Pokémon Zapdos

[Rosen]

Zapdos is a less worthy option for defoging: It has weakness to SR and its kinda a setup bait for mons like Clefable. Thunderbolt + Heat Wave is cool but I think Skarmory is a more realiable defoger for OU.

hi welcome to smogon, let me 'splain the current situation of ou

skarmory is, on paper, better. however, skarmory gets trapped and murdered by magnezone, opening up holes for monsters like mega pinsir to sweep uninhibited. this is a problem because magnezone is all over the place at the moment, so skarmory is having a tough time doing its job. zapdos does not get trapped and checks mega pinsir, which is a massive boon over skarmory.

 

[pwnémon]

Yeah I feel Zapdos is actually really underrated in OU right now, its PhysDef set is Pinsirs most reliable counter and arguably SD/cb talonflame. I almost always prefer it to rotom-w when building balanced teams due to roost. However one problem that plagues it is its 4mss , every time I use it I want to have Tbolt/heatwave/toxic/defog/hpice/roost but unfortunately thats not possible, when paired with Latis it can forego defog for toxic/ hpice which allows it to beat stuff such as garchomp/landorus' or toxic switch ins.