BKC stated multiple times how sand stall dominates Rain teams, and now you are arguing that rain teams actually do have a fighting chance against sand stall. Which one is it guys, i want to know so we can continue this discussion.
first off, please note that i am not bkc. while it is true that he and i share opinions on many issues, we have slightly differing viewpoints. what i'm emphasizing is that, when using a team that is neither rain nor sun, you will automatically lose certain games due to team matchup, and you will win some games due to team matchup as well. however, when using rain or sun, not only will you automatically win some games due to team matchup as well, but you will even have the ability to play your way out of matchup disadvantages and still clutch a win, which is a trait that non rain/sun teams lack.
i have to remind you that weatherless offense teams are also offensive teams. Be it Deo-D HO, DragMag, or Dual Screens + 5 sweepers, all of those teams can get around bad match-ups due to their offensive nature, so offensive sun and rain teams are nothing special in that regard. A rain offense team choses to use Politoed as their support Pokemon, Deo-D teams chose to use Deo-D as their support Pokemon, and DS teams use dual screen set upers as their support Pokemon. I don't consider any of those kinds of support broken, as rain offense is nothing special whenever i play against it. Weatherless team can stand up to the power of weather teams because they either have their own form of heavy support (DS users, Deo-D, etc) or they have a more solid defensive core due to the ability to run one more Pokemon than rain and sun teams, as well as their ability to have better defensive synergy overall. Finally, i won't comment a lot on your examples about Sun or Rain against weatherless, as this will lead to an endless cycle of theorymon, but i just have to say that it is not as simple as you make it seem. Deo-D can set-up against Xatu with Skill Swap, Weavile can revenge kill any Chloro sweeper after SR + Spikes, and Volcarona dies after SR from Night Slash. Or if you don't want to use the gimmick called Skill Swamp, Weavile can trap and kill Xatu for you. This is how i got my reqs in the last suspect test and it worked just fine. Sun teams didn't trouble me at all.
you missed the point i was trying to make and only quoted a small portion of my overarching argument. what i was actually saying is that weather offense teams, by their inherent nature, are able to overcome matchup disadvantages by constantly applying pressure while maintaining the weather advantage. key word there is "while", meaning both of these conditions must be in effect for weather offense teams to stand a chance in a disadvantaged matchup. since weatherless offense teams lack weather, they also lack one of the two conditions for success in disadvantageous team matchup scenarios, and therefore, winning is nearly impossible. you bring up an example here of you laddering for reqs with skill swap deo-d and weavile. first, i'd like to congratulate you on your success with such unusual and innovative sets. second, i'd like to emphasize what i stated earlier, that a) these innovative sets are part of what makes the game enjoyable, and i'm not detracting from their use at all, but also b), that when you use such different pokemon or sets that deviate from the standard, you are making a trade-off. your increased prowess against sun with xatu is coupled with a now greater disadvantage against rain balance and potentially sand offense as well. every change in teambuilding that deviates from the norm sacrifices an advantage against one playstyle for an advantage against another. that is the nature of teambuilding.
Oh and Kingdra is not a suboptimal dragon, and if you think it is, i can't help but think you either haven't used it or are very biased against it. How is Rain Dance Kingdra a suboptimal dragon when it fares so well against sun and rain offense, two of the biggest issues for weatherless HO teams?
if kingdra was not a suboptimal dragon, do you think it would have been left unbanned in dpp while latios was sent to the uber tier automatically? kingdra has lower base stats, a thinner movepool, and less versatility than latios, latias, and even salamence. there's a reason you see it used a whole lot less than the three pokemon i just mentioned. yes, i'm not going to deny that if you manage to get a rain dance up with kingdra and remove ferrothorn from play, it can be quite a dangerous pokemon. however, the trouble lies in actually setting up kingdra, who is notoriously frail in this highly offensive metagame, not to mention preventing your opponent from changing the weather on you mid-sweep. kingdra isn't bad, but it's not the best special or physical dragon out there by any means.
When did i say that it is ok if weather kills other playstyles? I said that weather alone is not killing any viable playstyle, and this is why weather is just fine. Also all of those playstyles you mentioned are still viable in my book, so we have to agree to disagree here. The only playstyle in general that is very hard to use is pure stall, and this is not only weather's fault. Terrakion, Thundurus-T, Kyurem-B, and Sheer Force Landorus are all main reasons to stall's decline as well.
first of all, you misinterpreted me once again. i was not claiming that you said the destruction of playstyles was a good thing; rather, i noted that you said the advent of rain and sun in bw2 did not destroy any playstyles, when in fact it destroyed five to six of them. additionally, whether a playstyle is viable in "your book" or not is irrelevant, i'd be interested to hear how many people in this thread feel that sun stall is still a prevalent and viable threat to the metagame, or maybe hail balance, or rain stall.
Once again, i am a weatherless team user, and sun teams were never an issue, because i built my team while having the sun threats in mind. Who would be so stupid to use a Deo-D weatherless offense team without a way to get past Xatu, and without a way to stop common sun sweepers? Every type of team has to chose to what it wants to be weak, not only weatherless teams. As shrang already mentioned, chosing to which and how many threats you will be weak to depends entirely on your teambuilding skills, as long as you use viable Pokemon and strategies. So to close this matter, in almost all of the games that i played with my last weatherless team (around 75 iirc), almost none of them was an insta-lose due to team match-up, as you seem to imply for weatherless vs sun offense or rain offense. I don't see weather as a problem, because it doesn't limit my options more than any other meta-shaping factor, and because i can create very succesful teams of various team-types. And i am not even a very good teambuilder, so i don't think that it is so hard for a player with an average level if skill in competitive Pokemon to overcome the difficulties imposed by weather.
you seem to continually ignore the point i've been emphasizing with every single post i've made in this thread: teambuilding emphasizes trade-offs. there is no perfect weatherless team, just like there is no perfect rain or sun team, but rain and sun teams minimize the amount of trade-offs necessary to be made during teambuilding, which makes them easier to build, easier to play with, and easier to win with. just because you're a good teambuilder and you faced some rotten opponents on the ladder doesn't mean that weatherless teams are suddenly perfect against all playstyles and never suffer a team matchup loss. again, it's all about trade-offs. your weatherless team might be, for example, good against rain teams, fair against sand teams, and bad against sun teams, or perhaps good against sun teams, fair against rain teams, and bad against sand teams. whatever it may be, i'm going to continue to emphasize that weatherless offense is more dependent on team matchup than any other playstyle in the bw2 metagame until you understand my point.