Idea to fix the nuclear type

[Dragonstrike]

Spoiler

I totally agree with most of the sentiments expressed in here. I find it very disappointing that the vast majority of nuclear type Pokemon are unviable in standard online/competitive play. The most prominent nuclear type in the meta is Nucleon, due to the reasons stated above by shademonkey. However, as seen in other forum posts, the competitive community feels the need to quick ban other nuclear type users, particularly:

1) Urayne (due to its high base speed of 102)
2) Raffiti (due to its ability, Quick Feet, and access to Shell Smash in conjuction with Nuclear type moves)
3) Jerbolta-N (due to its high base speed of 110 and its ability, Quick Charge)

All of these Pokemon have two things in common: access to Nuclear type moves and a high Speed stat/means to boost speed. There does not seem to be any middle ground for the Nuclear type as a whole: any Nuclear not fast enough is relegated to obscurity and any Nuclear that meets the appropriate benchmark for speed is suddenly Ubers material. This begs the question of what a UU tier would look like in competitive Uranium; I have come to the conclusion that any Nuclear type at the top of the speed cap for the UU tier would also be deemed "overpowered" as well as "uncounterable" and would also face the banhammer like Nucleon & company. In addition, what exactly would prevent Pajay/Harptera/Whimsicott from setting up with Tailwind and allowing one of the "lesser" nuclears to start a sweep against the entire UU tier? The nuclear type just isn't healthy for the meta the way it is. At the very least, I am on board with capping damage done by nuclear moves at 2X and making any Pokemon with a Steel/Nuclear type take 0.5X damage from nuclear type moves, so that they can serve a decent chance at being counters.

Well, you're commenting on quite the old thread here.  But since you are...well, let me point out another reason that Shadow Moves aren't nearly as scary as Nuclear moves.

In addition to Shadow moves only being able to score 2x SE damage in XD, no pokemon can get STAB on them.  That also plays a very important part in mitigating how much damage the moves can deal.  Combine both prior facts with how readily available decent Shadow Pokemon are, giving the player access to many options for resisting/tanking Shadow type damage, and the type doesn't seem as daunting to face in the long run.

Nuclear has no such handicaps, likely as a way to differentiate it from the Shadow Pokemon in XD.

And I'm honestly fine with that.  It mechanically supplements the in-game story, and it does a fantastic job of driving home the point of how dangerous Nuclear types are.

While I don't need to elaborate on how hard they are to balance from a competitive standpoint (we've beaten that topic to death and then some), I do agree with Shade that they don't need to be changed.

I also agree with Shade that the statistics of some of the pokemon in this game are rather extreme, but I don't think they necessarily need to be altered drastically, either.  As nice as having everything perfectly balanced would be, that's not typically the foremost thought when pokemon are usually designed.  Twitch and JV had some ideas and wanted to run with them, and this is what we got (minus nerfed Dramsama, which is a decision I both do and don't agree with).

A tiering system is one method used to make a competitive environment feel more balanced (and possibly more fun as well.)  And if things have to be banned from a certain tier to make things more fair, than that's what that kind of system can do.

If the Nuclear type proves to be too much for the competitive meta as a whole, then the simplest answer would be to be to ban usage of the type and separate it into two metas: One where Nuclear types are allowed, and one where they aren't.

That's only in concept, though.  In practice, only a few Nuclear types are actually relevant due to the difficulty of getting the majority of them competitive ready at all.  And that's where usage based statistics come in if possible.