I'm one of those people who think that for this gen we should tier around offense, not balance.
Obviously keep balance teams viable, as it is right now, but personally I'm pretty happy with the way SV OU is right now
i believe we shouldn't tier around
any single playstyle. we should tier for a healthy diversity of all playstyles, with none being overwhelmingly strong or invalidated. the natural result of that seems to trend towards bulky offense and balance being the strongest playstyles (because they mix both good defensive options and good offensive options), other forms of offense being strong but not necessarily the dominant playstyle, and the niche picks being hard stall and gimmicky forms of hyper offense (webs, screens, etc). hence why i do agree with you that the current meta is approaching, but not yet reaching, an ideal state, at least for what can feasibly be done with community support
and if you really want to take tiering action we can look towards other routes e.g. retest Volc/Gouging, some box legend, or suspect Ting-Lu (will elaborate if asked, but ill just say this: if this isn't broken, neither are Lugia and Giratina-A.) instead of banning other offensive threats that are still susceptible to trends and get adapted to.
now this is where it goes off the rails. first off, retesting ubers is almost entirely off the table, especially ones that were banned from ou already and
especially especially things like gouging fire, which was banned with upwards of a 90% ban margin, or volcarona, which was rejected from the tier in every way a mon can be (quickbanned, denied a drop,
and suspect banned). second off, ting-lu is fine. the difference between it and the mons you mentioned is that lugia and giratina-a both have setup capability on top of their ridiculous bulk. ting very notably does not. and third, you don't seem to actually be trying to balance things with your choices. you just seem to be trying to make offense better without citing any problems that your tiering actions will answer besides "playstyle i like gets better, playstyle i dislike gets worse"
It is pretty clear to me that balance go-tos are given the benefit of the doubt compared to offense tools and the only thing I can do is to respect the will of the others while presenting my pov on why that's not necessarily the best action.
plenty of offensive tools are also "balance go-tos". the term you're looking for is "defensive tools", and the reason they're given the benefit of the doubt is because pokemon is a game in which strong offense is, and always has been, fundamentally better than strong defense. you need to make progress in this game. that's why hard stall tends to be more niche than all-out offense. it's also why it's really easy to create a mon with no defensive counters but really hard to create a mon with no offensive counters. so it's pretty difficult to actually have a good defensive tool be
truly broken unless it's also got really really good ways to consistently make progress as well. the only time that something defensive was broken in ou for its defenses alone was gen 6 mega sableye. you could argue dlc1 gliscor, but that was more a case of its defensive prowess
combined with its extremely cheap progress-making ability, with access to spikes, knock, sd facade, toxic, etc
We're living in times where we could use shorter games, for reasons which are not necessarily related to SV OU, but competition from other formats and culture as a whole.
jesus mary and joseph we are
not going to start tiering based on the tiktok generation's short attention span
This is why setup sweepers being seen as these big fat boogeymen isn't compatible with my statement above. I get swept all the time when I misplay, same with other players, but maybe we can find better setups to prevent this from happening in the first place.
there are plenty of setup sweepers that aren't seen as "big fat boogeymen". there aren't serious complaints right now about darkrai, deo-s, torn-t, scizor, weavile, ceruledge, primarina, tusk, crown, hell, even valiant isn't attracting the ire it used to. people are actively
celebrating several of these being here. there's two whole ogerpon forms that nobody's complaining about at all, one of which is arguably better at shredding fat balance structures than waterpon is. it's a very specific subset of setup sweepers that's problematic
I also find it that most of the time people who want a suspect will automatically vote for a ban without having the intention to switch their votes around. Same with your post towards Ogerpon-W, a good balance breaker. Because yes Ogerpon-W is great against balance teams and has a wide movepool. But who's to say it is ban worthy, when people can't agree on what its best fourth move is, and code it as "versatility"?
who's to say it's banworthy? me. i'm to say that. i'm saying it right now. and so have many, many people before me, who are much more knowledgeable about the tier than either of us. and why does it matter whether people "automatically" vote for a ban after calling for a suspect? not many people are going to call for a suspect with the intention of voting dnb. and it doesn't really matter if people have made up their minds before the suspect either. you seem to have your mind made up just fine. why is it not ok for people to go into a suspect intending to vote ban, but perfectly fine for you to go into a suspect intending to vote dnb?
Even if we've had Ogerpon-W for quite a while, you can't just present those hundreds of pages as one big book, a collection of arguments that does not properly address pro and anti ban arguments.
how does the collection of all arguments about waterpon in existence not properly address pro- and anti-ban arguments
Because you'll get bias, misinformation, fearmongering, and many arguments that contradict each other with a bit of poking.
bias like "we should tier around offense"? misinformation like "we need shorter games because vgc"? fearmongering like "but if we ban this, fat balance might become good"?
The metagame will continue to adapt until it is fully solved. That might happen tomorrow, post-CG or in a hundred years.
if you wanna wait a hundred years for the meta to be fully solved, go ahead. i, for one, think that if the meta hasn't been able to adapt to something for nearly two years, we should probably get rid of it instead of waiting the other 98
We don't have a game theory solver here, so the ban side doesn't make itself look good when complaining about pokemon a or b with such confidence, such "venom" competitively speaking.
there is no "ban side". almost every voter here has a varying record of votes on different things. in fact, thanks to the gouging fire suspects, a significant number of them have two different votes on the same mon. and you complaining about zap-king-lu with confidence doesn't make you look good either. just because you named yourself after tapu bulu doesn't mean you have to live in crippling fear of zapdos all the time
Keeping the status quo remains the best way forward, at least in SV. It doesn't mean i will vote DNB for each and every suspect going forward.
so wait. if keeping the status quo is the best way forward, why would you
not vote to keep the status quo every time? you're not making any sense
i think hamurott's due to pop off. i've been seeing a lot more innovation on it recently, stuff like resttalk (yes really), rocky helmet, taunt, generally a lot more focus on utility and role-compression stuff that hamurott wasn't doing much of before. it's been suffering a little due to the rise of geezing but i think the new techs people are cooking up will flip the script on that
we all love it when some random low-tier mon gets an established foothold in ou, so i'm kinda sad to have to say this, but araquanid is definitely on the road back to nu. webs are in a really rough spot right now with all the bo and balance teams running around, and everyone has some easy answer for araq these days. webs thrives on teams that aren't prepped for dealing with the webs lead, so i think we'll see the archetype leaning towards ribombee again in the future until that becomes the websmon that gets prepped for
people talk about dnite a lot, but i think if there's a suspect post-scl (which there likely will be) then it'll be waterpon. the mon is just intolerable to build around and play around without actually bringing much, if anything, of use to the tier that couldn't be replicated by something else. i'll skip the thirty-page essay because virtually everything to be said about waterpon has already gotten said, people have been complaining about this shitter since before firepon was even banned
I'm just a silly 
