RBY OU Reflections on the Current State of RBY

Maybe I did misinterpret that slightly but I think everything I said there still holds anyway.

 

Personally I am fine with the way things are. Reflect lax is a fairly standard physical wall while Reflect Chansey can be forced out with para+pressure to some extent (mostly from Pyschic). Is it annoying? Yes. Broken.... meh. If anything its just the new “Standard”

If Stomp is banned on Exeggutor I dont see why we wouldn’t consider banning Reflect on Lax/Chansey.

Especially because if you cannot run reflect Lax it prompts more people to fit a physical wall into their team such as Cloyster. It could also prompt an increase in Rest on bulky pokemon such as Eggs and Lapras.

Also possible increase in Clefairy usage?

 

It's not banned; you can't legally get that set in-game (Stomp + Sleep Powder or Stun Spore) because Stomp is learnt as an Exeggutor only, and Exeggcute learns the powders at a later level than Exeggutor learns Stomp, and Exeggutor doesn't learn Sleep Powder / Stun Spore via level-up, so you have to choose between teaching it Stomp and teaching it an actually useful move.

(See here and here)

 

Never realized that was the reason. Makes sense now thank you! (Tried and I was able to run Stomp on ladder but needed to use Hypnosis instead... bleh)

I still wouldnt be against at least a tournament that bans reflect on lax/chansey.

 

Does Zapdos beat Reflect Chansey 1v1?

 

Hello.. have you guys forgot about OU's biggest ally? OU's biggest threat?? That's right No. Why? Because you've all shunned him away! Turned a blind eye, to once a former brotheren. Has Gengars popularity decreased? Why? Are slowmons setting up at little to no cost? The answer is in this poor fellas dismissal. Who everyone has forgotten about. Who am I talking about? None other then poor Dragonite! Shunned out, about the same time the reflect trend started... Coincidence..? I think not!

Think about it.. so they set up reflect and just want to sit there hu? Why not make them panic & move around with a lil thing called wrap. While spreading twaves of your own, or making them pivot away from their protective reflects.

You want to ban reflect? Haha, how about not joining the problem, and open up to different ideas. Seems like everyone has just joined the stall party and expects the state of rby to be good...

Some good ideas include: Toxic, Leech Seed, Slash, Leer, Rest, Fighting Types, Swords Dance, and last but not least, never forget about W R A P (&friends).

How about we explore the current state a bit deeper, use different ideas and break this trend, and figure a solution. Like it always has been done before.

#MakeDragoniteGreatOUAgain

 

It's tricky, it depends on the timing... and on luck of course.
If Chansey succeeds in Reflecting up with high HP, it looks in a good position to me as long as you Softboil correctly (stay above average CH DPeck + DP through Reflect range as much as possible -unfortunately it's 80%ish-, especially in those spots where 100 more damage on Zapdos won't matter; you might want to switch to Snorlax in some scenarios). At very least Zapdos is going to be revenge killed.

Wrappers are still gimmcky and meant to be so: they lose to fast teams and miss moves randomly. They risk is very high everytime you hit the button, and the reward is damn low.
There are well known ways around setuppers, mostly it's Sleep Powder if you can, TWave and Body Slam (+HB if possible, Selfdestruct/Explosion as emergency buttons) or critical hits. Basically, just build your team correctly and play correctly.

I'm going to write a cycle of special articles on SPL - I have news for RBY OU's metagame, SPL gave a major input indeed. Anticipation: things might be healtier than we thought and I discovered a new piece of technology (not a new pokemon, not a new moveset though: don't overexcite).

 

Hope to see those special articles on PP

 

Dragonite's Wrap does on average 21 damage to Reflect Chansey. You will on average land 19.2 Wrap turns before Chansey gets to Thunder Wave you, which is not enough to defeat it (it's only slightly more than Softboiled heals). The situation is, of course, substantially worse when facing Reflect Snorlax.

Switching around is not the only solution to Wrap; sitting there and waiting for it to miss with something appropriately bulky and able to disable the Wrapper in one shot works too.

(Special Wrap-like vs. Reflect non-Amnesia Snorlax works fine, though. That's Cloyster's Clamp and Moltres' Fire Spin, for anybody who hasn't memorised this stuff.)

 

I wonder what removing Cleric Clause would do to mitigate this - it's cartridge accurate and the main reason I saw cited for using it is "tradition" - but if the tradition was a metagame without Body Slam paralysis immunity, clearly these are new times anyway.

The Gods of Pokemon work in weird ways and by my calculations, Alakazam can afford to take burn/poison damage 113 times when also taking 32 Seismic Tosses, and Reflect Chansey has a practical maximum of 108 PP (with Thunder Wave and Seismic Toss), so that means Alakazam has just enough recovery to outlast it.

Onto Defense Curl I guess... (for the superior PP)

That I guess brings up the point that if just Reflect were banned, Chansey can learn Defense Curl and Snorlax can learn Harden, the latter probably being less of an issue because Snorlax generally doesn't have as much time.

 

What's Cleric Clause?

 

Note that for all intents and purposes, right now Cleric Clause just formalises the status quo. Similarly, in some later gens, Symmetry Clause exists: the game's mechanics are modified to be symmetrical, as in the case of certain glitches & mechanics in-game, it matters which cartridge is the "host" of the match.

Will we ever retest any of this stuff? It depends, I mean firstly, we need Pokemon Showdown to be able to implement the possibility of the clause being inactive. Secondly, in RBY I think the only thing we could allow is Pokemon to not be at max HP. In GSC, I don't know - prestatus would not be as strong as it is in RBY by far, and having Pokemon at below max HP has some value, and I'm sure you could have Pokemon with less than max PP in their moves without any issue. People might oppose change for inertia's sake too though, or for thinking that the game "should" be played with cleric clause active.

 

what about amnesialax with fire blast instead of blizz/ib? ik every time i bring up fire blast everyone repeats all the dangers of burned starmie etc. but those pokemon hate switching into lax bc of body slam (which is the move you should prob be spamming “most of the time”). and the point is if you burn reflectlax youve turned it into free momentum. bc lax’s crit rate is horrible plus each amnesia reapplies the burn stat drop so its forced out immediately and you get one or two free amnesias (two is if it rests before switching). not having coverage against goldon isnt too important to me since burned goldon is useless so the only issue is chansey.
specifically @reflectlax since it lacks hbeam so you get more chances to try to burn it (or you can switch any amnesialax in after it rests ofc)

i agree with partial trapping to deal with reflect chansey as well as slash reflect chanseys alot harder to break through but thats kind of true of chansey in general (even before the mechanics “change”). but chansey has to give up boltbeam for reflect which is a big cost (esp bc of starmie) the same reason why other options on chansey like counter or sing are rare and like someone said above if chansey is dropping boltbeam you need a plan to deal with starmie esp psychic mie

but reflect lax seemed strange to me when i first heard of it idk and yeah i made fire blast amnesia lax specifically to take advantage of reflectlax but theres lots of other options. most obvious are crits which are everywhere in rby, burns bc rest doesnt cure the burn attack drop in rby, and amnesia users. ik i have no experience etc but if reflectlax is rly this dominant (still hard for me to believe tbh) maybe ppl need to be less scared of using fire blast (and burned chansey isnt exactly threatening esp if its not running boltbeam but if youre rly worried about that you can always use a wrapper) and use more pokes with amnesia and slash (i havent even seen persian mentioned in this thread idt) which are two of the “best moves” (if thats meaningful) in rby

one last thing @ sleep clause there can be a lot of advantages to not activating sleep clause right away including that it makes things alot harder for set up move users but especially defensive moves since you just force them out with a sleep move

but basically to me reflect users are welcome, if chanseys not using boltbeam and a lot of starmie use psychic that helps slowbro alottt, slowbro rly struggled in the old meta but now it sounds like teams wont be automatically prepared for it, fire blast is an interesting move in rby (high risk/reward kind of like the tier in general) and anything that benefits it and fire types is a positive change to me since fire types used to be almost unusable mainly due to having no resistances (and maybe still would be overall but theres at least a chance, esp charizard which can use fire blast fire spin and slash so could cause problems for both lax and chansey idk just brainstorming) and idk it kind of sounds like people arent rly trying a lot of innovations like this? maybe im wrong in concluding that but it sounds to me like theres a lot of ideas yet to be tried before claiming that any deviation from reflectlax reflect chansey puts you at an immediate disadvantage

 

why would you run fire blast and reflect? isnt the whole point of using fire blast on lax to burn physicals so that you dont need reflect
technically thats true 1v1 ^ at amnesia lax vs reflect lax but you have more options w fire blast bc you dont have to start with amnesia eg you can use fire blast first keeping amnesia hidden. also with fire blast you can also beat both fishlax frequently and tauros sometimes (depending on if burn hits and on tauros crits) whereas blizz amnesia lax loses both consistently. what you lose with fire blast is not being able to spam the special move even after boosting (unless youve already paralyzed their chansey/mie plus fire blast thaws opp frozen)

but yeah i think there are other fire blast sets. fishlax could run fire blast over selfdestruct or maybe over earthquake. since fire blast is best used as a one time surprise anyway bc once its revealed you have to consider special switchins. but being able to reapply the burn attack drop with amnesia is rlyy useful (against both any physical lax and goldon) bc you can set up amnesia even at low health and it ruins their burned physical even more. or in the case of reflect lax they have to rest immediately to prevent the attack drop from repeating (and still have to switch out since attack is still at -2 and reflect lax loses to amnesia lax with rest anyway). amnesia fire blast with 2 other attacks is an interesting possibility too, i think how it would be played is you come in on a physical and use fire blast immediately, if you do get the burn (30%) you can set up at least one free amnesia since your health/bulk is high and even burned tauros would need multiple crits to avoid being forced out by the crippling attack drop (3 amnesias woukd cut their attack to 1/16 if they dont switch......) and then youll still have a great match up on the switchin. lots of options for the other two attacks, you rly need a physical attack in case you dont get the burn^ rly body slam or hyperbeam, for the other special attack thunderbolt threatens starmie which makes using fire blast less risk but leaves fire blast as the only way to hit goldon, or blizzard/ib to go for freeze against chansey (note thunderbolt can paralyze chansey) and basically replacing fire blast since they have the same coverage. (hyperbeam with blizzard leaves you in trouble with starmie and pp issues but hbeam with thunderbolt is possible, body slam works with either ithink) and i guess running self destruct instead of the second special attack is always an option too.
obv rn im writing this re the current metagame where no one expects fire blast on snorlax, if it became common it would be a lott worse since the first burn attempt would be much riskier. but again its risk/reward and the reward of burning physicals is huge esp for the amnesia 3 attacks sets.

my point is that all these sets feast on reflect lax which this thread is claiming is too dominant or hard to deal with or ? idk. its hard to evaluate any of these suggestions “overall” without playtesting etc so im not trying to do that here beyond trying to show why they are “usable” and “potentially” v rewarding.

sorry at length of my posts but i felt enigami missed the main point of fblast amnesia (ie to burn first and then use amnesia) so i needed to clarify

 

I think that Fire Blast's merits are slightly overstated. First is that burns are not at all reliable to spread, which is an issue when FB's PP is bad. Second is that opposing Lax can and probably will Rest the burn off. This obviously isn't a bad thing, but I don't think it's really having the effect of countering ReflectLax. The exception is the original idea you posted (Amnesia). If their Lax rests on your Lax, you've just created a scenario where you're given free turns to boost and attack, and it comes with one of AmnesiaLax's biggest obstacles asleep. Still, there are other checks available (Chansey, Waters, GolDon are still checks albeit somewhat shaky) so it's not going to steamroll the opp

All in all, I think FBLax could be viable as a niche option, but it's not a game-changer. I just think any strategy hinging on burns is too unreliable to be consistent.

 

juoean
I like to see your creativity. Hope to see you join the RBY seasons and spice them up with your ideas :]