Ideas/Suggestions conserning competitive play

[Dragonstrike]

Okay I have another suggestion. By now it's probably no secret that we of the competitive community are probably going to suspect and or ban Nucleon from play due to, among other things, overcentralization in the teambuilding process. At least... That's the normal way to do it. But, if the new game makers would listen to my suggestions, perhaps we can avoid the entire thing. Just hear me out for a second: I suggest the game makers nerf nucleon!

This would avoid having to ban the radioactive fox if successful, letting everyone be happy. I have three possible ways we can nerf nucleon in order from hardest to easiest:

1) Make it so Nucleon can't learn Hyper Voice.
- It's stab Hyper voice is essentially a 180bp spammable move that is super effective to doubly super effective against 90% of the metagame not counting nuclear formes. This is legitimately absurd. I suggest replacing Hyper voice in its learnset with the much more reasonable Radioacid or Proton Beam so that it cant OHKO the vast majority of the meta. This would be harder than it looks though, as Eevee can learn Hyper voice and there is a possibility of breeding it down I believe, so I don't really advocate this method but wanted to out it up just in case.

2) Rearrange Nucleon's stats
- For the nuclear type, speed is everything. In Nucleon's case, it can KO the vast majority of the meta but in turn it can be KO'd by the vast majority of the meta. It's base 90 speed is the problem, with a choice scarf attached (since it needs nothing but Hyper Voice anyway) it can outspeed almost all pokemon and never have to worry about bad typing matchups. I suggest a new stat spread of 95/60/65/130/110/65, in fitting with the stat spreads of the other 'eons as a nerf to Nucleon. In this way one will have to play thier cards right in order to efectively use it, as opposed to mindless spamming. The speed drop and special attack boost will make it a huge nuker, but only when used correctly. I would advocate for this method, or even just rearranging Nucleons stats however you see fit to get it below 70-75 base speed.

3) Replace Atomizate with another ability
- This one is pretty easy to get by. Getting rid of Atomizate and replacing it with, perhaps, Lead Skin or Gieger sense (if that ability got fixed) would bring Nucleon down to much more reasonable levels, since Hyper Voice couldn't be used against the meta. I'd advocate for this method due to it being the easiest (I think) to implement in game.

Careful there taking about nerfs, for they can make quite the mess out of a Pokemon's role and viability. While I am all for balancing the competitive meta, I do not agree with changes to base states or abilities at ALL (Except in certain case, where it clear that a change would be a net POSITIVE gain for said pokemon in question). They can either end up being ruinous for it (Hello, Dramsama....), or redefine what it can actually do, and therefore its role. If I had to choose between a nerf or a ban, I would take the ban, because it will not affect the core gameplay of the Pokemon. Rather, it would just disallow it from being used in competitive, which is fine if it still remains as good as it can be.

Let's look at this into a little more detail. Say that you removed Hyper Voice from its movepool, and only made it teachable to latter eeveelutions, to prevent any chance of it getting its uber move. Well, now you took away Eevee's STAB and messed with the learnsets of multiple evolution just to fix one thing. 

The stats more or less have to stay the same, because otherwise, this creature goes from god to god awful. Its Speed and S.Atk are its only usable qualities, and lowering those would just make it plain unusable, or make it require very specific team compositions for players who still want to run it post nerf. The later would kinda defeats the purpose of re balancing its stats to prevent over-centralization in teams in the first place, too.

As for the ability, I say unless you give it something roughly equivalent in power, like say a Modified version of Chernobyl (Yes, Atomizate is THAT powerful), leave it alone. If you take that away without giving something that vastly increases its survivalbilty (Its a Nuclear type with bad HP, its going to die quickly), or some form of Offensive ability that makes it powerful without being OP as heck, taking away its signature ability and replacing it with something token will just kill its usage. Even if you did give it a good make up ability, it would vastly alter how the Pokemon is played, and there would have to be weeks of playtesting just to make sure the ability actually works for it, or, heaven fobrid, ends up being even more broken than Atomizate in practice.

Its good that we want to do something about potential problem that will crop up in the competitive scene, but their is fine tunning to a Pokemon to make it work, then their is taking a sledgehammer to it and hope that what left will still function.

Okay, let me put this from my perspective. You say you would rather ban Nucleon (which appears to be where this is going) than alter it in any way, shape or form to make it just usable. What I am trying to do is please both us from the compettive meta and normal players who just want to use Nucleon. The way I see it, if we ban a pokemon then it doesn't get any love from the people who like it. Assuming that the ban is even successful (which is a whole other beast I won't discuss here)

Now I will frsthandedly admit that with Nucleon and its ability to have supereffective coverage on the entire metagame, balancing it according to my methods would be hard due to the qualities of nuclear pokemon. But I believe it can be done. Nucleon should still be viable enough with 65-75 base speed, in comparison I offer you Sylveon, similar pokemon in ORAS serving as a special nuke when nessesary, but is still slow. It alternates between OU and UU, and Nucleon would be still better than it, so I feel my case is justified. 

I will respect your decision not to alter pokemon, but I hope you will respect mine in that I just want everyone to be happy and compromises will need to be made regarding this pokemon.

A couple notes regarding Nucleon in the meta and how changing it in certain ways might affect it:

First off, I would like to point out that Geiger Sense is Nucleon's HA, so that idea's out the window for the most part.  Particularly since its best STAB move atm without Atomizate or a new ability like the previously suggested Atomize (Normalize, but Nuclear.  And that would still be incredibly broken), is Gamma Ray.  Ick.  

Second, Sylveon doesn't even remotely have the same issues that Nucleon does.  The ways they play are incredibly different.  Yes, Sylveon is slow and has an -ate ability backed up by a strong Sp Atk stat.  It only works though because Sylveon can actually take a hit and respond in kind.  Nucleon can't, just by the sheer virtue of everything except Poison and Nuclear moves absolutely annihilating it.  Making it too slow makes it unusable, and it'd have to have Shuckle tier bulk (likely an exaggeration) backed by decent HP to even have a chance to take a strong hit.  I would also like to point out that a max speed, scarfed pokemon with base 65 speed can still outspeed every pokemon with 121 base speed or less with no speed boosts.  And that's still the majority of Uranium's metagame, outspeeding Yatagaryu and everything slower than it.  Oh, and Fairy might have decent coverage, but it doesn't OTK almost every dual typed pokemon either.  As similar as Nucleon and Sylveon appear to be, they aren't really alike in any way at all.

Third, the base problem isn't exactly with Nucleon, it's with the Nuclear type in general.  Most Nuclear types, fortunately, don't have the stats or right spammable Nuclear moves to make them worth using though.  Nucleon is an exception to this, yes, but I'd also like to present a second example: Nuclear Baariette.  Nuclear Baariette has access to Nuclear Slash, which is just powerful enough coming off of its attack stat to becomes a real threat.  It doesn't help that it also has access to Swords Dance, Moxie, and Guts to make it even more powerful if you play your cards right.  This is where it gets real good though.  Unlike Nucleon, it has powerful coverage moves to muscle past enemy mons that try to take its Nuclear attacks: High Jump Kick and STAB Knock Off/Crunch.  And just like Nucleon, that gives Nuclear Baariette perfect Super Effective coverage.  The only reason it hasn't shown up yet in competitive Uranium discussions: you can't breed it for good IVs currently, making its usability way too dependent on RNG/hacking.  I should also mention two other pokemon that might cause problems with Nuclear attacks: Urayne if and when it can learn Atomic Punch, a spammable base 80 power physical Nuclear move, and Shell Smash and Expunge Raffiti.  Yes, it's not a Nuclear type.  But do you really want to take a +2, 110 power Nuclear move that's only resisted by Steel, with no hope of outspeeding the user without priority?  Yeah, a type with Super Effective coverage of Nuclear's magnitude is what can and will break metagames.  There isn't an easy way to balance it.  It either wrecks the entire metagame mercilesssly, or it's completely unviable in the metagame because everything with the type just gets annihilated before they can do any damage.  Playing an entire match consisting of the game 'Who goes first?' is not exactly going to be a fun experience. 

If people want to play with Nucleon, okay, they can do that.  It likely won't be allowed in the competitive scene though, so they'd have to do it in something like Smogon's Anything Goes tier (yes, Nucleon's destructiveness and meta influencing is comparable to that of Mega Rayquaza's.  It's just that bad.)