CAP 32 - Part 1 - Concept Assessment

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spoo

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Alright, I think the last two questions have been sufficiently covered. I don't see anything crucial left for us to discuss before moving on, so Concept Assessment will be coming to a close.

The clear majority of us believe that offensive builds will be the most effective as potential roles. This is where the design space seems the most open, and through tools like high-BP STABs and unique boosting abilities/moves, we have a lot of room to work around lackluster stats and set ourselves apart from competition. Support for defensive roles was also decently high, though, and I agree that they have a lot of promise; while a defensive mon's stats may be comparatively harder to compensate for, we also established earlier that the bar for average stats is much lower for defensive mons in general, which helps to alleviate this issue. As for purely support-based roles, it seems our faith in them is the lowest. Still, because support options provide utility independent of our stats, certain abilities and moves could complement a more offensively or defensively inclined build very effectively.

Now onto the more divisive topic of stage order. I've waffled back and forth on this for the past couple days, but ultimately I'm confident that this is our best choice moving forward.

Concept Assessment => Typing => Concept Assessment 2 (choosing a role) => Defining Moves (very loose, all-encompassing list) => Ability => Defining Moves 2 (standard operation) => Threats => Stat Limits => Stats => Movesets​

I talked this decision over with the TLT and received a majority support for this order of operations. Both SLs for Ability and Moves, the stages most affected, preferred this order as well. There was some dissent for the placement of DM before Ability earlier in this thread, as well as choosing our typing before role, so I want to be as transparent as possible about my thought process.

Typing before CA2
Just as our typing heavily informs our role, a few users pointed out that our role can easily inform what typing we choose, which makes it difficult to choose which one to go first. In the vast majority of CAP processes (I think everything before Gen 8?), we didn't explicitly identify a role before the Typing stage or even at all, so I don't believe that we would inherently be without a clear goal in Typing by doing so. My intention for placing Typing before roles is to restrict our options during the former stage the least possible amount; while we could likely make just about any role work (some will be better than others), our typing is absolutely crucial to our success and I'd argue there is a much slimmer margin for error in choosing a good one. As such, I believe it is better to conduct the stage without a role that restricts what options are available.

Defining Moves & Ability
Historically speaking, polljumping is not uncommon in the Ability stage. (For anyone unaware, polljumping refers to arguments that are based on polls that haven't happened yet, e.g. arguing for Electric/Steel because it would make a good defensive Pokemon that has Levitate.) During Jumbao, some of the discussion around Drought was based around wanting options like strong Fire-type coverage and Growth later on, while the most it ended up getting was Flame Burst. During Smokomodo, much of the discussion around Technician was implicitly about Bonemerang and Flame Charge, but those options ended up being denied later on. These CAPs led to the creation of the Defining Moves stage in attempt to remedy this issue, which it largely did. But even as recently as our last CAP, Saharaja, we saw people arguing for Serene Grace as its Primary Ability who assumed that we would learn additional moves with strong secondary effects -- of course, we were unable to know this, because a proper discussion about moves hadn't happened yet. Additional minor examples of this phenomenon can be found in a number of other processes. I don't agree that we should carry on as normal and simply relax the rules around something that has shown to have negative impact on the CAP process.

In my opinion, it will be easier to conduct a successful Ability stage if we have some idea of what our best moveset options are. Whether this is a comprehensive list of relevant STABs, good status/general utility moves, or anything else, these are things that can influence what ability we choose. By discussing moves earlier than normal, we can reduce the impact of polljumping and make more informed decisions at a crucial step of the process. I believe this is key to our goal of building with synergies between each stage in mind. The flip side of this, as a few users were keen to point out, is that it could negatively warp the Ability stage in its own way. If we already have a list of good moves in front of us, we may unfairly ignore abilities that interact with moves not on the list, despite how exhaustive or inclusive the initial list aimed to be. There could also be new moves enabled by our ability that weren't discussed in the initial DM stage and find themselves left out during the Stats stage as a result. The solution to the latter issue is to have a Defining Moves 2 stage, conducted as normal post-Ability, but the former issue remains. We will need to be proactive about considering the full breadth of Ability options and not hyperfixating on our list of Defining Moves. I fully trust Scizivire to ensure that this happens, and I trust the CAP userbase to not fall into this trap as well.

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That covers everything I have to say. Thanks for making this stage run as smoothly as I could've hoped, and for all the great insights that will guide us during the rest of the process. The Typing stage should be soon underway, so I'll hand things over to dex to take it from here!
 
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