Is it possible for people to post multiple replays from someone not named dEnIsSsS. It's hard to see how BP is still hard to beat when it's only him, who's a really good player to begin with.
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Other The effectiveness of Baton Pass teams after the nerf
- Thread starter Arcanine is Regal
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And now this tells me that it's Denisssssss who's OP. I don't think it's acceptable to suspect him. :P
But seriously, I think it's Deoxys who's the problem now. Until people with little-to-no previous battling experience are able to shoot up to the top of the ladder with a 3BP copy+paste team (similar to how SwagPlay and 6BP did) then we can't really start saying the sky is falling, right?
Basically, all I'm hearing from this thread is complaining that Denissss is too good a player. Every single replay posted has involved him and all that's telling me is that he's really good at what he does. Honestly, I don't think we should be going on about nerfing Baton Pass even further until someone can show to me that even some sub-par troll can get near the top of the ladder with a 3-BP team.
What about nerfing it by only allowing baton pass plus another non-damaging move? That way we wouldn't be hurting quick-passing or dry-passing to avoid pursuit. The only set that comes to mind that would be affected by this would be dual screens espeon, but that isn't very good to begin with. Furthermore, there would be no need for the current limit of three baton passers per team, wich always struck me as a really random number to have the limit established in.
If a strategy cannot be countered in normal playing conidtions -even if said requires perfect or near perfect execution-, it is broken. This is hard to learn -at least it was for me- but it is true.
I have 2 examples from 2 other, different games, MOBAs to be precise. Two champions/heroes (Anivia in LoL and Invoker in DotA) require a huge amount of skill (which can be acquired with time and exercise) to be played to their full extent. Thing is, in the hands of the average player, these heroes would be mediocre to decent at best (even pre-nerf). Then one player became famous for destroying everyone with that particular hero. They were highly praised for their unmatched skill until other players began to follow and things began to spin out of control. Eventually, in both games the idea that high skill ceiling doesn't justify superior power prevailed.
For now Denisss is the only one capable of executing the strategy almost flawlessly, how long until others follow and things start spinning out of control? Do we need to reach that point to react?
The best viable counter, haze quagsire, failed to actually counter it in the hands of a skilled player. Unless actual viable counterplay is found soon, action has to be taken.
Edit: Viable counterplay means a strategy or at least a handful of otherwise useful pokes. If those conditions are not fully met, the 3bp core will just go from broken to overcentralizing.
Remember the BW2 core of T-tar/Lando-I/Keldeo. Lando-I was banned.
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The people in this thread need to get over it. Stop posting one player that dominates with this strategy. He is good, the way you fix that is by getting better, not by banning his team so he can't use it anymore lol. Even if you did, he would most likely just make a another team to dominate with. Most of the games involved his opponent just trying to stall him out or making a mistake in prediction and giving him the turn needed to set up properly. There are plenty of pokemon that win once they get 1-2 stacks off a boost because you made a bad choice.
By this logic, what if one player learns to beat it consistently and everyone else adapts his/her new strategy?
Are you suggesting the strategy should be banned because someone else might learn to use it at that high of a level? Sounds like some fked up Minority Report stuff where you punish people for things they haven't even done yet. How do you know they will actually do it? There is no proof yet, only a hypothesis. What if no one else is capable of pulling it off?
By this logic, what if one player learns to beat it consistently and everyone else adapts his/her new strategy?
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Thank you, I was just about to post this.( I am about to mention him briefly XD)
You people are making good points, but at the same time are blinded by what is actually going on. Denisss has been playing nonstop baton pass for MONTHS, he is an average player at best, that has a lot of experience with a broken(imo) strategy. The argument here is that all it takes to do well with the strategy is be familiar with situations, and just keep getting into every scenario possible until you know how to abuse baton pass to the fullest extent in every situation, once you have done that you can either always win the game, or force the game to infuriating 50/50 plays(assuming the opponent doesn't have an amazing bp counter). So this means that the opponents only way of winning is to hope denisss messes up, which he has done(ive seen him forget to click baton pass and just hard switch out of his chain lol), or they hope to win 50/50s which some of you are confusing with skill. If you look at the replays and do not think that most of the time the players could have just flipped a coin and decided either option 1 or 2, then you do not understand how predictions go. That is what I am getting at....coinflips, the meta should not come down to the most experienced players on ladder just flipping coins and making decisions.
I know you guys are sick of denisss replays and I wont be mentioning him again(hopefully), but this is a game he loses to costa, one of the best ladder players I have ever seen. He won by winning a bunch of 50/50 plays, he made very smart plays, and BARELY won.
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132588220
The reason he didnt use toxic on the clefable is because he knew clefable had sub, and that is the same reason he switched into hippowdon, hoping he would sub and the sand would kill.
So yeah this is the best case scenario to come out of playing denisss assuming no hax or misplays, and even then it is still a narrow victory, and my main argument is that anyone can achieve the level of experience to abuse baton pass it just takes time. So I have no problems waiting a few weeks to see if this should be suspected again.
Edit: I want to point out that, that replay was one of the most fun games to watch. Only because have how many mind games went into every play, that I hope all of you see.
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The reason his replays are so prevalent here are because they're the only one anyone hung on to. We weren't banning him from using his team, we were nerfing the playstyle that SEVERAL hunred people adopted. He isn't the only one that made it this far with this team. We had 3 other threads to talk about this. Let's not bring it here.
I still think the nerf we went with wasn't enough. All you need is Scoli, Espy, and Smeargle/Sylveon to get the product you want. We may have to retest it. Just saying. :)
I still think the nerf we went with wasn't enough. All you need is Scoli, Espy, and Smeargle/Sylveon to get the product you want. We may have to retest it. Just saying. :)
There are more people at the very top of the ladder using HO, stall or balanced teams than BP, your point?
Seriously, why can't you guys just accept there is a new playstyle in the metagame and you'll have to adapt to it as you did with the others?
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The problem is that's the only evidence there is that BP is still broken, and everyone who talks about it tries to pretend Denis+ is a terrible (or average or low skill) player who only wins because BP is broken. Does anyone have any replays of other people using BP?
I didn't say it's the ONLY playstyle up there. T_T
But there were many people that were successful in using it.
Let's pause for a minute on the "this is only broken in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing." That describes all pokemon. I'm sure all of us who have played on Battle Spot free battles have encountered shitty ubers teams that were easy to beat because they were being controlled by a casual player. What the question should be is whether BP is still broken in the hands of a competent player.
So while I don't think a few replays of Denis using the strategy prove that 3BP is broken on their own, I do think they provide illustration that it certainly could be.
I also don't think the fact that Denis may be a highly skilled player is evidence that it's not broken. The only way that would be the case is if there were some part of the strategy that was so exceptionally difficult that only an extremely highly skilled player can pull it off, and I'm not sure I see anything like that.
(Ironically, the only evidence we have that Denis's success is solely due to his skill is a few replays or memories of other people trying 3BP who are clearly unfamiliar with the style and are still figuring out what kinds of things to do with it. Remember Denis made this new team, so he already became familiar with how it was supposed to work during the team building process.)
So while I don't think a few replays of Denis using the strategy prove that 3BP is broken on their own, I do think they provide illustration that it certainly could be.
I also don't think the fact that Denis may be a highly skilled player is evidence that it's not broken. The only way that would be the case is if there were some part of the strategy that was so exceptionally difficult that only an extremely highly skilled player can pull it off, and I'm not sure I see anything like that.
(Ironically, the only evidence we have that Denis's success is solely due to his skill is a few replays or memories of other people trying 3BP who are clearly unfamiliar with the style and are still figuring out what kinds of things to do with it. Remember Denis made this new team, so he already became familiar with how it was supposed to work during the team building process.)
How is he average at best? Didn't you just describe a "good" player? Someone who put the time and effort into getting good and being familiar with match ups? Doesn't that make him a good player? Just because he doesn't follow the same meta as you does not make him bad. Of course he can beat pokemon that counter his team, he practices a lot while I'm sure the Unaware Quag users dont have anywhere near as much experience against the strategy at his level.
Dhalsim in SF4 plays like no other character and just zones people with footsies while almost everyone else uses big combos, FADC to Ultra, etc. Some of the top players use him, but if they were given a shoto character, they would lose every match. Does that mean that they are average because they are a master of character, but suck with the rest? Even in League of Legends the top players usually specialize in a specific role, if you put them in another role or make them use a character they are bad with, they will lose. The point is, so what if he only wins with BP, he is good enough to do so consistently while not that many other people can. Just practice more against BP teams so you can learn how to stop them better. Don't force the metagame to work only in one way. That is just straight up lazy. Most people on Smogon are used to only playing one way because everything that is different gets banned. Don't expect to beat something if you only played against it 10 times when the user has used it hundreds of times. That is how skill/experience works, the better player + strategy wins. Expect the un expected, right now he expects people to try to counter him by resetting his stats, so he works around that.
Has anyone tried saying fk it, and just using Psych Up to copy his stats to your own Espeon or Sylveon and sweep back? I doubt it because that would be a creative way to deal with the situation and people are stuck in playing one way. If being defensive doesn't work, time to switch to offense. Or just use Perish Song since his team isn't resistant to it. There are answers, people just refuse to use them because they are "not viable". Guess what, BP chains weren't that viable either until someone realized that with the right team it could be very powerful.
Oh hey Shack, we're doing this again, aren't we? :D
I agree with your first point, Denny certainly isn't a bad player by any means, and anyone who thinks otherwise is letting the BP hate get in the way of common sense. Pioneering a team that gets banned and coming back with something that gets around the ban while maintaining performance is not something an average player would be capable of.
Where you're wrong is that Smogon bans stuff that's different and doesn't fit "The Metagame". Stuff gets banned because either A) it's unrealistic to expect people to find a method of handling it on every team (Mega Kangaskhan, Blaziken, Kyogre) or B) it lets worse players beat better players due to BS (Shaymin S flinch hax, no good way to handle evasion, Mega Gengar coming in and killing off whatever it wants). Stuff like that ruins creativity, which, believe it or not, isn't what we're trying to do here.
Psych Up is bad against every sweeper in OU, so it has exactly one purpose in stopping BP, and frankly it doesn't do that well at it either. Stored Power with enough boosts will blow straight through basically anything you want to try to go with, outside of Sash Alakazam or whatever special Dark type you'd like to bring to the party. Perish Song is much more realistic, but it's still hard to fit onto a team given that the usable mons that would run it are Celebi, who isn't great in this meta, and Politoed, who demands a very specific team to make it worthwhile.
On a more constructive note, Choice Scarf Switcharoo Klefki is adorable / fucking bullshit, being able to come in at any time and force a Scarf onto a core member of the team is quite useful. It isn't too bad at messing with other teams as well, works a little bit like Thundurus (less offensive power, but being able to force mons into one move or spreading paralysis, poison, and Spikes on the enemy team is worth something). Dragon Tail is another option on defensive mons now that Sylveon can't be a part of the chain, so long as you pack enough of a punch to break Subs and have a method of getting around Smeargle it'll work well.
"Not viable" means just that: it is not viable in the general metagame and therefore weighs down the team in all but a very small number of situations. Something doesn't become viable just because it ostensibly helps against one playstyle.
I've never played SF4, but imagine there was a fighting game where nobody could see which character the other person chose until the match started. There are a bunch of well-rounded characters with various strengths and weaknesses. But then there is a character called S, who sucks against all those characters for some reason (he's slow, not as strong, his attacks are too punishable, whatever). Then there is a character called P, who is really powerful and can dominate against every character--except S who for whatever reason has an even matchup vs. P.
In that situation, P is still overpowered, and S still sucks. P can still win every time against the dozens of normal characters, and S still loses against them. Only in one situation is S useful to the player, and otherwise in almost every other circumstance choosing him is a huge liability. Telling people to "just deal with P by picking S" means you're telling people they have to choose between always losing to normal characters, or always losing to P.
Or we can just tell everyone to pick P. But then there goes any variability to the game (which people will whine about anyway).
What we want for a metagame, is one that is both as skill-dependent and as diverse as possible without changing the core game mechanics. When one type of team can steamroll through everything except teams that have a few things that suck against other types of teams, you lose both of those things: skill-dependency because the game becomes overly matchup dependent (gimmicks > OP strategy > normal teams > gimmicks), and diversity if people gravitate to the OP strategy in hopes of winning lots of matches and actually standing a chance vs. others using the strategy.
Pokemon is matchup dependent to a degree no matter how you look at it, of course, but when the game becomes essentially a rock-paper-scissors thing where the game is over at the battle preview, that doesn't exactly sound fun. And trying to balance the game to avoid that certainly isn't lazy.
Tl;dr for the above: Regardless of what anyone thinks about whether BP is (still) overpowered, I really wish this type of "just deal with it" argument would go away. If BP isn't broken, then there's nothing to do about it. But if it is, then that needs to be addressed. The problem with saying "just deal with it" is that it avoids such questions completely. Smogon is trying to balance the 6v6 singles metagame; anyone who does not like that philosophy as a whole (rather than just individual decisions) would probably have a better time just playing on battle spot under Nintendo's rules or with friends using their own rules, rather than trying to tell Smogon to stop doing what it was made to do.
It's easy to just shout out supposed solutions and go "lol u guys are dum," but if they are unconventional or have been shown to be poor choices in the past, nobody will take them seriously until we see those things in action not only against BP teams, but also vs. the metagame generally.
To address Psych Up specifically, the issue is simply that the move is dead weight against everything except BP chains.
Perish Song is more useful generally, but the only OU-viable pokemon to get it (which means, the only pokemon that can do well in OU generally, including outside of going against BP teams) is Celebi. Politoed can also do it, but he is mostly dead weight outside of rain teams. Also, nobody in their right mind will ingrain before any potential perish song users are dead, especially with the current anti-BP vs. anti-banning firestorm encouraging to run Perish Song on things that wouldn't otherwise run it.
EDIT: Typo.
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Like Haunter said, this team has been around for only a few days. Let's see if people can find ways to beat it before we declare it broken.
If we do determine that this new style of Baton Pass is unhealthy for the meta, I think the best way to go would be to suspect test Scolipede. Baton Pass is not inherently broken; it has never been banned in any previous generation even when trap passing was a thing. Scolipede has taken both quick passing and chain passing to a whole new level thanks to its relatively good bulk and defensive typing and its ability to pass Iron Defense boosts which Ninjask couldn't do.
I think it would make more sense to suspect the greatest abuser of Baton Pass rather than the move itself just like many people here want to suspect the greatest abuser of Stealth Rock but not the move itself.
If we do determine that this new style of Baton Pass is unhealthy for the meta, I think the best way to go would be to suspect test Scolipede. Baton Pass is not inherently broken; it has never been banned in any previous generation even when trap passing was a thing. Scolipede has taken both quick passing and chain passing to a whole new level thanks to its relatively good bulk and defensive typing and its ability to pass Iron Defense boosts which Ninjask couldn't do.
I think it would make more sense to suspect the greatest abuser of Baton Pass rather than the move itself just like many people here want to suspect the greatest abuser of Stealth Rock but not the move itself.
I'm sick of seeing people here bashing Denisss as if he were some mediocre player. As was previously said, "Pioneering a team that gets banned and coming back with something that gets around the ban while maintaining performance is not something an average player would be capable of." It doesn't matter if he's mediocre at best at other playstyles, and actually not all that surprising if he is, seeing as he doesn't have the amount of practice playing something more "regular" as he does with his BP teams. I'm sure any of you will be far worse players if someone just handed you a random team with a completely different playstyle from what you typically prefer, until you've practiced with said team long enough to get good at playing it. And like it also has been established, he is also not perfect, and has lost plenty of matches (both legitimately, and with a stupid/misclick kind of error). But neither is anyone reading this topic, either. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional and letting their jealousy get in the way of logical thinking.
BP is not completely mindless, and never was. If it were, we'd see FAR more players on the top exclusively with BP, and right now to my knowledge there's only about 1-2 top and (a generous estimate) about 5 additional players who don't completely suck balls with the strategy. Sure, it's an easy win against some teams, provided you're competent enough to not repeatedly try to spore Gliscor (who is already toxic'd) or a grass type, or try to boost defense with Scoliopede vs. a Heatran spamming Lava Plume; but approximately 90% of the BP players I've come across lack the basic competency to even know how to work the team on a level that would allow them to beat other scrubs. Same can be said about any team though, since there's far too much in the game to consider to be able to literally counter everything, and the best most teams can get is to have to play around certain threats with good prediction. And now that the main team has been "nerfed" it's MUCH harder to execute on a top level against all teams, since there's generally only one shot to get it "right" and not multiple provided nothing essential dies as with the original.
A team being "boring" or "annoying" to play against or having obscure counters, in and of itself also doesn't warrant a ban. There are plenty of boring/annoying to play against (such as a well-executed stall), and plenty of things with obscure counters (Mawile, for example, which VERY few things counter ALL sets that she can run). A team countering your preferred style of play without including obscure counters also in and of itself doesn't warrant a ban. Stall teams might have to get used to the idea of running moves like Taunt and Perish Song on multiple users, moves that are extremely useful anyway for forcing switches and keeping your team from being wrecked by setup sweepers of any kind.
That being said, it is quite possible for Baton Pass chains to be overcentralizing (still); but right now I'm just not seeing it with only one top player who still uses the strategy. I've seen a handful of Quick Pass teams (such as a lone Venomoth quiver passing to a Lando-I, or a lone Scoliopede passing atk/speed/a sub to a Garchomp), which are honestly harder to prepare for than a chain due to the fact that you can't prepare for every possible threat with extra speed/atk and good players would have at least 2 possible recipients of a pass with completely different counters to each other and pass to something that would guarantee a death on your side. Dry passing, while rare, still does exist (and should be used more seeing as we have more viable pursuit trappers). These strategies differ from the full chain enough to qualify as playstyles, and from what I've seen so far, none of them are completely mindless except against people who refuse to put checks for these strategies in their teams, though deadly when properly executed against any team. We shouldn't be punishing people who manage to create an original strategy that is difficult to beat when properly executed; in fact we should be encouraging it. At the very least, we should let this play out for a MINIMUM of 3 months to see what happens, and suspect test other things that are in a more dire need first due to the fact that they're undeniably overcentralizing.
BP is not completely mindless, and never was. If it were, we'd see FAR more players on the top exclusively with BP, and right now to my knowledge there's only about 1-2 top and (a generous estimate) about 5 additional players who don't completely suck balls with the strategy. Sure, it's an easy win against some teams, provided you're competent enough to not repeatedly try to spore Gliscor (who is already toxic'd) or a grass type, or try to boost defense with Scoliopede vs. a Heatran spamming Lava Plume; but approximately 90% of the BP players I've come across lack the basic competency to even know how to work the team on a level that would allow them to beat other scrubs. Same can be said about any team though, since there's far too much in the game to consider to be able to literally counter everything, and the best most teams can get is to have to play around certain threats with good prediction. And now that the main team has been "nerfed" it's MUCH harder to execute on a top level against all teams, since there's generally only one shot to get it "right" and not multiple provided nothing essential dies as with the original.
A team being "boring" or "annoying" to play against or having obscure counters, in and of itself also doesn't warrant a ban. There are plenty of boring/annoying to play against (such as a well-executed stall), and plenty of things with obscure counters (Mawile, for example, which VERY few things counter ALL sets that she can run). A team countering your preferred style of play without including obscure counters also in and of itself doesn't warrant a ban. Stall teams might have to get used to the idea of running moves like Taunt and Perish Song on multiple users, moves that are extremely useful anyway for forcing switches and keeping your team from being wrecked by setup sweepers of any kind.
That being said, it is quite possible for Baton Pass chains to be overcentralizing (still); but right now I'm just not seeing it with only one top player who still uses the strategy. I've seen a handful of Quick Pass teams (such as a lone Venomoth quiver passing to a Lando-I, or a lone Scoliopede passing atk/speed/a sub to a Garchomp), which are honestly harder to prepare for than a chain due to the fact that you can't prepare for every possible threat with extra speed/atk and good players would have at least 2 possible recipients of a pass with completely different counters to each other and pass to something that would guarantee a death on your side. Dry passing, while rare, still does exist (and should be used more seeing as we have more viable pursuit trappers). These strategies differ from the full chain enough to qualify as playstyles, and from what I've seen so far, none of them are completely mindless except against people who refuse to put checks for these strategies in their teams, though deadly when properly executed against any team. We shouldn't be punishing people who manage to create an original strategy that is difficult to beat when properly executed; in fact we should be encouraging it. At the very least, we should let this play out for a MINIMUM of 3 months to see what happens, and suspect test other things that are in a more dire need first due to the fact that they're undeniably overcentralizing.
With all due respect good sire, I humbly request that you give it a little longer then "a few weeks" before making a decision on whether or not to retest baton pass. As I implied in my previous post, I suspect(heh heh) that a large part of the reason why BP was not dominating the suspect ladder was a case of broken checking broken. The OU viability thread currently has 5 S ranked mons, and 4 of them check/counter Scolipede quite well, who is a major player in any serious BP chain and is a formidable threat on his own. Therefore, I believe that we should spend some time suspecting these threats known to be potentially broken and remove the ones that are actually broken before revisiting this topic. This is a prudent choice because regardless of whether or not BP is still broken, the metagame will benefit from the removal of broken threats, even if they are not directly related to BP or even check BP. If BP is indeed not broken in the OU tier, then it should remain unbroken once other broken threats are removed. If it is indeed broken still, then the removal of these other broken threats will make it more obvious to the player base, and we will hopefully have a better second suspect. It's a win/win no matter how you look at it.
Also, just for a change of pace, I'll show you some replays made by not-denis. The player shown here is mediocre at best and is known for using quick pass scolipede. (yes, I'm referring to myself)
I haven't had much time to play since the nerf, but since I never used full BP, I believe these replays to still be relevant to the topic at hand.
And before accusing me of being lazy, how about you make your own short pass team and find some decent replays of it. I still believe these to be quality replays that do a very good job of showing scolipede's strengths and his ability to punish any "misplay" extremely hard (when killing an SD tflame with draco meteor can be considered a game losing "misplay", something is up imo)
your S and P almost exactly mirrors meta knight and pikachu in SSBB. On the most recent tier list, Pikachu is the ONLY thing with a completely even match up against meta knight, which causes pikachu to rise extremely high in the tier list.
field report here, since most people are talking about theory
baton pass is still cancer. I don't care about whether or not it is broken; I'm more concerned about the extent to which it brings out the rock-paper-scissors element of pokemon.
i abused it under the name "mini cancer" just to see what it was like, and literally every game at the start of team preview I could predict and say "yep this is a won game" or "yep this is a lost game." there were some exceptions where I choked or got haxed where I had the matchup advantage, and some games I clutched out using surprise sets (or just winning 50/50s--another rock-paper-scissors element) that beat the BP counters my opponent carried when they had the advantage, but on the whole the predictions I made in team preview were far too accurate. I got to 12th on the ladder before getting sick of playing, because frankly it just wasn't fun. I could probably write a computer program to get an 80%+ win-rate on the ladder with baton pass. is this the type of metagame we want?
my main point is there's a reason you don't see this shit in tournaments. in tournament settings, where most players believe they can outplay their opponents, people are inclined to use teams that leave room for just that--outplaying your opponent. there is no room for outplaying your opponent with baton pass. they have either prepared the correct counters or they haven't. baton pass frankly turns every game into glorified RPS, which, broken or not, sucks and is cancer.
here is the team I used, with some brief rationale behind choices you might find strange at first. I encourage you all to give it a go, so that you can have some on-field experience and see for yourself how stupid this strategy is. that way, you won't think it's just denisssssssssss games that make this strategy cancer, but instead see it for yourself.
- clefable should have softboiled over wish; wish is useless and has lost me some games needlessly, but has not once benefitted me. you see wish here because I was too lazy to open the teambuilder again and change it to softboiled. I like recovery over stored power because now any threat that tries to boost alongside you loses really easily. also, early game passing defense and speed to clefable autowins like 50% of games depending on the opponent's team, and that's much easier to do if you have reliable recovery. sometimes the opponent cleverly gets their mega pinsir in and you can only pass 1 or 2 iron defenses to clefable with no ingrain, and in situations like that (as well as a variety of others) the recovery move allows you to win anyway. stored power is overkill and is only really necessary for teams with chansey, but chansey is generally seen on stall teams that have such a bad matchup even with haze quagsire that you don't even need clefable's stored power to win. fairy is a great typing for mono-attacking, much like dragon used to be in previous gens.
- passing speed and/or defense early game to gardevoir is devastating, because stored power becomes really strong really fast even without any satk boosts, and will-o-wisp --> healing wish to scolipede basically means you can trade gardevoir's life for a ton of scouting on the enemy team and 1-2 of their pokemon. usually the opponent will try to use their answer to bp early in the game to stop you from snowballing into a win, so if you can cripple it with gardevoir and give scoli a full hp second chance, the opponent usually doesn't have an answer. you can proceed to boost up some speed and defense, grab an ingrain, and pass to clefable for a quick and easy sweep. healing wish + screens on bp teams is stupid
- the sweepers (clefable espeon and gardevoir) hardly need any boosts to sweep; pass the minimum to them so that you can conserve health and pass more than once per game. if you autowin you autowin, but if you don't autowin you want to have a second chance because it's easy to lure the opponents into giving up their bp counters if they think your bp pokemon are down for the count.
- geomancy is used on smeargle over quiver dance because with screens you rarely need the sash, but you often find yourself needing sdef boosts really quick compared to 6-mon bp, since you dont have sylveon. this is also the reason that espeon is specially defensive rather than physically. with these tweaks you have the best chance of beating special threats in the early game. beating physical threats in the early game is really easy; just pass defense and speed to clefable or gardevoir straight away and enjoy the free win.
some replays (I didn't bother to save many but here are some)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132885930
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132831709
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132398699
finally I would like to say that while denissss is a fine player and teambuilder, users such as webbowser were making these quick-pass type of teams as early as the beginning of the suspect test or possibly even earlier; there is a replay of me on the mini cancer account weeks ago with a very similar team. this type of team is made simply of the obvious changes post-suspect-test to anybody with experience playing with/against bp. it's not really innovation; to most of you this type of quick-pass team is obvious and looks very familiar to the gen 4 dxs-->gliscor-->metagross quickpass teams. this is exactly why you fuckers should've voted option 3, but oh well.
we don't need time for the metagame to stabilize. when the metagame stabilizes and people are more prepared for BP, it will not have as high of a success rate, but its nature will still be very matchup-based with little room for either player to outplay the other, and that aspect will still make the overall quality of pokemon worse.
baton pass is still cancer. I don't care about whether or not it is broken; I'm more concerned about the extent to which it brings out the rock-paper-scissors element of pokemon.
i abused it under the name "mini cancer" just to see what it was like, and literally every game at the start of team preview I could predict and say "yep this is a won game" or "yep this is a lost game." there were some exceptions where I choked or got haxed where I had the matchup advantage, and some games I clutched out using surprise sets (or just winning 50/50s--another rock-paper-scissors element) that beat the BP counters my opponent carried when they had the advantage, but on the whole the predictions I made in team preview were far too accurate. I got to 12th on the ladder before getting sick of playing, because frankly it just wasn't fun. I could probably write a computer program to get an 80%+ win-rate on the ladder with baton pass. is this the type of metagame we want?
my main point is there's a reason you don't see this shit in tournaments. in tournament settings, where most players believe they can outplay their opponents, people are inclined to use teams that leave room for just that--outplaying your opponent. there is no room for outplaying your opponent with baton pass. they have either prepared the correct counters or they haven't. baton pass frankly turns every game into glorified RPS, which, broken or not, sucks and is cancer.
here is the team I used, with some brief rationale behind choices you might find strange at first. I encourage you all to give it a go, so that you can have some on-field experience and see for yourself how stupid this strategy is. that way, you won't think it's just denisssssssssss games that make this strategy cancer, but instead see it for yourself.
Deoxys-Speed @ Light Clay
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 252 Spd / 252 HP / 4 SDef
Timid Nature
- Taunt
- Stealth Rock
- Light Screen
- Reflect
Smeargle @ Power Herb
Ability: Own Tempo
EVs: 220 Spd / 88 HP / 200 Def
Timid Nature
- Geomancy
- Spore
- Ingrain
- Baton Pass
Scolipede @ Mental Herb
Ability: Speed Boost
EVs: 188 Spd / 80 Def / 240 HP
Timid Nature
- Substitute
- Protect
- Baton Pass
- Iron Defense
Clefable @ Leftovers
Ability: Unaware
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Def / 4 SDef
Bold Nature
- Calm Mind
- Wish
- Moonblast
- Substitute
Espeon @ Leftovers
Ability: Magic Bounce
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SDef
Calm Nature
- Substitute
- Baton Pass
- Stored Power
- Calm Mind
Gardevoir @ Gardevoirite
Ability: Trace
EVs: 252 HP / 188 SAtk / 68 Spd
Modest Nature
- Stored Power
- Hyper Voice
- Healing Wish
- Will-O-Wisp
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 252 Spd / 252 HP / 4 SDef
Timid Nature
- Taunt
- Stealth Rock
- Light Screen
- Reflect
Smeargle @ Power Herb
Ability: Own Tempo
EVs: 220 Spd / 88 HP / 200 Def
Timid Nature
- Geomancy
- Spore
- Ingrain
- Baton Pass
Scolipede @ Mental Herb
Ability: Speed Boost
EVs: 188 Spd / 80 Def / 240 HP
Timid Nature
- Substitute
- Protect
- Baton Pass
- Iron Defense
Clefable @ Leftovers
Ability: Unaware
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Def / 4 SDef
Bold Nature
- Calm Mind
- Wish
- Moonblast
- Substitute
Espeon @ Leftovers
Ability: Magic Bounce
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SDef
Calm Nature
- Substitute
- Baton Pass
- Stored Power
- Calm Mind
Gardevoir @ Gardevoirite
Ability: Trace
EVs: 252 HP / 188 SAtk / 68 Spd
Modest Nature
- Stored Power
- Hyper Voice
- Healing Wish
- Will-O-Wisp
- clefable should have softboiled over wish; wish is useless and has lost me some games needlessly, but has not once benefitted me. you see wish here because I was too lazy to open the teambuilder again and change it to softboiled. I like recovery over stored power because now any threat that tries to boost alongside you loses really easily. also, early game passing defense and speed to clefable autowins like 50% of games depending on the opponent's team, and that's much easier to do if you have reliable recovery. sometimes the opponent cleverly gets their mega pinsir in and you can only pass 1 or 2 iron defenses to clefable with no ingrain, and in situations like that (as well as a variety of others) the recovery move allows you to win anyway. stored power is overkill and is only really necessary for teams with chansey, but chansey is generally seen on stall teams that have such a bad matchup even with haze quagsire that you don't even need clefable's stored power to win. fairy is a great typing for mono-attacking, much like dragon used to be in previous gens.
- passing speed and/or defense early game to gardevoir is devastating, because stored power becomes really strong really fast even without any satk boosts, and will-o-wisp --> healing wish to scolipede basically means you can trade gardevoir's life for a ton of scouting on the enemy team and 1-2 of their pokemon. usually the opponent will try to use their answer to bp early in the game to stop you from snowballing into a win, so if you can cripple it with gardevoir and give scoli a full hp second chance, the opponent usually doesn't have an answer. you can proceed to boost up some speed and defense, grab an ingrain, and pass to clefable for a quick and easy sweep. healing wish + screens on bp teams is stupid
- the sweepers (clefable espeon and gardevoir) hardly need any boosts to sweep; pass the minimum to them so that you can conserve health and pass more than once per game. if you autowin you autowin, but if you don't autowin you want to have a second chance because it's easy to lure the opponents into giving up their bp counters if they think your bp pokemon are down for the count.
- geomancy is used on smeargle over quiver dance because with screens you rarely need the sash, but you often find yourself needing sdef boosts really quick compared to 6-mon bp, since you dont have sylveon. this is also the reason that espeon is specially defensive rather than physically. with these tweaks you have the best chance of beating special threats in the early game. beating physical threats in the early game is really easy; just pass defense and speed to clefable or gardevoir straight away and enjoy the free win.
some replays (I didn't bother to save many but here are some)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132885930
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132831709
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-132398699
finally I would like to say that while denissss is a fine player and teambuilder, users such as webbowser were making these quick-pass type of teams as early as the beginning of the suspect test or possibly even earlier; there is a replay of me on the mini cancer account weeks ago with a very similar team. this type of team is made simply of the obvious changes post-suspect-test to anybody with experience playing with/against bp. it's not really innovation; to most of you this type of quick-pass team is obvious and looks very familiar to the gen 4 dxs-->gliscor-->metagross quickpass teams. this is exactly why you fuckers should've voted option 3, but oh well.
we don't need time for the metagame to stabilize. when the metagame stabilizes and people are more prepared for BP, it will not have as high of a success rate, but its nature will still be very matchup-based with little room for either player to outplay the other, and that aspect will still make the overall quality of pokemon worse.
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I disagree with the notion that an average player would not be able to take an arguably easy-to-use (insert "relatively" there, if you're being snarky) playstyle that was already established in previous generations and happen to get to the top of the ladder and stay there, given how overpowered the playstyle was (before getting nerfed) at the advent of the new generation. Personally, I just don't see your reasoning – if you point me towards it, I'll address it, but currently it seems that you're just taking it on faith that "a bad player wouldn't have been able to do this 'just cuz,'" even though the playstyle was so strong that there was a vote to nerf it, and the playstyle had already been ridiculously powerful in previous generations (specifically, 3rd gen).
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This reasoning is not logical. You are excluding other possible factors that contribute to whether or not people would use BP in your hypothetical scenario where BP is mindless. What if people don't find it fun to use? What if people don't want to use a playstyle that they find overpowered? What if people prefer to use teams with more than one win condition? What if people prefer to use more varied teams? There are other reasons that I'm not going to list because the point should be clear already: there are many factors that contribute to the usage of a pokemon/team/playstyle, and "mindlessness" is certainly not the only one.
Your usage of the word "some" near the beginning of this quote does well to heavily underplay the fact that no team archetype other than BP can win so consistently against so many different teams. However, that does nothing to actually change this fact.
Whether you've come across 1%, 5%, 90%, or 54.481341% in your personal experience is irrelevant in the context of this discussion because if we were to start considering the individual experiences of one person as being representative of the majority of experiences, we'd be committing a whole slew of logical fallacies. I'm not trying to tell you that you can't use your experiences as proof, in all contexts, but that if by your own admission, the players from your experiences are as bad as you say, then what would it matter if the given strategy/team under discussion really was overpowered? Wouldn't it be the case that these unskilled would never give you a clear indication of the efficacy of the strategy? Or, supposing they were good players, would it really matter if you were only quoting your own experiences? The point is that the amount of evidence/experiences against BP is tremendous, because, conveniently, Denis happens to be on top of the ladder and plays against a large amount of skilled players, the majority of which do not use BP, such that there are extensive amounts of replays available for search which demonstrate how his team can destroy a large variety of playstyles.
It doesn't matter if something that is too strong if correctly executed is difficult to execute; as long as there isn't too much luck involved, such that the execution can become consistent, people will eventually be able to get so good that the playstyle becomes too difficult to counter.
Semantics. Obviously, everyone that's claiming that BP is "boring" or "annoying" also have additional comments to make about it. You're not doing anything here but wagging your finger at those people that so far, haven't bothered to articulate their distaste beyond the adjectives you've described, which is something that's typically done by the moderators and not the users.
You can make this point with validity when the popular opinion holds that "well-executed stall" is as "boring/annoying" as BP. Until then, this is only your opinion and doesn't do much in the way of asserting why BP is not whatever it is you're arguing against. In any case, even if you do prove that stall is boring/annoying, that will do nothing to address why BP is not problematic. Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Preferred" is the word you use here which invalidates the claim – BP counters too many playstyles. Not just a given person's "preferred" style. In any case, your example in the second sentence of this quote is contradictory; the moves you list in that sentence, even by your own admission, are hardly obscure.
Yes. We agree.
It doesn't matter if only one player is able to abuse the strategy; as long it can be overwhelmingly explained and shown why the strategy is too powerful, it should be banned.
I don't have anything to say to this, but I did read it. I'm not trying to be rude here, so don't think I'm ignoring it or something.
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