So I decided it might be worthwhile having a poll to gauge how people feel about wrap and similar moves, and their use in conjunction with agility (mainly in RBY OU, since the other tiers are so rarely played) and to discuss what should be done about it. I'm aware the issue has been discussed in the past, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any resolution and I thought a poll might be interesting. If there was actually a decision made to leave them unbanned on PO, I'm not aware of it, I'm under the impression that this is an unresolved issue. Either way, can't hurt to start a bit of discussion right? I personally believe Agiwrap should be banned. It's a strategy that requires minimal support to successfully pull off and offers just about no counterplay- In OU your best options are Gengar, which tends to get removed from battle quite easily, hope for a miss, or PP stall. Meanwhile, Dnite is tearing through your team. It can pull of sweeps with little support (the main obstacle being wrap's imperfect accuracy), and even if it does falter due to a miss or something, it will usually take down or critically weaken multiple pokemon, such that your team is at a severe disadvantage and likely unable to handle the rest of your opponent's team. I'm inclined to say that wrap, clamp, etc. without agility is fine, as you can easily bring something faster, not to mention that clamp, fire spin, etc. are even less reliable than wrap. If you still want to sweep using wrap, you require a substantial amount of support, so it seems fair. That said, I rarely encounter wrap, save in the form of AgiNite, so this is mostly theoretical. I would like to mention that it's as if we're halfway between a wrap and a wrap-less meta. This is because wrap is allowed, but that tactic is known to be controversial, and I think in many cases it is an unspoken assumption that that wrappers won't be used. This means that while is wrap and agiwrap is still used, it perhaps doesn't see the usage it should in a wrap meta, and hence doesn't have the impact that it should on the rest of the meta. If I'm mistaken about this, and a decision has actually been reached to allow all forms of wrap, then I guess I'm beating a dead horse a little. In that case, I guess this thread should be deleted or something. I thought wrap moves were initially allowed because people were unwilling to ban things without trying them, and there has since been no change.
Wrap is annoying, that's for sure. No, I don't think AgiNite should be banned, because it's damned hard to set it up without taking PAR or being KOed, and because PP-stalling Nite out of Wrap is reasonably easy to do. The Smogon guide doesn't lie about groans of annoyance, though. Voting "other" because saying it's "fine" would be saying that I don't mind when some chucklehead pointlessly draws out a lost game for 100 turns by using Dnite's Wrap on a fully-set-up Withdraw/Amnesia Slowbro. But just because Dragonite can be used to do stupid things doesn't mean it should be banned from competitive play IMO.
I don't think it's much of a discussion at this point. Wrap is allowed here, but almost nobody uses it on the ladder and there are almost never RBY tournaments. I also recognize, however, that RBY2K10 is dead, but that doesn't matter as most of the playerbase can be found on the ladder. I can tolerate Wrap as long as it's played only by a select few people, which it currently is.
I don't use Wrap myself but all the times I've faced it it has been rather lackluster so I never felt like it was really overpowering, stalling out its PP is really easy, it misses often and even the free switches it forces are workable around with smart switching
I just find it a really weird situation, having wrap allowed, but then it's such a suspect strategy that no-one uses it. For me at least, there's a lot of uncertainty over whether I should be using these tactics. This more than anything I was hoping to resolve by bringing this up, and I figured a poll would be interesting. Also, because I dislike AgiNite, it's terribly cheap.
http://rby2k10.proboards.com/post/11756 My argument tends to boil down to "Wrap is incredibly boring, play something that's fun", but here's a math take on why it should be banned. There's an issue that when I suggested what the tiers should look like to the higher-ups, I assumed that Wrap would be banned, and as such I suggested tiers that assumed Wrap would not be legal. In a Wrap-legal metagame, some Pokémon are misplaced (Dragonair is absolutely not NU with Agility+Wrap legal for example) with the current tiers. This also led to a frustrating exchange some time ago which resulted in Dratini being banned from RBY LC, whereas the tier would have been much better if Wrap would just have been banned from the start (or at the very least, Agility+Wrap).
It's allowed. Nothing is stopping you from using it, and anybody who gives you grief is an idiot who needs to learn the rules before complaining.
I'm probably the only person who consistently uses wrap on the PO ladder at the moment, so the negative stigma still seems to be lingering. I obviously think it should be legal. It's pretty clear to anyone who knows the game well that it's not 'broken', it's just that a lot of people find it boring. There are however, questions concerning centralisation in the lower tiers, at least given the current tier list, which wasn't designed for wrap. With regards to Isa's comments that the PO tier list had non-wrap in mind, I'm not sure whether the tier list should be changed for a wrap meta because pokemon tier lists have traditionally been based on usage. Hence the name 'Overused' and not 'High Tier' or something like that. If we want to do away with traditional and make ability-based tier lists, then yes the tier lists would be different from what they currently are.
there is no real reason to ban trapping moves in rby if you know how wrap works you can stall all dragonite's wrap pp I've been recently playing big rby tournaments and facing a lot of trapping shits without real difficult to win my matches wrap moves are annoying as a lot of thinks in pokemon but they aren't broken
I trust Tiba's judgement for the most part if he's been playing against it and not really facing difficulty. But I dunno if stalling it is always an option. If you're up against dual wrappers that's 64 pp to burn through. That's tough unless you're willing to up your Gengar/Speed usage and/or are willing to play extra-cautiously to avoid paralysis.
Wrap is way too weak to relay on. 1.) 4 Wraps have a BP of 60 with 52 % accuracy. 62 % chance if your opponent is para. 2.) If you score a crit, a switch will turn it to non crit.
Wrap only needs to do one accuracy check for multiple turns unless your opponent switches out, in which case you need two consecutive misses for it to be of consequence!
Those two consecutive misses have a chance of 2.25% of happening across any two given turns. For 31 turns, you have roughly ~50% chance of not missing twice in a row across all those turns. Factoring in the chance for misses and critical hits, that's the same ~50% chance of hitting three-four Pokémon with an attack ~471 base power that you may share across your mons somewhat as you wish, without attacking.
It's pretty simple. Dragonite at any time other than end-game: Stall it, usually with a rock, or maybe gengar. Other wrappers: Don't let your fast psychics get paralysed. If you cannot fulfill either of those conditions, then you got outplayed or haxed badly in some way. If you can't stall nite, then your team took a big enough beating beforehand to justify a loss anyway. If your speed got paralysed, then that was poor play on your part. Note if your speed does get paralysed, you can still attempt to stall the non-nite wrappers (cloyster especially), and you can always run your own wrappers to speed-tie.
Unfortunately, nobody ever uses Dragonite apart from during the late game when both players are down to only around three Pokémon. Coming in on something that lacks Thunder Wave/Stun Spore isn't hard, and even (especially!) if your foe has Tauros out, Blizzard won't KO, and Body Slam only paralyzes 30% of the time. Take a hit, Wrap your foes. No. I can have two fresh Pokémon and a Tauros remaining versus a sole Dragonite and still lose easily unless Wrap misses twice in a row (or the first time it's used), which I've already shown is a rare happening. It's not very hard to come in on something that cannot hurt you enough or status you. Tauros, Lax, Eggy without Stun Spore are all common and lack a move to OHKO or get a paralysis off. Damaged Golem and Rhydon cannot stay in either to kill if they're in range of a Blizzard (or Surf) KO. In a pinch you can even use Agility versus tri-attack Starmie, your chances of living a Blizzard are around 50%. Finding the right opportunities to set up isn't hard.
I use dragonite earlier on, not to sweep, but normally to set up an offensive switch. You're neglecting the fact that if you bench nite until the end-game, you're essentially playing a 5v6 battle until then. That is the drawback of the benched sweeper strategy. Also I think 2-3 healthy pokemon can stall nite, especially when you factor in misses. If you have 2-3 pokemon left, you should still have your rock, which you should have protected during the battle for this very reason. You don't even need rocks to KO nite. Once it's stalled it's not that much of a threat offensively. So for nite to sweep, your rock has to gone or low health, and there needs to be only 2-3 pokemon left at mid-low health. Earning that position can justify a win in my eyes. And end-game nite is nowhere near as auto-win as you seem to be implying. My nite has gone done in the end-game so many times due to misses, which is why it's only a last-resort for me, due to how unreliable it actually is. It's probably gone down in the end-game more times than it's actually managed to sweep. It's not even top 3 in terms of most valuable pokemon on my team.