Rain is not so broken!! [UU Warstory]

[Bluewind]

That crit on Qwilfish put Flareblitz at a huge disadvantage, my guess is Shrang probably would have lost if Flare had got RD up on turn one seeing as nothing on his team could take 2 attacks from Specs Gorebyss...nevertheless it was a decent warstory, though I don't think it proves Rain Dance as not being broken.

I have to agree with RT. here. Even though the result of rain being set in turn one is unclear, Flare could have been able to come out on top.

I did find those some of, if not the most, entertaining comments on a warstory, though.

 

[Rolf]

I was actually about to say just that. You have no idea how bad that crit at the beginning was as far as quick momentum. Remember, Rain is just Hyper Offense on steroids. By losing early momentum, you basically have to salvage your game from that point on. That is exactly what happened.

 

[Banedon]

I skimmed over the logs, and there is no instance in which he's entered a 12% or lower with any of his grounded Pokemon, so the match would have occurred exactly the same way even with a layer of Spikes down. But the move Flare was gonna use is unknown, so in essence, your theories are about as good as mine.

That's not all actually, since if Spikes were down shrang's Kabutops would've failed to hit FlareBlitz's Kabutops (it would've died), and it would be a 90% Kabutops vs. Rotom with rain down. If Rotom Thunderbolts, it can be absorbed by Uxie, who can put rain up again and hence win the game. If Rotom Shadow Balls, Uxie would die but Kabutops gets two turns to kill Rotom and thus win the game as well. I think as well the opening crit really put FlareBlitz on the defensive.

Btw Flare post that team so I can steal it please :D

 

[FlareBlitz]

It's a pretty straightforward team, mate.

Qwilfish has Spikes/Waterfall/RD/Xplosion. The EVs are funky, but physically defensive with some ATK investment. I do remember that I gave it enough speed to outrun Scarfed base 80+ during rain.

Uxie is specially defensive. You guessed the set already.

Mespirit is physically defensive. Enough ATK investment to break Raikou's subs with U-turn. Same set as Uxie but with Healing Wish over Heal Bell and Zen Headbutt over Yawn.

The sweepers are straightforward.

 

[Synre]

Ignoring the result potentially changing because of the first turn, I'm not sure I understand all these comments that are essentially "rain is/n't broken because with/out hax it was possible Flare could have won the game." I'm not sure what that line of thought is intended to prove - why would anyone expect either team to be a 100% counter for the other? Both sides made mistakes, too - shrang's Moltres was trying pretty hard to give the game away. I don't think this does much in regards to the rain debate, but I love warstories between competent players and this was interesting, so thanks for posting it.

 

[lati0s]

It was a pretty good read, but all I could think about the whole time was why did flare switch gorebyss into venusaur when he had uxie and mespirit, that was just retarded.

 

[Aqueos]

Nice commentary

Time to remove this ridiculous Ludicolo from this world. MACH PAWNCH!!!

 

[Stagnant]

I guess I'll be the first... I really didn't care for the warstory and lati0s pretty much hit the nail on the head...

"all I could think about the whole time was why did flare switch gorebyss into venusaur when he had uxie and mespirit, that was just retarded. "

After the crit~ and that needless sacrifice, I stopped reading.

Rain is not so broken... after you outspeed then crit the lead and your opponent gives you a free kill. ~.~

 

[flashbolt]

EDIT: Just to make this clear. This is not an attempt to undermine Rain or Flare. My first paragraph says it very clearly. While this Warstory is posted at the same time as a controversial Rain debate, its purpose is to i) Entertain and ii) Show methods of countering Rain teams. It's not enough to know "What" counters a Rain team, but it is also very important to know "How". Hopefully this Warstory sheds a bit more light.

So you are not trying to undermine rain with a thread called "Rain is not broken!!"
I think there is a slight oversight there.

EDIT: not that is matters much, you just probably could have thought of a better title.

 

[iKitsune]

The sad thing is this still illustrates exactly how good rain is. Shrang played perfectly and beat him but from this shows how powerful rain is and how much it punishes bad switch ins. It also of course exemplifies some excellent strategies to handle rain, Subs and Toxic Spikes when Qwilfish is gone which is nice to see and thus the battle was still very one sided on Shrang's side and yet rain proved its prowess and it managed to be close.

 

[PK Gaming]

It was a good battle (albeit a the crit at the beginning was depressing) and the comments were quite good. Both players played well.

8/10

 

[Heysup]

The battle was alright, and obviously doesn't really show "Rain isn't broken", but as a Warstory it was quite good. The commentary was great; short and interesting.

I mean seriously, this is the best line used in a Warstroy ever:

He got Rain back up, but whatever. I got a Sub up, so eat shit.

I may have to sig this.

Four stars

 

[El geek]

Haha as i said you, i will read it later, and i did.
I laugh a lot with your warstory, because your coments are so funny xd
In the first moment ur oponent did a lot of misstakes, and u did not know take advatage of this =/! That was not good, and then your "noob inside" appeared... but at the end u knew win ;)
This match was very good, rlly good match ^^

PS: this is weird, because in messenger u are more serious xd
PS2: first time, i'd read a warstory in english. I read it complete ^^

 

[raddaya]

Warstory is pretty good, but as people have said this doesn't prove much about rain being broken, I still believe it is broken. The Stone Edge crit basically won you the game, and though you did make some mistakes your commentary made up for it. 4.75/5

 

[reachzero]

I did like that this battle was pretty close and had some interesting moments (mostly the Uxie Healing Wish, which was awesome), yet aside from rather a lot riding on that first crit, I felt that there was a reason hardly any comment was longer than two lines: this battle was very straightforward, and almost no move required very much thought. It played out very much like what it was: a Rain team with a plan against a team with an anti-Rain plan, and everything (except the first crit) went according to plan. Okay battle, but I felt it was missing something as a warstory.

 

[Yuggles]

I did like that this battle was pretty close and had some interesting moments (mostly the Uxie Healing Wish, which was awesome), yet aside from rather a lot riding on that first crit, I felt that there was a reason hardly any comment was longer than two lines: this battle was very straightforward, and almost no move required very much thought. It played out very much like what it was: a Rain team with a plan against a team with an anti-Rain plan, and everything (except the first crit) went according to plan. Okay battle, but I felt it was missing something as a warstory.

...Well that's one of the reasons people think rain is broken. It can be used by any person with basic knowledge of the game, and that person will probably end up dominating despite using a really simple strategy. so whether it was intended or not, the OP makes a good point with this warstory.

 

[Jack Jack]

Rain is not broken. I play Hail ;D

Seriously, an opening crit is not that hard. Always gotta have a plan B. Like a focus sash on Qwilfish or whatever.

If the opening crit is that significant, then rain must be very unreliable. Crits happen all the time, always against you at the worst possible moment. Gotta be ready for them.

 

[Squidd]

Rain is not broken. I play Hail ;D

Seriously, an opening crit is not that hard. Always gotta have a plan B. Like a focus sash on Qwilfish or whatever.

If the opening crit is that significant, then rain must be very unreliable. Crits happen all the time, always against you at the worst possible moment. Gotta be ready for them.

Well, for one... I think Qwilfish makes a horrible lead in the first place to use on rain. It is shut down by quite a few common leads. With a team that NEEDS to have momentum at an early point in the game, having a lead that doesn't give you some sort of momentum 99.99% of the time (aka. Qwilfish) really does make the whole stratedgy less reliable from the off. It is the reason electrode is the most common rain dance lead, and why I even use ambipom on my rain team. If you don't have a lead that can get that rain dance up reliably, you have a bad lead tbh.

I'm basically trying to agree with the above post in that having qwilfish as the lead in the first place is being unprepared. I was under the impression the most important reasons for Qwilfish being on rain is obviously to absorb the t.spikes later on, and to hurt kabutops counters. I just don't see how having Qwilfish in the lead position is even the slightest bit as beneficial as using something like Ambipom to set up rain.

I think the warstory had too many silly mistakes to judge anything about the effectiveness of rain from it (making mistakes like wasting precious sweepers, especially when you have effectively only 3 sweepers to work with during a battle, is just not something you can be doing).

The warstory should just been seen as what it is though imo,a warstory, not something that aids or takes away from the Rain Debate.

A nice read though, with some great comments. Nice work ;)

 

[SlottedPig]

The battle ("relatively low hax?" siding with the other people...) wasn't the best skill~to~skill thing. The commentary was funny - yes, I admit it was - but often it told little more than what the next turn would look like on your part. No "if FB switches to ..., I'll ..." thoughts. It's good for a first try, and the play-around Rain was decent, but it just could have went a lot better for FB. Plus, out of several chats, you only made one of them green..

 

[Chou Toshio]

I know that the OP is not trying to comment on rain, but some of the posts concerning rain on the first page are ridiculous enough to address.

It was a pretty good read, but all I could think about the whole time was why did flare switch gorebyss into venusaur when he had uxie and mespirit, that was just retarded.

This. For anyone who said Flare played the game well, I really have to laugh considering he lost one of his main sweepers (ludicolo is more rain support, not sweep) by switching it into a pokemon that is basically a check for it (do you switch infernape into Latias? That's pretty much what he did here). You rarely see brain-farts worse than that. If anything that's proof enough to me that this was not an example of a top rain team.

While I'm not taking either side on the debate, this warstory is definitely a long way off from having any say on rain not being over-powered. I'm mostly assuming the title is in jest/sarcasm. All this really showed if anything is that:

"Team X gets fucked when its lead pokemon (who is supposed to be well designed first step of a team for setting its pace the rest of the battle) gets killed without doing anything due to hax." How often do you see this? Almost NEVER.

Lead pokemon should be designed to accomplish *something* in almost any situation, and have a very low chance of being completely destroyed (even by hax). Especially in an environment where something like Froslass is dominant. Between focus sash and bulky-setups like Uxie or Claydol, there's no excuse for using a lead that can be outsped and put out with a crit without doing anything by something like Kabutops (ie, proof enough that quilfish was not a well designed lead pokemon here). I can appreciate that Damp Rock is useful for pokes setting up rain, but you don't use it on a lead with defenses/speed as mediocre as qwilfish's.

 

[FlareBlitz]

I've already addressed this before. Qwilfish beats every lead out there, including Froslass, if played properly. It works like Electrode with Spikes. Its purpose is to set up rain and abuse the speed boost to set up spikes quickly and blow up on things I don't like. Against Taunters I just attack; it 2hko's both Froslass and Ambipom, while avoiding a KO from Tbolt/Fake Out -> Return. Don't complain about it if you've never seen how it works, because the people who do regularly watch my battles know it's an effective lead.

 

[Chou Toshio]

Why do you assume a person doesn't know how a lead works or hasn't seen how it works? It's pretty obvious as to how the lead works, and yes I have seen lead Qwilfish in action.

Just because you have some tricks that COULD work doesn't change the fact that as the set is, it's extremely vulnerable to the most basic strategy of pokemon: All out attacking. Froslass could after all, just thunderbolt. Even if not Froslass, 65 / 75 / 55 is defensively weaker than Infernape even though Qwilfish is a poke that also wants speed and ATK evs. Needless to say, you can't do everything with the limited base stats you're given, but lead pokemon need an absolute stat (toughness or speed) that they can rely heavily on to ensure they get a chance to use their tricks.

Considering all of this, I see no reason why this thing should not be running Focus Sash (not to mention that way you can forget any need for defensive evs). You may get 3 less turns of rain, but then your stats are not good enough that you're in much of a position to complain about that.

 

[FlareBlitz]

Ambipom: On the Fake Out, if it has a Life Orb, I automatically use Rain Dance. If it does not, I use either Rain Dance or Waterfall depending on whether I think it's going to taunt me or not. Or I'll just use Explosion if I don't feel like dealing with it.

Uxie: I usually start by Spiking against Uxie so that if it's TrickScarf I can get 2-3 layers down immediately. If it's not, Qwilfish can low-investment Psychic/Zen Headbutt, and is faster than most Uxie variants, letting me get up a layer of spikes and rain.

Froslass: Waterfall straight out. If it taunts me, I win. If it spikes, I use RD on the Destiny Bond or second Spikes, and then kill it. If it has tbolt, no matter, Qwilfish can survive...and if it Tbolts me, it's risking me getting rain up.

Regirock: Rain Dance, Spikes, Spikes, Explosion/Waterfall if I'm still alive. I win pretty handily.

Omastar: Spikes, Spikes, Rain Dance, switch to Ludicolo. The two layers turn most of rain's checks into 2hkos (except water absorbers obviously).

Moltres: Qwilfish survives all attacks from all variants of Moltres barring random shit like LO HP Ground. As long as it doesn't flinch me with Air Slash, I get rain up and kill it.

Swellow: See Moltres.

Now, one pattern you'll see here is that Qwilfish works very similarly to Electrode as far as its matchups go (except for doing much worse against Omastar and much better against Regirock). However, the reason I use Qwilfish over Electrode is because it's not nearly as vunerable to common Scarfers in the lead position (Moltres, Primeape, etc), because it can set up hazards, and because it outruns base 80+ scarfers in the rain (important in case Lead ScarfVenu is stupid enough to use EQ, which doesn't ohko, or if Sleep Powder misses).

 

[shrang]

Come on guys, let's not have a debate in my warstory. This stuff should probably be in the rain thread or something.

 

[jamashawalker]

honestly i feel you cant really judge a set of a poke without testing it out or watching multiple games with it in action...I have seen that quilfish do work against many different opponents and leads and Flare plays it just right