I think what Ulevo meant was that since you can see opposing weather inducers but not movesets - people will often sac their weather inducer early on for a free switch if the opponent has no perma-weather inducer. By hiding the move Hail until this happens, you can then rid yourself of Rain for the whole match.
I'm glad someone is paying attention.
Then essentially as long as I keep my politoed alive, your pokemon has 1 useless move for the entire game.
First of all, you won't have any idea that I have Hail, or Sunny Day, or Sandstorm on any of the movesets I'm carrying. Why would you keep Politoed out of battle if you didn't see Tyranitar/Hippowdon/Ninetales on my roster?
You won't, because that's not how competitive Pokemon is played. It's quite easy to play verbal warfare in a Pokemon argument and just say you'll be keeping your Politoed alive all the time. Politoed is there to induce weather, and while it has other uses, it isn't there for much else. You'll be forced to sacrifice it mid battle, or you'll be mindgamed in to losing it, or it will be trapped, or die from residual damage via phazing. However you want to come to the conclusion that your Politoed is going to die, it will eventually. So don't hypothetically pretend you're going to keep your Politoed in your back pocket the whole match when you see no weather formers on the opponents team--you won't, because no one else does.
If that's your solution to rain teams then you're getting swept and already lost half your team because you're not using it or can't use it effectively until politoed is dead. Then tell me this isn't a gimmick solution to rain.
There will be moments when you will be forced to switch, and most intelligent players will send in their weather inducer seeing there is no threat of the weather changing as a sacrifice to keep their sweepers or walls healthy. In all likely hood, Politoed will be sent in and eventually will be taken out.
It's basically like saying I'm not gonna use rapid spin until your SRer is dead because you can just set it again. Meanwhile, all my pokemon are SR weak and lose a chunk of health switching in.
A more accurate example would be that it is similar to refrain from laying down Spikes and Toxic Spikes until their Rapid Spin user is gone, otherwise you'll simply be wasting turns. Of course this isn't as much of a concern due to Ghost types.
Your logic is also flawed because the Rapid Spin user would have every reason to use it before hand because the opponent wastes two turns to set up Stealth Rock again (the turn switching, and the turn to use Stealth Rock) while the Rapid Spin user also takes two turns to get rid of the entry hazards.
Weather on the other hand only needs a switch, so if the user doesn't want to continue to waste turns AND ruin the edge he has by keeping an option to remove weather in his back pocket a secret he has to wait for the Politoed to die. It's that simple.
Please don't use silly analogies.
It makes me wonder if you know what overcentralization is.
Overcentralization is the term used to describe the phenomenon of a dominant Pokemon having a systemic effect on the metagame in such a way that it becomes of a higher priority as a threat than others, and thus rises in usage to reflect that. This can also be the case for specific moves, items, Pokemon combinations or archetypes.
Being used a lot doesn't mean it's overcentralizing. Having very few counters and forcing these counters to be put into teams or risk losing because you don't is overcentralizing.
Yeah. Because people really had a problem with Wobbuffett in DPPt when it was unbanned during the suspect test. /sarcasm
If the Pokemon is a dominant threat, but it doesn't see usage (which it will, but that's not the point), exactly how is it going to command other players to prepare for it? It won't.
As for those examples I cited, ALL of them were overcentralized during their peak usage, and most if not all of them were topics of discussion for suspect testing among #stark members at some point in time. They shaped their metagames at that time because they were overcentralizing, and the metagame changed to manage that threat.
Nothing is ever "required to play" in order to win. In a game with as many options as this, there are always bound to be counters to everything. What matters is how many counters something has and what would happen if you don't use those counters.
You wouldn't consistently beat other players by ignoring a blatantly overpowered and broken Pokemon while they continue to abuse it. I really have no idea how you fail to understand this. It's really just that simple. Will you ALWAYS win? I'd be inclined to say that you might have a fluke victory every once in a while. That doesn't matter in a game where your competitive success is measured by how well you rank up against other players who constantly grind their way up a ladder.
Play to win. If you have something broken, abuse it. It's not complicated.
Garchomp and salamence were never required on teams to win.
And I never said I agreed with their tiering. Fancy that?
If you brought an Uber down to OU, it would not be required to win. As long as you have a counter to the said Uber, then it's quite easy to beat it. Like I said, If you've played PO's UU tier, you don't need to use lati@s to win, you just need to not let it sweep you. Doesn't mean lati@s isn't broken in UU.
Certain Ubers would have varying degrees of potency as to how high they would increase your success rate by using them over other players who wouldn't or couldn't use them on their team. The point is that all of them (or at least all the ones that actually deserve to be on the list) would raise your likelyhood of winning over other players lacking that Pokemon considerably to a point where it would be a stupid idea not to use them.
Your reasons for banning something are clearly flawed. We ban based on power. If something is overpowered it gets banned. However power itself cannot be measured quantitatively. Who's to say what is too powerful and what isn't. What factors do we consider? Slaking is not overpowered despite having great base stats because of its ability. Mew is overpowered despite having the same stats as jirachi/celebi because of its movepool. There are too many factors. That's why things are banned based on overcentralization because power in turn causes overcentralization.
I don't feel like explaining myself again. I'm just going to refer to Wobuffett yet again and be done with it. Salamence (although I disagree with banning that) fits a similar description.
Then why did you bring up the fact that sand is being used more than rain?
Because overcentralization is a possible indication, not the underlying basis in which we decide a tiering process. If sand is statistically dominating over rain, it doesn't automatically mean Drizzle isn't suspect, but it's a good indication. I don't see how this is hard to understand.
I also said this because people were making it seem as if rain was EVERYWHERE, which it clearly isn't.
That's what you're assuming and again, as shown by the PO UU ladder, not true.
We're not discussing Borderline and Underused. We're discussing Uber and Overused. Thank you.
