Auto weather poll

[Adamant Zoroark]

Sure, its overcentralizing the game and weather has become a staple. But it should not be banned. EVER. For any game to be fun, there must always be a challenge. Things like manaphy, blaziken, excadrill, and tornadus t are examples of things that make it too dificult and impossible to play. They should be banned for that. Weather is a huge component in this metagame, and it provides a level of difficulty, fun, and creativity to the game. It is not broken, just extremely common.

If we were to ban it, that would be dumb. BW is a weather metagame, period. Every generation has its era, and this is the era of weather. I personally think banning weather would make the game less fun than it is now. Rain is far by the most troublesome weather, but not impossible to prepare for. There are plenty of pokemon capable of putting rain to a halt. Amoonguss, ferrothorn, virizion, and celebi are all great for this. You just have to stylize your team to deal with as many of the different threats as possible. Thats the fun in team building too, isn't it?

Anyway, thats my two cents on it. I seriously think we should not ban weather.

Sure, there must always be a challenge, but there is no challenge in using weather. It's just an automatic win condition, that's all there is to it. There's absolutely no fun in it.

Also, Genesect was not impossible to prepare for. Excadrill was not impossible to prepare for. DPP Salamence was not impossible to prepare for. Something "not being impossible to prepare for" has never been a good argument and never will be. If anything, I'd argue that weather encourages uncreativity since you can just use the same cookie-cutter Rain team with a few changes, click that button that says "Hydro Pump", and win. Then, every team has to dedicate some slots to beating the cookie-cutter Rain team, as well as the cookie-cutter Sun team, and the cookie-cutter Sand team..... Fuck, that's already a pretty big burden on team creation. Point is, nearly everything in this generation is cookie-cutter.

 

[Tressed]

Rain, imo, should be banned. It brings us the spam of high powered moves, ala Hydro Pump, Thunder, et Hurricane. It brings a variety of defensive buffs to things like Ferrothorn and Jirachi, who are both assholes to take out in rain. And of course it also boosts stuff like Swift Swim Pokes to the point where we have to make bans like Aldaron's Proposal to try to stop the spam. And its brought by a rather mediocre Pokemon, but one that can actually pull its weight during battle. Its not hard to get Politoed to do its job at all, seeing as its SR neutral, has okay stats, and a movepool that is good for what it does.

Sun, I'm not so sure about. Its got the same sort of buffs that Rain does, of course towards different Pokemon. To use sun effectively, though, you have to find a way to make Ninetales not suck as much as it should, seeing as it loses a quarter of its health from switching in and all. Ninetales really is the only thing that is holding Sun back from being in the same place Rain is right now. That being said, how do you stop a Sun team from running you over if you opt to go weatherless?

Sand and Hail I'm okay with. A little damage each turn, an Sp Defense boost to rock types (Hail doesn't even get a stat boost), and a couple of solid, yet manageable abusers are all fine for the meta. The only real power boost you'll see is Landorus-I running Sand Force again, which isn't tough for stall teams to manage, while Sandslash and Stoutland will hardly dominate like Excadrill used to.

 

[Champion Steve]

I said to myself that I wasn't going to get into this, but...
If this tournament winning Stall team that has had months of fine-tuning done to it is that weak to Keldeo, then I really have to question whether they deserved to win.

 

[Dark Fallen Angel]

I haven't read all the thread, but I have mixed opinions. I agree that Rain is, to some extent, overcentralizing the metagame. See how many bans we had that had to do with rain. Not to mention it even has a complex ban.

However, I am still reluctant if rain really needs to be banned. I am never in favor of banning a playstyle, except peharps those that rely on shifting the luck to your side, such as Moody/Evasion teams. Banning rain would take away some of the metagame diversity, but if someone proves me the contrary, I am going to be in favor of banning the rain, as long as sun was banned alongside. This is because rain is the only thing that stops sun from being the dominant weather, and rain is dominant itself.

Also:

Also, Genesect was not impossible to prepare for. Excadrill was not impossible to prepare for. DPP Salamence was not impossible to prepare for. Something "not being impossible to prepare for" has never been a good argument and never will be. If anything, I'd argue that weather encourages uncreativity since you can just use the same cookie-cutter Rain team with a few changes, click that button that says "Hydro Pump", and win. Then, every team has to dedicate some slots to beating the cookie-cutter Rain team, as well as the cookie-cutter Sun team, and the cookie-cutter Sand team..... Fuck, that's already a pretty big burden on team creation. Point is, nearly everything in this generation is cookie-cutter.

This is true, but... Genesect was not impossible to prepare for, although you had to dedicate your entire team to prepare for him, and most of time, you couldn't prepare for other things, like other top-threats like Terrakion, Landorus, and Tornadus-T. Not to mention that even if you prepared for Genesect, it could still sweep you with the right support and by playing with care and worning down the opponent. The same applies to Excadrill.

 

[Kidogo]

Sure, there must always be a challenge, but there is no challenge in using weather. It's just an automatic win condition, that's all there is to it. There's absolutely no fun in it.

Also, Genesect was not impossible to prepare for. Excadrill was not impossible to prepare for. DPP Salamence was not impossible to prepare for. Something "not being impossible to prepare for" has never been a good argument and never will be. If anything, I'd argue that weather encourages uncreativity since you can just use the same cookie-cutter Rain team with a few changes, click that button that says "Hydro Pump", and win. Then, every team has to dedicate some slots to beating the cookie-cutter Rain team, as well as the cookie-cutter Sun team, and the cookie-cutter Sand team..... Fuck, that's already a pretty big burden on team creation. Point is, nearly everything in this generation is cookie-cutter.

First of all, running rain is not "no fun"--to start with, if everyone ran rain, then matches would be decided based on who had the better team and was a better player, not on team match-up, which honestly sounds p nice to me.

About your point on creativity: yes, it is possible to use a cookie-cutter rain team and be fairly successful. But there are many ways to succeed with rain. Similarly, there are many ways to check it on non-rain teams. And when somebody does come up with an innovative new way of countering those threats, they can be both original and successful. Take "lavos sun", for example. Sun is known as the weakest of the major weathers (since hail is basically non-existent), and has a bad matchup vs the other two weather styles. However, genesun was able to overcome this based on its ability to control momentum. Now, not everyone can make a new team style like that, but it's original team concepts like that that keep the metagame evolving and being creative. So in a lot of ways, having a playstyle that is fairly dominant actually encourages creativity in other playstyles. So yes, we could all use standard rain offense if we wanted (I happen to play rain predominantly). And many people do, because it's easier. But that doesn't mean that there can't be creativity in other ways and even within the rain archetype.

 

[Nyara]

Ninetales and Politoed had almost the same stats, Politoed is just barely more bulky and had a bit more of power behind it's punchs in exchange for... a lot of speed, that is, but yeah, Ninetales is weak to Stealth Rock, Politoed doesn't, that changes almost everything... I could rather ban Stealth Rock before the other weathers, in my opinion, but Drizzle is still too powerful and is without doubts more stronger than any weatherless or other weather team, OU should be place of only rain/power creep or of more variety? That's controversial because the answer to boths are: yes.

We bans things when they are overpowered, and are oversharping the metagame, and when the other styles of play can't hold that style on almost any way that is not playing in part with the same style.

But at the same time, OU is the place of the overused things, in other words, the best of the best that is not so overpowered like Mewtwo or Kyogre, so, OU can choose to just play one, and a single style play and keep it balanced inside it's unique playstyle, yet that's rather a must-kill of variety.

What I seen with the previous bans is a sort of "we're not sure of what we want to our metagame", we wants a more balance with the power creep or we want to push things into a single, more powerful style as it's the most used and effective? The council tried to reach to a mid point with it's ban, by reducing the power creep of rain by banning some of it's abussers and ablities; a decent mid point, but I could rather take a more firm and clear resolution with the problem, as nobody is sure of what should be considered and what not in that mid point. For example, by ignoring the power creep of rain, Keldeo is obviously not broken, but he's one of best abussers of rain, and help to make it so dominant, so, if we ban Keldeo, a not-uber Pokémon by our current standar, we could balance a bit more the styles of play, but at the same we're banning a Pokémon that's not uber by alone or without the support.

It's rather a dilema, what to do. I could rather start a suspect without Drizzle, and see what happens, see if weatherless is again viable, and if sun really needs of rain to being balanced or not, because what I heard at the moment are a bunch of theorymon work about that, or I could rather ban Stealth Rock and see if other styles of play start to overcome the weathers in OU. That's what I think, at least, but of course, that's just my opinion.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

First of all, running rain is not "no fun"--to start with, if everyone ran rain, then matches would be decided based on who had the better team and was a better player, not on team match-up, which honestly sounds p nice to me.

About your point on creativity: yes, it is possible to use a cookie-cutter rain team and be fairly successful. But there are many ways to succeed with rain. Similarly, there are many ways to check it on non-rain teams. And when somebody does come up with an innovative new way of countering those threats, they can be both original and successful. Take "lavos sun", for example. Sun is known as the weakest of the major weathers (since hail is basically non-existent), and has a bad matchup vs the other two weather styles. However, genesun was able to overcome this based on its ability to control momentum. Now, not everyone can make a new team style like that, but it's original team concepts like that that keep the metagame evolving and being creative. So in a lot of ways, having a playstyle that is fairly dominant actually encourages creativity in other playstyles. So yes, we could all use standard rain offense if we wanted (I happen to play rain predominantly). And many people do, because it's easier. But that doesn't mean that there can't be creativity in other ways and even within the rain archetype.

You're basing your first part off of a hypothetical "if everyone had rain" which isn't true. You cannot base an argument on a hypothetical scenario that will obviously never happen.

The stuff you mention is, I think, the exception rather than the rule. You know what happened when Lavos Spawn posted genesun? It became the cookie-cutter Sun team until Genesect got banned. The simple fact of the matter is that there is a very small minority of players who are actually creative due to the fact that you can use the same cookie-cutter team and be successful with very little, if any, skill.

 

[UltiMario]

Actually Lavos Spawn's sun team died pretty hard somewhere around a couple weeks before Gene got banned. Gene wasn't even the annoying part of that team, it was the Xatu IMO.

Anyways, it's not hard to do stuff like that when someone makes a #1 team RMT and goes into good detail about how the team functions. I was only able to start playing Gen V NU and RU from stealing high-ranked and well-described RMTs to find my way around the metagame when I had no idea what to expect. I'm sure I won a few matches against people much better than me at the tier simply because a stole a good team to learn the metagame before I tried to teambuild myself. It's really not an arguing point.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

Okay, let me try to word it in a way you will understand:

Teams LIKE Lavos Sun became the cookie-cutter sun teams. You ended up having Ninetales/Chloro sweeper/Xatu or spinner/Genesect/Dugtrio and another Pokemon works on the team. Stealing high-ranked teams from RMTs has existed since RMTs existed, and it's not my point. My point is that a vast majority of teams look strikingly similar to the other even if they have a couple of different Pokemon.

 

[Wizarus]

First of all, running rain is not "no fun"--to start with, if everyone ran rain, then matches would be decided based on who had the better team and was a better player, not on team match-up, which honestly sounds p nice to me.

About your point on creativity: yes, it is possible to use a cookie-cutter rain team and be fairly successful. But there are many ways to succeed with rain. Similarly, there are many ways to check it on non-rain teams. And when somebody does come up with an innovative new way of countering those threats, they can be both original and successful. Take "lavos sun", for example. Sun is known as the weakest of the major weathers (since hail is basically non-existent), and has a bad matchup vs the other two weather styles. However, genesun was able to overcome this based on its ability to control momentum. Now, not everyone can make a new team style like that, but it's original team concepts like that that keep the metagame evolving and being creative. So in a lot of ways, having a playstyle that is fairly dominant actually encourages creativity in other playstyles. So yes, we could all use standard rain offense if we wanted (I happen to play rain predominantly). And many people do, because it's easier. But that doesn't mean that there can't be creativity in other ways and even within the rain archetype.

Keep that Tele-DaD logic out of pokemon. It was one of the worst formats in Yugioh history, and luck is arguably even more influential in this game.

Outside of that, the problem isn't about weather wars, it's about how it affects non-weather teams . Anyone not running weather finds their team instantly nerfed, because of the innate x2 speed abusers, the OP weather boosted attacks, and the nerfed pokemon that comes with the weather changes(Fire types because drizzle, water types because of Drought). And that's outside of the limited options you have for team building, because you're trying to counters weather in addition to the other threats. Outside of HO, you handicap yourself when you don't run weather, and that a problem IMO.

 

[alexwolf]

I wonder where does the assumption that you handicap yourself when not running weather came from. It seems to me that people are bandawagoning too much in this thread. I check the OU RMT forum frequently and i have seen many weatherless offensive and balanced teams that are not any worse than your average rain/sun team. Here are some examples (advertisement time): Savior by complete legitimacy, Season Unending by Intergalactic, and Mind Games from LucaroarkZ, out of which only the third team is purely offensive.

Well i suppose that with such a hot topic, bitching is to be expected, but please keep it to a minimum and avoid making false statements.

 

[MCBarrett]

Okay, let me try to word it in a way you will understand:

Teams LIKE Lavos Sun became the cookie-cutter sun teams. You ended up having Ninetales/Chloro sweeper/Xatu or spinner/Genesect/Dugtrio and another Pokemon works on the team. Stealing high-ranked teams from RMTs has existed since RMTs existed, and it's not my point. My point is that a vast majority of teams look strikingly similar to the other even if they have a couple of different Pokemon.

Pretty sure genesect got banned after the rock polish set became popular and there were too many viable sets to be able to counter it. Also you could easily fit it onto any team so it was pretty centralizing to the metagame.

In regards to drizzle there is absolutely no reason to ban it. It's not too hard to wear down a politoed and set up your own weather. Sure, it does centralize the metagame around weather, which is why I think banning all auto weather is a better argument, but competent players really should be able to account for all opposing weather when building a team. That's why I like ou, because it is challenging and fast paced compared to the other metagames. Nothing is OP atm though, especially with tornadus-t moving up.

 

[Wizarus]

I wonder where does the assumption that you handicap yourself when not running weather came from. It seems to me that people are bandawagoning too much in this thread. I check the OU RMT forum frequently and i have seen many weatherless offensive and balanced teams that are not any worse than your average rain/sun team. Here are some examples (advertisement time): Savior by complete legitimacy, Season Unending by Intergalactic, and Mind Games from LucaroarkZ, out of which only the third team is purely offensive.

Well i suppose that with such a hot topic, bitching is to be expected, but please keep it to a minimum and avoid making false statements.

I see Starmie and Landorus-T on 2 teams and I see Latias on all 3, as well as at least 3 Water and Fire resisters on every one. This is what I'm talking about when I say you handicap yourself when you run weatherless teams. There are but so many pokemon that can fill the niches you need to fill, while weather teams will always have more breathing room.

The moment the weather changes to Sunny or Rainy, there will always be at least one pokemon on a weatherless team that is either nerfed by it, or nearly useless against it. This is in addition to the boost they provide for the team.

 

[Zephir]

I wonder where does the assumption that you handicap yourself when not running weather came from. It seems to me that people are bandawagoning too much in this thread. I check the OU RMT forum frequently and i have seen many weatherless offensive and balanced teams that are not any worse than your average rain/sun team. Here are some examples (advertisement time): Savior by complete legitimacy, Season Unending by Intergalactic, and Mind Games from LucaroarkZ, out of which only the third team is purely offensive.

Well i suppose that with such a hot topic, bitching is to be expected, but please keep it to a minimum and avoid making false statements.

The authors of these RMT say, respectively, that Volcarona, Stoutland and Volcarona + Toxicroak are the main threats to their team. Also, the first two balanced teams will have problems dealing with Tyranitar + Keldeo other than with hazardous double switches, while the weatherless offense was not viable before Tornadus-T's ban.
Building a great weatherless team like Savior is a lot harder than using successful weather team archetype / cores and then it often requires a higher level of play because you have no easy gameplan. So yes, you're handicaping yourself for "little" rewards - with this example you have few win condition, struggle against sunteams with Volcarona or even Venusaur if Latias is not burnt, while sandstalls with something like HippoSpDef & Jellicent are no easy matchup at all.

 

[taxi driver]

really hope we test weather (rain) next gen and not the multiple abusers

steel and water were already the best types in ou before rain. rain just boosts previously "bulky waters" into offensive powerhouse that ohko anything that doesn't resist it while making amazing defensive steels like ferro and jirachi even harder to kill.

I dont get why we are still using the rain+ss ban. Reading over Aldarons Proposal in the policy review the main reason people supported it was because excadrill and sand veil garchomp would destroy the meta without rain there to check it. People were hoping that the meta would balance out and become diverse but that didn't happen, sand dominated and we banned excadrill and chomp. Since that point rain has pretty much been the dominate weather and does create much greater emphasis on team matchup in BW then earlier gens like bkc said.

Also to the people scared that sun would dominate the meta without rain(we shouldn't allow broken things to check broken things in a healthy metagame anyway) the main sun abusers are crappy grass mons with the only decent one being vena and some fire mons. Fire and grass are mediocre typings with easily exploitable weakness like sr and grasses 5 weaknesses.

Im looking at every suspect test since round 2 and every pokemon banned used weather to boost its power in some way except for deo-s and maybe genesect. hopefully politoed gets lost in dream world on the way to 6th gen

 

[UltiMario]

I see Starmie and Landorus-T on 2 teams and I see Latias on all 3, as well as at least 3 Water and Fire resisters on every one. This is what I'm talking about when I say you handicap yourself when you run weatherless teams. There are but so many pokemon that can fill the niches you need to fill, while weather teams will always have more breathing room.

The moment the weather changes to Sunny or Rainy, there will always be at least one pokemon on a weatherless team that is either nerfed by it, or nearly useless against it. This is in addition to the boost they provide for the team.

So people are arguing weather teams are too cookie cutter and then saying weatherless teams aren't good because the good ones are all cookie cutter.

Hmmmmmmm.

Also, there are implications that weatherless teams don't have restrictions. Rain really prevents you from running fire moves, Sun does the same for water moves. Things that are either frail or weak to Water and Fire will respectively be gimped by their own weather from taking these attacks, and Sun is basically forced to run a lot of shit (Venusaur/Victreebel, Dugtrio, Spinner/Xatu) just to function. Not to mention you actually have to run the weather starters in themselves. I can't tell you how many matches it feels great to play weatherless because Sun teams start 6-5 in my favor due to Ninetales being a worthless piece of shit. Politoed can be a bit more threatening but it's still not significant. Sand has better starters, but I don't think anyone here can seriously argue sand is broken.

Basically weatherless teams and weather teams have a lot of the same issues when it comes to needing specific Pokemon to work. It just happens to be easier to make weather teams because those mons are a lot more obvious to choose. Venusaur, Dugtrio, and Donphan owe their OU status to Sun, and Volc hugely benefits from it. The teams are easy to build because the weather starters themselves are so bad it's a waste of a teamslot if you're not heavily abusing the weather. This ends up limiting options more than anything else. Weather teams basically have to abuse or else every game is a 5-6 uphill battle.

That's why weather is easy. Because the good shit in weather is right there in front of you. It takes less thinking to build the teams because you're picking from a pool of 10 good Pokemon in that weather instead of 50. A rain or sun team has at MAX 2 slots that aren't pooled from those 10 or so mons that are good in that weather. It doesn't make it better. It doesn't necessarily make it easier to play, it just decreases the chance of a bad player building a bad team because they have less bad options that look attractive to choose from. Sand and Hail are a bit more forgiving in the anti-team synergy department, so they don't really have this issue this badly. Maybe 3 mons (including starters) for each team archetype on your team get pulled from this pool of mons they synergize well with that weather. That's why nobody complains about them. The weathers give more room to be diverse, like weatherless does.

tl;dr- Cookie Cutter Teams means jack shit to balance. Especially when there are 5 different shapes the cookie is being cut in, all very different.

 

[TheFourthChaser]

Pretty sure genesect got banned after the rock polish set became popular and there were too many viable sets to be able to counter it. Also you could easily fit it onto any team so it was pretty centralizing to the metagame.

In regards to drizzle there is absolutely no reason to ban it. It's not too hard to wear down a politoed and set up your own weather. Sure, it does centralize the metagame around weather, which is why I think banning all auto weather is a better argument, but competent players really should be able to account for all opposing weather when building a team. That's why I like ou, because it is challenging and fast paced compared to the other metagames. Nothing is OP atm though, especially with tornadus-t moving up.

I'm going to be using this post since it's easy for me to counterargue while not having to pay attention to the thread again for awhile.

There are perfectly acceptable reasons to want a Drizzle ban, we've already given it a huge nerf in the form of Aldaron's proposal and it still came back to bite us in the ass. Rain is superior to every other style atm so yes you can try wearing down Politoed, who is reasonably bulky, but assuming a player isn't also running rain they'll have to deal with a weather war against some damn strong mons like Keldeo and Tornadus. Yes, a competent player does prepare for "all weathers" but rain is THE weather to prepare for. Saying nothing is OP is ridiculous, even if you don't agree that Rain is too powerful atm theres still Deo-D (which is likely the next Suspect).

I'm not really sure what to take from the poll because honestly Suspect mistakes were not made until BW2. I'm amusing a majority of voters either aren't good or are in the "ban abusers" camp. I promise that in XY I will go toward fixing the metagame in a much more efficient way. #TimeForChange

@above
Weather (Sun can KIND OF be excluded from this one since it's best abuser is Venusaur) is so good because you have mons that are already great without it, not because it is "easy to build". Keldeo would be at least a top 15 mon in a Drizzle-less metagame but because you now have free Water boosts you get Top 5 Keldeo. Hippo and Tran already have good things going for them like taking on certain Dragons and setting up SR. If weather were only good because of it's ease in building you'd see more weatherless or even Hail in tournaments, but you don't.

Edit: Because of irc I have remembered to mention that Torn-T's ban wasn't really a big rain nerf. Tornadus-I has a stronger Hurricane and now we get Prankster Tailwind running around. Torn-I might be "easier to chip down" but it should really be taking hits, all that really happens is a greater emphasis on Rapid Spin which is no problem for OU.

Edit 2: Because of PS's talk about this thread and how silly some of it is I'm gonna say that anyone posting "weather is auto-win" is just silly. This is Pokemon, there is no such thing as an auto-win.

 

[Bent1ey]

tl;dr- Cookie Cutter Teams means jack shit to balance. Especially when there are 5 different shapes the cookie is being cut in, all very different.

It doesn't mean anything to balance, but it's an awful argument to keep competitive gaming being intellectually appealing.

This is barely Rain's fault or even weather's though, with a power curve that's been getting higher and higher it's normal for the weaker teams to be outclassed by strategies using mainstream more powerful pokemon. I mean, seriously, other than Tentacool, Starmie and Forretress spinners don't really exist, if you go to UU you'll realize most of their spinners are considered to be truly awful. Discussion about Excadrill being unbanned was often done by considering its ability as a spinner, simply because that niche is mostly absent. This kind of streamlining is true for any role in the game and its pretty inevitable.

 

[MeteorMiss]

I wonder where does the assumption that you handicap yourself when not running weather came from. It seems to me that people are bandawagoning too much in this thread. I check the OU RMT forum frequently and i have seen many weatherless offensive and balanced teams that are not any worse than your average rain/sun team. Here are some examples (advertisement time): Savior by complete legitimacy, Season Unending by Intergalactic, and Mind Games from LucaroarkZ, out of which only the third team is purely offensive.

Well i suppose that with such a hot topic, bitching is to be expected, but please keep it to a minimum and avoid making false statements.

Absolutely agree. Could not agree more.

Rain isn't an auto-win. It's a powerful playstyle. Those claiming that winning requires no skill with rain are being ridiculous and have simply not tried playing with non-weather.

 

[Hugin]

No, it's not auto-win, otherwise everyone in tournaments would use Rain. But Rain is very powerful and very easy. Lead with either Toed or a counter to their weather starter, use Ferro/Cruel to tank, and look for an opportunity to switch in Keldeo/Thund/whatever and start spamming a 120 BP STAB move with no miss chance. If anything can wall you, suicide Trio to take it out. It's not perfect, nothing is, but all it really takes is one mistake from the non-weather side, one mispredicted switch, and suddenly there's nothing left to stop the sweep. The weather side has a lot more cushion, because most of their team is essentially coming in at +1.

 

[FallenFoliage]

I, personally, believe weather is fine the way it is. Top notch RMT teams will always be all over the meta, and believe me IT WILL CHANGE.
It all works like the relationship between a Predator and its Prey. You graph it and the popular teams will always be overthrown by some new gimmick.

An example was the fact I created a weather-less team for countering the Tornadus and Thundurus combo, consisting of: Weavile. This team is now more than irrelevant and its ineffectiveness shines now with the ban of Tornadus.

Point is, weather isn't an abuse, there are ways to counter, ways to vary et cetera.

However , I STRONGLY believe, there should be a No Weather option for OU specifically on PS. This will spawn a whole new mini-era of variety before release of the next gen. We're all pretty tired of the same stuff. You don't have to read the entire thread, make any theoretical analysis of any extent to take note of that.

It seems this is ignored every time I bring it up, and I'm not gonna be double-posting all over the Suggestions for PS board but.. I want to open my own thread on the idea that a No Weather option should be available (only preventing weather inducers from coming into play) along with an Item Clause, to spark even more innovation.

Edit:I will as soon as I have time to compose an elaborate thread.(weekend)
Support my argument here:http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3469608&

 

[TheFourthChaser]

I, personally, believe weather is fine the way it is. Top notch RMT teams will always be all over the meta, and believe me IT WILL CHANGE.
It all works like the relationship between a Predator and its Prey. You graph it and the popular teams will always be overthrown by some new gimmick.

An example was the fact I created a weather-less team for countering the Tornadus and Thundurus combo, consisting of: Weavile. This team is now more than irrelevant and its ineffectiveness shines now with the ban of Tornadus.

Point is, weather isn't an abuse, there are ways to counter, ways to vary et cetera.

However , I STRONGLY believe, there should be a No Weather option for OU specifically on PS. This will spawn a whole new mini-era of variety before release of the next gen. We're all pretty tired of the same stuff. You don't have to read the entire thread, make any theoretical analysis of any extent to take note of that.

It seems this is ignored every time I bring it up, and I'm not gonna be double-posting all over the Suggestions for PS board but.. I want to open my own thread on the idea that a No Weather option should be available (only preventing weather inducers from coming into play) along with an Item Clause, to spark even more innovation.

We've had Clear Skies before on PO, it had low activity because we don't want an alternate metagame that means nothing in a tournament evironment. Weavile is a check and wasn't too great a mon in this metagame even with Torn-T, you still had to deal with Keldeo, Politoed, etc alongside the SR weakness, U-Turn weakness, priority weakness and bad bulk. Item Clause would not be agreed upon, it's a silly rule outside of VGC. I don't understand why weather isn't an "abuse", Rain is clearly being abused to a large extent.

Absolutely agree. Could not agree more.

Rain isn't an auto-win. It's a powerful playstyle. Those claiming that winning requires no skill with rain are being ridiculous and have simply not tried playing with non-weather.

The skill it takes isn't exactly high, that is why Rain is easily abused.

 

[FallenFoliage]

We've had Clear Skies before on PO, it had low activity because we don't want an alternate metagame that means nothing in a tournament evironment. Weavile is a check and wasn't too great a mon in this metagame even with Torn-T, you still had to deal with Keldeo, Politoed, etc alongside the SR weakness, U-Turn weakness, priority weakness and bad bulk. Item Clause would not be agreed upon, it's a silly rule outside of VGC. I don't understand why weather isn't an "abuse", Rain is clearly being abused to a large extent.ç

With the right support Weavile can neuter the behemoths. It's not a rain counter, I would never say that. But it did in fact check the most popular rain abusers at the time.

I'm aware of the once clear skies on PO, and I know about its low usage, and I know about a turny environment. Yet, wouldn't that mean you're arguing rain shouldn't be banned? Or do you just think my alternate approach is silly altogether?
Because No Weather is a common requesite for WiFi BattleFinder users. And besides your countering my idea, you seem quite upset about the rain abuse.

P.S.- A lot of us are.

 

[Aquasition]

Call me crazy, but with all the rain teams going around, I think one way we could balance this out is to allow Rayquaza into OU. Maybe at a lower level than normal to balance out Rayquaza's stats(like lvl 85 or something). I'm just hypothesizing here. Would this change the way the weather wars works?

Other than that though, I think banning Drizzle and either Chlorophyll or Drought might work. As for why ban Chlorophyll, remember that the main Chlorophyll users Venusaur, and to a lesser extent, Lilligant, have access to sleep powder and a powerful boosting move(Growth for Venu, QD for Lilligant).

 

[haunter]

Ahah, I think your signature is perfectly fit for your post. I've always been for the pro-weather party, but according to what Gen VI brings to the table, the council might take a different approach to weather strategies.

If anything, this poll proves that Drizzle isn't the "obviously broken" ability that some people make it to be.