Damp Rock Suspect Discussion

[tennisace]

So the NU council (or a supermajority of it) decided Damp Rock should be an official "suspect" to be voted on. This thread will serve as a sounding board for peoples opinions.

What you are expected to do in this thread:

1. Post about your experience with Rain teams in this thread, both teams you used and teams used against you.

2. Discuss Damp Rock's place in the tier; has the metagame adapted properly to it? Does it break the metagame?

3. All Council members are expected to post their thoughts on, experiences using, and experiences against Damp Rock in this thread.

4. Remember, you are trying to convince the council members with your posts. Keep it civil!

 

[Full2Half]

Even though I dont face them as much as I feel like I should be, I would love to see this out. As it seems that each time I face a rain team, it just ends up with them switching into a gorebyss, setting up a smash, and rolling me over. As well as ludicolo being annoying, but swalot can handle this. My opinion on jynx can be seen on that respective thread, but essentially you get the point. Honestly, I think swift swim is moreso the problem than damp rock, as without it the biggest abusers would be dry jynx, ludidisho, and maybe swanna. If I have any kind of say, I would like to see damp rock gone.

 

[erisia]

Out of the two weather rocks, i think this is the more powerful item of the two, as it provides almost all of its abusers with both a STAB boost and doubled Speed, as opposed to the Heat Rock which only provides one or the other. Furthermore, it's ridiculously easy to set up Rain Dance with something like Volbeat or Murkrow, which literally cannot be stopped, and may possibly be able to come in and set it up for a second time. Meanwhile, Rain has access to a variety of sweepers, including the infamous Gorebyss, second in commands Golduck and Huntail, Ludicolo to take Grass attacks, Seismitoad to take Electric attacks (and hit Ludicolo), and Armaldo to break through specially defensive pokemon / Rapid Spin. I haven't seen it enough to judge whether it's broken or not yet, but I'm far less able to deal with Rain teams than Sun teams, so if it were up to me, I'd ban this one first if we're banning anything.

 

[spuds4ever]

Having played with a lot of HO rain in NU (and not that I'm actually any good, but I quickly shot up to 1200 without playing really any NU before hand), I can say that damp rock is godly. Being able to set up for 8 turns very quickly with either volbeat and electrode and then u-turn/volt switch out to gorebyss or some other rain abuser (thanks for dropping down ludi) and you often find yourself with a completely untouched offensive juggernaut for 6 full turns of hell for your opponent (which would otherwise be only half of that without damp rock).

While damp rock may not be broken as such, the access to the things it can grant you is definetely moreso imo. I think, if possible, SS should be banned on the same team as damp rock. While SSers would still be able to set themselves up, they'd lose out on a precious coverage move which can be potentially game-changing and have to find another turn of set-up which is tough when you're offensively inclined.

 

[DTC]

While damp rock may not be broken as such, the access to the things it can grant you is definetely moreso imo. I think, if possible, SS should be banned on the same team as damp rock. While SSers would still be able to set themselves up, they'd lose out on a precious coverage move which can be potentially game-changing and have to find another turn of set-up which is tough when you're offensively inclined.

What is the need for a complex ban? If rain is broken, Damp Rock should just be banned. It's not like in OU where rain is good for more defensive playstyles as well. Rain thrives on having 7 turns to abuse rain with Swift Swim abusers.

I'll add in more later; I just wanted to say that much for now.

 

[Cherub Agent]

I actually think that Rain can be coped with in NU. We lack the ultimate SwSw abusers in Kingdra, Kabutops and Omastar, limiting us to stuff like the eel twins, Seismitoad and (the admittedly excellent) Ludicolo. The chance of you allowing your opponent to set up both Rain and a Shell Smash (I'm obviously talking about Huntail and Gorebyss here) is very low, any decent player should be able to prevent that. Seismitoad has great coverage and typing, but disappointing power. Ludicolo is often seen as a standalone Rain sweeper, and doesn't even bother using Damp Rock, since 5 turns are usually sufficient for it to pull off a sweep. I'm gonna say that Rain isn't broken in NU at the moment, mainly because we lack a large variety of Swift Swimmers, and the ones we have aren't exactly top of the rung.

 

[DTC]

The only types that resist water are grass, dragon, and water itself. Dragon- and Grass-types are beaten by the coverage move every Water-type has: Ice Beam. Meanwhile, Water-types can be beaten by HP Grass/Ludicolo.

Gorebyss doesn't even need to set-up a Shell Smash to wreck teams in the rain. Part of the reason why it wasn't banned was that it was too slow before it set-up a Shell Smash and therefore wasn't much of a threat until it set-up; however, with rain, Gorebyss gets not only a free +2 Speed Boost, but also a Hydro Pump/Surf boost. It doesn't even need to set-up a Shell Smash to sweep. If you manage to set-up a Shell Smash when rain is up, chances are it's good game. It's not even that unlikely. Want to set-up with Shell Smash? Use Rain Dance + Memento Gardevoir. Either way, Gorebyss' Hydro Pump's in the rain HURT, even without boosting. Choice Specs Gorebyss is also pretty cool if you want to use that, but it's less useful outside of the rain.

Ludicolo can also wreck teams, and it has the advantages of being faster, bulkier, a better typing which comes with Giga Drain, and more room for other moves over Gorebyss. It isn't as powerful, but it can still wreck through teams. It can also act as a back-up Rain Dance user if the dedicated Rain Dance users are dead.

Seismitoad and Floatzel are two other great Swift Swim rain abusers. Seismitoad is immune to electric types which is nice, and it also comes with Earth Power. It also has great bulk and even more Speed than Ludicolo, meaning it can invest more EV's into bulk. It doesn't have Ice Beam, but it's still very strong. Floatzel has the best Speed out of all Swift Swim Pokemon; enough for it to only have to run a few Speed EV's to outspeed everything. The rest it can dump into Attack/Special Attack to run through teams. One of the issues with trying to beat Floatzel is you don't know what kind of rain abusing set it is. Choice Band? Rain Dance setter sweeper? Mixed rain sweeper?

Those aren't the only rain abusers; while there isn't a huge array of rain abusers, there are still other options. Lapras, Jynx, Samurott, Swanna, Carracostsa, Huntail, and Relicanth are all good rain abusers as well. One of the under-used abusers I find useful is Swords Dance Armaldo. There aren't many physical abusers of rain and Armaldo happens to be one of the few.

Anyways, rain can easily muscle through any kind of team, especially offense, with its high powered Water-type attacks and strong abusers that work well outside of the rain. Most rain checks can not handle repeated attacks or cannot beat some of the abusers. The 3 extra turns Damp Rock brings to the table are enough for the rain sweepers to destroy through an entire team; without it, rain would be much, much more manageable in NU.

 

[NatGeo]

I think you can very easily make a lot of parallels between this and Heat Rock, since they do basically the same thing in that they give their abusers a few extra turns to dole out damage, which can be vital given that 6 or 7 turns is a lot more than 3/4 to do damage with. The one thing that separates Damp Rock, though, is the boost rain gives to its abusers; erisia already mentioned this but a boost to Water-type moves, as well as swift swim, are really the key here given the inherent superiority of water as a type in general. More Pokemon resist Water than Fire, and those that resist Water are taken out by Ice Beam & a Grass-type move (this explains the prevalence of Ludicolo on rain in general); admittedly, this is irrelevant when you're talking about things like Choice Specs Charizard in the sun, but I think my point has been made!

Also kind of hopping onto what DTC said, I think one could go on a limb and say that overall, rain abusers are just better to use. Sun really only has, what, three main abusers? Sawsbuck, Victreebel, and Charizard to be specific, but you can at least gear up to defend against them (somewhat :P). With rain you have quite a few more abusers, especially Ludicolo, Jynx, Huntail / Gorebyss, Floatzel, other niche Water-types like Swanna.... the list goes on for a bit if you really want to dig at it. At any rate, it seems to me like it's much, much harder to prepare for Damp Rock teams when they have more abusers. Just a thought!

 

[Raseri]

I also support a ban on Damp Rock (who woulda thought :O) because the abusers are being boosted in multiple ways. As most of the rain sweepers(except Gorebyss of course) lack a way to boost their stats unlike their brothers in the sun. The rain abusers are able to take advantage of the 50% boost to water moves to dismantle opposing cores; even water-resists can take a lot of damage from a boosted surf or hydro pump. Another thing that makes Damp Rock broken is that the boost the rain sweepers receive is more significant than the boost the sun abusers receive. Two of the three most common swift swimmers would not be sweepers without the rain boost(Seismitoed and Ludicolo) in fact Seismetoed would not be seen at all because its only niche is taking advantage of rain. The extended boost Damp Rock gives allows pokemon like Ludicolo to become one of the best sweepers in the tier; while in the sun Sawsbuck is one of the best without the boost.


I support banning Damp Rock:
- It turns adequate exploitable Pokemon into behemoths for 6 turns
- it gives pokemon with adequate stats an incredibly powerful stab move
- The few pokemon that can tank one of the sweepers is demolished by another.

I'm leaning more towards a weather ban in general but testing without the influence of Damp Rock is needed to know if its the extended boost that breaks it.

I also didn't include Jynx at all since she is not a weather abuser; she happens to benefit but doesn't take advantage of the rain at all and should not be used in a damp rock arguement

 

[TROP]

Anyways, rain can easily muscle through any kind of team, especially offense, with its high powered Water-type attacks and strong abusers that work well outside of the rain. Most rain checks can not handle repeated attacks or cannot beat some of the abusers. The 3 extra turns Damp Rock brings to the table are enough for the rain sweepers to destroy through an entire team; without it, rain would be much, much more manageable in NU.

I am feeling quite lazy, but this pretty much is what I think about the possible nerf to rain and to a lesser extent sun.

Will probably edit this post tomorrow.

 

[ChaoticaMortis]

I'm leaning more towards a weather ban in general but testing without the influence of Damp Rock is needed to know if its the extended boost that breaks it.

I also didn't include Jynx at all since she is not a weather abuser; she happens to benefit but doesn't take advantage of the rain at all and should not be used in a damp rock arguement

Weather isn't that bad when limited to 5 turns. Take into consideration that the time the sweepers now have is cut in half, and the support Pokemon that set up the weather are even less useful. This might lead to many Rain abusers to start running Rain Dance in their own sets (something a few of them do already), and while this does still equal 4 turns of Rain to deal with, the opposing Pokemon had to waste a coverage slot for Rain Dance.

I would consider Jynx a weather abuser; Dry Skin heals her in the rain every turn, negating LO recoil. This gives her extra longevity and the ability to switch more often if she needs to (granted she still won't be able to take a hit). Also (and this is negligible), the rain will reduce her weakness to Fire attacks.

 

[papita]

Funny thing is i was using both Jynx and rain and now they are both suspects.... not good for my team.

Anyways it´s difficult to stop a good rain dance team. Volbeat in particular it´s great because not only can set up rain but can also pass a tail glow boost. Now this was before the tier change so no ludicolo arround yet. And now it must be much harder to stop and much more devastating. But the premier weather setter is gone now (mespirit) but still it´s easy to overpower a team using rain. And even something like seismitoad who doesn´t have the most spectacular specual attack can 2hko a defensive behemoth like Lickylicky. Yeah so the bottom line: imb4 rain.

 

[marilli]

Well, it seems to be a general consensus that weather hurts the metagame quite a lot.... my only thing with banning the Damp Rock (and Heat rock, too. Despite the fact that sun and rain are quite different, these hold true for both weathers) are the followings (note: includes arguments for and against banning)

1. Why ban damp rock? Yes, damp rock has been voted on already, but why damp rock instead of mons? If the 3 new mons are the only things that make weather broken, then why don't we just ban some of them back? Of course, this has the downside of making the metagame not very interesting because it's returning to the old settled metagame, but more importantly, just because we didn't ban these before doesn't mean that it was never broken. As the only person who voted for the Gorebyss ban, I seriously wondered how most people responded to rain Gorebyss, which was still pretty darn overpowering if you ask me (in the words of DTC, "rain gorebyss can go fuck off"). Even with new counters and more competing weathers, swift swim + surf spam remains strong and viable. If we were banning the mons instead, we may be in a position where we have to ban a lot of mons..

2. Now, how do we go about nerfing rain, if we are even going to? Rain really RARELY seen on the ladder. This makes it hard to judge how much rain should be nerfed. Can we ban the top abuser and let it go? What if banning damp rock isn't going to be enough? (lol not very likely but just entertaining the possibility) How about we just admit that a big part of this weather argument is suspended on a theorymon argument? This is made all the more confusing by the fact that there's 3 big (and deserving) suspects around, and all of them are so intertwined with each other. The current suspect system makes it so much harder to unban than getting a second vote going and banning it. Jynx is probably going to be declared broken, from surveying the opinions of other council members. I mean, Jynx is a big factor against water-type spamming, so we could use the excuse of a big metagame shift, and re-vote on the weather rocks in a metagame without Jynx... Well, I just don't feel comfortable banning like 3 things all at once, as one ban probably affects all the rest. And we all agree we should have as small of a banlist as possible.

 

[jake]

Why are we considering banning something when it's hardly being seen at all? This goes for Heat Rock, too -- you'd think that if it were utterly, absolutely broken, I'd see more than a few weather teams every fifty matches or so (and even then it's probably the same people I keep battling....). I understand that the support the weather rocks provide can create a powerful environment for x sweepers but uhhhh if it were really that good wouldn't people use it more? Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that we should really just be focusing on the almost unanimous suspect (and the one that's used far more heavily than either of these) rather than messing around with the weather rocks right now. I've run both kinds of weather teams and while I'm not a fantastic team builder, each style had their own troubles and I could hardly argue for their banning.

It seems to me that if these playstyles are as hardly used as they are and we still try to push them to be banned, we're just trying to cut out the things we don't like in the metagame rather than the things that are broken. If weather gains a ton more popularity and proves to be very difficult if not impossible to deal with, sure, I agree that it should be suspected. But until that happens, I really wonder why we're trying to vote to ban something that's never used.

 

[nyttyn]

I think the biggest problem right now is Memento Rain Dance into ShellSmash suicide leading, and the fact that there isn't really anything in the tier that can handle it. Quagsire gets murdered by HP Grass, Swoobat still can't overcome Gorebyss's double speed from rain, Trace Gardevoir can't outspeed because of the shell smash boost unless it runs with a scarf, and Absol can't reliably kill with sucker punch because the game devolves into a massive guessing game of "Shell smash or attack?" It's like Russian roulette, only if you lose a giant killer pink fish kills you and your friends. And even though you can burn all 7 turns of rain in a worst case scenario, you're still dealing with a +6 extremely pissed off giant killer fish. On this plus side, this leaves it highly open to propriety, but on the downside, if you have no priority aside from Absol you are utterly screwed.

Honestly I think that, instead of banning Damp Rock, we should ban the primary offender - Gorebyss. Gorebyss in the rain is simply too overpowering for the tier, especially with a suicide memento dance lead, since those -2 stages mean that you can't even kill it before it gets a smash up. I am going to keep testing it, as I am not a particularly high ranked player, but I think at this point we would be better off just banning Gorebyss, as damp rock and the associated mons in and of themselves are not broken, as Trace Gardevoir still exists to handle them (Run signal beam over shadow ball/focus miss!). The problem is that the only thing that can counter Shell Smash Gorebyss in the rain is Choice Scarf Trace Gardevoir. It's not even difficult to get a Shell Smash in the rain, as memento's -2 makes the damn thing nearly impossible to kill given the power levels in NU.

And since the only counter is one, choiced pokemon, it is beyond simple for your opponent to just swap into something with, say, volt absorb, or grass and electric resists, as they know you will be using either Thunderbolt or Energy Ball (and who uses energy ball on Gardevoir nowadays?). Technically, Ludicolo serves as a check, but it gets 2hko'd by HP grass 100% of the time, even if gorebyss gets low rolls, unless you're running Tankicolo. In that case it only gets 2hko'd some of the time, a small comfort. God forbid it takes a high BP neutral attack (ice beam) instead of sub, in which case it will always 2hko.

Math here on Gorebyss's speed in the rain post shell smash, btw:

52 * 2(swift swim) * 2(shell smash) = 208

Gardevoir W/ Scarf post swift swim trace
80 * 2(swift swim) * 1.5(scarf) = 240

Gardevoir w/o scarf

80 * 2(swift swim) = 160


tl;dr ban gorebyss

 

[marilli]

Math here on Gorebyss's speed in the rain post shell smash, btw:

52 * 2(swift swim) * 2(shell smash) = 208

Gardevoir W/ Scarf post swift swim trace
80 * 2(swift swim) * 1.5(scarf) = 240

Gardevoir w/o scarf

80 * 2(swift swim) = 160


tl;dr ban gorebyss

umm.... no

Also, you assume you have 4 turns of setup. You really shouldn't be allowed to set up 3 moves without having any negative consequences. Otherwise you could to a lot of unstoppable things with full rack of Spikes + SR, too. Also, Substitute > Memento, which basically makes this setup far from guaranteed.

ps: if you have Absol vs. non-substitute Gorebyss do sucker punch predictions, Absol will win 7/8 of the time: it's not a 50-50: you can think of it like: when do i start attacking--from turn 1 to turn 8. Gorebyss guesses a random number from 1 to 8 and he needs to guess it right in order to win.

#math

 

[TLCJR4LIFE]

I actually find the weather hate hilarious and irrational.

I mean so much of this "I barely play it, and I don't know if it's broken, but I don't like rain!" in this thread.


Rain is a decent option in NU, nothing broken or nothing even remotely dominant. At this point people just want to ban something for the sake of banning it.

 

[TLCJR4LIFE]

I also support a ban on Damp Rock (who woulda thought :O) because the abusers are being boosted in multiple ways. As most of the rain sweepers(except Gorebyss of course) lack a way to boost their stats unlike their brothers in the sun. The rain abusers are able to take advantage of the 50% boost to water moves to dismantle opposing cores; even water-resists can take a lot of damage from a boosted surf or hydro pump. Another thing that makes Damp Rock broken is that the boost the rain sweepers receive is more significant than the boost the sun abusers receive. Two of the three most common swift swimmers would not be sweepers without the rain boost(Seismitoed and Ludicolo) in fact Seismetoed would not be seen at all because its only niche is taking advantage of rain. The extended boost Damp Rock gives allows pokemon like Ludicolo to become one of the best sweepers in the tier; while in the sun Sawsbuck is one of the best without the boost.


I support banning Damp Rock:
- It turns adequate exploitable Pokemon into behemoths for 6 turns
- it gives pokemon with adequate stats an incredibly powerful stab move
- The few pokemon that can tank one of the sweepers is demolished by another.

I'm leaning more towards a weather ban in general but testing without the influence of Damp Rock is needed to know if its the extended boost that breaks it.

I also didn't include Jynx at all since she is not a weather abuser; she happens to benefit but doesn't take advantage of the rain at all and should not be used in a damp rock arguement

Oh no! While we're at it let's ban Choice Band and Scarf too.

Weather isn't that bad when limited to 5 turns. Take into consideration that the time the sweepers now have is cut in half, and the support Pokemon that set up the weather are even less useful. This might lead to many Rain abusers to start running Rain Dance in their own sets (something a few of them do already), and while this does still equal 4 turns of Rain to deal with, the opposing Pokemon had to waste a coverage slot for Rain Dance.

I would consider Jynx a weather abuser; Dry Skin heals her in the rain every turn, negating LO recoil. This gives her extra longevity and the ability to switch more often if she needs to (granted she still won't be able to take a hit). Also (and this is negligible), the rain will reduce her weakness to Fire attacks.

No you are right, it's TERRIBLE when limited to 5 turns...and the only reason people want stuff like Damp Rock gone is because they hate weather....because God forbid people use strong team synergy to get wins.

People aren't going to dedicate a Pokemon, a move slot and more importantly a tempo in a match for a negligible payoff.

Otherwise, it basically becomes a temporary Dragon Dance.

Why are we considering banning something when it's hardly being seen at all? This goes for Heat Rock, too -- you'd think that if it were utterly, absolutely broken, I'd see more than a few weather teams every fifty matches or so (and even then it's probably the same people I keep battling....). I understand that the support the weather rocks provide can create a powerful environment for x sweepers but uhhhh if it were really that good wouldn't people use it more? Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that we should really just be focusing on the almost unanimous suspect (and the one that's used far more heavily than either of these) rather than messing around with the weather rocks right now. I've run both kinds of weather teams and while I'm not a fantastic team builder, each style had their own troubles and I could hardly argue for their banning.

It seems to me that if these playstyles are as hardly used as they are and we still try to push them to be banned, we're just trying to cut out the things we don't like in the metagame rather than the things that are broken. If weather gains a ton more popularity and proves to be very difficult if not impossible to deal with, sure, I agree that it should be suspected. But until that happens, I really wonder why we're trying to vote to ban something that's never used.

This is exactly what's been pissing me off about the community this gen.
Maybe it's just because I started playing a long time ago and back n the day, stuff ...you know...actually had to be broken before it was banned and not just banned due to elitist snobbery. By Gen 7 I'm fairly certain the current NU tier will all be Ubers by then.

I mean I understand there is no BL3, but there is no real reason to have a hardon for banning things. I mean, seriously in another topic I heard legitimate conversation about Braviary being banned, with it's amazing 5 percent usage just because some dude ran a bunch of calcs on it and discovered it can do some damage with it's high attack stat(it's also slow, is almost strictly relegated to wallbreaking, and has poor typing...but yeah)

Literally reminiscent of little kids complaining because they can't get past fireballs in Street Fighter despite it being a perfectly balanced(yet very good) attack.

 

[marilli]

This is exactly what's been pissing me off about the community this gen.
Maybe it's just because I started playing a long time ago and back n the day, stuff ...you know...actually had to be broken before it was banned and not just banned due to elitist snobbery. By Gen 7 I'm fairly certain the current NU tier will all be Ubers by then.

I mean I understand there is no BL3, but there is no real reason to have a hardon for banning things. I mean, seriously in another topic I heard legitimate conversation about Braviary being banned, with it's amazing 5 percent usage just because some dude ran a bunch of calcs on it and discovered it can do some damage with it's high attack stat(it's also slow, is almost strictly relegated to wallbreaking, and has poor typing...but yeah)

Literally reminiscent of little kids complaining because they can't get past fireballs in Street Fighter despite it being a perfectly balanced(yet very good) attack.

Well, it's hard to argue we have a hardon for bans when our last vote was a 6-1 vote against a threat that was bitched about by just about everyone (and the last vote being more of an attempt to prevent the irrational / huge usage drop when something gets voted 7-0 not broken, but gorebyss usage dropped p. hard after the vote regardless).... If you think I'm like a little kid who can't even get past a fireball, do show us your argument why it's not broken? Complaining about elitist snobs magically holding the poisition as a tiering contrib despite being noobs, and just arguing we're trying to ban something because we lost to it isn't going to get anywhere >.>

You react as if we already voted 7-0 on ban or something

 

[TLCJR4LIFE]

Are you seriously suggesting a prove a negative?

Great to see people understand the concept of burden of proof.

Also, people bitching means nothing, it's quite common in this community, and really has nothing to do with a mon being broken or not. Half the people who play blame the game for being terrible everytime they lose.

I mean, how am I supposed to take "Yeah well this should be banned because Gorebyss is really strong in the rain" as a serious argument? No kidding it's strong in the rain, that's the whole point of someone wasting an entire pokemon slot just to set it up. Furthermore, I haven't heard anything other than the usual Gorebyss bitching to make me think it's broken, but more importantly, pretty much like everyone else here, haven't PLAYED anything....because well, rain is not only not dominant, it isn't even common.

I don't even think rain is good enough to use, I've used Sun too and eventually I find the wasted turns and tempo end up killing you more than your momentary speed boosts. The only thing really great about weather teams is the ability to get free perma-weather without wasting turns, which of course is banned in almost every non OU tier..so it's not good.

Furthermore, if you get swept by rain I really don't have much empathy for you, it only improves the STAB attack of water, so you know what's coming. You can either bring out a resist, or better yet we even have multiple pokemon who are completely immune to it, like Jynx.

 

[marilli]

Well maybe you should start with not being antagonistic towards everyone because I said I don't feel comfortable with banning them either...? >.> And I don't now even how to reply for the rest of your post because... I wasn't arguing anything?

I'm just saying that constructive arguments / criticisms may be better than just badmouthing half the community?

 

[TLCJR4LIFE]

I'm not being antagonistic as much as I'm voicing my displeasure with knee jerk reactionism.

 

[nyttyn]

or better yet we even have multiple pokemon who are completely immune to it, like Jynx.

Would like to note here that Jynx is currently suspect.



Anyways, I agree that no matter what we do, the problem here is not damp rock. As it stands, rain can be at times impractical, due to the fact that it requires both a turn of setup and a turn of swapping out. Damp Rock, however, negates part of this weakness by giving a extra 3 turns to do rain related stuff, which is huge. I do not, however, as of this time beleive that the extra 3 turns pushes it into "broken" territory. In fact, I would argue that the 3 extra turns is what is keeping Rain from being underpowered, as you have to burn two turns to get it up and exploit it in most cases. All Damp Rock does is give you time to actually use rain.

Also, you assume you have 4 turns of setup. You really shouldn't be allowed to set up 3 moves without having any negative consequences. Otherwise you could to a lot of unstoppable things with full rack of Spikes + SR, too. Also, Substitute > Memento, which basically makes this setup far from guaranteed.

ps: if you have Absol vs. non-substitute Gorebyss do sucker punch predictions, Absol will win 7/8 of the time: it's not a 50-50: you can think of it like: when do i start attacking--from turn 1 to turn 8. Gorebyss guesses a random number from 1 to 8 and he needs to guess it right in order to win.

Indeed, as my own testing has proven to me, three (fourth turn is attacking time) turns of setup is rather absurd to assume, and Sub does screw it over quite badly, which is why this strategy is actually hilariously flawed as a lead. It does work sometimes, but that's why you have a backup lead.

Incidentally, that calculation is rather flawed, as we do not input turns 8 turns at a time in pokemon. In fact, it would be fairer to call it 33/33/33 odds. 33% chance that he will sucker punch, 33% chance he will use a normal attacking move, and a 33% chance of swords dance, which is a bit of a problem given that you don't want him to have a SD boost. Unless you somehow know he's choiced, in which case it becomes 50/50 again. Absol will only win half the time, but he has eight turns to successfully guess.

 

[AyoGabos]

Also, people bitching means nothing, it's quite common in this community, and really has nothing to do with a mon being broken or not. Half the people who play blame the game for being terrible everytime they lose.

I mean, how am I supposed to take "Yeah well this should be banned because Gorebyss is really strong in the rain" as a serious argument? No kidding it's strong in the rain, that's the whole point of someone wasting an entire pokemon slot just to set it up. Furthermore, I haven't heard anything other than the usual Gorebyss bitching to make me think it's broken, but more importantly, pretty much like everyone else here, haven't PLAYED anything....because well, rain is not only not dominant, it isn't even common.

Took the words right out of my mouth. I am sick and tired of people whining about things being "broken" or calling for them to be banned simply because they rip holes in unprepared teams. As you said, of course Gorebyss is dominant in the rain. The one that really annoys me is when people bitch about Jynx. If you hate Gorebyss and Jynx so much, just use them on your own teams for Christ's sake. A well-rounded team is one that does not get blasted by one Pokemon continuously; a well-rounded team is one that gets beaten either by being out-played or out-skilled. Damp Rock is not "broken" in any sense of the word; I have laddered into the top #150 on the NU Smogon ladder and did not run into a single rain team. Not one. I personally use rain because I love it, especially with the addition of Ludicolo. Having said that, my own rain has been countered on numerous occasions, so it is definitely not broken. Eliminating Damp Rock simply restricts the use of weather to DrizzleToed and DroughtTales in OU. The use of Heat Rock and Damp Rock allow weather to play an important role in tiers other than OU.

Not broken. At all.

 

[TLCJR4LIFE]

The only people who should be using not Rock aided weather are mons like say Kingdra in UU who can function as anti-weather and power themselves up.

However, there is no permaweather in NU, so you'd be better off just using a permanent boosting move.