RBY OU Viability Rankings

I think gar/vic are 1U, rest are debatable and I don't have a strong opinion atm though I do have a bias. I also think Lusch's approximate VR list is pretty good

btw Enigami says he wants to make rby 1u VR more like other VR in that the tier is split in the B rank so if u put the A mons there in A+, B mons in A-, and the C/D stuff in B somewhere and some maybe in C, then u would achieve that

 

Hating on Golem might be trendy, but I'll point you at 2015 when you'd all decided Golem was better and Rhydon wasn't 1U. If you're going "once and for all" it's insane to drop Golem.

Enigami/Disaster Area please don't hammer the square peg into the round hole.

 

I don't really believe in any "once and for all" nature of any metagame, although there is a case to make that the pre-crystal_ discoveries RBY OU meta was pretty stable, but im not even so sure of that.

We go for what we think makes sense now and see how long it holds

 

It's not a trend, it's called "fact", deal with it this is no 2015

 

There's two points I'd like to make here.

One: yes, I believe we can tier 'once and for all'. There are going to be shifts and rises and drops in viability but I really don't expect them to be large enough to disrupt tiering - and in the unlikely event that they occur, we could always go back to this in the future. Even if it might not be a true once and for all tiering, we should go ahead and act as if it were, there is no harm in going back to reassess things if our understanding of the tier changes.

Two: I think we have to establish what exactly means for a mon to be "OU worthy". To me, and this is merely a very rough conceptual statement that can and should be discussed further, a pokémon is good enough to be tiered in OU if it can be slotted into a variety of teams and perform reasonably well in all of them. Anything else is UU. Mons that are UU can perform well in tailor-made OU builds, but are generally going to be unviable in other situations.

Therefore:
Gengar is OU. The hard countering of EQ-less Snorlax and access to fast sleep makes him a good pick in a number of different builds. He has a completely unique niche and a toolbox that makes building with him different, but not entirely restrictive, as is the case for other pokémon in discussion here.

Victreebel is OU. The recent tournament success speaks for itself, it can take over games extremely easily and it is a nightmare match up for a lot of standard builds.

Jolteon is DEFINITELY OU. Of all the decisions this is perhaps the one I'm most confident on. The simple fact that he is a non-Rock/Ground Zapdos check is enough to give him a niche in a lot of different builds and he had the highest winrate out of any pokémon with more than 10 uses in the Invitational, which makes me think he's currently a bit underrated. I don't think his place in OU should even be in discussion really.

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Golem is UU. Is your team a specific build that wants to explode Exeggutor and/or Starmie? Oddly specific thing you're looking for there, but Golem might be the mon for you. Otherwise, he's bad. He's gotten ridiculously low usage for a while now for very good reasons, the teams that genuinely want a Golem over anything else are so few and far between that I think he is an easy UU pick.

Articuno is UU. Again, he has specific match ups where he's better than Lapras, but the builds where those match ups are a genuinely significant edge are too few and far between for me to call him OU. He definitely has a niche, there definitely are teams that want him over the Lap, but it's just not enough to put him in the ranks with Victreebel or Gengar.

Moltres is UU. Making Moltres work is just so hard. I've seen a ridiculously small number of Moltres builds actually function, and while the mon on paper has a lot of good upsides, none of the things he does are exclusive to him and he has to rely on inaccurate moves to do anything which is inevitably going to lose him games he "should" win. He's just not good enough.

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Dragonite is the only mon I'm a bit uncertain on, because I believe he's underexplored at the moment. I haven't seen much of him in tournament play but he is a mon with AgiliWrap, TWave, Blizzard, a strong HyperBeam, and a couple other interesting tricks in his toolset, which makes me think we should be seeing more of him. I would like to see more people try him out before giving a final judgement, for now he's UU in my eyes because he has never proven to be OU-worthy but I think this is the one ranking we might realize to be wrong on one or two years down the road.

 

(from this admittedly old/outdated thread All Gens - PP's Tiering Philosophy | Pokémon Perfect
and

(from this thread)

I don't think it's that tricky a question to answer, really, it's just a matter of if a Pokemon is sufficiently viable. There are ways you could interpret or define that which are more practical, and for me that's fine if you do it, it's a reasonable interpretation of that definition.

Btw, I think the phrase OU worthy is a bit weird, because for a Pokemon to be OU it just needs a certain usage threshhold (in later gens at least), it doesn't say much about the actual viability of the Pokemon which do or don't make the cut... it doesn't make sense in the context, to me, even though obviously 1U and OU are the same tier in RBY. When we make our changes, we're changing what's legal in 2U, not UU, and since Smogon actually has its own UU tier now I think the distinction matters more

 

See, I disagree with this philosophy. I don't care about whether or not you can use your favorite pokémon somewhere, I care about making tiers that accurately reflect the viability of things. Just because you can use Persian in OU and have it be good enough it doesn't make him worthy of being tiered with the rest of the OUs imo.

 

Imagine that we had a really good way of measuring the value of a pokemon. And with this we figured out the Gengar is the worst OU pokemon*. So that by using Gengar you would generally reduce the likelihood that you would win an individual game compared with using any other OU pokemon. Now, it might still be worthwhile to use Gengar. For instance lets say being known for occasionally using Gengar prevents your opponents from using Persian against you, and because you dont have to take additional measures to cover that threat you might increase your overall win rate in all games, in spite of the hit you take for using Gengar occasionally. So then because of that fact we decide that using Gengar is definitely viable and therefore should be OU.

So the question then is, what if you have a pokemon like Golem, which might almost always be worse than Rhydon, but when we measure its value we find that using Golem would reduce your likelihood of losing an individual game less than using Gengar would. Golem probably shouldnt be included in your OU rotation, but for any one off game is still better than Gengar, something we have agreed is OU.

Because I think Golem is, by this standard, a better pokemon than Victreebel or Gengar**.

* This is all hypothetical, please dont pick a fight about this bit.
** This bit you can fight me about

[Edited because I think I was applying an unfair double-standard in my evaluation of Jolteon]

 

I'm not known for saying much, but I would like to contribute to this discussion by saying that Persian is good.

 

I thought about this a little bit more

Regarding this: I can only agree. I too believe that viability of certain Pokemon is gonna change over time, but not to an amount that Pokemon that we consider OU now would suddenly lose so much appeal that they're no longer considered viable enough to be OU. Vice versa, for the OU tier at least, I don't expect any lower tiered Pokemon to magically rise in viability to the point where we consider them legitimate part of OU.

That being said, we need to be careful to not drift too extremely into one direction or another with any Pokemon, to make sure that the result (as it should ideally be final) is correct. with the minimal amount of doubt possible. Ergo, are we really sure Golem should not belong to 1U/OU, or is it maybe a bit hasty. Or, the other way around, are we really sure Victreebel should belong to OU/1U etc. (for example).

What you give here, is a start of a "definition", and one that makes sense to measure OU-affiliation against. To add to this, I've thought about something else that can be added to said "definition":
How does this Pokemon's presence affect the tier? Clearly, if the presence of a Pokemon has an effect on the overall metagame or not is something that indicates wether it can be seen as part of the tier or not. What do I mean with that? Basically, does the existence of a certain Pokemon change the way games are played (lines of play, chosen by the players) or does the existence of a certain Pokemon even have an effect on movesets of other Pokemon or how often several Pokemon are used.

To give an easy example (please don't rip this one to shreds, it's just for explaining purposes), Starmie's movesets. If there were no Exeggutor in RBY OU, Starmie would have much less of a reason to run Blizzard. It'll probably much rather go for a STAB move like Surf to do more damage to neutral targets, getting 100% accuracy, OHKOing Rhydon for example. So the presence of Exeggutor has an effect on that for example.

Now we can ask the same thing about the seven candidates that I made out to be borderline cases (some of them probably are not even, I just wanted to make sure to not accidently exclude one). I don't want to go into too much detail here, but let's have a quick look.

Gengar is pretty much a no-brainer. Its existence alone is (next to Counter-scouting purposes) the sole reason to run EQ on your normal types for example. Gengar, whith his unique typing, despite not being the most common, has quite some infuence on other Pokemon in the metagame. By this metric, that clearly means it belongs to OU.

Regarding Victreebel, I believe I can give an example as well, as to how it influences the metagame (at least a little). In this case it is not about contributing to certain Pokemon running certain moves or not, but rather about how games are played. I must note that Victreebel is not the only Pokemon that I hold responsible for what I'm describing now. I think you can group partial trappers in general here, but of course only the best of them (preferably those who get the most accurate trapping moves), who offer more than only partial trapping to a team, will be contenders for OU here. So, we all know how common it is to lead with Starmie or Alakazam and use Thunder Wave turn 1. There are a few paths that players can go in the lead match-up with paralysis leads facing each other. A lot of the time people will just trade paralysis, but sometimes one of the players might switch to Chansey and keep their fast Psychic type lead free from status. I believe this is partly (at least) to be safer against Wrappers like Cloyster, Victreebel and Dragonite, since having something to outspeed those can be very important. And since you cannot know on turn 1 if you are facing a Victreebel, you may chose to take paralysis with something slower, while you otherwise might rather like to keep your Chansey free from paralysis. So in this way Victreebel (or Cloyster, Dragonite) have an influence on the OU metagame, that is not negligible.

And we can ask the same question for the remaining Pokemon. I don't think Jolteon, Golem, Articuno and Moltres have some sort of effect on the metagame like this (feel free to correct me, I might just not think of it right now).
Still, that does not mean, they cannot be considered OU. Obviously other things play a role as well. But those Pokemon will have to claim their affiliation to OU on other grounds, more than the above.

 

I'm confused, why are we discussing MoltCuno and not Persian? Persian's definitely in the same tier as them and I'd probably take it over the birds. Tbh all three of them seem pretty black and white though, all 2U.

I actually think Moltres is a better overall pokemon than Cuno tbh, which might be a bit of a hot take but w/e. The first thing is that any comparison to Dragonite fundamentally misunderstands the best way to play Moltres. You should never expect to pull off an Agiwrap sweep with it because it's so unreliable, instead Fire Spin is used to both generate free switches and shut down enemy counterplay (e.g. stopping opposing Chansey from recovering). Furthermore the fact that its STAB is tied for the strongest unboosted special attack in the game means it has immediate offensive presence, something Dnite can only dream about, while also combining with AgiSpin to give the user a LOT more options than both Cuno and Dnite in how it's played.

Instead, AgiSpin is best used opportunistically, to capitalise on an opponent being weak enough that it should only take a Spin or two to put them in HBeam range. One thing that really helps with this is burn. The synergy between burn and Fire Spin is actually ridiculous, to the point where burn can even be useful against Starmie, which would normally top the list of things not to burn. Between burn and Fire Spin you're dealing around 10% damage each turn while it sits there and does nothing, so you only need a bit of chip damage (which is also really easy to accumulate with Molt) before AgiSpin into HBeam on a burned Star becomes a viable option (any more than two Spins is too many though). Granted, it's quite unreliable due to accuracy and FSpin's variable number of hits, and although Molt can exploit a burned Star it's teammates generally can't, but it's still a very playable option, and I've had games where the sole reason I've won is that I burned their Starmie.

Molt's ridiculously potent, it's just held back by its lack of reliability. Also its matchups are funny, arguably the best big 4 matchup in the game, but it loses to literally every relevant 5th slot pokemon
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Regarding the whole "once and for all" thing, I disagree with the principle of considering things set in stone. I'd also like to point out that metagame shifts tends to be hard to predict. It's hard to say with accuracy now because we have the benefit of hindsight, but I really don't think anyone would've expected a lot of the recent metagame changes at all- just look how Golem's plummeted while Don's risen to its former glory- these are massive changes that I really doubt anyone could've foreseen in a metagame as stable as RBY's. I just don't think it's reasonable to assume that the metagame will remain roughly as it is now, and that it's even possible to predict future changes

That said, I think it's fair to dispute the most recent division between 1U and 2U. Iirc it occurred in the midst of all these changes and some players weren't fully on board with said changes (e.g. me lol), as well as the fact that the VR we were using wasn't updated to reflect these changes, such as by dropping A- to B and B to C , so that all the genuinely contentious pokemon were sitting in the same rank. I'll also note that although I disagree with setting things in stone, it's very reasonable in RBY to expect a given tier division to last several years before there's been enough change to justify revisiting it. So in that context I don't mind it being called "once and for all" or whatever, just so long as we leave open the option to revisit things.

Also, as a quick side note, I think that this is a good principle we should be applying to lower tiers. I think it was a mistake to go as deep as we did as quickly as we did. With the playerbase for RBY lower tiers already being small and variable based on interest, it's practically impossible to adequately develop our tiers, which we need to do in order to make decisions about them. This makes for a precarious foundation, which we've then built several other tiers on top of. Overall I think it's just impossible to maintain the tiers we have, given the overall level of interest and resources we have. Instead, an ideal would be to have a thoroughly understood tier, such that if there are any changes in the tier list, the lower tier can adapt existing knowledge rather than starting anew, with the latter being how it feels atm. Although I've always been opposed to creating a tier list that tries to stand for all time, I do think we should aim to try and make them more enduring and well-understood, by focusing on 2U for a long time, before maybe considering 3U. As much as I want to see the tiering project go as far as reasonably possible, I just don't think it's sustainable to try, since we spread everything too thin and just end up with a house of cards. Better to focus on a small number of quality tiers than a large number that gather dust and get invalidated eventually anyway.
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I want to object to the idea of moving everything contentious up into B. The fact that other generations split across the B tier should have no bearing whatsoever on RBY, since later gens have far more pokemon present in all ranks of the VR, making it more rational to split in B since you generally end up with a decently sized tier by that method. Enforcing that on RBY just clutters our VR and warps everything, especially in relation to the definitions we have
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Lastly I want to strongly object to the idea of holding up pokemon from whatever rank you please as contenders for making it into 1U/2U. This is totally arbitrary and flies in the face of viability based tiering. We should settle on a rank to set our border in (C is what we've used and I agree with it) and if you think a pokemon should be discussed, make an argument for why it's good/bad enough to belong in that rank. I mean I can kinda see not wanting to distort a VR for the sake of tiering, but the whole point is that our tiering is built upon our collective assessment of the viability of pokemon, so you can't just ignore it completely.

So. The pokemon I'm interested in discussing are Cloyster, Dragonite, Gengar, Golem, Jolteon, Jynx and Victreebel. I believe Gengar, Golem, Jolteon and Jynx should be included as I dispute their place in B, and believe the lot of them should be moved down to C, and I believe we should be discussing the Pokemon in C rank. I can provides arguments for this, but we've already discussed these pokemon ad nauseam. All of the D rank pokemon I believe are accurately ranked, and therefore do not belong in this discussion because they're simply not good enough.

Cloyster- 1U. Consistently provides significant defensive utility. Offensively it's a bit unreliable due to matchup issues, but if you can get around that it's an absolute beast.

Dragonite- 2U. Could maybe consider 1U though. I can kinda see TIN's point that it might be a bit unexplored due to how badly it's shunned in high level play, but just because something's unexplored, doesn't mean that you'll find anything good from exploring it. Until it can demonstrate that it's more worth using, it can stay in 2U.

Gengar- 1U. It's still something you might theoretically see in the lead spot, but I'm now buying in on the idea of it as a non-lead. I was skeptical at first, but I used it recently and was pleasantly surprised by how it performed in that slot.

Golem- 2U (surprise, I'm no longer defending it lmao). I just really don't see much of a reason to use it tbh. TIN hit the nail on the head with the "explode on Egg or Starmie" thing, but I'd like to point out that blowing up on Egg isn't even really that valuable imo, since it's really easy to wear down in the early game, before Golem even sniffs battle. Also Explosion, while a valuable general tool, is too vague in its purpose to be truly meaningful when teambuilding, except for blowing up on Star, given that it's a common Golem switch in.

Jolteon- 1U. How times have changed lol, voting Golem out of 1U and Jolteon in. Anyway, although I'm no longer as ardent of a fan as I once was, I still think Jolteon is good. Can plug a lot of holes when teambuilding and it's still a pretty damn potent offensive option

Jynx- 1U. I never seriously considered this dropping out of 1U, I only included it here because I believe it should be C. We've discussed how it's bad when just slapped on a team a lot, but it's still good with support, and can be used on non-standard builds.

Victreebel- 1U. Really on the fence on this one, like I personally would've said 2U, but after reading some of the arguments I shifted slightly (I would've been on the fence regardless). It's really niche, but it has a lot of offensive potential, but what separates it from other pokemon that are niche offensive threats is that it actually supports the team through status, meaning it pulls its weight. So yeah, I'm open to all arguments here.

 

All I see is another chapter of the long diatribe for awarding POKEMON honorary titles (read, OU) when most of them are just situational (they depend vastly on what happens with the first Thunder Wave of the game).

I would say that Victreebel is way more relevant (hence has a high usage and people claiming it's OU) because other than learning Sleep&Stun, it sweeps easily over para'd Starmie and Rhydon, which are definitely going to see a lot of play right now. And possibly forever will.
Just like Golem depends on Physlax and BeamBolt being the most common sets, which is something we'll hardly see again.

Anyway the OU split is a decision that only has an impact on lower tiers instead - that remain underplayed at best.
The aforementioned examples show that those "inconsistent" pokemon depend on the context, which is getting more and more stable.
I don't know what will happen when players will stop clicking Thunder Wave on turn 1, at least most of the time. I, myself, have been not doing that consistently for a long time and I think that hurt me a lot indeed in my late stage.
That's what I'm curious to see before asking for a Reflect ban from Snorlax's and Chansey's moveset.
It's been many years of Chansey switching into Snorlax and Snorlax using Ice Beam + Reflect only to deal with other Reflect Laxes. It's been fun, what about stopping it?
Consider that this is coming from, you know, a spectator.

 

I've always considered votes on VR to be a bit formal for something that's really about discussion, but I feel like we're discussing things a ton and nothing happens. I feel like we should put forward ideas on what changes to make and people vote on the best solution. If certain changes are mutually exclusive, then use a preferential system. I mention this because imo there should be a broad reform, and none of the individual movements make sense their own.

I propose that all of A- drop to B and all of B drop to C

So yeah, propose stuff and let's vote

Also quick side note, worry about 2U later imo. The VR should be resolved first, and sorting out 1U/2U is more appropriate for a separate thread anyway

 

Regarding Hypno I don't think people actually discussed it much. I was the one advocating that it drop into E, TIN disagreed but I don't think many other people commented. If I had to pick which of us was the better informed, I'd give the edge to TIN, as I believe that they have more recent experience with Hypno, whereas I used it a while ago and I suspect the set I was using wasn't the most optimal. I did mean to test it recently, but that came after testing Nidos, Poli, etc. so using something that's actually viable suddenly felt amazing so I decided to drop the issue rather than properly testing it lol.

Regarding your proposal, I agree that F should be the bottom rank, as I think that's more appropriate. That said, I generally don't like subranks in RBY VR and this is no exception. I think they should all be merged into one. Alternatively, you could even alter G rank to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek, maybe call it sub-F and say that there's no reason to ever use these pokemon. With all that said though, I'm not going to stand in the way of reorganising F/G, so I'd still support your proposal to make F/F-. I don't agree with E+/E, as to me the E/F cutoff roughly defines which pokemon are viable gimmicks and which ones are unviable

 

What the.... Cloyster in C??? Now why yall doin my boy like that? There some people in this thread that need to meet me in battle -.- Seriously though. You put those nasty things like jolteon and jynx above my boy? GROSS.

 

Reading the posts here I think people have misconceptions about Cloyster.

People talk about cloyster being a worse lapras with explosion, but in my experience explosion isn't the reason cloyster is good.

Rest cloyster is the best switch-in to reflect lax in the game and clamp gives you a lot of control. People talk about the accuracy, but you should only use it where misses aren't too punishing (eg. against snorlax). People also talk about wrappers being useless if paralysed, but cloy can rest it off and continue to wall lax. I've had battles where I've taken multiple paraslams with cloy and continued to wall lax and tauros.

The great thing about cloyster is that you can either play it as your filler or as a snorlax replacement. As a filler it doesn't much offensive capability like other fillers do, but it frees up your snorlax to play a more hit and run style, because it is no longer required to be your opposing lax check. As a snorlax replacement it compliments many fillers nicely. For example, it can boom on starmie to open up rhydon, and rhydon can wall zapdos, who cloy has problems with.

On another note, people don't consider bel 1U because they only think of it as a swords dance sweeper. In my opinion the support set of leaf double powder played as mid game controller is better than swords dance sets because it does its job much more consistently. People say paralysis makes it useless, which is mostly true, but the great thing is that most of it's counters rely on their speed and don't like being paralysed themselves. If bel gets para'd at full health by a twave, you can often force 'trades' by forcing one of its counters to take paralysis before it kills it.

 

You can really tell when you're talking to a person with experience with these pokemon and when you aren't. This man has experience. Cloyster is amazing. Clamp has won me games I should not have won. It can get you out of a foxhole some times. I've been dominating the ladder on showdown with a team that replaces lax with cloyster. Clamp is great when you're feeling out your opponent. Like you said it is great against lax. "is he going to stay in? is he going to switch to chansey?" It is nice to feel your opponent out with. Also, people are constantly complaining about reflect lax, well cloyster doesn't care about that. I personally don't use rest, I've never had a need for it. I instead use double edge. Great for parad starmie switch ins or chansey. Cloyster is great. I've also had a good bit of success with victreebel as well. I use sleep powder, wrap, razor leaf, body slam. Body slam is good for the things that razor leaf doesn't hurt too well, and the chance for paralysis is also nice. I don't use it mid game though. I find it has a much better time if used during late game but I guess that all depends on the team you use and the moveset. Your rhydon team would most likely benefit more from a midgame vic because it weakens things for don.

 

Cloyster is not just a bad Lapras and found his niche thanks to Snorlax dropping Hyper Beam so often i agree. But it is not as great as you make it sound neither, there are big downsides that you didn't say.

1- The offensive presence against water types is 0, both Starmie and Lapras can wall it while also resisting Explosion, negating an 1v1 trade.
2- As any Rest water user, Cloyster enforce you to run also Rhydon (or Jolteon/Golem) unless you want a colossal 6-0 by Zapdos. At that point your team can't have 2 fillers+big4+lead and must drop one (Usually Exeggutor because the lead is crucial), and the team gets weaker than your average big 4, greatly exposed to Rhydon in this case.

3- Tauros is running Fire Blast nowday, that is a 4hko instead of 5hko, can be lowered with crits and is generally enough to pressure it while Resting.

4- Athough rare Hyper Beam+Reflect Lax is a thing, and Cloyster doesn't really apreciate switching on it.

There are also some wrong statements, the best Reflect switchins are Gengar and Porygon if anything, as Cloyster is always in para danger or Hyper Beam (Gengar does fear Earthquake but it is much rarer than Hyper Beam).
I'm higher on Cloyster than i used to be, and i recognize his uses, but it is far from that "very convenient best Reflect Lax switchin" you described

 

Well the point is that he walls lax well but offers other utility as well.

Like I said before, you either drop lax and have an offensive filler like Rhydon, or you play it as your filler but play your lax more offensively as opppsed to a reflect set that’s used just to neutralise other lax.

You lose offensive pressure against waters but that’s less valuable than having a great answer to lax because other Pokémon on your team can deal with waters. Being able to wall common lax sets and still have other things to offer is arguably more valuable than being able to threaten mons that other mons on your team already do.

As for Tauros, cloyster is a decent switch in because even though Tauros might be able to break it, it normally doesn’t want to stay in to eat a blizz or boom, and you can rest the damage off. If Tauros comes in on rest and tries to break through there’s always the option of your own lax if you have one.