Manaphy in ranked PVP

[Johncampita211]

Cmon guys Manaphy is abused now we cant change the fact that it is over used now and It is too strong . Many top pvp player really knows it on how manaphy wreck almost a whole team. Im pretty sure many manaphy user will disagree on banning manaphy. If that is the case unban dugtrio and blaziken who are over used also .

[Olker]

Dugtrio and Blaziken are nor overused... they are uber.

[Qeight]

I brought this subject up internally and we will discuss it, I will respond with an outcome when we reached one.

[Gengarlv100]

Manaphy is incredibly strong and destroys stall you are right. But it is not impossible to beat. Manaphy is no godly fast. Fast physical and spatker can weaken manaphy into manageable. Also, manaphy needs health preservation. Sadly the teams manaphy beat are mainly defensive. Banded weavile, gengar, alakazam and other come in a shred manaphy if it is speed and spatk invested. There is also unaware clefable and combined with chansey can out stall it. Another option is haze milotic, or roar/whirlwind. Finally klefki can be used to seriously hinder its performance. Checks are out there, you just arent using the right ones. A check in not always defensive, sometimes you much look at revenge killers

 

I believe banning or nerfing RAIN in any way will have an impact on manaphy, and should be more than enough. But as you talking of Manaphy's weaknesses ima explain you a daily situation. Imagine a manaphy setting up 1 or 2 tailglows without any counterplay on your special wall (99.9% of the cases). Then I agree it could be nice if you could revenge kill since its not too fast, with any of your fast sweepers. BUT since you dont oneshot him with not even a thunderbolt from most of the Electric types, imagine with the rest. So your gonna need rather raikou specs or 2 fast mons to revenge kill him. That's what it extremely annoying: team building around 1 mon (yes, we could also discuss ferro/conk etc) and the obvious upgrade to rain wich was already busted.

That means you lost 1 of your fast sweepers (knowing you have 2, otherwise you are ripperoni) and your special wall so then comes kingdra and its the most comparable situation of karthus pressing R and killing them all i ever seen on this game.

 

Have a nice day

[Baganha]

have you consider the hypothetical scenario of me joking and being perfectly aware that rain/manaphy is damn busted and should be banned? prolly conk also btw

 

Im sorry for my ignorance regarding your first post, it wasnt clear to me that your comment was a troll since i tend to take every comment here with the upmost of seriousness, unless it were talking about extremelt excepcional ones that are clearly not to be taken seriously.

 

Manaphy is not a problem, the problem is RAIN, just ban "Damp Rock" and you are going to see manaphy being less used.

 

I don't really care if someone agrees or disagrees with me, i just said the truth, take it and don't make excuses.

 

Could you possibly discuss this a little bit more detail? I would like to see your pov regarding this comment you made. Assuming you also have read my response to mamathieu and pages 3 to 5 form this thread.

 

... meanwhile, Rain continues to have a 5% / 95% matchup into prepared stall...

a 25% / 75% matchup into Baton Pass...

a 35% / 65% matchup into prepared balance...

 

just because you see something all the time doesn't make it good

 

 

Where did you get these stats from? I definitely agree with you that the three playstyles you mentioned have the better MU, but where do those exact numbers come from?

 

Also my b on the comment spam lol, shouldve probably just made this into a single post.

[Qeight]

After discussing it for a few days we decided to not ban Manaphy, to not ban Damp Rock and to not ban rain.

I'll give you guys a short explanation of stuff said during our discussion.

 

"If you ban one metagame, another will just become stronger and take it's place"

Having played PRO for years myself, this is a fairly accurate statement. The metagame shifts with PRO, new items/moves/abilities get coded, new spawns are added, spawns are changed, mechanic updates etc. If any of the above gets banned then something else will simply take its place.

 

"So I see no reason to ban something that is competitive and not overpowered"

This is indeed a strong point in our discussion, are Manaphy/Damp Rock/Rain teams overpowered or are they simply just strong competitively? The answers is the later, they are strong but not broken to an extend where there is no counter play.

 

"It is strong, not broken but facing it countless times every month/pvp session is just a joke."

We believe that obviously it does cause frustration but so does Chansey, Blissey, Clefable, (old Talonflame) and and and, we can't ban something just because it is annoying to play against. The same reason why would not ban stall or stall Pokemon. It is fairly common to call for bans because the Pokemon in itself is frustrating to deal with but if your team is prepared you can beat it, same goes for rain teams. You have to adapt to the metagame to succeed.

 

Last strong point we have is that the PvP update is right around the corner and banning something now would make simply make no sense. However once every PvP related update is released we want to be more open to these types of discussions but more to that another time.

 

Kind regards,

Q8

[Komata]

After discussing it for a few days we decided to not ban Manaphy, to not ban Damp Rock and to not ban rain.

I'll give you guys a short explanation of stuff said during our discussion.

 

"If you ban one metagame, another will just become stronger and take it's place"

Having played PRO for years myself, this is a fairly accurate statement. The metagame shifts with PRO, new items/moves/abilities get coded, new spawns are added, spawns are changed, mechanic updates etc. If any of the above gets banned then something else will simply take its place.

 

"So I see no reason to ban something that is competitive and not overpowered"

This is indeed a strong point in our discussion, are Manaphy/Damp Rock/Rain teams overpowered or are they simply just strong competitively? The answers is the later, they are strong but not broken to an extend where there is no counter play.

 

"It is strong, not broken but facing it countless times every month/pvp session is just a joke."

We believe that obviously it does cause frustration but so does Chansey, Blissey, Clefable, (old Talonflame) and and and, we can't ban something just because it is annoying to play against. The same reason why would not ban stall or stall Pokemon. It is fairly common to call for bans because the Pokemon in itself is frustrating to deal with but if your team is prepared you can beat it, same goes for rain teams. You have to adapt to the metagame to succeed.

 

Last strong point we have is that the PvP update is right around the corner and banning something now would make simply make no sense. However once every PvP related update is released we want to be more open to these types of discussions but more to that another time.

 

Kind regards,

Q8

 

I assume this is a final decision.

 

With all my respects, and not trying to create a drama or something like that but, we really, really needs a Council for PvP.

 

Things like this are not too much serious.

I can understand some of the points, for example "Pvp rework is coming, so we should wait". Ok.

 

But, "If you ban a metagame other will be stronger"?

 

Ban a metagame is not the point here, we are talking about manaphy, you basically have not access, at least in an easy way to his 2 biggest counters, a decent serperior (Too hard to get a good one, even if you invest hard time farming) and raikou (obvious reasons).

 

Without these 2 mons, you basically needs run Ferrothorn + any pokemon faster then manaphy (Usually weak ones: Heliolisk, jolteon, weavile are some examples).

 

This is the main reason why Conkeldurr have a 30% in our metagame. And this makes that you need teambuild with a Conkeldurr counter.

 

So basically, in every single team, you need run Ferrothorn + (Probably Tankchomp) + a pokemon faster than manaphy. To have a chance vs rain teams.

 

I hope, at least you give the community the chance to create a council. Or at least, work with some REALLY experimented players to discuss this things.

 

Thanks for your time, and sorry if I sound like I'm trying to fight or create conflicts. Is not my intention.

[Yameteee]

Faster mons not enough to beat manaphy, they'll just switch it out.

And every time manaphy in, u need things to sacrifice to let the revenge killer out. But again switch out till u have nothing to sacrifice. Revenge kill is impossible practically.

Wall & Ferro is useless, it just for buying time not affects the result since it can TG+rest+immune to status.

 

practically not theories

Edited May 16, 2019 by Pain6Path

[Komata]

Faster mons not enough to beat manaphy, they'll just switch it out.

And every time manaphy in, u need things to sacrifice to let the revenge killer out. But again switch out till u have nothing to sacrifice. Revenge kill is impossible practically.

Wall & Ferro is useless, it just for buying time not affects the result since it can TG+rest+immune to status.

 

practically not theories

Exactly, i was just giving some examples about How centralized is the metagame and how broken are these mons in the actual metagame.

 

Im just annoyed with the reasons.

"It is strong, not broken but facing it countless times every month/pvp session is just a joke."

We believe that obviously it does cause frustration but so does Chansey, Blissey, Clefable, (old Talonflame)[/Quote]

 

Chansey, blisey, clefable have a lot counters, and not necesary specific for them. Also they can't sweep your entire game with only 1 bad turn.

 

Manaphy is not comparable with these mons.

 

In the other hand, Talonflame was broken, in everysingle metagame. And of course was nerfed by nintendo.

Basically because with the old talonflame you can won a game in 1 turn, same as Blaziken and Old Ghotielle. (All of them Banned of course).

 

We can discuss about conkeldurr, but we can't discuss about manaphy. Basically the game have no answers for manaphy.

Maybe when u-turn, volt-swich works properly and we have access to decent spawn for serperior or access to raikou, then you can unban Manaphy.

[Baganha]

.

 

Firstly i would like to thank q8 and everyone who was included in that discussion for taking the time to talk about this, ive heard a lot of things regarding staff not taking consideration anything that the members of the community have to say but after this and the response to the prankster + defog combo thread i believe staff is definitely taking a step to the right direction and be more attentive to the community's voice. That said, there are still some things i want to write about after reading this response, not so much as to getting into a discussion about it, more so just to put out my thoughts on it as i believe its the least i could do since you've all went out of your way to discuss about this.

 

Im not sure what the first argument was trying to prove, but if the intention was to say something will take manaphy's place and should be considered worthy of a ban as much as manaphy than that is completely false, a ban isnt a cause of a slippery slope where everything after it deserves to get kicked out of the tier as well, some pokemon will take the place manaphy had, but most likely not as optimally as it, if this wasnt the point you were making then completely ignore this paragraph.

 

The second point, probably the most important one here, is the one which i find the most scarce of information, now we all know this game isnt some exact science so most things taken into consideration are done so in a bit of a arbitrary fashion, when you say manaphy is only competitive and not broken, what do you mean by that? what counterplay was considered that made you (by you i mean everyone in this discussion of course) think manaphy wasnt worthy of a ban? How little counterplay does a pokemon need to be considered a ban on him? 2 pokemon, 1 pokemon, nothing at all? This is where i see a lot of discrepancy between people's opinions in this forum, however i believe a lot of it is made in a very straight foward and one dimensional way, "offense beats it", disregarding the fact that manaphy's most usage is in a team that has incredible MU to offense to begin with, "incredibly unorthodox pokemon beats it", so pretty much almost every MU that you arent facing a manaphy, you will be at a disadvantage because you're unaware clef or av goodra dont do anything for that game, "faster pokemon kill it", i shouldnt even say what is wrong with this comment, there are things that surely check it, jolteon, raikou, serp, specs latis, but saying that ANYTHING that outspeed it, takes care of manaphy is an incredibly dishonest argument, random anecdote talking how they have beaten manaphy before and its never a been a problem to them, LMAO dont even get me started on that one. Point is, im not sure what exact criteria is being taken to say that x is broken or not, and honestly i dont feel like most people here do, specially when most if not all actions that have been taken into this meta were from another format, i know it isnt easy since "broken" is a very subjective definition and even what a pokemon needs for it to be considered broken is differs a lot, anything that its been banned here or in smogon have all had very diferent impacts on the meta, from threats to anything that was offense like pheromosa to wall and balance breakers like hoopa unbound.

 

Agree with the third point, anyone who wants to consider banning something just because its annoying to play against should probably reconsider playing something else or drastically change their mentality towards competitive mons, not much to add up here, pretty obvious point.

 

That last point kinda upsets me honestly, there being change to the meta in the "near future" shouldnt make for an excuse to not try to improve the current one, this just comes off as lazyness to me, i mean i understand youre not going to ban it, but would you really not consider it if you thought it was broken? Even if the pvp update is comming out in a month or so, thats an entire season we could be playing without a "broken" element in the meta. I know ive basically said the same thing to heroofthestreet but this isn't the same as the prankster + defog scenario as it is a much more specific thing, not as impactfull and would probably take much more work to resolve than just banning a pokemon/move.