Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4

Checking this forum twice a day for next survey half seriously questioning if bigsmogon is trying to cook up the new next big set for a debatable pokemon to push for the next suspect to again avoid the possibility of Tera blast ban.

Is posting a survey something only Finch is permitted to do? I understand he has a life. Are council members able to help with these sort of tier administrative things?

Maybe I'm missing vital things other council members do and sorry but it does seem like a lot, perhaps too much? Relies on one man. Can you guys assign things in a group chat, share it for review before posting? Things like that?

This may sound rude but there has been a trend of people expressing disappointment with the speed of action and I'm questioning if other council members should be doing more?

Respectfully
Thanks
i mean i fully support a tera blast suspect, but i'm not confident in it. not because i don't think there will be support, but because i've noticed a pattern where everyone starts talking about a tb suspect, people start gearing up like it's gonna happen any day now, the council seems to be on board, the suspect thread is practically already up, and then nothing happens for two months and something else ends up suspected instead
 
fair enough, tera blast is niche enough on many of those mons that a ban of it won't actually affect them. most of them have other sets that they use, so it's easier to just count the ones that use tera blast a lot of the time. so this time around, let's only count the pokemon that run tera blast 25% or more of the time:

uu: :comfey::polteageist::sandy shocks::serperior::thundurus-therian:
rubl: :blastoise::yanmega:

ru: :magnezone:
nubl: :cloyster::gyarados::regidrago:

nu: :basculegion::kilowattrel::munkidori:
(surprisingly not :porygon-z:)
publ: none

pu: :minior::salazzle::tornadus::toxtricity:
zubl: :electrode-hisui:

zu: :cryogonal::farigiraf::jolteon::magneton:
(realistically the sub-zu guys don't enter into this discussion much at all so i won't bother with them)

now, if we want only mons that use tera blast over any other set, we'll have to look only at stuff that has tera blast in the top 4 moves of its moveset. that gives us the following:

uu: :comfey::serperior:
rubl: :blastoise::yanmega:

ru: none
nubl: :cloyster::gyarados:

nu: technically none, but i'm counting :munkidori: since tera blast is in fifth place and psychic/psyshock should probably be counted as one move
publ: none

pu: :tornadus:
zubl: :electrode-hisui:

zu: :farigiraf::jolteon::magneton:

one final note: :blastoise::cloyster::munkidori: do still have other non-tb sets that are fairly commonly run, but everything else here leans on it extremely heavily
This looks more like I would expect, thank you for getting this up! Safe to say that there are some mons that would be affected by this no matter what, however the true amount that some lt mons would be affected is up for debate. The very fact that it’s only these mons that are too highly affected makes me wonder how much it would affect lower tiers if there was a ban. Personally speaking I don’t think there should be a ban on Tera blast at the moment, although I do not think my statement holds too much weight since I’m haven’t been primarily running Current Generation Pokémon too much recently. Big thank you for the data though!
 
Checking this forum twice a day for next survey half seriously questioning if bigsmogon is trying to cook up the new next big set for a debatable pokemon to push for the next suspect to again avoid the possibility of Tera blast ban.

Is posting a survey something only Finch is permitted to do? I understand he has a life. Are council members able to help with these sort of tier administrative things?

Maybe I'm missing vital things other council members do and sorry but it does seem like a lot, perhaps too much? Relies on one man. Can you guys assign things in a group chat, share it for review before posting? Things like that?

This may sound rude but there has been a trend of people expressing disappointment with the speed of action and I'm questioning if other council members should be doing more?

Respectfully
Thanks
You could just tag and ask next time! I respond to pretty much every question after all. We have nothing to hide and I feel communication has been very fair throughout the tiering process, especially relative to how bad it used to be historically. I will go through everything just for the sake of clarity anyway.

We began discussion on a survey over the weekend and finished up the list yesterday evening after some good back-and-forth. I will submit the list to higher staff, who make the survey forms on the forum, tonight after I get settled in and the survey will either go up late tonight or tomorrow night (GMT-5). Any council member can do this in theory, but only people who are CL+ have access to even view survey results, so it would be a bit silly of them to do it and I lead the discussion anyway.

This is not really a matter of X being busy or Y not doing their job so much as it is just due dilligence. Surveys frequently go up Tuesday or Wednesday during tournaments due to the cadence they dictate: In order to have a survey after W1 of SPL, it is best to observe the actual games during W1 of SPL, so discussions naturally did not begin until the middle of the weekend of the week when games happened or were happening. Discussions do not just all happen overnight, so typically we see a survey decided early week and the details finalized/it going up by mid-week.

In short, I am not going to just pop out a half-assed survey and I followed the same exact cadence we have always done for surveys.

This may sound rude but there has been a trend of people expressing disappointment with the speed of action and I'm questioning if other council members should be doing more?
I do want to reply to this specifically, too.

This is not rude, but it is a bit, to be entirely honest, unrealistic or unfair. We have had more suspects, bans, surveys, etc. than any generation by a long-shot and have continued at a fast pace. We had a suspect last month, we had two suspects in the months prior to that, and we are nearly tripling the amount of tiering action we see in an average generation on a rate basis. To imply the tiring process is moving slowly or we should be doing more is, to put it bluntly, laughable. I told you a survey was coming after SPL W1, it ended less than two days ago, and it is coming within the next day. Please just ask questions before assuming volunteers are not picking up the slack or things are not working. Thank you.
 
You could just tag and ask next time! I respond to pretty much every question after all. We have nothing to hide and I feel communication has been very fair throughout the tiering process, especially relative to how bad it used to be historically. I will go through everything just for the sake of clarity anyway.

We began discussion on a survey over the weekend and finished up the list yesterday evening after some good back-and-forth. I will submit the list to higher staff, who make the survey forms on the forum, tonight after I get settled in and the survey will either go up late tonight or tomorrow night (GMT-5). Any council member can do this in theory, but only people who are CL+ have access to even view survey results, so it would be a bit silly of them to do it and I lead the discussion anyway.

This is not really a matter of X being busy or Y not doing their job so much as it is just due dilligence. Surveys frequently go up Tuesday or Wednesday during tournaments due to the cadence they dictate: In order to have a survey after W1 of SPL, it is best to observe the actual games during W1 of SPL, so discussions naturally did not begin until the middle of the weekend of the week when games happened or were happening. Discussions do not just all happen overnight, so typically we see a survey decided early week and the details finalized/it going up by mid-week.

In short, I am not going to just pop out a half-assed survey and I followed the same exact cadence we have always done for surveys.


I do want to reply to this specifically, too.

This is not rude, but it is a bit, to be entirely honest, unrealistic or unfair. We have had more suspects, bans, surveys, etc. than any generation by a long-shot and have continued at a fast pace. We had a suspect last month, we had two suspects in the months prior to that, and we are nearly tripling the amount of tiering action we see in an average generation on a rate basis. To imply the tiring process is moving slowly or we should be doing more is, to put it bluntly, laughable. I told you a survey was coming after SPL W1, it ended less than two days ago, and it is coming within the next day. Please just ask questions before assuming volunteers are not picking up the slack or things are not working. Thank you.
Thank you for your thorough reply. I will message you just time.

My only response is that I expect the trend of more suspects/decision making processes will continue in gen 10. If people are complaining now about speed it's something to think about going forward.

Thanks again
 
This may sound rude but there has been a trend of people expressing disappointment with the speed of action and I'm questioning if other council members should be doing more?
i think we've all been kinda spoiled by how fast tiering was forced to go in dlc1. don't get me wrong, it was 1000% the right decision to tier at a breakneck pace like that*, but now we've got people getting upset about how slow tiering is going when we've had something like ten pieces of tiering action over the course of the last year or so. that's a lot! even though both kyurem suspects, the first gouging fire suspect, the gliscor suspect and the palafin suspect didn't result in any lasting change, that was still suspects being held. that's tiering action being done. so let's not get mad at the council, who've been doing fantastic work at a pace unlike anything that's ever been seen in smogon history, for not being "fast enough". if anything, that disappointment should be directed at us the community for not being more decisive during voting. i would definitely appreciate surveys being a monthly thing, though

*although in hindsight it would almost certainly be better to switch to the kokoloko method for future metas that are that short, because even with 6 bans in 3 months dlc1 was far from balanced at the end
 
Personally, I don't think the Kokoloko method used in some old gen UU metas is appropriate or even optimal for getting the meta to a stable point and even contrary to tiering philosophy.

IIRC, one of the posts on tiering philosphy from chaos, the founder of Smogon, cited that one of the goals of tiering is to have the fewest Pokemon bans possible, which the Kokoloko method goes directly against.

Using this method arbritrarily lowers the power level of the tier instead of accounting for the fact that stronger mons have been released. I'm against this unless 10+ CLEARLY broken mons are in the meta, which is a threshold neither of the two DLCs this gen reached.

This is one reason I support a ban on Tera since it causes so many mons to be either broken outright, such as Palafin-Hero, Terapagos, Ogerpon-Hearthflame, Ursaluna-Bloodmoon, Sneasler, Archaludon, and Gouging Fire, broken with Tera Blast, such as Espathra, Regieleki, and Volcarona, and borderline broken, such as Kingambit, Kyurem, and Gliscor.

I agree with top players such as xavgb that Kingambit is the most constraining mon to deal with in the meta, and I believe it should be the next target of tiering action. For a long while I thought it was fine for the meta, but I've come around on banning it.
 
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RIP KYUREM, 5/20 games in w1 with 20% wr, suspect test is unavoidable now
let's not get ahead of ourselves here. this level of snark and sarcasm is completely unwarranted based on the teeny tiny sample size you've offered. i've gone over before how a low winrate is not a be-all-end-all indicator of something not being broken for several reasons, and that rings especially true this early into a tour. it seems like you put a lot of faith in tournament winrates—i remember you also citing winrate statistics with a small sample size to try to argue that hydrapple was broken—but realistically they shouldn't be brought up in tiering arguments at all
I'm against this method unless 10+ CLEARLY broken mons are in the meta, which is a threshold neither of the two DLCs this gen reached.
dlc1 had bax, firepon, bloodmoon, roaring moon, gliscor, sneasler, waterpon, ghold, gambit, and manaphy. that's 10 mons right there off the top of my head, most of which had eyes on them from very early on in the meta. we could've kokoloko'd it for sure
 
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let's not get ahead of ourselves here. this level of snark and sarcasm is completely unwarranted based on the teeny tiny sample size you've offered. i've gone over before how a low winrate is not a be-all-end-all indicator of something not being broken for several reasons, and that rings especially true this early into a tour. it seems like you put a lot of faith in tournament winrates—i remember you also citing winrate statistics with a small sample size to try to argue that hydrapple was broken—but realistically they shouldn't be brought up in tiering arguments at all
me when i take the baitpost seriously
Firepon is not broken (at least, not anymore). Its only crime was being mean to Unaware Pokemon and they deserve it.
only to get one-upped by an even better baitpost
 
dlc1 had bax, firepon, bloodmoon, roaring moon, gliscor, sneasler, waterpon, ghold, gambit, and manaphy. that's 10 mons right there off the top of my head, most of which had eyes on them from very early on in the meta. we could've kokoloko'd it for sure

I personally never found Manaphy an issue and believe the main problem was due to people not being used to dealing with its new sets along with all the new threats in the meta. As you can see now, Mana is not even UU by usage, which shows the problem was mostly new toy syndrome.
 
Firepon is not broken (at least, not anymore). Its only crime was being mean to Unaware Pokemon and they deserve it.
Agreeing with Seraphyde on this one (wow, first time for everything) - Hearthflame has a wealth of answers in the current meta like Choice Scarf Great Tusk, Kingambit, Choice Scarf Landorus-T, Moltres, Pecharunt, all the Dragon-types, and even more. It doesn't do anything in a game except throw off an Ivy Cudgel and get forced out to take 25% from Rocks. Hell, even more niche answers like Archaludon and Rillaboom could thrive with this unban. I don't know why all of you are opposed to it.
 
I personally never found Manaphy an issue and believe the main problem was due to people not being used to dealing with its new sets along with all the new threats in the meta. As you can see now, Mana is not even UU by usage, which shows the problem was mostly new toy syndrome.
the environment drastically changed in dlc2 in ways that manaphy—and specifically that stupid ass stored power shitter set that was the thing everyone was taking issue with—really doesn't like. raging bolt and kyurem are around now to provide supereffective offensive pressure before manaphy can set up, meowscarada is somehow ou and can crit through the acid armors after it sets up, sun was really good when dlc2 dropped and that hurt manaphy a lot, serperior was firmly ou at that point, we still had archaludon to do electro shot shenanigans, etc etc etc. so manaphy dropped like a stone, and then it struggled in uu because its matchup spread down there is just kind of terrible and it never gets the turns to pull off any of the nonsense it was doing in dlc1 ou, plus pelipper's banned from uu so it can't even do rain stuff down there. it wasn't just people getting used to it, it was that a ton of answers dropped
 
Insane amount of Latios in week 1. What was that, like 4 Latios? Including a mirror match. Ting-Lu, Pech, Zama, all at like 70% usage too lol, crazy. I tried out Latios on ladder again and I gotta say, it does feel good. Fun seeing these lesser-used mons in tournament (similar to Slither Wing last time around, one of my new faves to use).
 
Agreeing with Seraphyde on this one (wow, first time for everything) - Hearthflame has a wealth of answers in the current meta like Choice Scarf Great Tusk, Kingambit, Choice Scarf Landorus-T, Moltres, Pecharunt, all the Dragon-types, and even more. It doesn't do anything in a game except throw off an Ivy Cudgel and get forced out to take 25% from Rocks. Hell, even more niche answers like Archaludon and Rillaboom could thrive with this unban. I don't know why all of you are opposed to it.

In case anyone couldn't tell, this is a joke post. Dead by Daylight absolutely doesn't agree with Seraphyde on this. Please don't anyone reply as if they're astonished by what he posted.
 
Insane amount of Latios in week 1. What was that, like 4 Latios? Including a mirror match. Ting-Lu, Pech, Zama, all at like 70% usage too lol, crazy. I tried out Latios on ladder again and I gotta say, it does feel good. Fun seeing these lesser-used mons in tournament (similar to Slither Wing last time around, one of my new faves to use).
I must apologize to Latios. It seems I was not familiar with his game
 
Firepon is not broken (at least, not anymore). Its only crime was being mean to Unaware Pokemon and they deserve it.

Fire/Grass is phenomenal STAB, though, especially since there's not a lot of quality defensive Fire types laying around to resist Fire + Grass + Fairy coverage. I mean, take this as a sample calc, factoring in one turn to Swords Dance and then terastalizing for a +1:

+3 252 Atk Hearthflame Mask Tera Fire Ogerpon-Hearthflame-Tera Ivy Cudgel vs. 248 HP / 248+ Def Moltres: 238-281 (62.1 - 73.3%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

62.1% minimum to bulky Moltres. 90/90 defenses, a resistance, and defensive investment, and you're doing 62.1% minimum. Moltres can't even do much back, since Hearthflame is immune to burn and resists Flamethrower, so the best you can manage is to Roar it out and try not to give a setup turn again.

Agreeing with Seraphyde on this one (wow, first time for everything) - Hearthflame has a wealth of answers in the current meta like Choice Scarf Great Tusk, Kingambit, Choice Scarf Landorus-T, Moltres, Pecharunt, all the Dragon-types, and even more. It doesn't do anything in a game except throw off an Ivy Cudgel and get forced out to take 25% from Rocks. Hell, even more niche answers like Archaludon and Rillaboom could thrive with this unban. I don't know why all of you are opposed to it.

Assuming a modest level of chip - either from hazards being down or Hearthflame taking a weak hit while setting up a Swords Dance - it still survives Scarf Lando-T, it survives anything Moltres throws at it while landing a 2HKO, it OHKOs Pecharunt with Tera, and it has the brute power to 2HKO the dragons with a resisted move (60-70% to Dragonite, for example, with a +2 Ivy Cudgel) if it doesn't just run Play Rough. Kingambit and Scarf/Booster Speed Tusk both do OHKO after a little chip, but Kingambit needs most of the team to be dead first.

Embody Aspect giving +1 Attack is immensely valuable here, since it allows Hearthflame to just bully through resists in a way that other Ogerpon forms cannot.
 
let's not get ahead of ourselves here. this level of snark and sarcasm is completely unwarranted based on the teeny tiny sample size you've offered. i've gone over before how a low winrate is not a be-all-end-all indicator of something not being broken for several reasons, and that rings especially true this early into a tour. it seems like you put a lot of faith in tournament winrates—i remember you also citing winrate statistics with a small sample size to try to argue that hydrapple was broken—but realistically they shouldn't be brought up in tiering arguments at all

dlc1 had bax, firepon, bloodmoon, roaring moon, gliscor, sneasler, waterpon, ghold, gambit, and manaphy. that's 10 mons right there off the top of my head, most of which had eyes on them from very early on in the meta. we could've kokoloko'd it for sure
lmao, sample size is more than 3 months (Kyurem was unbanned on October 12), SPL stats are just the latest proof that Kyurem is NOT broken (people can still try to ban Kyurem but its not objective)

Winrate/usage stats are a combination of many factors, such as versality, strength in a particular meta and etc, OBVIOUSLY its easier to start from general stats than to try to explain why Kyurem cant be rated above many mons

If something has poor performance, people will stop using it (broken SD Gliscor in SCL/OLT for example)
 
lmao, sample size is more than 3 months (Kyurem was unbanned on October 12), SPL stats are just the latest proof that Kyurem is NOT broken (people can still try to ban Kyurem but its not objective)

Winrate/usage stats are a combination of many factors, such as versality, strength in a particular meta and etc, OBVIOUSLY its easier to start from general stats than to try to explain why Kyurem cant be rated above many mons

If something has poor performance, people will stop using it (broken SD Gliscor in SCL/OLT for example)
I mean to be fair Zamazenta had like 80% usage this week, so not exactly a Kyurem-friendly environment.
 
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/sv-ou-tiering-surveys.3711911/page-2#post-10415802 -- survey is out!!!
Checking this forum twice a day for next survey half seriously questioning if bigsmogon is trying to cook up the new next big set for a debatable pokemon to push for the next suspect to again avoid the possibility of Tera blast ban.
p1hFl7v_d.webp
-- knock yourself out
 
honestly i think SV OU is the most balanced OU, idc about the old gens (1-6) because old mechanics is cringe but tera is a much more balanced mechanic than z moves in SM OU and SS OU is overall truly uncompetitive tier, so even though SV OU could be better i rated it an 8
You cannot just discard 2/3 of the OUs and claim SS OU is "truly uncompetitive" without any actual reasoning (it is one of the most balanced OUs). This is silly.
 
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