Drizzle Swim Revision, and Potential Excadrill Revision Discussion Thread

https://breakdown.forumotion.com/t542-drizzle-swim-revision-and-potential-excadrill-revision

Discuss this and beg for your opinions to matter. Discuss your stance, and get others to vote with you.

This isn't the voting thread, I already linked that.

This is a very interesting issue. I've long thought that Chloro+Sun and Drizzle+swim should not be in different states. They are both essentially the same. So if you ask me, one should not be banned while the other is not.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure if Drizzle swim is.... ok. Rain already has a very powerful grip on the meta. Many people consider it to be the best out of all weathers because of the many advantages it already has over them. If we allowed this, Rain would become even more of a dominant force than it already is.

However, I am currently undecided in my decision. I want to see what everyone else has to say about this.

I've considered that it will be giving rain another boon, but adding Beartic and Armaldo to the repertoire isn't actually going to have that much of a beneficial effect for the weather's dominance. I consider this a way of helping Beartic and Armaldo personally, which will still be sub par even with swift swim.

My reasoning being that if we do this, during the vote, I will nominate every fully evolved water type that has swift swim to remain banned, effectively allowing only Beartic, Armaldo and NFEs to be used in Standard with drizzle+swiftswim. I am hoping other People see it the way I do, but there's no guaranteeing that will be the case. Even Kabutops would be pushing it.

I like Invalid's idea of fully evolved water types. The thing with Chloro-sun is the grass types don't have fire stab. The closest thing is victreebel with weather ball. However drizzle-swimmers usually get stab and the rain boost on their attacks, more than doubling their damage output with out even factoring in the weaknesses. This plus the speed boost makes them nearly impossible to deal with. However beartic and armaldo don't get the stab water moves and are relatively slow in the first place. While they will be somewhat fearsome, they are both weak to some form of priority and are probably outspeed and crippled by common scarfers or walled by defensive things. Also, we might get to see people use seadra in standard.

While they don't have STAB boosted by sun, they do have an equally potent weapon: Growth.
Being able to double your offense stats after your speed has already been boosted makes this an extremely potent tactic. It's something that has no equivalent for rain. And while hidden power fire might not be as powerful as rain boosted water STAB, after Growth it still packs a fierce punch. Not to mention that Victreebel can use Growth and Weatherball together as well.

If you ask me, Venu can be just as hard to stop as a drizzle swift swimmer. It can sleep you, and provided it doesn't miss it can double its offenses and basically unleash its ungodly wrath upon the enemy team. Not to mention it has access to health restoring moves (though it doesn't commonly use them) and acceptable natural bulk, along with good coverage that is made even more diverse by its ability to essentially shell smash without losing bulk.

I'm jussayin, don't think that Chloro users are just completely inferior to rain. They have their own tricks too that can make them just as dangerous.

Here's how I see the issue, if you're throwing Chlorophyll into the issue, we have a balance issue in that Venusaur is broken as all hell, but still allowed. I don't like it, but it's also not a part of this. This is all about fixing the ban to change from all Swift Swim users with Drizzle to only the problem, which I consider to be the fully evolved Pokemon that get stab on water moves. If we want to reduce it to the bare essentials of the ban, it would be Kingdra and Ludicolo, either of these equipped with Hydro Pump and Choice Specs are impossible to deal with without a water immunity. The rest of the fully evolved water type swift swimmers each have something terrifying about them, but not like those two. If it's an issue I can go into detail about whatever water swift swimmer someone wants to talk about. I'd recommend for anyone pissed off about Chlorophyll Venusaur the following advice, nominate it, I'm on your side and I'll vote with you.

My use of bold is only for emphasis, not to be cocky.

For reference, here is a list of the Pokemon who get Swift Swim. Fully evolved Pokemon are in bold:
(note: Seadra does not get Swift Swim, it gets Poison Point instead)

Spoiler:

Of this list, I would be willing to have the fully evolved Pokemon Poliwrath, Seaking, Mantine, Luvdisc, Armoldo, Lumineon, Seismitoad, and Beartic be allowed to battle with Drizzle-Swim. Armoldo and Beartic only get a small advantage from Drizzle-Swim, and the other above-mentioned Water Pokemon are not the best of sweepers. You aren't going to fear someone who has Luvdisc or Mantine, even with Drizzle-Swim active.

If anyone disagrees with me, please post it on here. I'm sure that we all have our own, separate opinions in this, and they should be state before anything becomes 'set in stone'.

I would Add Carracosta to the list, its max speed with drizzle swim is 358, that's between Starmie and Serperior. Speed like that is good, but it's not broken, if Carracosta was a Pokemon with everything the same except its ability was illuminate and its speed was 114, I wouldn't find it broken, so requiring it to be in rain to even hold that much speed sounds even less impressive.

Yes, it does have shell smash. I would definitely be cautious against unbanning swift swim on Omastar for that reason, but with Carracosta, I don't know.


*edit* the more I think about it the more it seems like Carracosta functions like a Simple shell smash user, which could never be a good thing, my mind is changed about Carracosta.