Baton Pass. Yes, again.

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Because the move itself is not broken or uncompetitive, it is our obligation to preserve Baton Pass for the many Pokemon that make competitive use of it. What do we really lose by continuing to do these specific complex bans anyway? So what if you are clairvoyant enough to discern that one day Baton Pass will somehow be broken in some form again? Are we wasting too much time making these PR threads for your liking? To make the jump from "some forms of Baton Pass are broken" to "too many forms of Baton Pass are broken, let's cut our losses and ban the move as a whole" is not only unreasonable but completely unnecessary. Also, it doesn't help that the only two examples you could think to produce along with Speed Boost pass, CelePass and Amnesia + Iron Defense Mew, are embarrassingly far from being broken. At its core, the move is not broken, so why not nerf it into infinity if we have to? Again, this consensus was already reached in the Leppa Berry thread; try actually reading that thread and the real reason why Leppa Berry isn't banned and I'm sure you'll understand why trying to ban Baton Pass is out of line with tiering policy (except that this is even worse because BP is much more relevant than Leppa Berry!).

In short, 1) the idea that Baton Pass is broken is flawed, because an element that is only broken when combined with other particular elements is not inherently broken and 2) there is simply no reason not to continue with these complex bans; you say that we should "be consistent and avoid complex bans as much as possible", but you have imagined any inconsistencies, because complex bans on moves/items and complex bans on Pokemon are to be and always have been treated completely differently.
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Those two examples sound nice, before you realise that hey, there are broken forms of baton pass right now, in the form of ChickenPass in NU and potentially NinjaskPass there too. And as for examples of BP being broken, the full bp chains, geopass, smashpass, quiverpass, gliscorpass and IDScolipass have all been broken. Yes they all have speed involved in them, but the simplest solution is simply banning the move. The reason we shouldn't preserve Baton Pass is the same reason we shouldn't preserve pokemon like Lando-I by just banning Sheer Force on it, we aim for the simplest solution as often as we can, and by nerfing Baton Pass we are going against our own Policy to keep tiering decisions simple.

You say it deprives 88 pokemon of a move (87 if you dont count Blaziken), but of the ones that have Baton Pass slashed on their dex analysis, it removes the move from... 13. Including Combusken and Ninjask, which are potentially broken in NU because of Baton Pass. And that's including cases like Mr Mime and Jolteon where baton pass is not a necessity at all, and such metagame wonders as Illumise and Torchic.

And outright banning BP should have been the decision before. Nerfing it was not something we had to do, and just muddies the water in situations like DynamicPunch in PU. We should just correct the mistake of trying to restrict the broken thing and just outright ban it.
 
mew, lopunny, medicham and togekiss are good baton pass users too, and iirc bp togetic is a thing in ru and floatzel in nu. your list of viable baton passers if probably missing more stuff. i used to think keeping tiering decisions simple was a good thing too, but take a look at these 2 posts: 1 2. i think atomicllamas would disagree with your points presented here as well.
 
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PoMMan said:
Those two examples sound nice, before you realise that hey, there are broken forms of baton pass right now, in the form of ChickenPass in NU and potentially NinjaskPass there too. And as for examples of BP being broken, the full bp chains, geopass, smashpass, quiverpass, gliscorpass and IDScolipass have all been broken. Yes they all have speed involved in them, but the simplest solution is simply banning the move. The reason we shouldn't preserve Baton Pass is the same reason we shouldn't preserve pokemon like Lando-I by just banning Sheer Force on it, we aim for the simplest solution as often as we can, and by nerfing Baton Pass we are going against our own Policy to keep tiering decisions simple.

You say it deprives 88 pokemon of a move (87 if you dont count Blaziken), but of the ones that have Baton Pass slashed on their dex analysis, it removes the move from... 13. Including Combusken and Ninjask, which are potentially broken in NU because of Baton Pass. And that's including cases like Mr Mime and Jolteon where baton pass is not a necessity at all, and such metagame wonders as Illumise and Torchic.

And outright banning BP should have been the decision before. Nerfing it was not something we had to do, and just muddies the water in situations like DynamicPunch in PU. We should just correct the mistake of trying to restrict the broken thing and just outright ban it.
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Can we not just assume that chickenpass and ninjaskpass are broken for the sake of your argument? For what its worth almost every single council discussion has come up with the conclusion that it's not actually broken and people are just complaining about an autopilot strategy like they tend to every few months (see: shell smash, rain, sun, in countless np: threads).

It does deprive certain pokemon of a valuable moveslot, I'm sure why you think you can just write this off because its not as relevant on some lower tier mons. Just off the top of my head Dodrio, Floatzel, Flareon, Mr.Mime, and Shedinja are all pokemon i've used on competitive teams that really appreciate having baton pass as a move to gain momentum and are big parts of why I've used them in the past. (shit, baton pass gaining momentum for shedinja was the reason it was one of the best pokemon in xy nu) I think in general the 'this move isn't a necessity' is pretty weak for two reasons, 1) in some cases it actually is, and 2) what the fuck gives anyone the right to decide what move is a necessity on a set, if u can make the argument bp isnt a necessity on jolteon i could just as easily make the argument that stealth rock isn't a necessity on garchomp. it's subjective as fuck and your creating your own reality in order to justify a ban you want.

I'd like to believe a nerf was discussed simply because theres no reason to ban a non-broken mechanic from the game. Baton pass in and of itself isn't broken. Passing stat boosts via baton pass is the problem, and if anything thats what the conversation should be about, it allows dry passing for the pokemon that need it and literally every 'broken' iteration of baton passing you've brought up has to do with some sort of stat being passed.

I tried writing this at least 6 times and couldn't get my words to come across how I wanted, so I hope everything makes sense.
 
Not a necessity was the phrase I used when I meant there are other sets or on the same set baton pass is slashed on the dex analysis, ie: Jolteon has life orb sets and Mr Mime's dex analysis has focus blast dashed next to baton pass on the same set. I wasn't aware that the council did not think they were broken, and I apologize for assuming they were after seeing the former NU TL say he'd suspect one of the passers.

But as for the nerf thing:

I'd like to believe a nerf was discussed simply because theres no reason to ban a non-broken pokemon from the game. Greninja/Blaziken/Landorus in and of itself isn't broken.
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I changed the words around, obviously, but that argument could be applied to any non-complex ban we've ever done. Everything can be nerf'd so that the non-broken aspect of it isn't around any more, and I dislike the fact that we have done so for BP.

If Drypassing is a compromise, I'd reluctantly accept it, I can admit that in a situation where bp cannot pass boosts outside of shit like Ancient Power it would not be broken, but I'd much rather we just outright ban the broken thing instead of restricting it.
 
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Adaam. said:
Posting for Threw who does not have PR access. Tagging Jibaku since it is a response to his posts:
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My post was targetted more at the complex banning of other things that were mentioned, not directly at the Baton Pass clausing. I'll let the others handle that. I do however personally think that, from an outside perspective, the Baton Pass clause complications look a little ridiculous given the intended use of the move.
 
baton pass isn't a pokemon

we deal with pokemon differently than we do with entire moves and abilities and items because such things are typically employed by multiple pokemon and as such is a different standard / situation and cannot just be a one to one replacement omg
 
Sorry for the fewline post coming but wouldnt be just better doing a simple ban BP+stat boost keeping DryPass alive? Every move/item/ability that can stat boost wouldn't be used with BP in this way and you will definitely get rid of every issue coming from this move. Will this take off several non-broken mons? Well, also many other "bans for the good" (BW weather ability ban + DPP Sand Veil/Snow Cloak, poor Sandslash being discriminated by both bans) took off several "not broken/unhealthy/whatever" mons for the sake of getting rid of a major issue, so I don't think that CM/NP/Agility pass taken off would be that dangerous for Gen 6 or even 5/4 tiers.
 
blarajan said:
baton pass isn't a pokemon

we deal with pokemon differently than we do with entire moves and abilities and items because such things are typically employed by multiple pokemon and as such is a different standard / situation and cannot just be a one to one replacement omg
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Fine then, we didn't just ban swagger in conjunction with Prankster, or OHKO moves on good pokemon. Those are more extreme examples, obviously, but the underlying premise that we dont nerf broken (or in prankster's case, uncompetitive) moves until they are manageable, we just ban them.

I get that Baton Pass is somewhat unique in its situation, but it is currently contrary to our normal tiering policy, and I feel like it would be better if it was consistent.

And yes Prague I'd reluctantly accept a ban of baton passing boosts, but I'd much rather we just be consistent and ban the broken thing.
 
it's been a year since the bp clause got updated and it hasn't been an issue anywhere (yeah even in nu.. people just complain about everything). so you still want to ban the move just because it would look better? "let's ban non-broken things cause its easier, and lol, who cares" is something I'm absolutely opposed to

ps: if someone comes up with a ban worthy bp strat even under the current bp clause, then i will fully support your proposal
 
Well i don't know about everyone else, but I'm in support of the Boosts + bp ban whilst keeping dry pass. Overall, there's been so many things that cause it to be a massive pain in the ass with cheap strats that keep coming around.
In the last few months, things like cosmic power pass, nasty pass to sharpedo, speed boost + baton pass with combusken have all been a royal pain in the ass and with the track record that baton pass has had in previous time after all the patches and restrictions to it, I am very open to the suggestion that it would be a lot easier to get rid of it.







Also fuck kiyo for bringing it vs me in spl >:(
 
My post was a response to Dennis's post about if someone could come up with a broken strat under the current bp clause, that he would support banning it or just it + boosts.

As for why we should ban passing boosts (given that people want drypassing), there is no reason to be complex here outside of trying to preserve the slight non-broken elements of a broken thing that could potentially be broken in the future. If Blaziken is ever unbanned for example, because it is not broken (in a hypothetical gen7 where this is the case), SD or NP passing to blaziken could be broken then. I dont have evidence to support this outside of Nasty Plot to Sharpedo being broken in RU, but Shark was broken there anyway, but it is not a difficult thing to see as a potential issue.
 
PoMMan said:
My post was a response to Dennis's post about if someone could come up with a broken strat under the current bp clause, that he would support banning it or just it + boosts.

As for why we should ban passing boosts (given that people want drypassing), there is no reason to be complex here outside of trying to preserve the slight non-broken elements of a broken thing that could potentially be broken in the future. If Blaziken is ever unbanned for example, because it is not broken (in a hypothetical gen7 where this is the case), SD or NP passing to blaziken could be broken then. I dont have evidence to support this outside of Nasty Plot to Sharpedo being broken in RU, but Shark was broken there anyway, but it is not a difficult thing to see as a potential issue.
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My misunderstanding, I apologize. Regardless, I do not think it is fair to call the non-broken elements of Baton Pass slight. The uses of Baton Pass are very viable strategies, unlike... say, Leppa Berry. I'll wait to see what deniss says though.
 
PoMMan said:
As for why we should ban passing boosts (given that people want drypassing), there is no reason to be complex here outside of trying to preserve the slight non-broken elements of a broken thing that could potentially be broken in the future.
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What do you believe will make baton pass broken in the future? It is pretty obvious the problem is boosts from moves / berries / abilities augmenting the power of the receiving pokemon. If you don't provide a specific example, you're just appealing to fear that this will still be a problem.

plz don't say subpass lol
 
as much as i enjoyed njnp's creativity, i have to say his team is extremely match-up reliant. gardevoir and mega alakazam are extremely troublesome, azumarill beats anything 1x1, dragon tail chomper can phaze anything pretty easily, tornadus and pinsir are also very annoying (especially when your only flying resist is an offensive heatran) and combos such as tyranitar + phazer, body slam jirachi + phazer, whirlwind hippowdon + kingdra counter/check (such as clefable, ferrothorn, azumarill, prankster twave etc), specs keldeo + anything to revenge kill or counter/check kingdra (just in case it tries to do something while keldeo is locked into a water type move) + something to deal with a damaged (and potentially burned) espeon, as well as many others cases i'm missing right now are pretty much enough to stop this strategy. so yeah, common stuff beating this team definitely means it isn't ban-worthy.

sure this team worked on ladder (where lame stall teams are popular), but it doesn't mean it is broken. once people know the team, it gets much easier to deal with. stuff such as geopass, smashpass and iron def scolipede deserved to be banned because they saw tournament usage (finchinator once said geopass win rate in smogon tour was something close to 70% iirc). i highly doubt this lansat berry scolipede team will ever get a good win rate in official tournaments. maybe i'm wrong, but i think its way too soon to say this is ban-worthy material.
 
Why are you using complaints coming from non-top players about a strategy that isn't even broken, that rely on very specific things in its matchup versus the opponents ( all possible ways to beat said strategy, which you should actually know all of them before even arguing about this), as an argument for banning everything based on Baton Pass? And those "complaints" were from a specific lower tier, so why should it affect everybody else?

transivity, or w.e it is called, was broken if i recall correctly. Instead of talking for everybody, you should let each councils of all the standard metagames decide on the topic.

You just seem to be trying to find reasons to ban it without even going in depth on why the move itself is the problem, or why a certain strategy like sd pass is "broken" in uu when you do seem to have no experience on that.

Agreeing with everything denissss, kiyo, and blarajan posted.
 
PoMMan said:
Fine then, we didn't just ban swagger in conjunction with Prankster, or OHKO moves on good pokemon. Those are more extreme examples, obviously, but the underlying premise that we dont nerf broken (or in prankster's case, uncompetitive) moves until they are manageable, we just ban them.

I get that Baton Pass is somewhat unique in its situation, but it is currently contrary to our normal tiering policy, and I feel like it would be better if it was consistent.

And yes Prague I'd reluctantly accept a ban of baton passing boosts, but I'd much rather we just be consistent and ban the broken thing.
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Swagger and OHKO moves could easily receive a blanket ban because even though Swagger may not be broken on non-Prankster mons and Sheer Cold may not be broken on Spheal, fact of the matter is that no matter how these moves may be applied, they are never a healthy contribution a competitive metagame. Swagger, no matter in what context, is entirely reliant on luck and contributes nothing valuable to the metagame. OHKO moves, no matter what Pokemon uses them, also are luck-reliant and add nothing to the metagame. Meanwhile, drypassing is not reliant on luck whatsoever, and what's more, it actually has become a staple on a number of Pokemon and as such contributes a fair amount to the metagame.

What blarajan said is also true: if you ban a move, an ability, or an item, there is no direct replacement for it. Therefore, banning a whole item or a move can have a lot more impact on the metagame than banning one individual Pokemon.

To be quite honest, if you really want to keep your bans as simple as possible, the simplest solution would be to just ban those Pokemon that are broken with Baton Pass. We don't do this, however, because we know that this would affect a lot of Pokemon and therefore visibly shake up a lot of tiers. This goes to show that simplicity is only desirable when the alternative solution causes more unnecessary collateral damage to the metagame. Banning BP + (speed) boosting minimizes collateral damage, therefore we should consider it the superior option.
 
Not quite sure how keeping Baton Pass around despite lots of attempt to specifically nerf it in an attempt to keep wholesome strats around is ok, but PU trying to ban Dynamic Punch to keep the tier healthy is bad.

This has always been my grievance with the Smogon tiering system. We are super inconsistent, yet try to make it seem like we have these rock solid rules. How many complex bans have existed over the years for no reason other than a desire to "better the tier." Banning Baton Pass is the move that makes the most sense. We don't end up with asinine complex bans, and we still eliminate the problems it causes. Yeah, it would suck banning stuff like Celebi Pass and the like, cause there's definitely nothing broken about that strategy, but that certainly didn't stop us when it came to Frosslass. So why are we jumping through hoops for this? Baton pass has created many broken strategies. The easiest and simplest conclusion is to just ban the move. But we haven't, even though complex bans go against what we say is our policy for tiering.

Make all the excuses for it that you want, but Baton Pass is clearly the broken element here, and should be banned.
 
I have a question that I feel should be asked in this thread.

If something is done to Baton Pass, will Blaziken be affected? How will we go about that?
 
I think it may be worth taking a look at Baton Pass yet again.

It's been picking up a lot of traction again (specifically Speed passing) especially in OLT where it's an incredibly cheese playstyle that nets wins very very easily, this is mostly a result of Scolipede passing Speed to breakers like Megagross / Manaphy / Chomper, all of which have either their own boosting options or a large movepool which makes it very difficult to keep in check. It's not exactly hard for the Scoli user to net boosts either as I've seen them running Attract to get the easier Sub which makes passing easier since you're forcing your opponent into a 50% chance to not move.

Whether we should keep jumping through loops to preserve Baton Pass or to just outright ban isn't up to me, but I've always seen the problematic components being passers that can pass too easily, ie with Scolipede in OU and Combusken in NU. This is mostly because I've still yet to see Ninjask being considered workable on these teams, because it just simply doesn't from my experience, I still strongly think it's consistent Speed passers but it's w/e

Anyway, it's only been a week or so since these teams have actually picked up in usage, so I think BP should be kept a close eye on for the next while to see how the meta adapts to it, but it generally steamrolls bog standard offense, balance, and stall teams with ease.

Ban Magic Bounce already
 
No need to rewrite it in other ways so, just from few posts above:

Prague Kick said:
Sorry for the fewline post coming but wouldnt be just better doing a simple ban BP+stat boost keeping DryPass alive? Every move/item/ability that can stat boost wouldn't be used with BP in this way and you will definitely get rid of every issue coming from this move. Will this take off several non-broken mons? Well, also many other "bans for the good" (BW weather ability ban + DPP Sand Veil/Snow Cloak, poor Sandslash being discriminated by both bans) took off several "not broken/unhealthy/whatever" mons for the sake of getting rid of a major issue, so I don't think that CM/NP/Agility pass taken off would be that dangerous for Gen 6 or even 5/4 tiers.
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I believe this is the right way to fix Baton Pass issue since when there was the first BP suspect but hey it seems I have to wait years before getting listened
 
You can't ban BP + stat boosts because you could be in a situation where you unintentionally pass stats and lose (or have it fail) because of it.

Let's say you have a slower mon that you want to DryPass with. You go to click Baton Pass, and I Heart Swap my stat boosts to you, or I click Flatter against you before you do it. Congratulations! Either you now lose the match because of unintentional stat passing, or it just "fails", which wouldn't be a good idea anyway because that goes against cart mechanics.

It could only work if you set up a system saying that you can't pass your own stat boosts or something like that, but at that point it's starting to get a bit confusing.

Also, since I imagine this situation already exists in some way, what exactly would happen if my hypothetical occurs?

Ugh, this is getting too convoluted. Pls ban.
 
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