The whole point to carrying dragon pulse is to counter the counter that will be switched in when you 'try' and revenge kill; not for the Pokemon that they're bringing in to revenge kill the Heatran.
I never said anything like that...
And that's what I was saying about why they wouldn't switch in a steel type as an initial counter. No one is going to put out THAT much of a risk to suffer getting hit by either Earth Power or its fire STAB; which a lot of Heatran users will still use despite expecting a counter.
Well if they have a gyrados out for instance, they're probably not going to have to worry about fire blast or earth power.
So yeah, dragon pulse is used for countering (or at least getting good damage against) the Heatran counter that they switch in. ScarfTran outspeeds all standard dragon sets (and when I say standard, I mean the all-but-2-to-11%) apart from a Scarfed Flygon, and does enough to guarantee a 2HKO on all of these sets (which means that they will not touch you, thanks to their switching in). And Flygon isn't even common enough as it is, nor is it lethal enough to really ever worry about. And once again, I'll mention bulky waters. The actual reason for dragon pulse is safety. Safety in what you're going to hit, and safety in the amount of damage your hit is going to do. With dragon pulse hitting neutral on everything across the board apart from steel (which we already covered as being the one thing a person won't want to counter with), you basically have the best move you can go with for that security. HP Ice basically won't hurt bulky waters; which, as I said, is Heatran's most reliable (and most seen) counter. From that perspective, HP Ice almost seems to be redundant to throw on the set.
If you're expecting bulky waters, just use fire blast, seeing as it will still have 90 power on bulky waters. Dragon pulse is useless for anything except for dragons. And yes, I forgot kingdra. But overall you're still around 60,000 people short of the ones hp ice hits for 4x.
There are teams that revolve around choice items. The number of choiced pokemon won't matter as long as they can support each other and deal with common threats.
This is clearly
not a team designed to revolve around choice items, seeing as only 2 of he original pokemon have them.
Again, the reason CB Scizor is vastly more popular than SD is because it isn't so straightforward to counter. Scizor is the most common pokemon in OU, and almost every team carries a Scizor counter. CB Scizor comes in on a good match-up, but unlike its SD counterpart, scouts for and wears down its counters with U-turn.
*sigh*
Did you read my post? You can use U-turn on a SD set. But clearly he
doesn't want to because he used x-scissor.
Rotom comes in on U-turn, take 12.5% from Stealth Rocks, and another 38-50% from U-turn (even more on Scarfed sets). That sounds a lot better than either being forced out or OHKO'd.
1. That's just rotom lol. You're focusing on just one example.
2. This particular set actually outspeeds a rotom with no speed boost or ones such as the one on this team. Therefore rotom switches in on SD, then (if U-turn replaced x-scissor) scizor has the option of doing a U-turn for much more damage than the CB set.
Residual damage from Rocks and being able to manipulate the resulting match-up puts you at an equally large advantage, and never at the risk for simply wasting a turn and your Scizor.
1. SR is going to be up either way.
2. What do you mean "manipulate the matchup"? That's exactly what
CB takes away from you. If you mean repeatedly switching in and immediately U-turning away over and over until you die, that's a waste of the scizor. You also still seem to be under the impression that U-turn can't be used except with CB.
Scizor is one of the most reliable. There's a reason why it's one of the most commonly used sets in OU.
Hmmm.... maybe because lots of people on shoddy suck lol.
I've never had any sort of problem with a CB set, ever. SD sets, on the other hand, can actually be a threat.
Calculation for Dragon Pulse vs. Salamence: 87.92% - 103.32%. That's with a SpD- nature (which is the most common). With a neutral nature, it does a minimum of 79.15%, which is still a guaranteed OHKO with SR.
True, good point. Then again, you won't have guaranteed kills for dragonite or flygon.
Then again the only thing dragon pulse helps with is kingdra lol. The extra 40 power on latias is negligible (especially with its great special defense) and bulky waters take the same damage from fire blast as they do from dragon pulse.
Top
2 | Salamence | 135785 | 23.24
High
12 | Latias | 83201 | 14.24
24 | Flygon | 44903 | 7.69
26 | Kingdra | 43755 | 7.49
Low
42 | Dragonite | 25799 | 4.42
Bottom
178 | Altaria | 1050 | 0.18
Mmkay. Now, as you can see, more people use flygon and dragonite than kingdra.
70702 vs. 43755
Honestly using a move for only one pokemon is almost never useful.
