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Aerodactyl's role used to be walling PhysLax, but with ReflectIB Lax's popularity Aero's niche has just about entirely been taken over by Gengar and Porygon. It does much better in low tiers where it can wall stuff like Charizard, Fearow and itself, and its limited offense is remedied by the lack of instant recovery (outside of Staryu) past 2U/UU.
Ice Beam / Hyper Beam / Thunder Wave / Recover is what I normally use. Pory's moveset is great, but its stats aren't. It's a slower Chansey without enormous Special bulk, with a decent Attack stat (+ Sharpen) being the only thing Chansey lacks. Its purpose is to keep Snorlax from gaining momentum (unless Lax has Amnesia) while letting Chansey take paralysis comfortably, and since it's usually avoiding status like the plague, dealing with Tauros in the endgame. It also can wall Gengar once Sleep Clause is active without risking your Chansey, and if Exeggutor doesn't carry Stun Spore, Porygon can technically switch into and beat Eggy as long as it doesn't suffer Psychic drops or crits, and has > 50% chance to survive Eggy's Explosion at full health. Using Pory as a switch in to Eggy is not a good idea though especially if Eggy isn't paralyzed.
Thunderbolt, Tri Attack, Reflect, Flash, and Sharpen are Porygon's other options to explore, but IB + HB I think is Pory's best set.
I've been looking at butterfree's move set and I can just not figure out what this pokemon is suppose to do. If there were no bans, double team plus flash would be so powerful though.
I've been looking at butterfree's move set and I can just not figure out what this pokemon is suppose to do. If there were no bans, double team plus flash would be so powerful though.
Everything that can use TMs gets Double Team, and there are quite a few things that get Flash including all the Recover and Softboiled users (bear in mind Flash's bad accuracy, though).
Butterfree is supposed to spread status & provide EQ immunity. Problem is stats, offensive movepool (Psychic is just OK without STAB) and typing are awful in OU, and many lower tiers as well. 6U it's amazing, but that's mostly due to tier powerhouses like Machamp, Hitmonlee, Muk & Kabutops all being weak to Butterfree's coverage.
So what are everyone's thoughts on the recent post on smogon basically introducing some basic statistic analysis into the whole VR thing
S Rank: Reserved for Pokemon which pose a very significant offensive or defensive threat, consistently harming or walling the opposing team. The roles these Pokemon can fulfill are crucial, if not mandatory, for RBY teams and these Pokemon are the best at their certain roles.
S- Rank:
A+ Rank: Reserved for Pokemon that are outstanding in the RBY metagame. These Pokemon pose a signifigant offensive or defensive threat to most teams. If these Pokemon have flaws, they are often outshown by their strengths.
A Rank:
A- Rank:
B+ Rank: Reserved for Pokemon who are very good in the RBY metagame, yet are somewhat inconsistent. These Pokemon may have flaws, but they have positive aspects which makes them stand out, making them valuable members of a team.
B- Rank:
C Rank: Reserved for Pokemon that have solid niches in the RBY metagame, but nonetheless are generally inconsistent. These Pokemon have definite flaws, but may have positive aspects which can make them worth using.
D+ Rank: Reserved for Pokemon that are mediocre in the RBY metagame, but are decent enough to pose a threat at times, usually out of surprise. These Pokemon have a small niche in the metagame and are often not worth using.
D Rank:
D- Rank:
The key thing is it places very different cutoffs for various tiers. It also embraces subtiers, which is something I've always been against in RBY, but idk, maybe I should revise that position. I think it's undoubtedly a really cool project that we should take on board to at least some degree
Some critiques I have include opaque selection process for contributors, as well as not really covering lower ranked pokemon- I think there are many pokemon that ought to be in D, but there just wasn't enough data for them. Lastly although there's a clear procedure for separating pokemon, I'm not sure how it differentiates between subtier gaps and full tier gaps (this might have been explained in another post and I just don't recall it though). I think it worked out either way in this case.
One thing I will note is that this VR basically shifts almost everything C and below up one tier. Not sure how I feel about that, especially in the context of theoretically determining 2U. I guess the mons in C in this new VR are more debatable than those in B-? I guess it could be worthwhile making an E rank so that irredeemable trash can reside in F, while pokemon that are still unviable but not without some positive traits that merely fail to balance out their flaws can reside in E (basically F+->E).
By and large I don't have a problem with these new rankings aside from Jynx maybe being a bit high, but idk, there's a reason I wasn't selected as a contributor lol, it's because I'm not that active so my opinion isn't worth as much
Two full ranks between Rhydon and Golem is insanity, to the point where you have to ask questions about the method or, more probably, the systemic bias of the data going into it.
Full tier = dots go from below the line to above it.
Hello! Fellow who devised the graphical method here. A few quick words:
1. The method doesnt follow definitions of tiers like "fulfilling a niche" or "very significant threat". Its just tiers 1 2 3
... 10 or something like that. Naming of tiers like B+ or using the word subtier is subjective.
2. There are two ways to define a tier. Either jumps across the line or jump above a standard deviation. They should coincide in the limit of a large number of ranked mons that are fully ranked by all players and no outliers, but in the non ideal case I prefer for jumps above a standard deviation to define a tier.
3. A tier should just be thought of in this method as a position where within, contributors find mons to be roughly indistinguishable in quality, and outside the tier, distinguishable in quality. Both these conditions may not be fulfilled, which is when tier disputes would happen. More info in this post.
The dodgy bit about calling it "objective" is that it is in fact not objective because it is determined by the subjective preferences of the contributors and is beholden to any systemic bias among them.
I can only think of two ways to get a truly objective ranking.
1) Winrates. The confound here is that better players don't use the same Pokemon as worse players, so you'd have to figure out a way around that (controlling for it works to some extent, but the better players don't use shitmons at all so for those you'd need to look at how they perform for worse players).
2) Nash equilibrium. This is not a real option at this point, but if you could solve RBY you could just look at the Nash equilibrium of team selection. Of course, if you solved RBY then an online ladder would be laughable because everyone would just use bots to cheat.
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