[toshimelonhead]

I am starting to wonder if this lack of creativity in Gen 5 is not just a weather problem, but a problem with Pokemon itself. Pokemon is at this point a very mature franchise. We have gone through 600+ pokemon over effectively 15 years (spanning multiple generations) and through millions of battles have found 7-8 combinations that "work". I know the fallacies here--we didn't start with 600 pokemon and the Gen1 meta is drastically different from the GenV meta--but the point remains that we have discovered the vast majority of the metagame, in my opinion.

Gen1 was easy to discover everything since there are only 10 effective pokemon to use. Gen2 got a little better, but it still revolves around the same 12-15 pokemon and very similar strategies (not to mention the endless battles). Gens III and IV were a huge step in the right direction, but they also brought huge competitive shifts which weather pales in comparison. Think about the physical/special split and how that completely disrupted the metagame from Gen III to Gen IV, or even how abilities added another huge layer of complexity from GSC to ADV. Instead from DPP to Gen BW, the biggest change was not adding a new complexity, but from building from previous framework that DPP laid upon. Even though Gen BW felt like a completely different meta when it first came out, looking back the gap between DPP and BW is smaller than in other generations. Heatran in Gen V is the same Heatran we loved from Gen IV. From this alone, it is likely that we had "discovered" almost a third of the metagame before even knowing of Gen V. We already knew some solid cores like Skarmbliss and Dragmag. Nothing transferred like that from Gen II to Gen III or Gen III to Gen IV.

This "prediscovery" problem is huge for OU because unlike lower tiers, the parameters don't change as much. In this way, BW OU feels a lot like an Ubers metagame where stuff hits really hard and there's not much you can really do to change it. If people discover something in a lower tier, it's gone usually by people using it. There's not that same flexibility in OU since we don't ban on usage (as we shouldn't), we ban for more nebulous reasons. A metagame without rain still means that we've "discovered" about 60-70 percent of the BW OU metagame just through the massive number of battles and collective knowledge over the years. Banning weather will not fix this. Sure we can make new sets and there's more options than ever to do that, but collectively we know the best sets. There's not a ton left to surprise us anymore. While weather makes it worse in that it's very easy to make a quality team, removing weather does not mean that we'll have a balanced metagame or one where teams would be more original. We would almost need a brand new game of Pokemon, which hopefully Gen 6 could provide. But even then, it seems like there's not much more to expand.