Aard

Its arbitrary what is a consumable. Focus sashes were never consumables in the original games. You bought one and it was permanent. BP sinks are obnoxious. Why reduce the already inconsequential 500 bp reward by 20% just because someone builds a team with a focus sash mon?

That would be pretty cool if you could buy a focus sash that returns after battle for 50000 bp. If you need more than 500 of them then it seems reasonable be able to get a permanent one. Only think it should be done with the battle frontier stuff like air balloon, focus sash, and white herbs. Its a bad idea to do it with berries.

It would be helpful to have stats of how often certain moves are used since when talking about it people have to remember it has two moveslots for rock slide, thunderpunch, payback, bulk up, and ice punch. My guess would be a lot some of these combinations are exceedingly uncommon. If you build a team with gliscor and reniclus as your conk checks are you really ever going to run into an ice punch payback conk without some serious scouting by the opponent? Doubt it. Conkeldurr simply can't beat every threat at once and only a few sets actually do well over a large portion of the tier. Its not like its set up beyond repair once you scout it either because of its speed stat being so low. Basically, I'd like to see explanations of why its too hard to scout when a lot times battles rely on scouting the opponents moves in similar ways. Being forced to do it instead of hard walling might be unpleasant, but its a common situation that I don't see differs here. A Pokémon is uber if, in common battle conditions, it is capable of sweeping through a significant portion of teams in the metagame with little effort. The "in common battle conditions" is the key phrase there and my answer is no it cannot. There are plenty of combinations of common checks that together produce one poke that walls the vast majority of conks. Then the "little effort" part comes in because even if a really shaky style of bulky volc/starmie style of checking runs into the exceedingly rare thunder punch rock slide conk, then the conk still has to predict which mon is coming is or it just gets koed. I just don't see it. I get if you put every move on it at once it beats most things and that it takes a turn or two to figure out its set, but its not just sweeping through teams. If you want to reliably play against conkeldurr without getting creative with the teambuilding, run reniculus and one other check.

Yeah, the drop rate need to be over 7.5% at 10% encounter rate at the very least for it to compete in efficiency with elite 4 bp farming. The only reason anyone should ever try this is if they are hunting a shiny found in the area at the same time.

Nah, it works. I saw plenty of charti berries from the swellows in the same area. Is there a preference for dark or light grass? I tried for 30 more minutes. I went into 4 battles per minute for a total of 120 battles. Out of those I encountered 13 absols or 10.8% of the battles. Out of that 0 had life orbs. Maybe other people can measure so we can actually figure out the rates. Right now it really seems like a 10% encounter rate and a <5% item hold rate. I don't know the exact number total right now, but so far its around 75 absols without a life orb. That is not a viable farming method since there's a faster way to get life orbs with a lost of side cash to go along with it. I'll probably compare it to how much I get garbador nugget farming per minute soon. In general, just be cautious of what that zangoose guy says. Not the first time something he's advocated turned out to be bogus. If I hadn't had fun keeping track of how many battles and absols I'd seen I would've thrown my computer out the window after making $0 over two and a half hours. Just for reference that's 6 clears (really 7 but 6 to be generous) of the elite four in the same 150 minutes for 12000 bp and ~400k after potions and revives. A bigger sample size would be nice, but I'm pretty sure bp life orbs are far superior to absol ones.

Why? Frisk tells you what item the poke is holding. If I wait a turn that's much less than 200 encounters per hour and definitely not worth the time.

I tried it for almost two hours earlier and didnt get anything. i used frisk too so i could run as soon as i was sure it wasnt holding it. I guess I need comfirnation on the rate actually being one every 30 minutes because it seems like absol only appears maybe 10% of the time. And in 30 minutes you can only really do ~100 encounters. So basically if the hold rate is around 10% then maybe. It seems lower though.

How much time per life orb? If its over 45 minutes per one then fighting the elite 4 is faster money since after 90 minutes you'd have battle points to buy one and the money to buy a second.

If scizor is really a problem you could always switch starmie to tentacruel which also solves the volcarona hole if blissey isn't healthy. Either way, needs scald other thunderbolt or ice beam. Also, chansey objectively outclasses blissey in all situations. Don't know if its worth spending a mil on to fix that though. Run protect over softboiled too.

Team is stronger with hippow than with ttar. If you really want to keep ttar then you have to replace another mon like ferrothorn with roserade or hydriegon with gliscor. 4 fighting weaknesses and 1 resist isn't going to cut it. I'd replace ferro with roserade because roserade teams are fun, but I think hippow over ttar fits best with the playstyle you're going for.

Those are all good points. I might be underestimating the 10% life orb recoil to 6.25% burn. Still, the reason I think sheer force is better is when I run calcs on coverage moves versus checks the 1.69x sheer force life orb multiplier matters a lot more than when I compared 1.5x guts calc with drain punch versus 1.3x life orb calcs. If I had specific instances of "Only guts conkeldurr 1hkos magnezone" or something like that it would be much more inclined to believe guts is the better set. I also don't think flame orb and sheer force existing for only two weeks is an adequate sample size to see which actually wins out in competitive play. Oh, someone posted the magnezone calc while a was posting it. The 25% chance goes away after rocks so that's less substantial but there might be something else. Anyway, I'll talk more in the conk thread if I find any calcs.

I never said that and you know it. We have had 2 weeks with the update. Smogon had 2 years. They figured out what sets work better than us and its not hard to see why a 1.69 multiplier is better than a 1.5 multiplier that takes an extra turn to activate. You can do all your calcs with bite over crunch because that's what you saw one person use or be correct.

I wonder if it matches people with similar rating because that's just an inferior set damage wise and gets less kos. It would be like giving your poke 200 attack evs then leaving the rest blank. Exactly what with thunder punch kills skarmory besides conkeldurr? That sounds made up. Maybe a few things kill gyarados with it but not much on the physical side is koing skarmory. I'd rather go by a place that dedicated years to a similar tier and has really smart people writing content than use anecdotal evidence of what biased people say they saw in a few pvp games in a two-week-old meta. 252+ Atk Life Orb Sheer Force Conkeldurr Thunder Punch vs. 248 HP / 252+ Def Skarmory: 185-218 (55.5 - 65.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery 252+ Atk Life Orb Conkeldurr Thunder Punch vs. 248 HP / 252+ Def Skarmory: 143-169 (42.9 - 50.7%) -- guaranteed 3HKO after Leftovers recovery 140 base attack with life orb doesn't kill unless an ability helps it out and nothing really has 140 base attack so the thunderpunch skarm theory is out the window. 252+ Atk Guts Conkeldurr Thunder Punch vs. 248 HP / 252+ Def Skarmory: 162-192 (48.6 - 57.6%) -- 53.1% chance to 2HKO after Leftovers recovery Also, funny how this stuff ties together. A perfect example of why the guts flame orb set is inferior.

You should probably have a fighting resist that's also at least neutral to ice just because every good fightning mon gets ice punch. And a semi-bulky ground type is pretty standard too. Just any well balanced team that isn't pure stall should be able to deal with conk just fine. Really not hard to work thesei nto a team. Hippow, gliscor, starmie, volcarona, dragonite, salamence, gyarados, pelipper, skarmory, reuniclus. Really good mons. Then okay mons: gengar, roserade, metagross, gallade, scizor, swampert, chandelure. And then if you can't predict and want to specifically just wall things you still got cofagrigus and dusclops. You don't even have to plan for conkeldurr that much. Just some okay teambuilding is enough and then knowing how to not get outpredicted on every turn. Its stabs are still just 112 and 60 power even if you put them in bold to make them sound scary. Sheer force life orb is a 1.69x multiplier on the coverage moves which is better than a 1.5x guts multiplier on stab moves that don't need more buffing to get kills with a flame orb that takes a turn to activate. The guts set doesn't even use the flame orb, it uses leftovers and relies on tanking status then bulking up. So, you didn't really get the max attack right since it comes to 356. Anyway, its kind of exhausting having to do the numbers for both sides of the argument since people aren't even using the right sets to make arguments. It would be kind of like if I used counter chansey as a reason for wanting to ban it. Counter chansey kills a lot of its counters which is kind of funny but I'm not going to act like its the main set.

Its only a draw/lose if you try to wall it with pure stall. Anything like starmie or gliscor or anything else reasonable is a lose/win sometimes with two chances for the non-conkel to get it right. I guarantee we could just poll what type of teams everyone uses and if people were honest we'd get a really accurate correlation between people who play stall and people who think conk should be banned. Maybe play something with attacking moves. 105/95/65 on 45 base speed just isn't broken even with an effective 160 attack stat. Go build an offensive/balanced team with two fighting resists that aren't both weak to thunder or ice or rock and then play it for a few games. It might change your opinion of how easy conk is to deal with. I actually went through and saw if smogon ever banned something with <50 base speed and all I got was a denied vote on reniclus and a mega sableye ban that was because of its stalling. The worst part about this is if you guys got the small things right then at least it would be an interesting debate. But most of the people here seem to think guts is preferred over sheer force and that stone edge is better than rock slide (-2.5 power difference +10% accuracy). Anyway, I don't know what else to say. Ladder requirements were very helpful on the simulators to weed out people who weren't equipped to make influential decisions. Without scouting, a lot of stall players would find making them very difficult. Here, I don't really know what determines whose voice matters since the ranked ladder doesn't even go by elo correctly. The highest person on the ladder has a 53% winrrate just because they played a bunch of games. Then no one broke the 80% winrrate which is weird but the 70% winrates are a lot lower than the 50's and 60's just because of game number. Anywa,y that's a tangent. I just don't get how this ban ultimately gets decided. If its by this thread then that's not good.

It solves the scouting problem to a degree other mons don't. I'm comparing the 50/50 situations people wanted it banned for. They both has similar attack stats, hp stats, and movepools. Both can pick out kills with good prediction on switches. The difference is that Slaking cannot always ko stall mons on good prediction which is really what this is about. Go out and put something like a gliscor and starmie on your team and see how many times you really lose to conk. Even if your prediction is terrible its not going to have the odds in its favor. The only thing you can't do against it is play brainless stall and always switch to the same thing. There's a reason smogon never even considered banning it, and it wasn't the latis or lando-t since they are kod with good prediction by ice punch just like all the other stuff we've talked about

I have no doubt on that. But I fear it will go for the opposite reason. Conk is the most balancing mon in the game. People admitted they want it banned simply because they can't deal with 50/50 situations. That is a terrible reason to ban something. Choice band slaking could be banned for the same reason, but that doesn't crush stall which is what people are really saying. They want their cookie cutter stall teams to work after scouting. They don't want someone who is better at the game to beat outpredict them and win which conk can do even after being scouted. Whoever predicts better should win a pokemon battle. Conk achieves that and nothing more, bottom line. Chansey on the other hand... I don't think I've ever seen the person with the chansey be better at prediction. It is a crutch. And that is mostly in places without a chronic scouting problem.

Its not. And I'm discussing it because some people specifically want to ban it to make their dull playstyle stronger. We got to the meat of it with "50/50's predictions are bad" so it was a helpful discussion. Also, I thought that this was a general discussion for ou, not just for conk. I think chansey should be banned immediately independent of what's done to conk.

That's a key difference in thought. Prediction based 50/50's are what make pokemon battles interesting. The only time they should be eliminated from play is when they last more than 1 turn in a row. An example of a bad 50/50 is aegislash king's shield, its a 50/50 if it uses it, then another 50/50 on the switch turn after giving aegislash over 50% odds. An example of a good 50/50 is deciding whether to switch to starmie or gliscor when facing conk with a fighting weak mon. Its not even really a 50/50 sometimes as it becomes a 1/3 chance if the fighting weak mon can damage when conk uses a non-fighting move. Another bad example of a 50/50 is trying to beat down a chansey with a chandelure and hoping it doesn't switch when you calm mind. Eliminating all 50/50's would make the game very dull as perfect stall shows. 50/50's are only bad when dragged over consecutive turns.

Yeah, if you know chandelure is choice locked you can revenge kill it 100% of the time with scizor pursuit if it is locked into a desirable move. No prediction needed. This is a kind of funny example of how good memory does not equal good understanding. You guys remember forum posts from a year ago but don't take the effort to think about if it was true or not because you immediately dismissed it after saying "Fire, bug/steel, fire win!". 252 SpA Choice Specs Chandelure Shadow Ball vs. 252 HP / 4 SpD Scizor: 127-150 (36.9 - 43.6%) -- guaranteed 3HKO 252+ Atk Choice Band Technician Scizor Pursuit vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Chandelure: 236-278 (90.4 - 106.5%) -- 37.5% chance to OHKO Calcs back me up pretty clearly, don't know what to say. Maybe you forgot ghost is resisted by steel when you ran the calc? Don't really remember the conversation.

I don't remember saying that. I'm the guy that said cloyster is too much for uu and everyone laughed at me but then two months later its ou. I guess choice specs locked chandelure would be threatened by pursuit though and its pretty easy to figure out if something is choice locked. So it is true if they have a scizor and you have a choiced chandelure you can't blindly lock into shadow ball or energy ball.

Its like one of those mastercard commercials. The value of seeing someone get banned is priceless.

It is exponentially easier to kill conkeldurr than chansey. Counters that take 10 turns to work are far from easy where as killing conkeldurr is pretty much just predicting what move he will use which is simple. Sometimes the game is about outpredicting your opponent and you beat conkeldurr every time if you do that. All you need is two cnadidate switches out of a list of about 20 mons. With chansey stall teams, sometimes your team just isn't equipped to deal with the specific team they brought and its a loss from turn 1. In a game where people scout each other to get an advantage and build up differing resources over time, that is broken. Chansey is just the word cancer misspelled and it is exactly what it will be for this game. People think in terms of counters and checks too much. People don't play this game to get into hour long matches that are theoretically won or lost from turn 1 with very little opportunity to insert clever prediction. Things like conkeldurr keep the game exciting regardless of how many counters they have. If you switch Dragonite into ice punch then the opponent outplayed you. If you switch it into drain punch and then get a turn to use a powerful attack of your own, you outplayed them. That's how the game should be. I'd bet the people wanting conkeldurr gone are the ones with more mons who play the game through excessive scouting. Conk relies that you play the game in the moment instead of crushing your opponent on the vast pool of boxed mons you have. I honestly get the impression a lot of people here quit competitive play on the simulators because they weren't very good at predicting and wanted a more reliable way to win games. A way to minimize risk and feel like a good battler. Right now offensive play threatens that because you can't always win by inserting a cookiecutter stallteam and click buttons randomly. Anyway, that's who I think the two groups of people really are on this. I can't remember a base 40 speed pokemon ever being put into discussion for ban anywhere because it was too hard to predict. I don't think that has ever happened.

We were talking about the consequences banning conkeldurr would have on chansey. Someone claimed that itwould have no effect because there are plenty of other counters. I pointed out that most of the other counters are inferior to conkeldurr because there are more turns for things to go wrong.

The thing is if chandelure uses calm mind instead of a 145 base spatk move then the damage is 0. The chandelure has to use 5-6 or these or wait for a crit to kill the chansey. Anything faster that can ko can switch in on these turns. And the chandelure probably isn't going to be shadow balling the chansey randomly while setting up so the only real question is flamethrower or calm mind. More than ttar can switch in with advantage against those odds. Having to get in 5-6 setups before killing makes it a lot worse of an answer than conkeldurr which needs 0-1 setups beforei ts guaranteed to start blasting attack moves.