Lower Leagues will rule?
I have a gut feeling the Great League will become the real premier league of PvP. The Master league will become dominated by just a few types, which combine high stats with great moves. Pretty soon this will become dull. But the 1500 cap of the Great League makes things much more divers in multiple ways:
1) Many more Pokemon are viable.
2) No single Pokemon can out-CP everything else.
3) Larger range of bulk vs. attack to choose from.
4) IVs have much larger influence on stats, making even individual Pokemon unpredictable.
5) Unique type combinations that do not exist in the higher leagues: Alolan Marowak is a Fireghost, messing up Metal and Fighters. Magcargo is Firestone, putting the hurt to Flying and Fire types. Pair the firesnail with Mawile - a Steelfairy can be hurt pretty much by fire only.
By the way, I assume we can we use Legendaries and Mythicals? Try to plan a battle against Mew for the Ultra League.
Answers
I don’t know why I’m defending him but he does have a point, a 2500 mewtwo may not be able to win with sheer CP like in the top league but it is able to hold its own against a vast majority of competition.
I asked a question if a l25 kyogre is equivalent to a level 30 gyarados and people said it’s better to estimate it at around a level 34 gyarados which is a good 100-200 CP greater than a l25 kyogre. This implies pokemon with less base stats need to be powered higher than those with higher ones rather than compete CP to CP only.
Of course this takes type advantages out of the question but I’m just saying a 2500 mewtwo, groudon rayquaza kyogre is still stupid strong
That Gyarados vs Kyogre comparison only applies to DPS. The Gyarados will have more TDO, because its stat spread favors tankiness more than Kyogre's. Whether one needs to be powered higher has no impact on how good the pokemon is compared to other pokemon in the same limited cp league.
According to DPS/TDO, none of the four legendaries you mentioned make it to the top 5 TDO list of their type(s) in the 2500cp or 1500cp league. This suggests that they might not be stupid strong when limited by cp.
A Gyarados will need to go above a certain level to match an underleveled Kyogre in DPS, and therefore exceed said Kyogre's CP, because it's base attack is much lower and it takes much higher levels to reach those damage outputs, but that also means that the rest of its stats will go above the underleveled Kyogre's by a big-enough margin to end up with a higher CP. That was the main reason why you got those responses; DPS is king in raid and gym battles but it might not be the main deciding factor in PVP and the CP cap limits the superiority of a lot of species in considerable ways.
That's not to say Mewtwo won't have great coverage and rule in a wide variety of matchups overall, but on lower CP tiers the main advantage it will have is that it won't take as much dust and candy to be perfectly fit to compete and it will take no time for people to figure out how to easily counter it and shift the meta away from it anyways.
High stats gods and their stupid high power will only give them an edge in the beginning, but it will for sure be a brief period once players start basing their teams around blocking the mutant cat.
A CP 2500 Mewtwo will be a lower level pokemon with stats comparable to other CP 2500 Pokemon. Mewtwo has a decent resistance profile, being weak to Bug, Dark, and Ghost, while resisting Fight and Psychic. It's big problems are that aside from Psychic, it doesn't have STAB on any charged moves, and Psychic with STAB is only marginally better than Future Sight without STAB. A psychic Mewtwo at CP 2500 is basically a slightly crippled Espeon (Espeon should be carrying Future Sight and Psybeam, and still falls behind Alakazam in PvP because of not having any moves that aren't Psychic moves.) And for any other Mewtwo charged move, there's someone else who can do it better at CP 2500, probably with STAB, and probably with a fast move that also hits the foe's weakness.
The only exception to this are combinations like Psychic/Focus Blast or Thunderbolt/Ice Beam, where Mewtwo has a wide range of things it can do (using the second charged move). But as is so often the case, something that does multiple things well doesn't do any specific one better than everyone else.
Mewtwo will be a staple in the Master League, where it's phenomenal CP will help it rule the roost, but in the CP capped leagues, it's advantages are drastically reduced.
Don't believe me? Test it out. Have a friend on another team put something you choose in an empty gym. Attack it with a CP 2500 Mewtwo, let him heal it up, then attack it with a CP 2500 something else with the same move that is optimized. Second battle will be much easier. STAB and a matching type fast attack will matter a lot.
Note that your CP 2500 Mewtwo will be level 21 or 21.5, and your CP 2500 Jolteon (say) will be around level 35. That's why Mewtwo won't dominate the CP capped leagues.
Hahaha you are way cringier than mr-ex777. At least he can pull off that lunatic hobo vibe, you just sound like a literal 10 year old. That "zero life" argument shows up a lot between middle school level conversations. At least I hope you are a 10 year old, otherwise I might actually be worried about you and your mental age.
It's pretty basic math and understanding of simple game mechanics. The meta until now has been all about dps - can you do enough damage to either a) beat the clock or b) beat the other players damage output in the same amount of time against a common boss. That's all about the attack stat. Pvp means you're attacking and defending, and you need the optimal total damage output, not just dps. And since the game gives more weight to attack than defense or stamina when calculating cp, mons like Mewtwo, Rayquaza, etc. that get all their CP from their attack stat are going to have significantly lower defense and stamina than a mon like Umbreon, Lugia, or Cresselia while only having slightly better attacks.
When cp isn't limited, mewtwo will still be great. Against machamp, for instance, Mewtwo has the second best Dps (second to deoxys), and second best tdo (lugia tops it even there, meaning lugia would do more damage before dying and is already better in pvp). Putting a cp cap of 2500 on and mewtwo falls out of the top 10 in dps because psychic isn't a great move, and falls out of the top *75* in TDO because it's defense and stamina are so far behind it's competitors.
There's a lot we don't know about the mechanics yet, but mewtwo will definitely not dominate the lower cp leagues.
Actually no. The latest update to the comprehensive DPS/TDO spreadsheet makes it easy to see this. You can put in 2500 as the CP cap and then all Pokemon will be approximated with IVs and level such that their CP is 2500, or as close as possible. Mewtwo is actually fairly low on the list in terms of both DPS and TDO, with 14.1 and 264 respectively with it's best moveset. This is even worse than something like Breloom (14.2 DPS and 289 TDO) in both respects.
Mewtwo is such a great Pokemon in normal battles because it has such amazing stats and a pretty good (but not great) moveset. When the CP, and therefore stats, are limited to be the same as all other Pokemon, this nullifies its biggest advantage. And its shadow ball moveset, while pretty good, is nowhere near as good as many other movesets in the game. So other options should be strictly superior to Mewtwo most of the time.
That really holds metwo back in the CP cap seems to be the fact its attack is massive, thus leading to it having a lot lower defense than other thigns at the same CP, conversely something like, at the same CP as mewtwo, will have so much more defense because its attack is lower and defense is so high, and ass defense is a lot less influential on CP, tanker pokemon might rule the lower tiers.
I feel like this was the most brilliant move for niantic, it makes all those tanky legendaries go from useless as heck to literally some of the best options in PvP. While not completely making mewtwo useless, as its likely to be a master league heave hitter.
Disagree with the first - Master League is for High level players with maxed out legendaries from raids. Anyone below level 38 wading in that pool will drown. It will only get worse once the level cap goes up - that level 40 Rayquaza is weak sauce against a level 46 Rayquaza.
What makes me not that interested in the Master League is that unless you play maniacally most days of the week, you won't have the dust and other resources to field more than one or two teams of three. Right now I have maxed out 2 Dragonites, a Mewtwo, and a Machamp. Giving the Mewtwo a second move of Focus Blast would make the Machamp unnecessary (good since it's the weakest part of that team. I could power my best Rayquaza to level 40 (36 now, so 4 levels, about 80 RC I'd estimate, and about 60k dust). And then what? Or stick with one of the Dragonites, deciding between Hurricane and Hyperbeam as second move (yecch), and then maybe Raikou or Ho-Oh, or ???
On the other hand, in the lower level leagues, there's literally hundreds of pokemon to pick from (not all of them, Weedle won't be a big star here until we have a CP 300 leagues) and tons of combinations with synergy, supporting each other's weaknesses, etc.
I think the Ultra League will be the best to play in.
The Great League's CP cap is too low. Chansey, Blissey, Bastiodon, Umbreon, and Azumarill dominate the TDO discussion.
Once you get to the next tier: Meganium, Altaria, Blastoise, Lugia - I don't see any of them really countering the top tier picks. While Bastiodon resists normal moves to counter Chansey for example, the best of the next tier is Lugia resisting psychic moves.
I think the meta there will get stale quickly.
In contrast, the 2500CP cap allows enough pokemon with type advantages to counter the big guys - I think. So that league feels more interesting to me - especially with the extra charge move.
I have a feeling chansey will dominate 1500 CP as even a perfect max level chansey has around 1300-ish CP, and its chansey.
Theres actually a lot of surprisingly good pokemon bellow the 1500 and 2500 caps, the big ones being registeel and aggron as well as steelix all being better TDO wise, which is likely the most important metric for PvP, than meteor mash metagross.
Similar to how minun beats raikous'd tdo when both are bellow the 1500 cap
I think you're right, and I'll add one more reason to this list:
6) It's going to mess up the Hardcore Raiders and Gym Battlers something fierce as suddenly their Maxed out (ie: hit the last Breakpoint) Pokémon are only useful in a single league. (MAYBE the top two leagues, but most "useful" Pokémon are going to be above 2500 in CP)
What I'm hoping is that there's going to be some kind of stat effectiveness change so that Level is more important than it currently is. Right now, you can still field a pretty kick-ass Legendary Team for the under-1500 CP group just by using the Research Project Legendary's (most of which will be under 1500CP, even for Perfects), and will likely be much more useful than any Pokemon that reaches a higher level with CP 1500.
And while that helps out people like me (people who have a pathological aversion to transferring Legendary's), it doesn't seem to fix a problem that is so ubiquitous to Pokemon Go that no one even mentions it anymore - most Pokemon are literally worthless in the game. There is no reason to keep ANY Raichu, for example, nor Marowaks. You don't need Pidgeots, or Beedrills, or upwards of 75% of all Stage 2 Evolutions (or in many cases, even the Basic Pokemon like Miltank or Kangaskhan or Mawlie).
I think that the PvP is supposed to rectify that, but if a CP 1500 Tyranitar (L13.5) is more useful as a Dark Attacker than a CP 1500 Mightyena (L27), then these leagues aren't going to fix that problem. All it really does is give me a reason to NOT transfer my low-level but High IV "Great" Pokemon (Larvitar, Dratini, etc.) and instead evolve them to use in PvP. And not focus on the Dex Entry Pokemon.
So I foresee a lot of biatching like "Why didn't they make this announcement BEFORE the Community Day Weekend? I transferred my Level 10 96% Larvitar because I caught a Level 34 Weather Boosted Larvitar that was 78% but had Attack/Stamina of 15! I could have saved those candies and evolved the 96% Level 10 and used it in PvP! WHY NIANTIC WHY?!?!" and the like because of how the game has trained us to play for the past 2 years, and now this is a major shift to something radically different.
(on the bright side, it's probably going to save me MILLIONS of Stardust. And I do mean MILLIONS - I've got hundreds of low level-high IV Pokemon that I won't need to Power Up more than 3 levels to max them out for the various CP tiers of PvP.)
I'll respectfully disagree with #6. The alternative requirements of either being close (I assume 100m, but I don't recall an exact figure) or Ultra+ friends are going to keep a lot of the PvP casual. It doesn't easily lend itself to tournament-style play, though that's of course possible with X^2 people in a single location. That may coalesce in time, but for the time being, I see a lot of friendly battling for rewards even amongst hardercore players. The attempt to solve this mathematically RIGHT NOW seems misplaced.
What I mean by messing up the Hardcore Raiders/Gym Battlers is that they simply won't have many (if any) Pokemon that can decently compete in the lower leagues. Right now the goal for Raids/Gym Battles is to max out (ie: Last Breakpoint) the best Counters, and most of those Best Counters are going to max out above 2500CP. There has not been any focus - at all - on Pokemon of lower CP. For most players they just take up room in the inventory; why keep a Parasect, for example, when you know you're never going to use it - not even as a Gym Defender? Now... that Parasect might be useful in the CP1500 bracket. (it probably won't be, but there's a possibility, though.)
This is a radical change to the way we will be looking at Pokemon Go, and it's going to impact the Hardcore players more than others.
I disagree with most of the thrust of #6 above. For example:
"CP 1500 Tyranitar (L13.5) is more useful as a Dark Attacker than a CP 1500 Mightyena (L27), then these leagues aren't going to fix that problem."
Yes, they will. Tyranitar has Bite/Crunch, which is an adequate dark moveset. Anything with Snarl and Foul Play will be doing more damage per time, per energy, or per attack.
The powerful pokemon generally have inferior moves to keep them in balance. That's why Mewtwo has Psychic, not Future Sight, why Ho-Oh has Brave Bird and Fire Blast and not Sky Attack and Overheat. Ttar has Crunch because it's a decent move, not as good as Foul Play or Dark Pulse. So the weaker CP pokemon with better moves, like Houndoom, will dominate the Great League, and still do well in the Ultra league, for people who can power them up to 2500. Only in the Master League, where realistically it takes Top IV level 40 pokemon to play, will the usual suspects continue to dominate, just like they dominate raids.
