Is Punishment really that useless?Things that will help amazingly:
Hazards
Unaware
Tail Glow
Cotton Guard
Cosmic Power
Coil
Quiver Dance
Pursuit
Foul Play
Haze
Whirlwind
Roar
Dragon Tail
Circle Throw
Really cool metagame, and i expect good stuff from it :D
Yes, yes it is.Is Punishment really that useless?
punishment has a base power of 60. and then adds 20 per boost aquired. so for example, a poke with +2 on every stat would be:Yes, yes it is.
20+20BP per boost on the target is crap for a number of reasons. It has to compete with Foul Play, which is powerful regardless of how boosted the enemy is, and for instance one Swords Dance is 95 BPx2 for Foul Play while Punishment will be... 60 BP after one enemy Swords Dance. It also has to compete with Topsy-Turvy, Psych Up, Sacred Sword, Chip Away, Frost Breath, Storm Throw, and even Focus Energy: a target with x4 Defense will take, from Punishment, a 140 BP attack that does 1/4th its base damage eg basically a 35 BP move, vs these other effects more meaningfully punishing being hugely statted up (Topsy-Turvy, Psych Up, Foul Play) or flat out ignoring the boosts while having actually decent BP. (Sacred Sword, Chip Away, crits) Even Pokemon with maxed Defense and Special Defense (Or some other stat) getting hit by Punishment is the equivalent of a 70 BP attack, which is still crap compared to these other options. (OK, to be fair, Chip Away is only 70 BP) You have to have something beyond 18 total boosts before Punishment starts to look good compared to these other options, basically, and that just reinforces the utility of Transform/Imposter, Topsy-Turvy, Psych Up, Haze, etc.
It would be another thing entirely if there was even a single instance of a Pokemon with Unaware and Punishment, which would actually be really amazing against walls trying to wall. Three stat boosts and it's equal to Crunch, and past that it will quickly equal and then exceed Boomburst, followed by V-Create, and then even Explosion. But no such Pokemon exists.
The one real exception is that if Quiver Dance ends up dominating the metagame Punishment starts to be appealing, since it won't have its damage lowered and Foul Play runs off Attack in specific. Even so, Topsy-Turvy etc.
Only if you bother to bolster your crit rate somehow -Super Luck, Scope Lens, Focus Energy- because otherwise it's just jumping from a 6.25% chance of occurring to a 12.5% chance of occurring, which is not something to count on. And Focus Energy being a +2 to crit means it would bring Punishment up to a 50% chance of critting, at which point the potential to have vastly more BP on a highly boosted target combined with good odds of a crit starts to look better. And if you've got a Scope Lens or Super Luck+Focus Energy then Punishment will be a 100% crit chance anyway, rendering Night Slash irrelevant. (Absol gets Super Luck, Punishment, and Night Slash, so this isn't even academic)Night Slash will probably be better anyways, due to the high crit rate negating defense boosts, but Punishment would be an interesting idea.
how come no one else has posted this!? this will be EXTREMELY useful, the only reason NOT to use this would be if you want to use psych upSticky Web arguebly is more potent than rocks
Have to note that Absol is the only abuser, and enjoys the mega anyways, meaning it loses out on Super Luck and Scope Lens. Plus, due to a huge lack of distribution, it really isn't very noteworthy (Landorus, Weavile, and Absol being the only remotely decent users of it, and all being frail, which will be a pain in the ass in a game revolved around constant offensive buffing and Terrakion likely becoming a thing.)Only if you bother to bolster your crit rate somehow -Super Luck, Scope Lens, Focus Energy- because otherwise it's just jumping from a 6.25% chance of occurring to a 12.5% chance of occurring, which is not something to count on. And Focus Energy being a +2 to crit means it would bring Punishment up to a 50% chance of critting, at which point the potential to have vastly more BP on a highly boosted target combined with good odds of a crit starts to look better. And if you've got a Scope Lens or Super Luck+Focus Energy then Punishment will be a 100% crit chance anyway, rendering Night Slash irrelevant. (Absol gets Super Luck, Punishment, and Night Slash, so this isn't even academic)
until someone decides to use haze..... or unaware..... or a bug type move.couple of steps to victory:
1. Cosmic Power (as many times as you can)
2. switch to Malamar
3. Profit.
And you can just set up curse. Outspeed everything in TR.To keep things going, Trick Room came to mind as a potential strategy in this meta. Normally Trick Room, while viable, is not an easy strategy to execute and the best Pokemon for it are fairly limited since they need to be slow and have stats competitive with the tier you're playing.
However, I suspect boosting speed will be relatively common, if just by Q. Dance, Shell Smash, Shift Gear, or Smeargle's Geomancy. And Sticky Web might also be because of the stacking speed debuff. As such, while they're boosting speed, you could focus on defense and offense boosting exclusively. And, once you're ready to sweep, reverse the speed tiers and make the opponent (hopefully) cry now that their speed buffs/Sticky Web are working against them. Also, speed boosting/Sticky Web makes the natural speed tiers less meaningful, which means faster Pokemon could probably be viable on a BPM Trick Room team who wouldn't be very compatible with the strategy in standard.
Noivern also gets it, so that's nice.There's also Sacred Sword that does the same thing, except stronger and far less distribution. Either way, might be the first meta where Chip Away is actually good.
Also, it occurs to me that Infiltrator may be very useful. I suspect substitute will be common and Infiltrator will let you bypass that. Off the top of my head, Chandelure is a good user, but I'm not sure who else. Crobat?