>Love react for based Heatran take
Patching up counterplay to broken sweepers and giving more defensive options in the builder like you're describing is the reason I can't be 100% anti Tera, I remain on the fence for this reason
i assume stall has made a resurgence lately but i'm not sure why it's made a resurgence. i imagine stall teams don't like facing most gouging fire variants, and it gets annihilated by ogerpon should you not use hydrapple. stall did have a good matchup into rain when archaludon was in the tier though, so maybe that caused blissey to rise?
could it—or even the recent rise of stall altogether—also have something to do with the prevalence of stupid weather breakers? clod being the only consistent arch answer, plus blissey being one of the only consistent bolt answers, plus dozo being one of the only things resembling a consistent gouging answer, lend themselves well to stall cores (even though stall gets shredded by gouging anyway lmao). just a bit of an observation, i dunno
Not going to lie as a supreme hater of Lando, it's really good right now but it's essentially just 1 set. What Intimidate does in this meta is a lot of Rocky Helmet spam with all the broken sweepers we have.
Nah, Boulder is cheeks. Too overly Tera reliant, most people have abandoned it in favor of mons like Roaring Moon or Valiant on Offense that are great even without Tera while providing some mild defensive utility. Alot of people spamming RH Lando BO/Balance, and Roar Zama, phazing in general fucks up Boulder. Difficult to even get up an SD when you have one of the worst defensive typings in the game. Even after an SD it still isn’t strong enough to pick up crucial KOs on neutral targets.
actually it has two sets now! they both fulfill identical roles but the main difference is that one is bulky and the other is fast!
yeah man chien-pao wasn't even top 1 in usage last year, why did we ban it and espathra instead of gholdengo? the OU council is just so ass backwards man
would tera blast be a viable option on it as a fourth move? it's outclassed as stab by hyper voice and focus blast is stronger coverage (though the accuracy is a massive drawback), but it seems to me like tera blast might be better for bluffing since literally anything can learn it. it'd probably be best as a volc bluff, since volc carries tera blast more often than any other mon and isn't averse to using it before popping tera in some scenarios. of course, the problem with hisuian zoroark is that when you describe a strat with it out loud it stops workingMy experience too. Want to say thatZoroark-Hisui
It can bluff all these things well and they pull in their respective checks. Still pretty niche, but its nice as a build-around on HO where you can use it to bait a tera or hit some boots by bluffing as a must-answer-now type of sweeper.
Zoroark-Hisui @ Heavy-Duty Boots
Ability: Illusion
Tera Type: Fighting / Fairy
EVs: 4 Atk / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Hasty Nature
- Knock Off
- Hex
- Will-O-Wisp
- Focus Blast / Nasty Plot / Protect / Whatever
dude it's just people running stall which isn't a problem, calm down
Why run Deo-S which has no defensive utility and who's supportive capabilities are nothing special, when I can run Glimmora, Ting-Lu, Dragapult, Zamazenta, etc. all of which offer more to the general team?
This pretty much echoes my thoughts on the
drop matter; while I think UU might be a bit wild with Deo-S, I feel like Deo-S is sort of a jack-of-all-trades master of none. Sure it's fast, sure Psycho Boost hits hard, and sure it's got great utility, but it doesn't really specialize in anything other than being fast and nuking things with Psycho Boost occasionally. Also, sorry I haven't been as active lately; finals week and lots of additional work as a whole, I'll be more active ASAPOn the topic of survey scaling you guys raise good points and I’m sure a lot of people do vote 1 or 5 to maximize their impact even tho that’s not really the spirit of the survey.
(assuming a defensive set, but no matter what the set, Lando just U-Turns out for 50% chip and the switchin beats Espathra handily)
(this is one of the mons that would beat offensive Espathra outright)
(still does a clean 30 with a slow U-Turn into a teammate that can finish the job)
(no caveats here - dozo is a passive blob)
(assuming no twave)
the fact that espathra literally can't touch kingambit without TB fighting should probably tell you enough that this thing is not uber material w/o tera by any means. best you have is dazzling gleam but even at +2 it only deals about 46% max to uninvested kingambit. not to mention it's essentially useless against ting-lu hazard stack teams and needs substitute to not let heatran come in for free. do people actually think espathra would still be broken without tera?The Teraless Espathra discussion kinda got buried by the new tier shifts, but I figured I'd give a more nuanced take on it since the people disagreeing with me seem to love walls of calcs and theorymonning how "broken" a 95/60/60 bulk mono-Psychic mon is in OU after getting two free turns to set up somehow???
So to start off, let's just go down the OU list, and see exactly how easy it is for Espathra to set up to +2. Assuming Espathra has just switched in safely at full health, this is how that list looks (generally assuming the most common set for each mon as well as a bulky Espathra set - offensive Espathra beats a handful of mons easier but loses outright to many more).
Espathra Just Dies:
Espathra Can't Beat These Long-Term:
Espathra Wins the 1v1 But Takes Huge Chip:
Espathra Can Set Up, But Will Get Crippled:
Espathra Can Set Up:
So, what? Espathra can only set up on a handful of suicide leads and passive fatmons, half of which just U-Turn out? That sounds pretty bad! Especially when you consider how Espathra is so weak that even at +1 it fails to kill the majority of offensive mons, allowing them to revenge kill it with ease. The worst part is, if Espathra just beat stall, then you could maybe argue it had a place on HO. But like, it still loses to stall anyway??? CM Blissey is a nightmare matchup, and even other slow teamstyles have mons like Hatt and Ting-Lu that completely ruin Espathra every time it comes in. You have to be in THE most optimal conditions for Espathra to have even a shot at success, and half of the time that still isn't enough!
Now obviously organizing things this way removes a lot of the nuance, but so does calling Treads a team's Espathra answer when that mon isn't staying alive past turn 5 most of the time lmao. As you may have noticed, a bunch of this counterplay relies on dealing enough damage to handle Espathra before it sets up, which of course means that behind Screens or with a Terrain Seed, the mon becomes much scarier. But scary Screens mons are a dime a dozen in the current meta. Compared to offensive behemoths like Roaring Moon and Volcarona, I just don't think Teraless Espathra could be called anything more than a matchup fish and a gimmick.
Nobody who can get reqs thinks this. Espathra would be very underwhelming without Tera. If Speed Boost activated upon switching in mid turn, it'd be a bit better, but without Tera, Espathra will have an extremely difficult time setting up to +2 outside of screens given it's terrible defensive typing and mediocre bulk with garbage coverage options.
Idk, sub/cm/gleam/sp just brute forces its way through everything late game. Remember that teammates exist and will chip down it's checks. 1 free turn is all it usually needs since it sets up passively. Maybe it ends up as a shitty version of latias or ironpress zama but I have a feeling that snowballs too quickly and has a much easier time muscling past checks than the two cheese mons do.
Kingambit will drop off in usage significantly if Tera is banned and Ting Lu already has pretty low usage, idt their existence would make Espathra not objectively unhealthy and a centralizing force in the metagame at minimum, while it still adds not a single positive to the meta, even Regieleki could be a bad spinner.
