I want to point out some things that many people have been doing that I don't agree with when it comes to choosing typing, and some things that have been mentioned that will help us achieve our goal. The point of this post is not to suggest a specific typing, but to help people better focus their arguments for their suggestions. Hopefully asking ourselves whether or not we're doing these things in the future will help us choose better typings.
So here's some general dos and don'ts I feel are necessary for this part of the project.
Do:
- Have a selective 'group' of resistances.
It's easy to say something like 'we have a resistance to grass so we won't accidentally let Mega-Venu come in on us!', but that argument has a natural drawback that ALWAYS needs to be considered. I'm talking about coverage. In this case, Venu runs poison and fire moves along with grass quite consistently. So if one of our weaknesses happen to be from the group of grass, poison, and fire, that makes the original argument for the grass resistance invalid. Similarly, if we chose a ground typing for CAP, we handle Thundurus's STAB and t-wave extremely well. However, it almost always runs HP ice, making it much more difficult to justify a ground typing. For every typing we choose, we should be well aware of coverage moves.
It seems like the above should go without saying, but I see people saying things like 'my typing beats Thundurus' while they have a gaping weakness to fighting, which happens to be the type of focus blast. Thundurus runs that. Crazy, right?
Don't think of a weakness or resistance as justifiable just by itself. Being able to identify reasons for a typing working well is without factoring in common coverage moves is like trying to lock an open door. It doesn't matter if the door is locked if you forgot to close the fucking door in the first place.
- Correctly Understand Gyarados's (and other sweeper's) strengths.
A big part of the reason we chose MGyara as our sweeper of choice was the fact that after even a single boost, it wrecks EVERYTHING. Really, after it sets up, your only choices are to kill it with priority users or die. Because of this, CAP should be doing only two things: Killing and stunting priority users and getting out of Gyara's way and watching it kill everything. While we aren't trying to create a perfect mate for Gyara, handling these threats and setting up our after-death effects will be our only priorities while alive.
To put it simply, MGyara's strength is that priority is it's only weakness. It can set up on a large portion of the metagame, so as long as we can handle the small instances it CAN'T, we've done our job correctly.
Yes, I agree that we aren't trying to cover our sweeper's weaknesses. We aren't trying to create a perfect partner for our sweeper, nor should we. However,
in order to have a lasting impact on the battle, even after fainting, removing our endgame's counters is a perfectly reasonable choice and is beneficial towards the concept. We aren't trying to create a core, and we shouldn't expect to be switching between MGyara and CAP hardly ever outside of the endgame. In fact, doing so too early would be a waste. It's commonly seen that if you send your endgame in too early, you lose and die. Part of playing with sweepers is knowing the right time to strike. There's quite a distinct difference between a 'Perfect Mate' and our sac-sweep combo. Perfect Mate assumes switching between the two. Our SacSweep assumes that we transition between the two pokemon a total of once. To clarify and wrap up this section before I go off on some tangent:
We WANT to hurt things that threaten MGyara after a boost, namely things that can revenge kill it.
We DON'T WANT to hurt things that threaten MGyara before a boost.
This is what differentiates SacSweep from a Perfect Mate.
Don't:
- Have Priority weaknesses.
Arguably, the easiest way to kill the majority of the dragon dancers is with priority users. Not only does MGyara have a fighting weakness as is, but Conkeldurr and Breloom check it, both who have powerful fighting type priority. If we bait these pokemon out to fight CAP, we have lost our setup chance. I agree that we're trying to identify what we CAN set up on and not what we CAN'T, but choosing a type with a fighting weakness is equivalent to saying that it's fine to ignore MGyara as one of our sweepers. Which it's not.
Similarly, a weakness to flying or dark (Dark is special. I talk about sucker punch and stuff later) could be potentially hazardous, due to both types having strong priority users behind them.
Not only that, but a large portion of priority users tend to run a choice item. Whether it's Talonflame, Scizor or Azumarill, forcing them into a non-priority move can potentially be the difference between our sweeper getting to set up and sacking CAP for nothing.
Have Resistance to knock-off.
One of the most common traits most set-up sweepers have here in gen 6 is that the majority happen to be mega-evolutions. Not only do MegaZardX and MGyara have extremely powerful setup sets, but being a mega evolution allows them an innate resistance to Knock-Off. Spammers of the move, including Bisharp and Scizor, are handled extremely well by our Sweepers. We should be pulling these users out into the open as setup fodder.
I lied, the above isn't completely true. Thundurus learns knock off, who was already determined to be a threat to sweeping in the first place. I ran into this problem while I was writing what I did above. It's completely possible for thundy to start running knock-off to hurt us. The fact that megas handle knock-off well is worth mentioning, but we should be careful not to let a weakness to the move compromise our ability to handle Thundurus.
Similarly, Sucker Punch, the extremely powerful priority move, can be used to revenge kill our sweeper. Unfortunately, because the move shares it's typing with knock-off, it discourages us even farther when it comes to making ourselves 'weak' to knock off.
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Okay, I hope that this post was actually useful. This post was originally going to be a tangent about why having a fighting weakness is super terrible, but it sort of evolved into some sort of super-preachy-mega-post about everything that bothered me. If you think I'm super dumb and any of this is wrong, feel free to yell as usual. However, if you agree with any of the above points, you should be applying them to CAP's typing.
Writing on an airplane sucks. The guy next to me keeps trying to read my stuff.