Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Hello all, and welcome to the Stealth Rock discussion thread.
Stealth Rock is an incredibly powerful move that has shaped a large part of the competitive metagame since it was introduced to Pokemon. Recently, there have been some calls from a minority of users to suspect the move. This push has not seen much discussion outside of a thread on the issue toward the end of BW2, wherein the difficulty of having a rational debate on the internet was reaffirmed. Fortunately, I think the users in VR can do much better, so I wanted to make this thread to give an opportunity for good battlers to discuss their opinions about the strength and possible suspect-worthiness of Stealth Rock.
Before we jump in, haunter wanted me to clarify that the OU council is currently not considering a suspect test for Stealth Rock (which was also stated elsewhere by Aldaron). This is purely a thread to discuss/debate your individual opinions on the issue, not a place to petition for or against such a suspect test to the council.
That said, I'm interested to hear your general opinions about Stealth Rock. Consider discussing:
The move's distribution and how it affects the viability of its users,
The move's counters - Defog, Rapid Spin, and Magic Bounce - and how they affect the viability of their users,
The move's qualities that make it uniquely important to have it on a team - keeping in mind that over 93%* of teams had Stealth Rock based on the most recent 1825 ladder statistics,
Whether having Stealth Rock is a necessity when teambuilding,
Whether having a counter to Stealth Rock is a necessity when teambuilding,
The move's effects on the broader metagame,
Other interesting thoughts/ideas you have about Stealth Rock,
And finally, with all the above in mind, whether you think Stealth Rock would be a legitimate candidate for a suspect test.
Please engage, respectfully, with the arguments and positions of others - we all get smarter when we interrogate and investigate other stances on an issue. I look forward to seeing some good discussion below. Thanks to all who participate.
*I calculated this by multiplying the % usage of a Pokemon with the % of times Stealth Rock was on its moveset (from the moveset statistics) and summing these values for all users of SR with a usage rate above .5%. This is not exact because: there are some SR users below that threshold (although they're very bad), there may be some Pokemon who have SR a small enough amount of the time that it is collapsed into "Other" on the statistics, and there may be some teams with multiple Stealth Rock users.
I’m gonna kick this thread off since I’ve been the one bothering the OU staff about it so much. I don’t want to post a long diatribe with all my opinions about Stealth Rock since I think it would choke off discussion, but I would like to bring up a couple of things about the move that make it so powerful and are reasons why I would like to see it suspected. In this post, I’d like to talk about one of the meta-theoretical things that I’ve been thinking about a lot with regards to Stealth Rock recently.
Stealth Rock removes the burden of actualizing momentum
An aside: I think one of the broader failings of the Smogon community is the lack of theorizing about the game of Pokemon at a meta-level. When you look at other strategically deep and widely popular games like Magic, chess, various MMORPGs, etc. (I know that was a wide spread, but they basically share the properties of being popular and strategically difficult), their top players have spent time trying to understand the fundamental properties of the game and as such have built up a foundation of terminology and strategy that makes talking about the game much easier. In particular, this assists when discussing power levels of game elements. Concepts like card advantage in Magic or spatial advantages/tempo in chess allow players to easier evaluate power levels of cards/favorability of positions, respectively. We don’t really have that here. Outside DougJustDoug’s “Characteristics of a Desirable Metagame”, we don’t really talk about what makes game elements strong or broken, or what is desirable or not, or what we should be looking for that make Pokemon or moves or teams “powerful”. I’m gonna try to do a little bit of that theorizing here. Hopefully the following doesn’t seem too pseudo-intellectual or over the top – that’s not what I’m going for – but I do think that competitive Pokemon is a very strategically deep game that we could stand to understand, at a fundamental level, much better.
Something that’s very interesting to me is the concept of momentum, which is tough to strictly define, but is generally agreed to be very important to competitive Pokemon. The loose sense that I think can approximate “momentum” is something like – “something that a battler has when the current 1v1 matchup is favorable for him/her”. I’m going to try to tease out this definition a bit more so we can nail down what we’re talking about.
Pokemon is a game of limited information, in that you don’t immediately have knowledge of all the capabilities of your opponent’s Pokemon. You can by inspection know its species (and on rare occasion, not even that – Zoroark is an interesting inversion of the standard), and as a battle goes on, you can deduce or discover information about its item, move choices, and even EVs/nature. But since not all of this information is immediately available to a battler, classifying the favorability of any given 1v1 matchup is likely impossible. As a random example – say I have a 25% health LO Latios on the battlefield, and my opponent has a 50% health Keldeo. In fact, this Keldeo may be a Specs set, which would make the situation objectively favorable for me, since I can outspeed the Keldeo and kill it with Psyshock. However, if the opponent plays the match in such a way that I suspect it could be a Scarfed Keldeo, I will believe myself to be in an unfavorable matchup and act accordingly – so independent of the objective facts of the situation, I have lost momentum. Given that analysis, it seems likely that the “momentum” of a given situation is as much determined by the player’s perception of that situation as it is by the material facts of the matter.
With this in mind, I will say that in a given battle state, a player has the momentum if:
- He believes that the situation is favorable for him.
- His opponent believes that the situation is unfavorable for himself.
The player’s opponent has the momentum in the analogously reversed situation. There are certainly some situations where it is unclear which player is favored; when this occurs, we will presume nobody has the momentum.
An aside: an interesting case would be the situation where Player A believes that he is favored, but his opponent B also believes that B is favored – or the opposite, where both believe they are at a disadvantage. Here each will act as though they have/lack the momentum, leading to some interesting circumstances. I’m unsure how this situation should be classified; in any case, it is beyond the spectrum of the analysis as it relates to Stealth Rock.
We should generally be able to assume that when faced with an unfavorable situation, a player will attempt to improve his prospects by switching. There are other possibilities – stalling tactics to gain more information (Protect, Substitute, recover off a hit), a small number of moves that can change the conditions of the battle to improve your situation (burning a physical attacker, Reflect Type, some sort of boosting move…although if something like this works, it’s debatable whether the opponent had the momentum in the first place) – but typically, a player is going to switch in order to improve the matchup for himself.
Now let’s presume that we’re in a battle between players A and B, and we’ve reached a situation where player A has the momentum. From here, with regards to momentum, I see three possibilities:
Case 1: player A keeps/maintains the momentum. Player B will take an action in the effort to change the situation (likely a switch), but player A could keep pace and make another change to maintain favorability. The most typical method of doing this would be the double switch. This might even make the matchup more favorable, so player A might have the momentum even more solidly. Case 2: player A loses the momentum. This could either imply that player B gains the momentum, or that neither player has it. This would be done if player A mispredicts B’s switch or misreads the situation (or B predicts particularly well), leaving A unable to capitalize on having the momentum. Case 3: player A actualizes his momentum. Player A leverages the favorability of the matchup and uses it to gain an advantage. This would be either crippling/KOing the Pokemon B currently has in play, choosing a move that damages B’s switchin, or applying some sort of boost to your own team (in the form of weather, Aromatherapy, or a stat-boosting move).
There is some overlap here – for example, in Case 1, if you increase your momentum with a good double switch, that might be a form of actualizing your momentum. In Case 3, if you cripple your counter, maybe you are also keeping the momentum by maintaining the favorability of the situation. In any case, this soft division seems to me a decent analysis of the available possibilities.
One thing that is very important here is that having the momentum, on its own, does nothing. Simply “being favored” at any given snapshot of the battle does not directly help you win – you must, at some point, “turn in” that momentum – actualizing your advantage – for it to help you win.
And now, we get to Stealth Rock. A major trouble I have with Stealth Rock is that it breaks this balance with regards to the momentum. How? It turns “keeping momentum” into “actualizing momentum”. If you have Stealth Rock up on the opponent’s side of the field, as long as you keep the momentum (thereby forcing your opponent to consistently switch), you are actualizing your momentum since Stealth Rock is chipping away at your opponent’s health. It turns “being in a favorable position” into “winning” without any work on behalf of the player. Whereas you otherwise have the burden of actualizing your momentum, converting your favorable position – by predicting well, attacking at the right times, setting up at the right times, etc. – Stealth Rock allows you to simply maintain the momentum and increase your lead.
Looking around for other game elements that share this property, I don’t find very many – and most of the ones that do exist are very strong. Damaging weather effects – sand and hail – do (typically much less) passive damage, but are now (thankfully) limited in duration and are overall much less powerful. The same goes for Spikes and Toxic Spikes (the power level is there, but they’re outshined by Stealth Rock). Volt Switch and U-Turn actualize momentum while allowing a battler to maintain it, which is why they are incredibly useful, with entire teams built around them and Pokemon becoming much stronger if they have access to them. The same goes for Regenerator, to some extent, another very powerful game element – but none of these are as widely distributed or ubiquitously useful as Stealth Rock. I can think of no other relevant game elements that share this dubious distinction of allowing a battler to simultaneously keep and actualize momentum.
What practical effects does this have? If we consider carefully, I think we’d find the two most maligned playstyles – full stall and full offense – benefit the most from being able to actualize momentum by keeping it. “Braindead” offense with Stealth Rock up can simply switch from massively powerful attacker to massively powerful attacker, occasionally firing off hugely damaging moves, because Stealth Rock gives them “inevitability” by providing a free and repeatable source of damage. Meanwhile, 6-wall full stall can simply switch between powerful walls, recovering off damage all the while, while allowing Stealth Rock to do the work of wearing down the attackers. Obviously this isn’t quite so easy – there are countermeasures, and the farthest of each extreme is not viable because of them – but the effect of Stealth Rock, and the ability to simultaneously actualize and keep momentum in general, is to strengthen these mostly skill-less extremes.
I think that this effect is very bad for the metagame, and we can eliminate the most degenerate source of this characteristic by suspecting Stealth Rock. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this issue.
Aside: you’ll note that the same applies to the other, similar elements that I mentioned above – with VoltTurn spam strengthening offense, and Regenerator “spam” (cores, really) being a boon for full stall.
I believe Stealth Rock enhances the skill element of the game. By putting a tax on switches, it forces you to make wise decisions. It also checks a number of Pokemon such as Pinsir, Charizard, and Dragonite, who would likely be broken otherwise. If anything, it is far weaker this generation, thanks to the new Defog dynamics. Before, players had to rely on Rapid Spin, which had very poor distribution and could be blocked.
Reverb, if it's alright with you, I'd like to put the Defog/keeps things in check arguments to the side for a moment and talk about the first thing you said:
I've heard variations on this from a lot of people, and I don't really understand it, so I'd like to share my thoughts so you can see where I'm coming from and maybe show me where I'm off base.
For starters, I think switching has a tax built in - if you switch, you forfeit the ability to hurt your opponent on that turn, and you give him a free turn to do whatever he wants. That is not negligible at all. Games are routinely won or lost by getting a setup sweeper a free turn on a choice-locked Pokemon and taking advantage of the forced switch. Why is an additional tax necessary?
I also think this has the negative effect of misplacing the burden to act within a battle. Let me give a situation to try to clarify what I'm getting at.
Let's say you and I have two full health Pokemon each. I have a Latios and a Heatran, and you have a Mawile and a Gyarados. Let's just say for the sake of argument that Latios always beats Gyarados and loses to Mawile, and Heatran always beats Mawile and loses to Gyarados (I'm trying to simplify here).
We begin - you have Mawile out, and I have Latios. The best play is for me to switch to Heatran, so I do. You predict this and switch to Gyarados.
The best play for me is to switch to Latios, so I do. You predict and switch to Mawile.
Etc., etc.
So here, you're always in the better situation, but by smart switching, I can maintain neutrality.
Now put SR on either side of the field. Now, what becomes an even situation is tilted, because if each of us consistently makes the best play, whoever has SR on their side of the field will eventually lose from the passive damage. Eventually, the person with SR on their side of the field will be forced to make a risky, suboptimal play - perhaps leaving in Gyarados on a Latios with Thunderbolt, hoping that the opponent will mispredict and pay for it.
Why is that desirable? The player with SR up is now given the burden of making a suboptimal, risky play. Why is that better? Doesn't that contradict your assertion that taxing switches forces players to make "wise decisions"?
Why is that desirable? The player with SR up is now given the burden of making a suboptimal, risky play. Why is that better? Doesn't that contradict your assertion that taxing switches forces players to make "wise decisions"?
So how exactly is that the players fault, the one with no SR advantage? It's common knowledge that when one doesn't have the advantage, SR or not, they will be required at times to make sub optimal plays here and there. As such it is up to both players to try and gain the advantage through whatever means is available at that point in time, which includes implementing Stealth Rock on the opponents side of the field if they feel its necessary of course. I can sympathize that it is a centralizing force in the game but I do believe it's one of those centralizing forces that encourages a much more healthy metagame than say one without it. It makes forms of stall viable because Stealth Rock is one of their main means of acquiring passive damage. It stops people from just cruising on by using Sash Offense and basically relying on the momentum of which person will lose their sash first and which one doesn't. Also as Reverb pointed out, it keeps plenty of things in check that would otherwise simply be too much. Sure you can use the argument "Well isn't that grounds that the illusion of Stealth Rock damage makes it seem not broken when it is?". Let's not forget though that this is an aspect that correlates to balance.
Let's say we went ahead and took out all the bulky Electric, Water, Steel, and Rock types out of the tier. As of now Talonflame would be more centralizing to the point it may deemed broken cause there is no actual switch ins. Let's take out all the natural resists and immunities to Rain Offense. Then Rain Offense would then be the dominant and centralizing force in the game. These are somewhat very basic examples obviously but it's trying to describe that regardless, there will always be a certain amount of centralization via an aspect to the metagame, in this particular case, Stealth Rock. There will always be a lazy component in a metagame. We keep making the argument that removal of such aspects will further enhance the metagame when in reality the cycle will continue indefinitely more or less. The loss of viability to something due to Stealth Rock shouldn't be a focus on why Stealth Rock is an unhealthy aspect because realistically depending on the defining metagame trends, there will be Pokemon that thrive at a certain metagame, while others simply will not. The removal of Stealth Rock out of the equation will not change this what so ever. It will just change the way the game is played and then the focus will be on new centralizing forces that are subjectively unhealthy or healthy depending on the person whom you may ask.
AM, I didn't actually say anything about centralization, which was a conscious choice. Independent of my beliefs about it, I think most people are willing to accept some centralization and don't see it as a reason anything (including Stealth Rock) should be suspected unless it's truly out of control.
There are two main arguments for banning Stealth Rock. These are the effect it has on the viability of SR-weak mons, and the excessive rewards it provides to the player with momentum.
I'll get the viability one out the way first. I've heard it said countless times that Stealth Rock acts to counterbalance threatening mons such as Dragonite or Talonflame, keeping them from being broken. Let's be clear; this is not an argument. These Pokemon have no special right to be included in the OU tier. Meanwhile, there is a vast number of Pokemon which would see significantly higher usage in OU if not for their SR weaknesses. You could argue that banning broken mons is a greater evil than allowing otherwise viable mons to languish in lower tiers, but I personally don't see the value in the distinction. Though SR keeps more mons technically usable in OU, it drastically lowers the number of mons which will actually see use in the tier, overall proving detrimental to the richness and variety of the metagame.
The second argument is that Stealth Rock disproportionately rewards the player with momentum. While I personally believe placing such a high premium on momentum makes the game less enjoyable, the primary reason this is unhealthy for the metagame is its detrimental effect on the viability of defensive play.
In general if you have two teams, A and B, where A is more offensively oriented than B, then A will be better at conserving offensive momentum than B. This is because of the unequal cost to both teams of reclaiming momentum. Reclaiming momentum can only be done in two ways; either by outplaying the opponent, or by allowing the other team to actualise their momentum (typically by sacrificing a mon or some other serious concession).
Let's assume team A is standard offense and B is standard stall. If team B loses a Pokemon, it's very likely that the resulting defensive hole will be easily exploitable by A (e.g. resulting in a sweep or massive damage). On the other hand, if team A loses a mon, they've simply given up one member which could potentially have helped break through B. In other words, the cost of reclaiming momentum is usually greater for the more defensive team (assuming neither side outplays the other).
So where does Stealth Rock come into this? Well, it imposes a significant source of mutual damage to both teams (assuming both sides have SR up). Mutual damage always favours the quicker, more aggressive team, because it can take advantage of the damage faster. And what this does is impose a premium on momentum. Returning to our offensive team A and defensive team B, if A has momentum, B usually has a fair amount of time in which to attempt to outplay the opponent and regain momentum, before being forced to allow A to actualise it. But with Stealth Rock up, this amount of time is slashed. The extra source of damage means that B will very quickly be forced to either sacrifice or make risky plays (which has the same net result as sacrificing) to reclaim momentum.
(I was going to write here about setting and removing Stealth Rock also favour the faster, more offensive team, but I need to sleep and the reasons should hopefully be obvious).
The point here (or the tl;dr version if you prefer) is that Stealth Rock places a premium on momentum, and in doing so significantly disadvantages defensive play.
Maybe you don't care about having more mons viable in OU, or you think there will always be centralisation and dealing with one of its current iterations (Stealth Rock) is a waste of time, as someone said above (this is total bs by the way). Or you think defense is boring / fundamentally flawed as a playstyle, and there's no reason to try to protect its viability.
Whatever. I personally think that Stealth Rock has been engrained in competitive battling for so long that suddenly banning it from Smogon metagames would risk seeing us become irrelevant to many battlers. But I don't see any harm in testing a SR-less Smogon ladder to get people used to the idea and form their own opinions.
Whatever. I personally think that Stealth Rock has been engrained in competitive battling for so long that suddenly banning it from Smogon metagames would risk seeing us become irrelevant to many battlers. But I don't see any harm in testing a SR-less Smogon ladder to get people used to the idea and form their own opinions.
You're new so you probably don't know that we already implemented, in Gen 5, an informal Stealth Rock-less ladder for people to form an opinion on what the meta would look like without the premier entry hazard. Just leaving the link to the related discussion thread here for your (and everyone else's) convenience.
You're new so you probably don't know that we already implemented, in Gen 5, an informal Stealth Rock-less ladder for people to form an opinion on what the meta would look like without the premier entry hazard. Just leaving the link to the related discussion thread here for your (and everyone else's) convenience.
Actually I had a feeling we'd had a SR-less ladder but I couldn't find it. Thanks! That said, a ladder without Stealth Rock, or in fact a SR suspect test, is no way to test something like Stealth Rock. As was described in the thread linked, while there was a lot of enjoyable versatility early on, the meta naturally devolved into spamming the broken elements (Dragonite, Cube, Sash etc). The only way to actually gauge a metagame without SR would be to set up a "suspect tier" with its own separate banlist.
Nice discussion so far, but let's get something straight. Stealth Rock, regardless of its effect on the metagame, has many viable countermeasures. And while most of the checks and counters to SR may forfeit momentum, so do a lot of passive counters to a lot of threatening Pokemon, eg. Chansey as a counter to Greninja. And, while i agree that SR is one of the biggest hindrances to defensive teams, because it promotes aggressive double switching, there are many more hindrances to defensive play, such as strong wallbreakers, who are also very easy to bring in with aggressive double switches, Volt-turn chains, and overwhelming a defensive threat by stacking sweepers with similar counters. Not only this, but Stealth Rock also keeps in check many dangerous Pokemon to stall. And when i say keep in check, i don't mean prevent from being broken, i mean easier to deal with then they would be without Stealth Rock present. And of course, Stealth Rock is also one of stall's main win conditions, providing tons of passive damage during each game, which somewhat counterbalances the negative effect that SR has on stall.
Also, with the introduction of Magic Bounce Mega Diancie and Magic Bounce Mega Sableye, i think we are in for a new era of entry hazard wars, because both of them can beat many popular hazard setters without forfeiting any momentum, making Stealth Rock more matchup based instead of always being very useful. And both of them are great Pokemon in general and not niche Pokemon mostly used for dealing with Stealth Rock, unlike Xatu and Espeon, so it's possible for defensive teams to stack on anti-SR measures without weakening their matchup against other things. For example, Rapid Spin Starmie + physically defensive Mega Sableye can deal with almost every single SR user in OU, making playing almost the entire game with no SR on your side of the field a very realistic scenario.
As for the variety that some people think that SR's absence will bring, i really doubt it. The metagame always centralizes around a few top tier threats, no matter if they are Pokemon, strategies, or moves, and it will be the same if SR is gone. People will whore another incredibly centralizing game element that will decrease variety to a certain, non-unhealthy, degree, which will bring us to the same amount of variety, more or less. Not to mention that Stealth Rock is not that limiting to variety anyway, because in 6th gen there are plenty of ways to deal with Stealth Rock. Hell, we have Mega Charizard Y, a Pokemon 4x weak to Stealth Rock, as a top tier offensive threat in OU. And while 5th gen also had some very viable incredibly SR weak Pokemon, such as Volcarona, Volcarona was much more of a one trick pony than Zard Y. It either got into the field once and swept, or just checked an offensive threat once, used Roost before being forced out, and waited until the end-game, where its checks and counters have been removed, to sweep. Also, all of its sets had Quiver Dance, meaning it was always used as a win condition, which means that entire teams were built around supporting it, so anti-SR support was easy to justify and a must. This is clearly not the case with Zard Y, which can wear down its own checks and counters, provide defensive synergy, and switch into the field multiple times, all that while being 4x Stealth Rock weak, and without being the centerpiece of a team.
Finally, and this might seem a bit obvious, i don't think there is an objective answer to the question: ''Is Stealth Rock broken?''. It really depends on how long you like your games to be, and i am not only talking about stall, as we have already established that SR is far from the only thing that gives to offense an inherent advantage against defensive teams. Without SR, people will just have to find other ways to take advantage of their momentum, or resort more to existing ones, which seems neither good nor bad, just different.
I think about this issue a little bit differently then most, It seems clear that the teams that benefit most from Stealth Rock are stall/defensive teams and very offensive teams. I found this odd because they are polar opposites and they both go about getting rocks up in a different way. HO teams usually just lead with a quick mon and throw them up ASAP, then proceed to make smart double switches because they know the opponent wants to defog asap, whereas stall teams just get them up whenever they can and usually do so in order to make the opponent waste a turn getting rid of them in hopes of capitalizing on it. I might not be as clear as Id like to be, but what I am trying to say is that I think offensive teams use stealth rocks in a way that is far more effective than defensive teams, which is a large reason offense is dominant atm. I have an example http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-113621390 (Old Game ik)(also the SR is why megascizor died +4 252 Atk Aerilate Mega Pinsir Quick Attack vs. 248 HP / 116 Def Mega Scizor: 199-235 (58 - 68.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO) 11 turns, this game really shows in an extreme case how stealth rocks are used on offensive teams. So I more or less had a suicide rocker(very common for offense) and then once the rocker is dead stalls first goal is to get rocks off the field and enjoy the rest of the game SR free, well the problem is everyone knows that is their goal and it makes it instantly easy for offense to make "plays", if you will. With how offensive the meta is getting stealth rocks are pretty darn easy to keep on the field, I mean since most defoggers are flying type if you just get a volt switcher in on them you either kill their defogger before they get it off or get a free switch into a wallbreaker/Favorable mon. The meta is just so heavily shifting towards offense that it seems unfair that they can just throw up SR willy nilly and then play in such a way that makes it impossible for stall to get rid of them without serious consequences. If SR only lasted like 5-10 turns that would be a whole other story. But Idk I always seem to just ramble, hopefully you guys see the points I am trying to make, and I am sure I can clarify if you have specific question/concerns about what I said.
Anyway that little rant aside, I dont think SR should go, I'd be ok with a suspect but I would vote to keep SR. Mainly because at the end of the day SR does balance out a bunch of things and I know this sounds like a bad reason people wanted to keep Aegislash, but this is different because SR doesnt just balance a few mons, it balances whole playstyles. SR is one of the defining features of the metagame and it is so for a reason, it makes the game more competitive. At the end of the day I think offensive teams benefit more from stealth rocks than most teams, mainly because nowadays giving a free turn by defogging can mean you just lost the game. If I was king I would make SR only last like 10-turns or something(Id have to think about it more lol) but yeah losing SR would change the game completely and I dont think it would be for the better.
