@Gate88, as a coder, you’re very much aware of the importance of minor details. The difference between a program running or crashing, performing optimally or chugging, drawing the right pixel in the right place–it can be the difference of nesting a tuple, of shaving a redundancy from your schema, of managing information by the increment.
As a forretress, you find your purpose in these increments, in ensuring that little-by-little, your opponents’ plans begin to falter, knicked away bit by bit until they belly under their own weight, collapsing into the chaos of scattered fragments.
I talked in booj’s post about the importance of entry hazards in the OU meta. In short, just laying Stealth Rock severely punishes switch-ins, especially for the format’s many threatening Flying types, penalizing the typical bait-and-switch mind games while also thinning the margin of an OHKO for each of the opponents’ ‘mon.
Well Gate88, you not only have access to Stealth Rock–you’re also capable of laying all three of the game’s damaging entry hazards. And thus: you will.
Gate88 (Forretress) @ Custap Berry
Ability: Sturdy
EVs: 248 HP / 8 Def / 252 SpD
Careful Nature
IVs: 0 Spe
- Pain Split
- Spikes
- Stealth Rock
- Toxic Spikes
First,we’ll lay Stealth Rock, the most reliable. Next, it’s a choice between Spikes and Toxic Spikes. Spikes do 12.5% (non-type-dependent) damage upon switch-in, but they do not effect Flying types. They can be stacked three times, with a max of 25% damage. Toxic Spikes poison anything that isn’t Flying, levitating, or immune to poison (Poison, Steel, or with a special ability). They stack twice, with the first layer poisoning (-1/8th HP) and the second layer badly poisoning (-1/16th, plus an additional -1/16th for every turn in battle, reset upon switch-out). If the team is light on Steel or Poison types and likely doesn’t have a cleric, we’ll usually try for a layer of Toxic Spikes, since it’s a real thorn in the side of any team. Otherwise, one or two layers of Spike damage on top of Stealth Rock completely ruins the day of the opponent.
Of course, all this is contingent on you getting a few good moves in, which isn’t always guaranteed in the fast-KO world of Pokemon Showdown. Your affinity for the finer things in life may be one of your great gifts, and yet in superhero fashion, it may just be born of your greatest weakness.
As a Steel/Bug type, you have a somewhat unflappable air that strangers sometimes interpret as emotional distance. Though perhaps this chilled persona belies a vulnerability in need of protection, the same vulnerability your hyper-vigilance surveils–the chink in your armor that turns assets into burdens and vices into virtues. Unfortunately, most opponents will be all too aware of your x4 weakness to Fire-type attacks. On the one hand,this is your only weakness, which makes you one of the most defensive type combinations in the game. On the other, powerful Fire type moves are quite common, so if you were to try to avoid them you’d spend much of the battle running away.
There’s no avoiding this conversation: you’re a natural fit as a Suicide Lead. We start with you, you lay your hazards, and we don’t switch you out until you’re dead. Now, if the other team doesn’t have a Fire type, that could be quite a while. You’re naturally bulky, and with no need to invest in Attack or kid ourselves with Speed, we’ll fill out your defensive stats. But if they do have a Fire type…well…that’s where your ability Sturdy comes in. As long as the enemy doesn’t have the ability Mold Breaker (no Fire types do), you cannot be OHKO’ed. If your HP is at full, a would-be OHKO will leave you with 1 HP. That’s where your Custap Berry comes into play. Once you’re below ¼ HP, your Custap will ensure that you go first next turn, securing at least one parting blow.
In your case, that could be another hazard layer, though it’s customary to part ways with Explosion, a Normal move with a monstrous 250BP (for comparison, the base power for the best move in a typing will usually be 100-140BP). However, as the detail-oriented type, you’re very much aware that many of the opponents who would take you down, including heatran, dragonite, and magnezone wouldn’t even take 40% damage from Explosion, even if your Attack were fully maxed out. That’s why you favor the programmatic precision of Pain Split: it combines your current HP with your opponent’s and divides the number by two, distributing the result to both of you. This will result in you halfing the current HP of your enemy while actually healing yourself by the same amount. Now, if your enemy uses the same Fire move they used to get you down to 1HP in the first place, the healing doesn’t matter much. But I know from experience that when someone thinks you’re as good as dead, they tend to get a little cocky. If they use a priority move “just to be sure” or switch out to get ready for the next opponent, you’ve just bought yourself 1-3 more moves. Quite a return on a suicide mission!
In short, you won’t last long, but you’re sure to go out in a blaze of glory. Though, actually, your real enemies are not Fire types so much as openers that reflect hazards back at your team like mega-diancie, mega-sableye, mega-absol, and espeon. And, of course if the enemy has a ‘mon with Defog (clears the field of hazards) or Rapid Spin (clears the user’s side of hazards), all your good work is washed away. However, these moves are relatively rare, so you can usually take a guess at who might be packing them (starmies, tentacruels, latias/latioses, dragonites), in which case we may not sacrifice you and instead keep you around for future switch-ins.
So there you have it, though you can be a bit single-minded at times, your specialty is singularly beneficial to the team. You excel in an area that requires a dedication that most of us aren’t willing to commit to, and you’re willing to follow that path straight off the cliff, because–hey–life is short, so do what you love. And perhaps you can die smiling, knowing the legacy of ephemera you leave behind, lingering like a digital memory until wiped away.
