Garchomp and Sand Veil Discussion

[jas61292]

Honestly, I see very little good coming out of this. There is nothing inherently broken about Sand Veil, and it in and of itself is not why Garchomp was banned. It is just being used here as a scapegoat to give a reason to test it again. Honestly, enough has changed in OU that it is questionable if Garchomp would still be broken at all, so there is no need for such a scapegoat. This has nothing to do with Sand Veil and it should not be removed just as an excuse to do it. If we are going to test Garchomp I don't see why we aren't testing the full Garchomp. Obviously Cacturne and co have shown that there is nothing wrong with the ability. So why aren't we following the path we took with Blaziken and testing pokemon as a whole? Its like trying to put all the blame on a mediocre ability in order to let us test two variables at once, which is never a good idea.

That being said, I am glad that we are at least doing this test. I'd like to see how Garchomp fairs in the metagame, and while I personally believe having Sand Veil would help it balance the game back away from rain, it still will be an interesting tool for many types of teams in this metagame.

 

[ebeast]

While this is an OU thread, I will speak on behalf of NU players asking if possible to just make the Sand Veil ban alongside Sand Stream or just only apply to OU. Sand really does not exist below OU since the banning of Sand Stream from UU, and this really just randomly limits some Pokemon's options. In particular this is a huge blow to Cacturne's viability in NU as it only has access to 2 of its best moves with Sand Veil, Encore and Bullet Seed. While I know that complex bans are frowned upon, we feel that limiting a Pokemon's main niche in the lower tiers is worse than a single complex ban. Applying bans that only affect lower tiers negatively is plain unnecessary when there is an option that benefits the upper tier just as well while not affecting the lower ones. I know that this is just a test for now, but I still feel like that needed to be said.


A few logs of support
<%Keiran> ebeast post
<%Limi> i frown more upon needlessly limiting the options of lower-tier pokemon
<%Limi> than one complex ban
<AlexArthur> And it's randomly limiting options for no good reasons.
<%Limi> and yes, do post

Discuss; I can't wait to see the discussion we'll get out of this!

 

[Leader Fox]

I think Garchomp in Ou will be good because with no longer having Sand Veil, Chomp will no longer be able to get free subs and Attack Boosts making his Sub Sword Dance set kind like Terrakion except no Sp.Def boost, so i am not expecting that to be the top set, I am expecting to See Mix Chomp or Banded Chomp in Ou as a Good Set. And now Starmie Weavile Mamoswine and heck and Even Cloyster can now Check Him without the players having to worry for a Hax miss. So i am really looking forward for Chompy Seeing the Ou mountain :D

 

[SpecsX]

@Jas:
Cacturne can't make you lose a game because you missed once. Chomp can.


I thought Garchomp could just barely be handled, but, in my opinion, Sand Veil made it broken. Interesting to see how this test goes.

 

[Jumpman16]

giving cacturne a free SD behind its sub with 361 attack stab sucker punch can't make you lose a game?

 

[jas61292]

@Jas:
Cacturne can't make you lose a game because you missed once. Chomp can.

I agree.

I thought Garchomp could just barely be handled, but, in my opinion, Sand Veil made it broken.

I thought Garchomp could just barely be handled, but, in my opinion, 102 Speed and 130 Attack along side mostly unresisted STABs made it broken.

Basically, all I am saying, and all I have ever argued on things like this is that a Pokemon is a Pokemon. Either a single part is broken, in which case it would break other Pokemon as well, such as Cacturne, or it is the whole Pokemon that is. I see no reason to ban an ability to save one Pokemon, especially when there is a good chance it won't even effect it that much. I honestly feel Garchomp, the whole Garchomp, and not some gimped version of it, might not be broken any longer in OU, and I think Garchomp, in its entirety, deserves the test.

 

[emirinho]

giving cacturne a free SD behind its sub with 361 attack stab sucker punch can't make you lose a game?

You can counter Cacturne by many pokemon. You can handle it defensively with skarmory,forretress and many others and offensively by scizor,breloom etc.
However, if a Garchomp gets a free sub + SD only Skarmory can counter him. See the difference.
But without Sand Veil i think that Garchomp will fit into the metagame well. He will just bring the metagame more unpredictableness and diversity

 

[bwburke94]

giving cacturne a free SD behind its sub with 361 attack stab sucker punch can't make you lose a game?

Most teams that run Cacturne don't run sand. Sand Veil is on there because some moves are incompatible with Water Absorb.

 

[Lavos]

Cacturne is an extremely viable OU threat that zero teams prepare for, and while I'm very sad to see it go, it's for the best. Sand Veil contributes absolutely nothing to the competitive scene; all it does is make it easier for bad players to beat good players.

Most teams that run Cacturne don't run sand. Sand Veil is on there because some moves are incompatible with Water Absorb.

What are you talking about? The only reason to run Cacturne in OU is because of Sand Veil...Water Absorb is outclassed by every other Water Absorber out there.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

I thought Garchomp could just barely be handled, but, in my opinion, 102 Speed and 130 Attack along side mostly unresisted STABs made it broken.

Okay, so we should go around banning every Pokemon that's fast and powerful? Yeah, sounds like a plan.

Okay, sarcasm aside, 102 base Speed is fast, but there are plenty of faster Pokemon; Keldeo, Lati@s, Terrakion, Starmie, etc. Ice Shard is also incredibly common in OU right now, and without Sand Veil, Garchomp has a harder time against Ice Shard users without Yache Berry (and if it uses Yache Berry, this allows the Lati twins to eat it for breakfast much more easily than if it used Scarf or Haban Berry). I find that its checks and counters list is pretty similar to those of the other 4x Ice weak dragons. Either way, there are plenty of ways to check Garchomp in this meta, and there are probably even some that I haven't listed here.

 

[Colonel M]

You can counter Cacturne by many pokemon. You can handle it defensively with skarmory,forretress and many others and offensively by scizor,breloom etc.

You know what these Pokemon don't have in common with Cacturne?

They aren't in NU.

 

[SpecsX]

Awesome, it's a Cacturne discussion now. Sucker Punch can be played around, Jumpman16, and it's pretty frail, so a single mispredict could be deadly(albeit not if Sand Veil hax kicks in to save you).

What does Garchomp lose by being forced to run Rough Skin?

FREE CACTURNE

 

[Kevin Garrett]

Sand Veil is not being tested entirely because of Garchomp. It is a test in itself to extend the scope of Evasion Clause.

 

[Jobriq]

I think Garchomp should be tested with sand veil. With rain more common than ever sand veil isn't nearly as broken. Sand was the only autoweather in gen 4 OU (besides rarely seen hail) so there was nothing to stop sand veil once Tar or Hippo were sent out.

Sub+SD is the set that most abused sand veil, but that leave chomp only 2 attacks, (EQ and outrage). Gen5 gave a power boost to all multi-hit moves. Icicle spear from scarfed mamoswine, or cloyster will break garchomp's sub, and KO.
Gen5 has other checks to chomp that gen4 didn't.

 

[X5Dragon]

^^STAB Outrage (120 BP) and Earthquake (100 bp) with nearly unresisted coverage behind a sub and a veil? No thanks. I hope that this step is a crossing stone for other retestings such as Blaziken and Thundrus, etc.

GL.

 

[Stratos]

the fun part of this will be trying to convince me that Garchomp is broken WITH sand veil. Seriously. It's not easy to keep sand up in this meta, and even if it was, with all the new, speedy threats not around or prominent last time Chompy made his run (duggy, zam, torn-t, gene, keldeo) i don't envision him being broken in any way.

 

[alkinesthetase]

as infuriating as sand veil may be, i think the argument of cacturne move legality is more than enough to justify it being legalized and tested alongside garchomp. there's no legitimate reason to hurt cacturne's viability in lower tiers just because subsd garchomp is infuriating people in OU and up; the two are completely separate issues. cacturne in OU? okay, maybe that's another story. but for now garchomp is a good beginning. let's see where this takes us

EDIT:

the fun part of this will be trying to convince me that Garchomp is broken WITH sand veil. Seriously.

+1. i lean towards favoring sand veil right now, but it's a long story as we all know. evasion hax is both little more than a nuisance (people complain about it mainly because it's annoying) and potentially unfair (you can potentially beat someone by luck alone without any particular play or team advantage). i don't think competitive pokemon will ever settle on one side or the other of that argument

 

[Zacchaeus]

Awesome, we're finally starting to recognize the extent of the Evasion Clause.

But remember guys, Cloyster > Garchomp

 

[SpecsX]

Well, Chomp was never OP IMO, because Skarm can run Aerial Ace, I serioulydon't know what the fuck you guys were thinking.

Hide

Sarcasm+trying to see if i'm doing the hide tags right

Oh, and FREE CACTURNE!

Ok, but REALLY, I pose a question I asked at the beginning of this thread. How will this affect Snow Cloak abusers?

 

[Jimera0]

Uhg no. Do I have to bring up all the posts I made in the last Sand Viel discussion thread? Because I pretty much proved there that "WE DON'T LIKE HAX WAAAAAAH" was not an excuse to ban something.

I do not think that banning Sand Viel JUST to bring back Garchomp is right either. It sets an unsettling precedent of banning aspects of Pokemon instead of the whole Pokemon in order to keep it OU. That's not the way ban lists should work, not if we want to keep them simple and accessable. And don't make the argument that this is different because Sand Veil is being banned independently; that's bullshit, the ban's only being extended to others as an excuse.

And by god if I haven't explained enough why banning Sand Viel goes against everything Smogon has stood for the past 10 or so years I don't know what will convince people. Seriously, think about it for a second. When was the last time you've lost a game to Sand Viel? Probably back in the Garchomp era for a lot of us, and for the rest of us maybe once or twice from Gliscor. You know, a lot of Pokemon use hax based strategies, ones that area lot more effective. I don't see why we should treat Gliscor or Garchomp as any different. Why don't we just ban Serene Grace then? Or Confuse Ray? Seriously people. Hax is a part of Pokemon and you need to learn to deal with it instead of trying to cut it out like a cancer.

Bottom line is that Sand viel should NOT be banned for the purpose of brining Garchomp down. If Garchomp is broken with Sand Viel, it's broken as a whole Pokemon like Blaziken, Excadrill and Thundurus-I. Whether or not it is broken or not with Rough Skin should be utterly irrelevant unless we decide INDEPENDENTLY that Sand Veil is broken (and for the love of god it's clear that it is not. Annoying? Yes, of course. Broken? No!). IF hypothetically that were the case, then sure, retesting Garchomp would be cool. I honestly doubt that it's broken in the current metagame without it (and maybe even with it). But these tests should be SEPARATE, not rolled into one.

I mean, what are we going to decide from this? That if Garchomp is not broken without Sand Veil, that Sand Veil gets banned so Garchomp can come down? That seems ridiculously unfair to Sand Veil. The other way around, if we decide we don't want to ban Sand Veil, then Garchomp stays in Ubers because we don't know if it's still broken or not WITH the ability. That's not fair to Garchomp! It makes no damn sense!

What we SHOULD be doing is deciding once and for all on Sand Veil FIRST, THEN test Garchomp. The results are just getting muddled with this. In short; this is a terrible idea and just seems to be a way to pander to the community (and likely to the ideals of some of the council members) as much as possible as quickly as possible rather than to actually discover what is broken and what is not. And I really, really disapprove of that.

EDIT:
In case it isn't clear enough, my problems are these:
1) Testing both Sand Veil and Garchomp together does not give viable results as to either one and is unfair to what ends up Uber no matter what way the testing turns out.
2) Sand Veil isn't remotely broken. Double Team, minimize and evasion items should be the extent of the evasion clause only. Why? Because of their distribution, they can potentially affect the whole game and make it more luck base to an undesirable extent. The abilities however are distributed to an EXTREMELY small number of Pokemon and have very small effect on the metagame as a whole. If one Pokemon with an evasion ability is causing a lot of problems the Pokemon as a whole should be banned because it is the Pokemon that is broken, not the ability.

 

[jas61292]

Well, if this is about testing the evasion clause, then I think it is doing it the wrong way. First of all, individual tests should be done separately, like variables in a science experiment. Doing it this way will make it impossible to tell if the power of Garchomp and Sand Veil in the metagame are related to each other or not. We should stick closer to a scientific method like approach. EDIT: Oh yeah, and everything Jimera0 said above.

Additionally, if we are indeed reviewing the evasion clause, then we need to review a lot more than if these abilities should be included. The fact is, the evasion clause is outdated and obsolete. I have had many discussions about it, and the fact is that the crux of the evasion clause, Double Team, is an inferior strategy, as any basic statistical analysis can show you, and the only reason it is banned is out of tradition. In addition, them items Brightpowder and Lax Incense, which were added to it this generation, are also inferior items, providing a lower chance of success in most competitive situations than the more standard competitive items. If our goal is to ban things that are broken, then this entire clause needs reworking before we even consider adding more to it.


Now as for Garchomp I can't wait to see how it plays out. The dominance of rain in the BW2 meta will really make things harder on it, and I can see some of the new threats, such as Torn-T, making choice sets more difficult for it, as a predicted EQ is now more costly than ever.

 

[tab]

I've been reading these arguments about taking the stance of the simplest bans possible for three years. I didn't get them then and I don't get them now. I was under the impression Smogon aimed to make the best competitive game possible out of pokemon, and randomly losing a game you should win 20% of the time is pretty damn uncompetitive. If we can remove an element of luck without having to ban any pokemon (I believe everything with Sand Veil has an alternate ability now?), we should do it, for the sake of having as competitive a game as possible.

I honestly couldn't care less about how "complicated" a ban is. It's not like we're going to be flooded with people saying "what on earth is this chomp+veil ban? i dont get it =(". If a ban ensures a more competitive game, it's the right ban.

 

[Jimera0]

tl;dr

>.> really? You do realize that said post massively undermines your credibility as a participant in this debate since it shows you aren't even willing to read the opinions of others.

But just in case others are too lazy to read the full thing, let me put it in nice, bullet point form for you.

-Sand Veil and Garchomp should be tested SEPARATELY. As Jas said, we're mixing variables here and it's going to screw with the results and lead a decision that doesn't give one of the variables a fair trial, so to speak.
-Sand Veil is not broken. A Broken ability makes all users of it broken, and Sand Veil clearly does not do that. If it does make one or two Pokemon Broken in combination with their other aspects, that makes the individual Pokemon broken, not the ability, and we should ban the Pokemon. That's not saying that Sand Veil DOES make anything Broken; I maintain it doesn't, but even if it DID it shouldn't matter.
-Evasion Clause is, as Jas said, outdated and we should stop trying to extend it to all types of evasion simply in the name of making the name "evasion clause" more accurate. Instead what we SHOULD be doing is going through the individual components of evasion and banning or not banning them on their individual merits. I think that the whole "consistent evasion clause" argument is primarly an excuse, consciously and subconsciously, to remove luck elements from the game that cause people frustration. I stand by my opinion that luck is a part of Pokemon and that we SHOULD NOT be trying to excise it like a cancerous tumor. Double Team and Minimize are one thing, due to their distribution meaning they can impact the entire metagame. Individual abilities though? Those apply to such a small base of Pokemon that the level of luck they add to the meta is on the level of Confuse Ray or Serene Grace, widely accepted components of the metagame that no one is seriously considering banning. Banning them is purely based on the selfish basis that "I don't want to lose due to luck", and that is an extremely childish way to run a serious competitive metagame.

 

[emirinho]

First thing is first,Sand Veil Garchomp is broken. I agree with Jimera0 about the testing system. Now concerning the evasion clause. Double team, and all those items and moves that increase evasion may be unsuccessful in todays metagame. However, many would try to build it in their teams just like a last resort. So our metagame would be dirted with such playstyles.One cant say that Double team strategy can be completely useless. Only one chance or mistake can lead to a loss just because of double team or lax incense. Those playstyles are based on luck and have nothing to do with competitive battling thats why they are banned.
I personally think that Sand Veil and Snow Cloak are not necessary in this metagame either as we can classify them with the above mentioned playstyles.
So we should first test Sand Veil and then Garchomp.
Garchomp without Sand Veil is not broken.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

Jimera, I'm pretty sure we're not testing a Sand Veil ban because it's "broken". The evasion moves themselves were not banned because they were "broken". Moody wasn't banned because it was "broken" (hint: Moody wasn't broken). With these moves/abilities, you will obviously lose most of the time. That's why they're not broken.

With that said, I believe a Sand Veil-less metagame would be much more enjoyable because it prevents you from getting cheated by those damn SubAcrobatics Sand Veil Gliscors. In this case, it's not about broken, it's about the game being enjoyable. And don't bring up "hey let's ban critical hits" because obviously there's nothing we can do about that.