Ok then, reiterate for me. What exactly is your conclusion and how did you arrive at it based upon facts available at the present?
I can understand that Pokemon that are dependent on weather for success will suffer. Venusaur would obviously fall if Drought were banned, for example, since it depends on Chlorophyll to fulfill its given purpose. Gastrodon might also lose viability with Drizzle banned due to its niche of taking Hydro Pumps/Surfs and Thunders in Rain being eliminated. Not all Pokemon that can abuse weather are like that, though. For example, Jolteon literally just loses a reliable Thunder (I'd look up just how often Thunder is used on Jolteon, but the moveset stats appear to be down). It still has Thunderbolt, Volt Switch, excellent speed, Baton Pass, etc. Ferrothorn only loses its ability to somewhat help its Fire weakness, while meanwhile it still has Spikes, Stealth Rock, great typing, excellent bulk, etc. These Pokemon are not utterly dependent on weather, they just enjoy it.
Jolteon is really weak without Thunder, so it really depepends on rain to function. When was the last time you saw a Jolteon outside of a rain team? Also, i know that Ferro would still be plenty viable in a Drizzle-less meta, i just mentioned him to show you how one can predict some obvious changes from one meta to another.
As to what i said before, just by taking a quick look at the 4th gen OU you can see how many OU Pokemon were hurt enough to become barely unviable or coimpletely unviable due to Drizzle. Here is the list, for reference:
http://www.smogon.com/dp/tiers/ou
Out of those only Swampert and maybe Togekiss are Pokemon that are rarely seens and have little viability due to rain, as both are slow, gain not benefit from rain, and struggle to take two rain-boosted Water-attacks. Any other Pokemon on this list, such as Aerodactly, Dusknoir, Umbreon, Suicune, Metagross, and Flygon, that are barely viable or not viable at all, all suffered this loss of viability in the transition of 4th gen to 5th for reasons not related to Drizzle, or at least for main reasons not related to Drizzle. So as you see i took some data i had, and based on some big changes we experienced between the two gens i made some conclusions about which Pokemon lost their viability due to Drizzle. And those Pokemon were very few.
There is one other quirk with these arguments in that you have an inherent advantage since Drizzle is currently unbanned and we can see its effects. What I'm saying is that you can see which Pokemon are common in the Drizzle metagame and therefore you can make an educated (albeit unverifiable) guess as to which ones might be hurt by Drizzle's ban. However, we have no such observation as to which Pokemon might be more viable if Drizzle were banned, and so that's anyone's guess. While we could form a decent hypothesis as to which Pokemon would lose viability if Rain were banned, the number of Pokemon that would gain viability could be anywhere from a couple to many.
Many Pokemon can also potentially gain viability in a Drizzle-less metagame, but how are we to know just how many?
Of 'course everything we say about a hypothetic Drizzle-less meta is an hypothesis, but if the base of this hypothesis is well built and supported then the hypothesis is very possible and not far-fethced at all. In the end, if both sides (pro-band and ani-ban) base their arguments on two hypothetical scenarios, and the hypothesis that Drizzle increases diversity in OU is more well supported than the hypothesis that Drizzle limits diverstity in OU, i don't see the need to say that every hypothesis can be wrong. Of 'course it can, but if both sides need to make hypothoses to prove some points, what's the point of accusing theorymoning as a techinique? And not baseless theorymoning, but theorymoning that is based on a lot of facts and playtesting expereince on a 2 years old metagame.
And I would be inclined to agree with you if, say, Keldeo were the first Rain abuser being tested right now. The concern, however, is that we have made several notable bans at least in part because of Drizzle, and people are wondering if Drizzle wasn't the problem to begin with.
The only way that Drizzle was the problem is if it can be proven that Drizzle is a broken ability. And for an ability to be broken it must break the majority of the Pokemon that benefit from it, which is clearly not the case with Drizzle.
As UltiMario pointed out, it's unclear as to how many Swift Swimmers would have actually been broken, but let's go with your number, three. If it were just the three, then we could have just banned those and let other Pokemon like Poliwrath, Gorebyss, Seismitoed, etc. have plenty of OU viability due to their niche with Swift Swim. However, by banning Drizzle + Swift Swim, what good did we actually do the metagame? People were concerned about losing manual Rain Dance teams with Swift Swim users, but how often do you actually see those now that all is said and done? How common are those Pokemon that we kept unbanned? Kingdra does enjoy noticeable usage, but that's about it. The Pokemon that we "saved" didn't actually have much of an impact on OU at all after the ban.
If it was just a small handful of broken Pokemon, would it not have been better to just ban those and leave the many other abusers with their niche rather than ban the combo and weaken all Swift Swim users with only one receiving even decent OU usage after the ban? In other words...
Yeah this is an option that we could have explored, but is this case really relevant to what we are discussing here? The main subject of discussion here is whether rain nees to be banned or not, and by banning the broken swift swimmers individually instead of making the combo ban this issue remains unaffacted. I would like to talk about this another time, but it seems irrelevant to the discussion. In the end, the heads of the OU tiering decided that it is better to ban nothing instead of banning 3-4 Pokemon to keep some lesser swift swimmers around.
They did, but you cannot ignore that the bans of Drizzle + Swift Swim, Manaphy, Tornadus-T, and arguably Pokemon like Thundurus (Thunder) and Genesect (Thunder, lessened Fire weakness) had one factor in common: Drizzle. Regardless of what other factors might have made an impact, that was a common link between them. The concern is that all of these bans have been missing the main target, which is Drizzle itself (although Genesect and possibly Thundurus might have been banned regardless).
Ok i can see what you are saying, and this is definitely something to think about. But still, if Drizzle doesn't break the majority of the Pokemon that it directly affects, i can't see how it's the abilitiy's fault and not the Pokemon's. If 20 Pokemon relevant in OU had Speed Boost and only 5 of them were broken with it, would we ban Speed Bosst or the Pokemon?
Having a Pokemon banned from OU is a much greater negative than having Pokemon relatively unused in the tier due to lack of their Drizzle-buff. The versatility you say Drizzle promotes barely even exists, alex, because it is cancelled out by the loss in usage of huge numbers of other Pokemon. You think Fire types are the only ones adversely affected? Every other wallbreaker, nearly every wall in the game which can't abuse Drizzle is adversely affected, because Drizzle simply does it better.
Gibbs ninja'd me but he has it exactly right. All of our recent bans have been closely linked to Drizzle. Drizzle is the problem, we can see that purely by looking at the magnitude of its effects, as well as the number of pokemon it's pushing into Ubers and the stupid centralisation that has taken place because of it. Continuing to ban individual Pokemon, all in the name of the versatility that there's no real evidence Drizzle promotes, doesn't make sense.
It doesn't matter how many Pokemon are affected, what matters is how many Pokemon are viable in OU. While some Pokemon lost their OU status partially due to Drizzle, those Pokemon got replace by other Pokemon, so in the end nothing changed in terms of numbers. In order to see if diversity was increased or not in 5th gen, you need to see the usage statistics (to see how centralized OU is) as well as the number of OU viable Pokemon. And both of those things imply bigger diversity in 5th gen than in 4th gen, disproving the mindset that Drizzle limits diversity.
On the other hand, there is no evidence to support that Drizzle limits diversity in OU making claims such as this ''The versatility you say Drizzle promotes barely even exists, alex, because it is cancelled out by the loss in usage of huge numbers of other Pokemon'' baseles and most probably false. This huge loss of Pokemon that you speak of does not exist, and is something made up to blame Drizzle for the metagame that we have and some people don't like.
Finally, not only Pokemon that are relatively unused would suffer from a Drizzle ban. I have mentioned the Pokemon that could potentially lose their viability, or most of it, in OU before, and such Pokemon are Toxicroak, Tornadus, Gastrodon, Amoonguss, and more. And not only those, as sun-based Pokemon would lose their viability as well, such as Venusaur, Sawsbuck, Dugtrio, etc.
