings render entire strategies useless to some people that have no idea what they're doing. My girlfriend's brother (has no idea what an IV is, barely understands EV's as-is) likes the idea of DrizzleToad and two-three swift swimmers on his team. Everyone and their mother DC's when battling him, because they follow smogon like gospel.

Like I said before, if Nintendo bands something for tournament play, and smogon bans it, I say that's fair game.

[Tim85]

I don't follow tiers either. If a Pokemon fits the team, I'm gonna use it regardless of where it is on the tiers. Nor do I follow their rules, like the Drizzle-Swift Swim ban.

[Bentley]

Tiers can be fun, but mostly lower tiers where people can use downright weak pokemon to some success, I'm not really against that. But standard play as going by the Smogon rules doesn't look all that much appealing to me... Clearly it's been driven by something other than playing pokemon for fun.

[Demon Lord Gira]

Tiers can be fun, but mostly lower tiers where people can use downright weak pokemon to some success, I'm not really against that. But standard play as going by the Smogon rules doesn't look all that much appealing to me... Clearly it's been driven by something other than playing pokemon for fun.

Well, yes... it's made to make a fair and equal metagame where people can play based on skill. However, that doesn't prevent you from using NU and PU tiered mons in an OU match... you can still do that for fun if you want...

[Legionmaster]

Yes, because simply knowing what Pokemon and moves are popular and making educated guesses based on that is so skillful.

[Bentley]

Manetric and Yanmega are both solid pokes, Manetric is a slower Jolteon with better coverage and Yanmega just has some problem with Stealth Rocks, but they are pretty awesome on their own right.

Well, yes... it's made to make a fair and equal metagame where people can play based on skill. However, that doesn't prevent you from using NU and PU tiered mons in an OU match... you can still do that for fun if you want...

You're touching precisely what bothers me about OU, clearly you shouldn't play for fun if you want to face pokes in the OU list -if we were to assume people follow the Smogon tiers-, because the tiers were created to feature a certain kind of metagame, and the OU metagame is intended to throw aside every "subpar" choice there is. OU exists solely to discourage people from using certain pokes/strategies including NU or PU pokemon, even if they aren't outlawed explicitly.

Go to the Smogon forums and you will see lots of people advocating for powerful pokemon being higher in the usage list. Maybe those pokemon aren't more used because they aren't (as) fun to play with. Fair and fun are wide concepts.

When I claimed that OU is not conceived to "play for fun", I didn't mean it to be taken literaly, but to convey the idea that the standard metagame drifts away from fun games quite often. Sorry if this caused confusion.

[Demon Lord Gira]

So... i've decided to try my hand at a little weather wars... and here's my trump card:

Tornadus-T w-Choice Specs
Ability: Regenerator
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Nature: Timid
- Hurricane
- Focus Blast
- U-turn
- Sleep Talk

Tornadus-T only needs 3 moves to work. Hurricane in the rain destroys everything, Focus Blast wipes out everything else, and U-turn allows it to abuse Regenerator... But Sleep Talk... that's where things get fun. Oh, so you want to Spore me, Mr. Breloom? Well too bad! With Tornadus T fast asleep, all you need to do is press Sleep Talk, and things DIE! Even the fat pink blobs are afraid of switching in, or else getting confused by Hurricane... It pretty much turns Breloom onto it's head, and outspeeds every non-scarfed mon in OU bar Jolteon... It's alot of fun...