Okay, guys, discussion has been winding down. I'm not going to give a specific x hour warning right now, and may never, but I just would like you to be aware that I have spoken with the mods and we agree that the arguments are beginning to become rehashed. With that in mind, I'd like to see more thoughts on other abilities than the already-definitely-slated Regenerator, Motor Drive, Magic Bounce, Unburden. In particular, I want to hear about Intimidate, Water Absorb, and Sand Rush, three abilities which seem to have garnered some support but been largely overlooked in favor of swapping notes about Motor Drive. However, don't let that discourage you from bringing up new abilities or other overlooked ones—how long was it until steel/flying was mentioned in Typing? Furthermore, this isn't a gag order on the abilities that have been beaten nearly to death, ie the four listed above, but you should have a fresh perspective in your argument instead of arguing in circles. When we consider our abilities, I'd like us to consider the following questions, but first I need to cut to Regenerator to explain why:
Ok, Birkal brings up a logical argument about Regenerator which is that it allows the CAP to scout successfully, and is virtually the only way for the CAP to scout successfully, being virtually locked out of recovery and Leftovers, (the former for concept cohesion purposes and the latter for acrobatics purposes) and needing to stay above 50% to be useful. My question is: is scouting really worth the opportunity cost? As Fuzznip and many others have pointed out, basically every Pokemon in OU has a way to beat CAP6 before it sets up. And we have an ability, 50% of our statistical bulk, and perhaps a spare moveslot vs the world—significantly less than some Pokemon. Removing the ability leaves a major chink in the armor, and I don't believe scouting is worth it. People may run surprise lure sets for cap6 since it's guaranteed to have massive usage, but aside from specs hp fire forretress, i feel we can discover most lures by scouting with other Pokemon. @
birkal draws the comparison to Dragonite switching out of a Rotom-W with an unknown moveset, but the whole point of a lategame sweeper is to be used after the opponent knows it's too late. It's not as if Rotom-W will hide its scarf for a whole game unless i bring out my cap6. While scouting may at first appear as an equally valid way to bring cap6 breathing room, i'd rather have an ability which directly contributes to the Big Sweep.
With that said, these are the general questions that I, at least, have been using to evaluate abilities proposed throughout the thread. I would love to see discussion on these underlying principles, because the abilities proposed and what we vote on are simply going to be symptomatic of the underlying opinions on what the CAP needs out of this step.
1) What additional setup opportunities does this ability bring?
This is the main question that every ability in the thread must answer in my opinion. If the ability does not make it easier for CAP6 to set up, I'd rather find something which can. It's the simplest pitfall of every competitive battler: finding strategies that can completely wreck teams with the right support and under the right conditions, but those conditions are stupidly specific. A little reliability goes a long way, and abilities like Unburden and Sand Rush offer little to no extra reliability. Once we're at +6, well, nothing can hurt you if it's sleeping with the fishes right?
@
Scoopapa mentions that there are moves which deal with things such as status and phazing. there are literally two of these: substitute and taunt, both of which have major obvious pitfalls (such as missing a variety of phazing) and neither of which allows us to run 3-move coverage. We can't turn to the movepool for answers to defensive tactics, so—if we need to defeat them at all—we have to defeat them in the ability.
2) With a reasonable movepool, how likely is this ability to distract from the concept? (The concept obviously being: Belly Drum user)
This is, among other things, the major pitfall of Magic Bounce. We suffer from the unfortunate combination of a great defensive typing and the need for a good defensive ability in order to make Belly Drum work, yet we can't let our Pokemon adopt a defensive role. With rare exceptions, you can't have a defensive Pokemon without a supporting movepool. Unfortunately, Magic Bounce is, as reachzero said, one of the exceptions. Magic Bounce is so exceptionally useful as an ability that competitive players managed to turn ESPEON into a bulky Pokemon, just to give it more opportunities to
spin and heal bounce. No matter how restrictive our defensive movepool, cap6 wouldn't willingly shave off 50% HP.
3) What Pokemon does this remove from the threats list while at +6?
Unlike the former two questions, I'm actually not looking to minimize or maximize a value here, but to find a happy medium. It's certainly a boon to remove a couple especially troublesome checks or counters from our list, but removing them all is pretty bad (it's also bad to remove only all our /offensive/ checks—while defensive checks need like 80% hp to work, pokemon that can outspeed and ko only need 1%). (This is another reason why unburden sucks—removes all non loom offensive checks). Besides, this is a question of fairly low priority anyway, since the Movepool stage is adequate to handle most checks and counters that we want to handle (read: not all of them at once
I'd like the bulk of the remaining posts in this thread to be centered around the topic of the above lenses and how they relate to abilities—not forcing you to see things my way but rather to explain why my premises are flawed and how fixing them points to your ability as the only logical answer.
As for the lenses I'm looking through, they've led me to the following conclusions about the frontrunners:
Magic Bounce:
Not only is the risk of project derailment disturbingly high here, but it also removes a probably unhealthy amount of checks, as nothing defensive has an answer to a +6 CAP. I appreciate the spirit here, as nothing else gives more setup opportunities, but i dare say going with this ability is vary riksy.
Motor Drive:
To anyone worried about Magnezone, I can easily understand why Motor Drive would be the premier ability: low risk of project derailment, gives us at least a couple setup opportunities, and removes one especially worrisome counter. My question is, why is Magnezone such a big deal? CAP6 won't be switching in much before it's ready to sweep because every stealth rock chips away at precious HP. Once I've used Belly Drum, i see no difference between Magnezone and anything that forces me to switch: one literally traps and kills me, sure, but unless we go with Regenerator, a switched out CAP after a Drum is nearly equally useless.
Unburden
Not only does it not afford us setup opportunities, it also removes every offensive answer to CAP6. At least it guarantees we'll use belly drum, but I'm pretty skeptical here. (Then again, Unburden support seems to have declined).
Water Absorb
This is similar to Motor Drive, except it trades a Magnezone immunity for increased setup opportunities (bulky waters with mono-water coverage and scarfed hydro pumps are dime a dozen). In addition, it pseudo-provides the benefits of Regenerator, if you can switch into the right things. Having such an absurdly good defensive typing and some sort of healing does somewhat risk derailing the project, but we can keep this in check with Movepool to make sure skarm is superior in the defense department.
Regenerator
I gave my opinions already, but see the last sentence of water absorb also.
Intimidate
Of the abilities suggested, this one holds most tightly to my criteria. It allows us to set up on a whole host of physical attackers (generally an easier class to prepare for since they all just try to kill shit unlike walls who employ a variety of tactics) while not obliterating our counters list. Some people have expressed fear that cap6 would become a bulky pivot a la lando-t but forget the latter's base 145 atk and stab eq and u-turn, so I'm not too worried.
Hopefully this post actually brought a new manner of thinking into the thread instead of simply rehashing old arguments. Remember, the bulk of the argument in this post was not about the abilities, but around the philosophies behind choosing the abilities, a trend I'd like to see continued. Remember also to consider and discuss Water Absorb, Sand Rush, and Intimidate. Lastly remember to suggest any new abilities that you discover which fall perfectly through your sorting algorithm. With those final thoughts, I'm going to wrap up this two hour tl;dr: post.