Seeing a little bit of discussion arise in the Nucleon thread, I felt encouraged to make this stat-based tiering guide of all fully evolved Pokemon in Uranium's Pokedex. Based only on base stats and ignoring typing, abilities, and movesets for each Pokemon, I have separated the fully evolved Pokemon in Uranium's Pokedex into 3 distinct tiers. I have also looked at Mega Evolutions separately and have separated them into 2 distinct tiers; the reason I treated Mega Evolutions separately was because they noticeably skewed the average stats in my calculations, making them more error-prone, and balancing their impact has proven to be too difficult, since the Mega Evolutions are also disadvantaged in that they can't be regularly switched in as part of a battle without risking initially taking damage in their base forms and they are also unable to hold any other items except for their Mega Stones.
Hopefully, this can serve as a rough guide as to the viability of Pokemon in the Uranium Pokedex and reasonably discern strong metagame threats that can be built effectively in several unpredictable ways and weak Pokemon that usually get outclassed by other stronger Pokemon in the metagame in their roles and are limited in the ways they can effectively be built, making them too predictable and relatively easy to counter. The tiering below is based on stats calculations, admittedly with a little bit of subjectivity as to what makes certain stat builds stronger than others (asking myself how many underpowered stats on a Pokemon are required to balance out its overpowered stats, and evaluating the quality of the stat distribution on the Pokemon in ambiguous cases).
My opinion of an ideal metagame in PU with justifications will be made clear at the end of the guide. Okay, here we go:
Regular Pokemon Tier A:
Feliger
Yatagaryu
Fafninter
Seikamater
Xenoqueen
Gyarados
Actan
Beliaddon
Laissure
Lanthan
Garlikid
Chimaconda
Electruxo
I would like to reiterate that the tiering is based only on stats. All of the Pokemon shown above either have:
1) too many base stats that are significantly higher than the rest of the Pokedex without a reasonable amount low base stats to balance them, or
2) a balance in the number of high and low base stat, but containing a stat total within their most effective offensive and defensive niches that is unreasonably high compared to other Pokemon.
Having said that, this is by no means a ban list for these Pokemon, but some of these could potentially be very worthy suspects for a ban depending on their typing and abilities (looking at you Yatagaryu, Sheer Force Subduction Lanthan, Fur Coat Fafninter, Sticky Web Seikamater, and Contrary Chimaconda; ...).
OLD: [*Syrentide was the most questionable case that consistently circulated between this tier and the one below it (Regular Pokemon Tier B). With only its speed keeping it in line to potentially fit in the lower tier, any form of Rain support, would make this Pokemon overpowered, since it can abuse its ability Swift Swim to outspeed even Mega-Inflagetah without requiring and stage increases in speed to do so. Expectedly, rain support would be very common in a meta where teams are trying to preserve their steel type Pokemon to avoid getting completely swept by nuclear types. Thus, in a typical battle, Syrentide will likely have an average speed that is significantly higher than that of the rest of the Pokedex, which made it deserve this tier.]
Regular Pokemon Tier B:
Syrentide
Winotinger
Luxelong
Frosthra
Dermafrost
Brainoar
Tubareel
Glavinug
S51-A
Cocancer
Metalynx
Trawpint
Antarki
Dunseraph
Gellin
Baariette
Astronite
Floatzel
Espeon
Jolteon
Vaporeon
Leafeon
Sylveon
Blubelrog
Gliscor
Escartress
Coatlith
Mismagius
Glaceon
Umbreon
Anderind
Archilles
Krilvolver
Ampharos
Inflagetah
Harptera
Daikatuna
Luchabra
Tracton
Flareon
Gararewl
Herolune
Dramsama
Neopunk
Vilucard
Corsoreef
Aromatisse
Majungold
Alpico
Haagross
Theriamp
Oblivicorn
Note: Based on stats alone, Nucleon would fit into this tier but it is obviously getting a quick-ban due to its 100% accurate spammable 90 BP nuclear type Atomizate boosted Hyper Voice, as discussed in several other threads; thus, it was excluded to reduce any confusion.
I read a comment on a post here in the forum somewhere that stated that the PU Pokedex is very balanced for the most part; I would have to say the statistics agree with that assertion as do I. All of the Pokemon shown above are very balanced with respect to their stats and utilities. This encourages a very diverse and exciting metagame to be a part of with approximately 51 Pokemon that could potentially be chosen to fill in certain roles on a team. While some might have a bit of an edge over others, by no means does one Pokemon severely outclass another based on stats alone. Introduce typing advantages and disadvantages and abilities into the mix and the story may very well change here.Having said that, not all Pokemon were created equal and there are still quite a few that are solely there to make the in-game adventure more fun, but are by no means worthy of being on a serious competitive team. These are:
Regular Pokemon Tier C:
Gargryph
Kiricorn
Pajay
Empirilla
Navighast
Splendifowl
Chainite
Frikitiki
Paraboom
Stenowatt
Praseopunk
Nimflora
Geigeroach
Drilgann
Titanice
Ludicolo
Tanscure
Whimsicott
Sponaree
Eshouten
Lavent
Jerbolta
Raffiti
Harylect
Miasmedic
Terlard
Hazma
Tofurang
Firoke
Arbok
I think I might have missed Barand and Sableye; however, in the off chance that Tier C does gain community interest in creating a comp scene around it, Barand and Sableyes would be probably be considered as jokes even here based on their stats. I guess what this tier is saying is that based on base stats alone, the less skilled player in making in-battle decisions using exclusively Pokemon in higher tiers will win noticeably more battles than the more skilled player in making in-battle decisions using exclusively Pokemon in this tier.
The take home is, in general, Tier A > Tier B > Tier C when discussing regular Pokemon.
As promised earlier, I also created a tiering for Mega Evolutions; the inclusion of Urayne-alpha here was an accident, but giving it some thought, I later came to the conclusion that including it here was appropriate, since it has a wide variety of useful stats, albeit slightly less than other mega evolutions, as well as the ability to hold an item and sweep with 4X supereffective coverage against >80% of the metagame. I do believe that if teams opt to include Urayne-alpha, they should not be able to also include a Mega Evolution in addition to it. This, I believe, will allow for the best possible diversity, since I don't think Urayne-alpha is completely broken (unlike Nucleon), and the extreme difficulty in soft resetting for a competitive 5 IV Urayne with an ideal nature somewhat balances it out. I think we are all on the same page that the beta form of Urayne is stupidly broken on a completely different level than the scope of any of these tiers and doesn't deserve a place in a serious comp scene. Here is the first tier for Mega Evolutions:
Tier A: Strong Megas and Urayne
Inflagetah (Mega Inflagetah)
S51-A (Mega S51-A T)
Baariette (Mega Baariette)
Syrentide (Mega Syrentide)
Gyarados (Mega Gyarados)
Metalynx (Mega Metalynx)
Archilles (Mega Archilles)
Ampharos (Mega Ampharos)
Electruxo (Mega Electruxo)
Urayne (Urayne Alpha)
These Mega Evolutions are discernably stronger and have a higher utility than the ones in the following tier based on their base stats:
Tier B: Weaker Megas
Sableye (Mega Sableye)
Drilgann (Mega Drilgann)
Kiricorn (Mega Kiricorn)
Arbok (Mega Arbok)
Whimsicott (Mega Whimsicott)
Dramsama (Mega Dramsama)
Overall, these Megas do not contain any impressive stat builds and superficially, they don't seem to give enough of an "oomph" factor when they appear and are very outclassed by their counterparts in Tier A. These should not be taken seriously based on their stats alone.
Now that I have presented a stat-based tiering guide, I would like to present my opinion of an ideal metagame in PU:
Firstly, I believe that the most popular metagame that would be played would be one thatencourages the use of Pokemon from Regular Tier B as much as possible and discourages the use of Pokemon from Regular Tier C. This would optimize team-building diversity to the best ability possible. Seeing that the vast majority of Mega Evolutions exist in Tier A, it naturally follows that Mega Tier A should complement Regular Tier B, and that Mega Tier B should complement Regular Tier C.
As I said earlier, Pokemon in Regular Tier A are by no means broken, so they shouldn't necessarily be excluded from fights. Thus, I propose the following team-building archetype for 6v6 singles:
- choose any (1) of a Mega-Evolution/Urayne-alpha, or any other Pokemon;
- choose any (2) of a regular Pokemon in Tier A or lower (any except Urayne-alpha); and
- choose any regular Pokemon from Tier B or lower to fill in the rest of the team slots.
Another possibility for those desperate to do team-building using their favorites that would otherwise perform sub-optimally against the rest of the Pokedex:
- choose any (1) of a Mega-Evolution in Tier B or any other regular Pokemon in Tier B or lower;
- choose any (2) of a regular Pokemon in Tier B or lower; and
- choose any regular Pokemon from Tier C to fill in the rest of the team slots.
This tier could ideally allow people to experiment with any Pokemon I ranked too harshly low and boost their usage to be potentially viable in the more competitive format initially proposed.
All in all, I do believe this is a good starting point that can help influence the initial usage statistics to create as healthy as possible of an early stage metagame. However, we shouldn't just stop there. One limitation of this guide is its failure to take into account Pokemon's abilities, typing, and movesets. I don't believe this limitation is too extreme though, since most of this will develop when people attempt to build their own personalized teams. Of course, Pokemon that have been brought up as suspects in other threads should be suspect tested (Yatagaryu, Inflagetah, Mega Syrentide, Lanthan, etc.), but only when the time comes and only when usage stats become available and reliable for each Pokemon.
