Nominating Porygon-Z as a suspect under the Offensive Characteristic. The most auspiciously broken set is:
Porygon-Z @ Choice Scarf
Trait: Download/Adaptibility
EVs: 4 Def / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid Nature (+Spe, -Atk)
-Thunderbolt
-Ice Beam
-Tri Attack
-Hidden Power [Fighting]
With this set, Porygon-Z reaches a blazing 457 Speed, with 368 SpA. One of the most important factors in getting repeated KO's is the Speed stat. 457 Speed is faster than:
- +Speed Electrode (and, by extension, aboslutely anything without a speed boost of some sort)
- Scarfed Neutral Base 100's, such as Typhlosion
- Scarfed +Speed Base 80's, such as Venusaur, as well as Altaria after one Dragon Dance
- Neutral Base 55's and +Speed Base 50's with +2 Speed, given by Rain Dish, Chlorophyll, Rock Polish, or other factors. This includes Rock Polish Torterra, Rock Polish Rhyperior, Gorebyss and Neutral Omastar in the rain, and Tangrowth and Neutral Exeggutor in the sun. None of the specifically neutral pokémon are ever run as +Speed, however.
This is an impressive list, but it is only part of the equation. The second contributing factor is the impressive coverage granted by BoltBeam, Tri Attack, and HP Fighting. BoltBeam is only resisted by Lanturn and Shedinja in UU. Tri Attack and HP Fighting both hit neutrally on Lanturn, leaving only Shedinja with the capability to completely ignore this set. While it is important to remember that Porygon-Z is Scarfed, and can thus only launch one type of attack at a time, this set works all too well as a revenge killer. Some calcs, assuming a revenge kill with Download:
+1 Thunderbolt vs. Standard Rain Dance Sweeper Gorebyss: 156.2% - 183.8%
+1 Thunderbolt vs. Standard Stalltres: 95.6% - 112.8%
+1 Ice Beam vs. Rock Polish Torterra: 221.1% - 261%
+1 Ice Beam vs. Rock Polish Rhyperior: 139.1% - 163.9%
+1 Ice Beam vs. Sunny Day Sweeper Exeggutor: 136.6% - 161.3%
Thus we see Porygon-Z's ability to stop many threats in their tracks, which could otherwise power their way through teams. Porygon-Z needs no setup to do this, unlike RP Torterra and Rhyperior, and, in a different sense, Gorebyss and Exeggutor.
Speaking of setup, Porygon-Z can run a set that counters many of the pokémon a Scarf set has trouble with:
Porygonz @ Lum Berry
Ability: Download
EVs: 4 HP/252 Spd/252 SAtk
Timid nature (+Spd, -Atk)
- Dark Pulse
- Nasty Plot
- Tri Attack
- Hidden Power [Fighting]
+2 Hidden Power [Fighting] vs. Standard Registeel: 49.5% - 58.8%
+2 Dark Pulse vs. SubPlot Mismagius: 132.1% - 155.7%
+2 Tri Attack vs. ResTalk Milotic: 48.7% - 57.4%
+2 Dark Pulse vs. Lead Uxie: 81.4% - 96%
+2 Hidden Power [Fighting] vs. Curse Umbreon: 55.3% - 65.5%
+2 Hidden Power [Fighting] vs. Utility Chansey: 34.3% - 40.6%
+3 Hidden Power [Fighting] vs. Utility Chansey: 42.7% - 50.5%
(Fix0red a couple calcs. TY Diesel.)
(Fix0red again, as NP set doesn't have Tbolt. What's gotten into me?)
All of the above are also outsped by this set, excepting SubPlot Mismagius. +3 HP Fighting gives the situation that Porygon-Z is switched in on something that is physically defensive and has used Nasty Plot once. Notice that this has a very good chance of 2HKO'ing the best special wall in the tier with stealth rock and a turn of setup. The Lum Berry makes Porygon-Z immune to a retaliatory Thunder Wave for the single turn that Chansey has to live.
No pokémon operates in a vacuum. It is likely that many targets are already somewhat worn around the edges when Porygon-Z gets its say, be it through Spikes, Stealth Rock, or prior battle damage. Porygon-Z boasts a base speed of 90, which outspeeds most of the UU tier, and has phenomenal special attack, as well as access to Nasty Plot, which provides an incredible boost to its attack, and two great abilities. Adaptibility gives Tri Attack (which also has a 20% chance of basically screwing the opponent over) an even greater boost, turning many 2HKO's into OHKO's. Alternatively, P-Z can use Download, which, if switched onto the correct pokémon, provides a boost with no setup. The Scarf set wreaks havoc as a hit-and-run revenge killer. Simply pull out Porygon, and your opponent instantly risks losing their already set-up sweeper, or must switch out, stopping the sweep in its tracks either way. When a threat comes up or your prediction is bad, simply swap it out with something that can take the hit - probably a ghost, as P-Z is only weak to fighting.
The final contributing factor to Porygon-Z's dominance is that it can run both Nasty Plot and Scarf sets, and pose a danger either way. Something that may prove a hard counter to the Scarf set might be setup fodder for the NP set. Similarly, what may seem to be a NP set that has not yet set up may prove to be scarfed, heavily damaging your switch-in and forcing a second switch or even getting the kill before the supposed counter can rack up enough damage.
Simply put, Porygon-Z is quick, devastatingly powerful, and unpredictable to the degree that you may well lose a supposed counter or even the match in the process of discovering which set it is running. A pokémon with such stunning offensive abilities has no place in the UU tier.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I would also like to nominate Damp Rock as broken under the Support Characteristic. You're all familiar with it, so I'll move on to the bit where anything with a Damp Rock and Rain Dance screws everything else over. Now, I'm not saying that Rain Dance teams are the One True Strategy or anything like that, but you could probably tell a six-year-old with his level 80 Infernape and level 16 whatever-he-thought-looked-funny-enough-to-catch in DPP to make a Rain Dance team and ladder with it a bit, and he'd end up with voting rights.
Going out into unofficial but still common-sense territory, a good metagame should reward cleverness and ingenuity in teambuilding. The presence of Damp Rock, however, gives a disproportionate reward for building the sort of cookie-cutter team they'd stamp out for five cents a unit in China. This is incongruous and damaging to other types of play. For one thing, a Rain Dance team is unaffected by the ebb and flow of the metagame. Honchkrow gets Brave Bird, Stall teams scramble to reconfigure. Honch and Gallade go up and Cress comes down, Stallers breathe a sigh of relief. Nothing in the foreseeable future will drop into UU territory and shake up a solid Rain Dance team. You could play for another year with zero or very few alterations and be met with similar success. I'm not saying that timeless teams are a Bad Thing. But it is bad when a timeless team was tossed together in ten minutes, tweaked a couple times, and then left to rest on its laurels.
Damp Rock allows Rain Dance teams to stand indifferent of the fluctuations of a healthy, evolving metagame.
The playstyle allowed by 8 turns of rain requires little strategy to end the battle victorious. There are good teams and bad teams, and good teams should win most of the time against bad teams. A bad team in the hands of a skilled player, however, should stand a decent chance against a good team. This is not the case with Rain Dance teams in the current metagame. For a while, I played with a Hyper Offense team. It was quite fun, with battles lasting a dozen or so action-packed turns. The thing was, though, it had zero chance against Rain teams. Zero. Even when I knew what was about to happen, I couldn't stop it. I had a fast Taunt lead - but too bad, Electrode uses Rain Dance no matter what. After that, the remainder of the team becomes a Hyper Offense team on steroids, and my team was of the non-Barry Bonds variety. My Scarfed sweepers were slower than anything in the rain; my Banded ones were less powerful. I'm not bringing a knife to a sword fight here. I'm bringing a sword to a sword fight. But my opponent gets to call down meteors, which are on fire. And covered in angry lions, which are also on fire.
Without the Rock, the Rain team gets a whole 3 turns to sweep. Making a defensive concession or two, I might be able to stall out and do something to the Dancers. With 6 turns of sweeping, though, that's an impossible dream. If I got lucky, I'd end up with a couple pokes left, and no matter what kind of comeback I made, I was already in an untenable position. Now, there's some validity to the statement that maybe I should've prepared for every playstyle out there or whatever. But to do so would entail changing the entire team into something unrecognizable. I'd get advice to maybe put in Toxicroak or add some priority moves. But Toxicroak didn't work with my team, and I already had three freaking priority users. This isn't to tell some sob story or cry about how rain screwed me over. The point I want to make here is that Damp Rock allows Rain Dance teams unprecedented dominance over some matchups.
You'll notice that I specified the presence of the Damp Rock in the equation. There is an aboslutely significant difference between a team with rocks and one without. It's time to toss out a couple numbers.
SD Kabutops is probably the best sweeper in the UU metagame, being able to OHKO such walls as Milotic and Hariyama after a swords dance, and it always gets to go first. Even against priority, because Kabutops gets Aqua Jet. With a Damp Rock, here's how the turns go:
1. Dance
2. Switch/U-Turn
3. Swords Dance
4. Sweep
5. Sweep
6. Sweep
7. Sweep
8. Sweep
9. Switch
10. Dance
11. Switch/U-turn
12. Swords Dance?
As you can see, three turns of setup yields five turns of sweep. The turns that are italicized represent turns where your opponent more or less gets free shots at your team. If you count switching back to a Dancer, you're sweeping 5 turns out of 9. If you let Kabutops die instead, it's 5 turns out of 8. That's 55.5% and 62.5% of the time, respectively. Subsequent sweepers like Gorebyss that don't set up will net you 6 out of 8 or 9, for 66.7%-75%. Without the rock, you get:
1. Dance
2. Switch/U-Turn
3. Swords Dance
4. Sweep
5. Sweep
6. Switch back to Dancer
7. Repeat
You'll notice that this drastically reduces the effectiveness of Rain's premiere sweeper. The mighty Kabutops, which with the Damp Rock, gets five turns of +2 ATK sweeping, now gets only two. That's less than half. And he dearly needs that Rain. Pretty much anything with a good fighting attack or Earthquake (Which is only the whole freaking metagame) will do serious damage if they survive or go first. After a switch, dance, and Life Orb recoil, Kabutops is good as dead. Only two turns out of six are dedicated to sweeping under the rain, which is a paltry 33%. The difference between 55% and 33% might seem a bit smaller than it is: without the Rock, you only get about 60% of the sweeping turns. Of course, if you don't use Swords Dance every switch (and you won't), that's still 75% vs 50%, where a non-Rocker gets 66.7% of the sweeping turns that a rocker gets in a given time frame.
This might not seem too bad, and it isn't, until you remember that once the rain's gone, you get to trash the other team for a bit. With 50% of the turns being dedicated to rain sweeping and 50% to rain setting, you get an equal-opportunity slugfest against a team with limited resistances and predictable setup routines. One of the crucial points in rock vs. non-rock is that damage incurred during the initial period of rain. With the rock, you get five or six turns of Hell. Even dedicated walls often only sponge two or three turns. You're almost guaranteed to lose at least a third of your team, though half is probably more accurate unless you're running stall. This pretty much takes away your ability to utilize team synergy, as you've got a giant, gaping hole in it. Without the rock, though, you might lose one wall the first time around, plus a support if you're really unlucky, then have the opportunity to agility up or whatever and mount your counteroffensive. After that, you've probably got even odds or so (if you can figure out how to KO a single poke in 3 turns), and the battle proceeds from there, with their setups being a bit worn around the edges and vulnerable for the next time they have to set up.
This is the absolute core of the issue. Nothing can take an unlimited amount of hits, and Dancers are no exceptions. There is a fairly limited spectrum of bulky Dancers (Lanturn, Raikou, and Uxie, mostly), and it's not hard to take them down, due to the fact that they must repeatedly switch in and take whatever hits you throw at them, and then proceed to use a non-offensive move. After that, it's another switch, where you can pursuit or predict the switch (or just use Thunderbolt) to heavily damage, cripple, or kill their chosen sweeper.
The TL;DR of it all (As I'm horribly longwinded) is that without the rock, you:
1. Cannot destroy their hopes with the initial sweep, and
2. Aren't even sweeping half the time, which means that
3. You may well lose your Dancers after a couple setups, then proceed to lose horribly.
I'll now move on to reiterating a post from the megathread because I'm lazy and I want some shiny calcs.
A Pokémon is uber if, in common battle conditions, it can consistently set up a situation in which it makes it substantially easier for other pokemon to sweep. Thus, to be eligible for support, the technique or whatever used must be:
1. Easy to use/hard to stop (It can be "consistently set up")
2. Powerful ("Substantially easier... to sweep")
So, this begs the question: How do you prevent a Rain Dance? The simple answer is that you can't. One of the commonly-used leads is Electrode. Hands up, who's faster than Electrode? Oh, that's right. NOTHING. You can nail it with Fake Out, but nothing can OHKO it without a crit. And then after that, it's got free reign to Dance while you kill it in return. There's some goofing around you can do with Technitop or a Scarfed Persian with Hypnosis, but if you want to use a non-retarded lead, it's 8 turns of Hell for you.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm nominating Electrode for BL or anything, but I just want to give an example of how freaking easy it is to set up rain. And that's just one potential lead. Ambipom makes a workable lead than can even force switches for an anticipated Fake Out while it dances unscathed. TechniTop does some fiddly stuff and can stop Ambipom if you're stupid enough to let it take a Mach Punch to the face.
Now, that's just analysis on two potential leads. Unless you want to use TechniTop for your lead (and honestly, I'd rather be able to deal with Froslass and Uxie), rain's up. Focusing on the ease of setting up at the moment over the power of Rain Dance, we'll just assume your team hasn't been swept off of the initial Dance. How do you prevent it now? That's another problem. Even if the opposing Rain Dance team sucks without its weather, it only needs one turn to put it back up again. You have to have a 100% success rate in blocking it. Maybe they switch in a Lanturn on your Hp Grass Raikou. Or maybe they catch you Sleep Talking. Or maybe you just can't OHKO their next Dancer. The point here is that it's nigh impossible to prevent a determined foe from using Rain Dance. Therefore, the use of Rain Dance immediately makes any user fit the first part of the Support characteristic in the context of its team.
The second part of the Support characteristic is that the setup makes it significantly easier for another pokémon to sweep. Showing this is too easy. Here are some random calcs from a standard Rain Dance Sweeper Gorebyss:
Surf vs. Utility Chansey: 33.4% - 39.3%
Surf vs. Standard Registeel: 48.9% - 57.7%
Hydro Pump vs. Standard Registeel: 62.1% - 73.4%
Surf vs. CM Cresselia: 45.3% - 53.4%
Hydro Pump vs. CM Cresselia: 56.8% - 66.9%
Surf vs. Defensive Venusaur: 33.8% - 39.6%
Ice Beam vs. Defensive Venusaur: 58.8% - 69.2%
Now, that's how Gorebyss (which is admittedly the most powerful sweeper on a Rain Dance team) fares against UU's premiere walls. Here are some more mundane defenders, again vs. a standard Rain Dance Sweeper Gorebyss:
Surf vs. ResTalk Spiritomb: 76% - 89.8%
Hydro Pump vs. ResTalk Spiritomb: 96.1% - 113.5%
Surf vs. Standard Leafeon: 79.3% - 93.4%
Ice Beam vs. Standard Leafeon: 141.7% - 166.8%
Surf vs. SubCM Raikou: 93.5% - 110.2%
Okay, okay, enough Gorebyss. How about Special Ludicolo?
Surf vs. SubCM Raikou: 79.5% - 94.1%
Surf vs. NP Mismagius: 94.3% - 111.5%
Surf vs. SD Sceptile: 52.1% - 61.7%
Surf vs. WishStall Clefable: 52% - 61.7%
Note that Ludicolo in the rain outspeeds Sceptile.
Kabutops time!
Waterfall vs. Utility Chansey: 86.3% - 101.7%
+2 Waterfall vs. CM Cresselia: 98.2% - 115.8%
+2 Stone Edge vs. ResTalk Milotic: 105.1% - 123.6%
+2 Stone Edge vs. SubPunch Poliwrath: 58.1% - 68.5%
+2 Stone Edge vs. Any Toxicroak: 98.4% - 115.9%
+2 Waterfall vs. Physical Tank Hariyama: 125.8% - 148.3%
+2 Aqua Jet vs. TechniTop: 87.2% - 103%
Technitop fails to OHKO back, NP Toxicroak does 67.4% - 80.3% back with Vacuum Wave, and Hariyama does about 40-50% in return. I keep trying to find something that might seem like it could stand up against Kabutops, but I think Poliwrath might be the best at taking its hits.
Oh, wait! I found something!
+2 Waterfall vs. +6 ResTalk Cradily in the Sand: 23.4% - 27.9%
Too bad you'll never hit +6 vs. a Ran Dance team. Also, Gorebyss walks in and lols at it with Ice Beam. A valiant effort, though.
The addition of Rain Dance turns potential counters into more meat for the grinder. Kabutops in particular is unstoppable. Of course, these calcs take into account a Swords Dance, which allows a free shot at Kabutops if you predict it, and Life Orb recoil will wear him down, but note that you could use a Muscle Band or whatever with similar results. Even priority users can be annihilated with Kabutops' own priority. This clearly demonstrates the awesome power of Rain Dance on offense.
But wait! There's more! In every one of those calcs listed, the attacker went first, maybe barring Hariyama vs. Kabutops' Waterfall. There are priority moves out there, but they're most effective on Kabutops, who is weak to fighting. Quick Attack and the like will do very little to anything. Extremespeed's not bad, except its users either suck are or called Arcanine and get ganked by water moves.
Therefore, the usage of Rain Dance fulfills the second portion of the Support characteristic for the assisted pokemon. In effect, it's a free +1 Atk/SpATK and +2 Speed for your entire team. That's better than a Scarf AND Specs at the same time. Six turns to sweep, six pokémon on the other team. Coincidence? I think not. Damp Rock fulfills the Support Characteristic and does not belong in the UU tier.
