Announcement LC Suspect - Ruff Boy

[jake]

Our next suspect will be Rufflet. Thanks to its ability Hustle, Rufflet is by far one of the most powerful Pokemon in LC. Between Brave Bird and Close Combat, Rufflet boasts phenomenal neutral coverage on the entire tier, and enables it to use Choice items to great effect. When equipped with a Choice Band, Rufflet is able to OHKO nearly every Pokemon neutral to Brave Bird, making it an incredibly intimidating threat. It doesn't need to be Banded to be threatening, though, as it's similarly effective with a Choice Scarf cleaner set or one of its boosting sets featuring Bulk Up, Agility, or both.

The power granted by Hustle does come at a price: Rufflet's moves are 20% less accurate, which means that it is constantly at risk of missing critical moves. Rufflet can circumvent Hustle by using Aerial Ace, a move that hits 100% of the time, though it is much weaker than its other moves.

The council believes that Rufflet's flexibility and immense power are worthy of suspecting, and may be too much for the tier to handle.

The voting requirements are a minimum GXE of 80 with at least 50 games played. In addition, you may play 1 less game for every 0.2 GXE you have above 80 GXE, down to a minimum of 30 games at a GXE of 84. As always, needing more than 50 games to reach 80 GXE is fine.

minimum games needed

GXE	minimum games
80	50
80.2	49
80.4	48
80.6	47
80.8	46
81	45
81.2	44
81.4	43
81.6	42
81.8	41
82	40
82.2	39
82.4	38
82.6	37
82.8	36
83	35
83.2	34
83.4	33
83.6	32
83.8	31
84	30

For this suspect test, we will be using the regular LC ladder, so you must create a new account that begins with LCRB to qualify. When you have reached the requirements, click here (not posted yet) to post your proof. The suspect period will end on April 19th, 11:59 PM EST.

When posting in this thread, please keep in mind these rules:
1. No one liners or uninformed posts.
2. No discussion on other potential suspects or the suspect process.
3. Be respectful.

Your post will be deleted and possibly infracted if you fail to follow them.

 

[Shrug]

 

[TheRam]

 

[mad0ka]

just wanted to write a few of my thoughts regarding rufflet to maybe give a bit of discussion. while dewpider is certainly not super splashable due to its peculiar typing and middling speed tier, it still provides the same webs support for rufflet as cutiefly and can pressure defoggers in a similar manner. rufflet's substitute bulk up brave bird superpower set under webs is nigh impossible to stop barring misses, as it OHKOs literally everything in the tier at +1 with the appropriate coverage move. it's not difficult to set up either, since it has passable bulk. it can even set up on onix if it's revealed to have rock blast over head smash.

furthermore, rufflet has a myriad of other sets it can run too, which is often impossible to guess from just team preview alone. choice band, choice scarf, defensive evio sub roost bulk up, evio bulk up roost with close combat, berry juice agility-- the list goes on and on. these sets all have different ways of answering them too, and there's no real way to safely scout because of how strong a punch rufflet packs.

we still haven't really had many games at all for lcpl since it's still not the weekend, but speaking from my experience testing with a bunch of different people and the one official game we did have so far, it's clear to me that rufflet is still just as big a threat as it was pre-cutiefly ban. we originally delayed the rufflet suspect because we wanted to see how cutiefly being banned would impact rufflet's viability, and i can't say i've seen anything so far that makes it less ban-worthy to me.

 

[ghost]

I will be voting to ban Rufflet. The best pro-ban arguments are spelled out in the metagame thread and in doka's post above, but to restate why I believe this mon is broken:

1. Rufflet has almost no defensive counterplay. There are three viable flying resists in the tier: Onix, Pawniard, and Chinchou. All of these mons are trapper food and the former two are detonated by a well-predicted Close Combat. Rufflet makes Onix a nearly mandatory team member to stop choices Rufflet from clicking buttons and killing things. Chinchou is a slightly underrated pick in this meta I think, but it does not take banded Close Combat itself. Webs support from the decent Dewpider nullifies Chou and Onix's speed advantage and thus webs + CB ruff builds invalidate a lot of team structures.

2. Rufflet's versatility makes it even harder to counter. You've seen the rise of Rock Head Onix with Head Smash to deal with fat BU Ruff that sets up on Rock Blast, but even then Rock Head Onix loses to Scarf Ruff clicking CC on the switch. BU Ruff also handles Pawniard well. Making wrong predictions between scarf and band against opposing Rufflet can be seriously costly. There will ultimately be a Rufflet set that does well against your team.

3. Having a Hustle mon as the best mon in the tier reduces the impact of skillful gameplay and makes the meta worse. Rufflet utterly demolishes stuff 80% of the time but also often loses from winning positions thanks to Hustle. While the risk-reward heavily favors using Rufflet despite the miss chance, I don't think it's good for such an RNG-heavy mon (think Wingull in SM) to feature so heavily in the meta.

I will say, this suspect has made me wonder how much the presence of Arena Trap is breaking mons that might not otherwise be broken. That's not what I'm being asked for vote on, though, so I will vote to ban the mon in front of me.

 

[El químico del pueblucho]

u-turn rufflet is good, i'm amazed that wasn't showed in this thread, serves in many cases if you want to get a better position. Sturdy users tends to defeat it(not easily) but at least adds pressure to it. Btw if rufflet is on suspect i want to see this mon is suspect bc tends to ovrcentralizating the meta: marenie, and 50% of times i see this mon vs the same mon.

 

[Goodra953]

I find that a lot of teams are totally invalidated thanks to rufflet. Even if it has counters, like marianie, bronzor or trubish for the boosting versions, most of them are more checks that counters, and in case some of these comes into play, just u-turn. Even if I don't have a particular hate for this pokemon, and my team can deal with it decently OK, if your team doesn't have a pokemon with resistance to both close combat or brave bird, which is hard, or a quick pokemon that can status or OHKO, your team is almost useless RN.

 

[ninjadog]

I think Rufflet is clearly broken and arguably uncompetitive, and it should certainly be banned.

It can run primarily Choice Band, Choice Scarf, and BU sets to great effect, and with the right set is capable of OHKOing the tier's two most prevalent flying resists in Onix and Pawniard, both of which are also easily trapped. Unlike in Gen 7 where we had Mag, Gastly, Staryu, Abra etc., there is a distinct lack of fast powerful special attackers in Gen 8, meaning the BU set is more powerful than ever. On a lot of builds we have seen this week in LCPL the special attackers are limited to defensive or utility mons like Mareanie, Spritzee, or Dewpider, leading to the BU set being an immediate threat even without webs.

One argument I've seen against a Rufflet ban is because it has a 20% chance to miss every attack (bar Aerial Ace) and so it isn't that good as it'll rarely hit every attack, but as KSG talked about earlier I think this is something we should strive to avoid. Obviously there will always be % chances in every game particularly with LC's rolls, but Rufflet will force RNG thanks to Hustle almost every time it takes the field.

Taking a look at this week's LCPL games we can see bbb vs lax where the game comes down to essentially 50/50 odds in hitting 3 Brave Birds in a row, and I'm sure if Rufflet isn't banned this type of ending will be a repeated occurrence in LCPL. Another form of a counter-play to Rufflet that we've seen this week seems to be fishing for Scald burns which further increases RNG. In Jox vs Fille Jox goes for a burn turn 1 that essentially costs him the game as once Rufflet hits +1 it is able to damage his team to the point where he has very little chance of winning, not helped by the Hurricane miss. In Xiri vs The Amuse despite having a pretty awful MU and being outplayed for the majority of the game Amuse still has a chance to win thanks to the strength of Rufflet, had he gotten poisoned by a Sludge Bomb, or had he been the uncommon Facade set so there is still an element of you having to guess the moveset or you lose.

Serene Grace vs Starmaster is a slightly different scenario as Serene's Eviolite Vullaby gets crit turn 1 by Rufflet after he makes the correct predict, however I think this shows the brokenness and limited counter-play to Rufflet as once his surprise check gets lucked he has very little chance of winning, whereas with most other Pokemon if your primary check gets lucked you are still able to outplay and overcome it. In Laroxyl vs Voltix, I think Voltix's team is actually very strong against Rufflet with 2 Flying resists, 2 Fighting resists, multiple strong priority users as well as a wisp user, and as a result Laroxyl's Rufflet never enters the battle. Voltix still handily loses the match though as by overcompensating for Rufflet he leaves himself weak to several other mons including Timburr and Oddish which we see here. I think this game shows how Rufflet restricts teambuilding and how you have to sacrifice a good mu vs other mons in order to properly contain it.

Looking at all of the Week 1 games I think it's pretty clear Rufflet needs to go with a number of negative influences being caused by its presence in the tier.

 

[czim]

I do believe rufflet is too strong but its mostly for 2 reasons
-Our lack of fast and good special attackers, making setup sets hard to revenge kill
-Trappers being excellent partners and pressuring its already limited defensive checks
But the thing that the hustle misses are a problem is just a fallacy, misses are part of the game and that's just a risk of using the mon. I really don't get what makes a bb miss so much worse than let's say a hjk miss from mienfoo, or a missed will-o from pony when you're vs a ground type, or a hurricane miss from a wingull, or getting a 30% scald burn that makes your game much easier, or even a rock slide miss from diglett or a head smash miss from onix, or just a missed air slash or heat wave from np vullaby that costs you a game. Rng is part of the game and I dont get why hustles miss chance makes the mon less or more broken

 

[jake]

Voting has concluded, and Rufflet is now banned from SS LC.