Corviknight is coming to the game on the 20th, and the datamine of its moveset caused massive controversy in the community. To preface, switching has a 50 second cooldown. So if you lose the lead, you will be pretty much forced to fight at a type disadvantage. Because of this, the most meta pokemon are those with characteristics that make them able to do a lot of work even in matchups that they technically lose. These are characteristics such as bulk, good coverage, spammable cheap charged moves, and good defensive typing, heavy fast move pressure etc. You don't need all of these but having a couple is needed. One that you absolutely do need in most cases is spamable charged moves. Pacing is king in this game. If you don't get to use your charged move before your opponent gets to theirs and knocks you out, you might as well have had nothing. Getting to charged moves slower than most of the meta also opens you up to be farmed down.
Farming down is when a pokemon has a charged move they can use, to finish their low hp weakened opponent, but instead they save it and beat you down with their fast move, which is free and generates energy required to use their charged moves. Farming down is possible and worthwhile because charged moves are the main threat of damage in the game, while fast moves do very small amounts of chip damage at a consistant rate. The average fast move deals 5 damage by the way. If you know you have 5 seconds before your opponent gets to a charged move, and know he is low hp enough where you can kill him with your fast move pressure in under 5 seconds then you both save your loaded charge move AND likely have enough for a second one by the time you kill him, giving you an advantage of having 2 charged moves you can dump on his next pokemon immediately before they even have a chance to build up to their charged move. That is the kind of stuff that wins games, so its important to have low cost quick to get to charged moves, that while not being immensely powerful enough to oneshot your opponent, threaten them with chipping a sizable portion of their health, putting them at a disadvantage against the next pokemon, you want them to HAVE to dump their energy QUICKLY to kill you, so they have no advantage over the next pokemon you switch in for free, which will probably counter your opponent's pokemon.
Having explained this let me tell you why Corvinight was scaring people. Steel flying is an extremely OP typing in the meta. It hard walls grass types. If you have a steel flying pokemon against a grass type, you could farm them all the way down, because grass type attacks are double resisted by steel flying types, and grass types are well known for their horrible coverage options. Steel flying types make grass types very unsafe to put on your team. This may just seem unfortunate for grass type enjoyers, but thats not the case. It has a HUGE butterfly effect on the meta, because there happens to be another extremely common and extremely good that has no weaknesses save for a 4x weakness to grass, that being the water ground typing. There are many really strong water ground types in the game. Turning grass types into a massive risk to use, paves the way for these ground water (often called mud boys because their moves are always either mud slap or mud shot) types to run unchecked. You can run grass types still, as the heavy use of mud boys means you can steamroll them, but then the meta becomes a hardcore rock paper scissors (RPS) match with little room for skilled play to flip matchups that are so confidently one sided. Grass always beats mudboy, flyer always beats grass and mudboy, mudboy plays well into most things save for grass types and flying types. Its no fun. In terms of the weaknesses of steel flying types, there are the fire types and electric types. In pokemon go PVP, fire types are a glass cannon type. Their typing is good offensively, but they are a bad defensive type, so there are very few bulky fire types to use, and using them isn't really a good idea. The only decent fire type fast move is incinerate. Its one of the longest moves in the game taking 2 seconds per move, but it generates energy extremely fast and does high damage. Most incinerate users can get to charged moves in at least 2 uses of incinerate, so 4 seconds. Not bad at all. The problem is that the long duration of the move makes it clunky, as you cannot throw a charge attack while a fast move is in progress. Most fast moves take under a second, so this isn't a problem for them, but it is a problem for incinerate. Its easy to accidentally overtap and use incinerate at times where you need to throw a charged move right away, and those two seconds can often result in your opponent making it to a charged move. Which by the way, is very bad, because incinerate users are often extremely attack weighted glass cannons that can barely take a low power neutral charged move, let alone one that is SE. So fire types are hard to use, how about electric types? Unfortunately, this is a ground type owned meta. The best pokemon in the whole thing are ground types. Ground types double resist electric (no immunities in pokemon go), so running electric types is a huge RPS risk.
You can see that the steel flying typing is a massive issue for the meta. Niantic was aware of this. Skarmory, the only other steel flying type pokemon, literally defined the meta for the last 6-7 years of GBL until october last year when niantic, sick of the old meta, did a massive move rebalance. In this move rebalance they targeted many strong meta pokemon and meta moves. One such target was skarmory. So, to nerf skarmory, they nerfed the stats of all of skarmory's fast moves, ruining them, and every other flying type attacker collaterally, because skarm happens to have all common flying fast moves, and even ruined his charged move by making it more expensive to use. This was a massive blow to the old meta. Flying types were now a niche defensive pick (except for talonflame, who is lucky enough to have incinerate and all the best un nerfed flying attacks few other pokemon have) because all flying type fast moves were horrible. The meta as it stands now has a MASSIVE weakness to pre nerf fliers, and as the datamine revealed, Corvinight was effectively not only a pre nerf skarmory, but BETTER than pre nerf skarmory. Corv's fast move was steel wing. Steel wing was nerfed a little in the skarm nerf, but it didn't matter, because corvinight's charged moves were some of the best out there for a flying type. He had drill peck, which is a very efficient low cost flying charged move, and most threateningly, he had brave bird, a cheap massive flying nuke move that lowers your defense by two stages. Fighting this pokemon would be a guessing game between taking moderately damaging drill pecks, or getting one shotted by brave bird. Skarmory always had very slow pacing which ballanced him. Corvinight did not have this slow pacing. For a time. Not long ago datamines found that niantic changed his moves twice! First, they removed brave bird. This made corvinight far more digestable and predictable, and they gave him payback, an expensive dark type nuke move. Fair, ballanced, just fine. Then they decided drill peck was too much, and took that away, giving him mid tier ground type fast move, sand attack. Thus far, corvinight only has payback and sky attack as charged moves. Both of these are extremely expensive moves, meaning, that corvinight if he comes out this way, will be an absolutely neutered joke, probably a little worse than pre nerf skarmory.
Let that be your introduction into how utterly retarded niantic is. Remember that for later, because it will prove to come up a lot. Niantic is a fucking retarded mobile game company who got its hands on a pokemon game. I should also mention that they are releasing this route 1 flying type pokemon as an egg, and special type of lure you have to buy exclusive, as in, it unlike any other route 1 bird ever, will not appear in the wild. It is a premium pokemon you will have to walk with eggs to get. This event was likely designed this way because the first planned corvinight moveset was extremely powerful and meta defining. But now, its hardly even worth bothering to get this pokemon in the wild, let alone as an egg exclusive. Total niantiFAIL
