np: OU Suspect Testing Round 5 - Sandstorm (Excadrill/Thundurus Banned)

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Sir Azelf said:
Im surprised people want to unban Blaziken and then say its countered by Lati@s, Gyarados, Nite, Jellicent etc but with two moves in the sun it OHKO's all them even post intimidate with SR up and this is with no LO. :/ lol
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Actually, it IS with life orb. And this is more the fault of sunlight than it is blaziken himself. Blaze doesn't grant himself the sun boost afterall, he needs the support of what is considered to be the worst weather starter of them all (or 2nd worst).

So t-tar and politoed switch in on the revenge and then have to switch out of the incoming hi jump kick? At this point, I don't see the problem here. If T-tar or politoed (without a scarf) switched into a nasty plot/Sword's dance infernape who was going to sweep their team under sunlight, they'd have to switch out again. And that wouldn't exactly be hard to do since the weather is no longer around. So after switching in Politoed, I then switch to gliscor. Your blaziken is forced out and my counter has served its purpose.

And for the most part, it isn't exactly in blaziken's best interests to always set up against an enemy tyranitar. Choice scarf tyrantar initially outspeeds and ohkos if you thought it was safe to go for the hi jump kick or sword's dance. Yes, you could use protect, but that's just basic pokemon prediction and theorymon. Aren't most of the high end pokemon beaten by using good prediction anyway? You don't switch your ferrothorn into a latios hp fire. And all of the scarf users who kill blaziken can directly switch into an unboosted attack without fearing an ohko. Or maybe your ferrothorn could go for the thunder wave on the turn blaziken uses sword's dance. These are all things to consider in an actual battle, rather than saying that sunlight is ALWAYS up, that blaziken ALWAYS came in against your setup fodder, and that the blaziken user's prediction is 10x better than your own, since he knows exactly when you will switch for a free SD, and since he knows that what you switched to was an obvious scarfed pokemon who just so happened to be resistant to his attacks, so he uses protect for another speed boost and then sweeps your team.
 
Blaziken this generation is essentially a better Salamence from last generation. Even in discouraging situations (-2 SpAtk/Locked into Outrage), it's still destructive. It's also still just as versatile. For example, Slowbro can be fucked if people want to use Work Up Blaziken, Dragonite is fucked if people want to just use the mix-revenge Killer, and status inducers might as well quit if people are running Substitute/Lum Berry.

Yes, the key to Blaziken actually being 'broken' depends on it set, but for something so versatile, having the right set deems it so much more powerful than a Pokemon such as Dragonite having the right set and needing favorable conditions to win. Let's just say we have a generic Rain team, they're still swept by HJK for the most part. +2 HJK will ravage even Thundurus, Tornadus, Toxicroak and Starmie, the most likely candidates to that resist fighting. Who cares if it doesn't have to use it's fire move? I mean, Volcarona RAPES plenty of rain teams without ever having to touch Fiery Dance/Fire Blast. Blaziken does it way faster and without an auto 50%.

Also Scarf Tyranitar can't OHKO Blaziken without Earthquake, which are rather rare, and you wouldn't really switch a Blaziken directly into one, but rather after it just Pursuit/Crunch raped you Lati@s.

Anyways, Blaziken is really gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood with or without Sun.
 
If we ban all auto-weather except Hail, then its pretty obvious Hail will be suspect the next round since everyone will be running Hail Stall Teams, Snow Cloak abusers and Scarf Kyurems.

Weren't people joking about UU being all about Hail?
 
X5Dragon said:
If we ban all auto-weather except Hail, then its pretty obvious Hail will be suspect the next round since everyone will be running Hail Stall Teams, Snow Cloak abusers and Scarf Kyurems.

Weren't people joking about UU being all about Hail?
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No, it's not a joke.
UU is all about hail ._.
The #1 guy on the UU ladder uses hail as well.
 
Dragonite is annoying, but I don't think it is broken. I saw a couple nominations up for it and its ability. I was kind of surprised. Then again, some people are just ban happy. I saw a few nominations where literally almost everything "annoying" was listed. I can't even take such things seriously. I doubt that Dragonite would get anywhere near even a simple majority. But hey, you never know.
 
I don't really understand the clamor to ban ALL weather. Tyranitar was fine (albeit really high OU) last generation, and the main thing that Sand got this generation was Excadrill. Why not just ban that?
 
SJCrew said:
Striving to get rid of auto-weather indiscriminately is too drastic. We know Hail isn't doing anything, so leave it alone. Excadrill is up for a ban this round and is also Sand's main source of muscle. Without Excadrill, Sand Stream is fine. Tyranitar himself is as good as he's ever been without having entire teams devoted to him.

Drizzle and Drought are the real problems. We didn't have them in metagames past, and now that we do, Gen 5 OU is suddenly known as "the weather meta". Rain is just the worst of it all. We had so many Pokemon take the fall for it because we thought that was what we wanted and the end result was complete garbage. Sidestepping bullets only ran us into an entire flurry of them. Now it's our turn to fight back.

I feel a revolution coming on this round. I hope I'm right. Stop bitching and get excited everyone, this is what suspect testing is all about.
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I doubt anything but thundurus is getting banned this round as they will need a supermajority which i doubt any will reach and this us probably the last round of suspect testing as it is not very efficient Which can be seen in the nominations thread with people wanting to vote on stuff like a ban on the move baton pass and a retest of deoxys-n in ou ( I'm seriously not surprised the guy who nominated this didn't get reqs)
 
Personally, I've always thought that letting everyone nominate something for a ban was a bad idea. It makes the suspect nomination threads look much, much sillier than they need to be, especially with silly things like the desire to unban Blaziken (which I find much more odd than the Baton Pass-related nominations, to be honest).
 
SJCrew said:
Personally, I've always thought that letting everyone nominate something for a ban was a bad idea. It makes the suspect nomination threads look much, much sillier than they need to be, especially with silly things like the desire to unban Blaziken (which I find much more odd than the Baton Pass-related nominations, to be honest).
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Yup the last couple of posts in the thread by people without reqs have been ridiculously stupid although they will most likely be deleted.

I dont think a ban on the move baton pass would be good at all and in the unlikely event it gets a supermajority I would sincerely hope someone steps in and vetos it. Baton pass teams are very uncommon but a well built team should have at the very least a strategy with a fair chance of success versus them wether it be setting up a sweeper or spamming powerful choiced moves early on, a match versus baton pass is decided in the first couple of moves as they are very vulnerable to start with, without any defense boosts or an Ingrain set up. Teams relying on espeon to take all the hits from stuff like skarmoury brave bird or heatran lava plume arent that hard to take down it's once smeargle comes in spores something and sets up an Ingrain that trouble really begins.
 
Since people are nominating excadrill, you could also nominate haxorus for the same reasons. With the new "double dance" set, he can 2HKO skarmory and ferrothorn. If they can't counter him, please tell me what can.
 
I don't think Baton Pass is broken. I mean, with Team Preview, you're going to know if you're facing a Baton Pass team and thus you can strategise accordingly. If you can't place pressure on them at the beginning or are just too lazy to do it, that's not the fault of your opponent.

Plus, if the chain gets broken, people tend to ragequit like crazy, so it's more of an all-or-nothing strategy than most.
 
Gen. Empoleon said:
I find it very unsettling that people are getting more and more complex with their bans. Baton Pass on more than two pokemon on a team is probably the most obscure and odd nomination I've seen.
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that was me 9.9
idk, i just want to ban baton pass chains, but i really don't know how to nominate them. Using only one pokemon with baton pass is still a viable, legit and counterable strategy (such as SD BPass celebi or SubPass gliscor), but full baton chains are fucking terrible to play against.
 
Blue_Star said:
that was me 9.9
idk, i just want to ban baton pass chains, but i really don't know how to nominate them. Using only one pokemon with baton pass is still a viable, legit and counterable strategy (such as SD BPass celebi or SubPass gliscor), but full baton chains are fucking terrible to play against.
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How does being "terrible to play against" mean it's broken? If you're playing with a team that can't handle Baton Pass accordingly maybe you should switch up your team? Prankster Moves, Taunt on odd pokemon (such as Gyarados!) Dragon Tail, hell even regular Thunder Wave if timed right. I just don't understand where this really sudden and odd Baton Pass hate has come from. It's a not very effective strategy, unless it gets going, but the problem is getting it going. Espeon won't be able to come in to Bounce unless it has defensive boosts, and if it doesn't then a few Gyro Balls will kill it. And, hey, kill one pokemon setting up is super hard all over again.
 
Razza said:
Yup the last couple of posts in the thread by people without reqs have been ridiculously stupid although they will most likely be deleted.

I dont think a ban on the move baton pass would be good at all and in the unlikely event it gets a supermajority I would sincerely hope someone steps in and vetos it. Baton pass teams are very uncommon but a well built team should have at the very least a strategy with a fair chance of success versus them wether it be setting up a sweeper or spamming powerful choiced moves early on, a match versus baton pass is decided in the first couple of moves as they are very vulnerable to start with, without any defense boosts or an Ingrain set up. Teams relying on espeon to take all the hits from stuff like skarmoury brave bird or heatran lava plume arent that hard to take down it's once smeargle comes in spores something and sets up an Ingrain that trouble really begins.
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No no, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a ban on Baton Pass. I will vote no on that like the fist of the north star if makes the pool. It's just more detrimental to bring back a broken Pokemon on flawed (and completely untrue) logic like "he has more checks than X and that's not banned!" Some of those nominations really didn't use any logic - I tune people out the minute they say "I have no problems with this" in a debate because it means they are too biased to think beyond the scope of themselves and their teams to make an objective ruling. I don't want people like that to decide what I play against or even what I vote for.

EDIT: Supporting the Smogon Council. Authoritative leadership is really the best thing for competitive Pokemon at this point.
 
Bring back the Smogon Council god damn it. As much as I love having a say, having 40+ people that you know next to nothing about voting to shape the metagame is kind of stupid. I don't think there's a damn person running Rain that would vote for Thundurus to be banned. (Even if he was broken) If he's the Pokemon that got you this far, you certainly don't want him gone. Of course that's assuming they think at a personal level rather than a metagame level when it comes to voting. I know nothing about the voters so I just assume the worst. At least with the council you knew who was making the calls and that they weren't biased because of their own team.

And at this point, we're pretty much down to just the annoying Pokemon rather than the "broken" Pokemon. Thundurus isn't really hard to deal with at all. Run nearly any Pokemon with a Choice Scarf and you beat him. If he's running Thunder Wave, he either lacks Nasty Plot or has a hole in his coverage making him fairly simple to deal with. He has far more counters than Excadrill. He's annoying but nowhere near broken. He doesn't even shape the metagame in any way unlike a few Pokemon I don't need to mention. Hell he's countered by his own weather a lot of the time due to Starmie trolling him & Choice Scarf Water-type moves being good in Rain. Even Sun has...well every Sun sweeper including Ninetales herself pretty much laughs at him if he doesn't have a Nasty Plot boost, especially if he's using Thunder. Really any well-built team shouldn't have too much trouble dealing with Thundurus.

I'm dead serious here, run anything with a Choice Scarf that can out-speed Thundurus and hit him with a SE attack or even just a 120 Base STAB. He's downed by anything with SR damage. He can beat your copy & paste Sand Core, boohoo, but if you have one Pokemon that breaks away from copy & paste Sand like...hell Choice Scarf Zoroark even, Thundurus is promptly revenged. Scarf Zoroark is my current Thundurus check in OU and my Serperior, Tornadus, Dragonite, Salamence, & Scarf Genesect revenge Pokemon in DW OU. He's not a good example of a Scarf Pokemon, which is actually the point. If there's one thing I've noticed this test period, it's that Choice Scarf is really overlooked now that Garchomp's gone. A lot of it's Excadrill's fault since the only Scarf Pokemon that threatens Jolly Excadrill is Scarf Deoxys-S. And that's like the biggest statement to how much Excadrill messes up Speed tiers.

I'm not trying to make light of Thundurus too much as he is a really good Pokemon, but he is entirely manageable. He doesn't have a luck factor like Garchomp unless you consider priority Thunder Wave luck which is entirely the point of the move in the first place but unlike Garchomp he has to give up power or coverage to use it. He's just not broken. Annoying, but not broken.

If we're really going to ban annoying things now, which is sad that you're THAT ban-happy, how about we start with Excadrill & Rock Slide and work our way down from there?



On an unrelated note, I'm using Specs Latios & Colbur Jollyfett to entirely remove Tyranitar by locking him into Pursuit and Countering to change the Weather permanently. There's no better feeling than changing the weather knowing that you completely dicked over Tyranitar and pissed off your opponent to no end.
 
I think if drizzle finally got banned, I would be open to retesting manaphy. IMO it's most threatening set was bulky cm with hydration + rest during r2 when it got banned and it would lose that free full recovery without perma rain. Idk why people piss themselves when they hear +3 Tail Glow. From an offensive standpoint, its certainly a manageable revenge kill since base 100 speed just isn't what it used to be and tail glow sweepers can't afford to invest in bulk. Easily picked off with some prior damage a la sr by the myriad heavy bitters of bw, terak, lando, latios, etc. And on top of that, it's shitty movepool is going to leave it walled by one of Ferrothorn, gastrodon, or lati@s regardless of what two coverage options it's packing. Blissey is always there to status it sans hydration too. I feel like it would also be hardpressed for a scot free setup opportunity in this metagame...

Thoughts? Most people were in agreement when I made a similar post a round or so ago.
 
I'm not sure about whether Manaphy should be OU or not. I don't know why it was Uber in Gen 4 but I presume it's because Rain Dance + Damp Rock + U-Turn gave Manaphy enough turns of instant healing and STAB boosts to wreck teams with Tail Glow. If Drizzle's banned, then who's to say that Rain Dance won't make a comeback? There's better setup pokemon this generation like Rotom-W with its boosted STAB and Volt Change, Accelgor which is basically a better Electrode with access to Spikes, and Thundurus, Tornadus and Whimsicott can use it with Prankster. Meanwhile, Manaphy has a buffed Tail Glow and can lay the smack on most pokemon in the metagame other than the few mentioned above, which can all be dealt with by other team members. Just partner it with something like Virizion to take out Water types and Ferrothorn (not that Ferrothorn likes taking +3 Ice Beams, or does enough damage with Power Whip).

I suppose whether Manaphy should be Uber or not depends on the popularity of Rain Dance as a playstyle in the absence of Drizzle, to some extent. Without Rain support, it's basically a bulky Simipour.
 
dannyboee2 said:
OK i know that i didnt make the cut, but i see many people voicing their opinions anyway, and i would like to contribute.

BAN DRAGONITE

Ok so my opinion on dragonite has never been good since i started playing Pokemon competitively. But when 5th gen started, oh god i saw it DW ability. why did they give him multiscale?!?! i mean hes bulky enough anyway! base 95 def and 100 sp. def!!! I swear a stab quad effective max. special attack cloyster using blizzard would kill it. and you cant ban multiscale without dragonite because otherwise dragonite is useless. Inner Focus... really? I mean, he would do AMAZING in Uber, and he just is such an unfair pokemon in OU! well thats my dragonite theory.

BAN ALL MOVE RESISTING BERRIES

yah i bet you havn't thought of that. but i mean really. if you give a sucky, non defensive/sp. defensive flygon a yache berry, it can live a hit! and flygon's arnt supposed to do that. and if you give a ferrothorn one (which i admit, why would you?) then it can live 3 FIRE MOVES THATS RIDICULOUS. those things need to go.

And yes i also say ban the usual, Excadrill, baton pass, what have you.

Hey Jabba and co. I HOPE YOU READ THIS IT WOULD MEAN A LOT!!!!!!!!!
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saw this and I had to comment. Like had to.

Why should resist berries be banned? If you have a resist berry, it means you forgo life orb/leftovers/ whatever better items you can use. Oh, and resist berries only work once. If it's used, its gone for the rest of the battle.

Cloyster doesn't use blizzard. It uses icicle spear.
 
T.TNT said:
saw this and I had to comment. Like had to.

Why should resist berries be banned? If you have a resist berry, it means you forgo life orb/leftovers/ whatever better items you can use. Oh, and resist berries only work once. If it's used, its gone for the rest of the battle.

Cloyster doesn't use blizzard. It uses icicle spear.
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At least it gives a good laugh to whoever has to tally-up all the nominations so it's not entirely pointless.
 
T.TNT said:
saw this and I had to comment. Like had to.

Why should resist berries be banned? If you have a resist berry, it means you forgo life orb/leftovers/ whatever better items you can use. Oh, and resist berries only work once. If it's used, its gone for the rest of the battle.

Cloyster doesn't use blizzard. It uses icicle spear.
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That dude is a joke. Seriously, foolery gets to the point where it pisses me off. I see he didn't make the cut of course, but it makes wonder if we can have confidence that all or most of the voters are completely capable of sound judgement. I can't count how many times un-banning something was brought up in that thread. Blaziken?? Really?? If one doesn't want Dragonite or Excadril in OU, why the hell would one want Blaziken back?

Re-instate the Smogon Council? Maybe? Just saying...
 
\Can someone tell me how the Smogon Council would be less biased than the method we have now?

Nine (or some other arbitrary number) voters picked entirely by credibility in the eyes of three or so administrators is less biased than fifty voters chosen by entirely objective battling requirements?

I'm sorry, but a Council method would be worse than the method we have right now. The only reason a few bad players get included and a few good players excluded is because of hax, and the latter of those situations can be avoided by special permission applications. A Council would be fine if there wasn't a seemingly random maximum number of voters.

If you want to remove the idiots from the voting pool, impose a sentence requirements or a lower reqs+sentences. I'm not sure why we have that in UU and not in OU, I guess it's because administrators would have to read a lot of sentences. A Council method is worse that what we have now in almost any measure.

They got rid of the Council because it doesn't work.
 
People are far too ban happy, especially when it comes to weather. Using an auto-weather poke does not mean you will get auto wins on the ladder.
Is it popular? Yes.
Annoying? Yes.
Broken? Not by any means.
I honestly think weather is EXTREMLY over rated, and often times do much better with weather-less teams, that's just me though.
 
I'd like to add that IRC guys told me that the official Smogon Council only applied to the Salamence period last generation (in favor of a more "defensive metagame"). Though I'll admit that some kind of updated council system is better than what Katakiri described.
 
DetroitLolcat said:
\Can someone tell me how the Smogon Council would be less biased than the method we have now?

Nine (or some other arbitrary number) voters picked entirely by credibility in the eyes of three or so administrators is less biased than fifty voters chosen by entirely objective battling requirements?

I'm sorry, but a Council method would be worse than the method we have right now. The only reason a few bad players get included and a few good players excluded is because of hax, and the latter of those situations can be avoided by special permission applications. A Council would be fine if there wasn't a seemingly random maximum number of voters.

If you want to remove the idiots from the voting pool, impose a sentence requirements or a lower reqs+sentences. I'm not sure why we have that in UU and not in OU, I guess it's because administrators would have to read a lot of sentences. A Council method is worse that what we have now in almost any measure.

They got rid of the Council because it doesn't work.
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This, just this.

I was expecting the usual and reasonable Excadrill, Latios and Thundurus, heck even a few Runicles ones again. But the drizzle nominations are kinda high, it might actually go sadly. I liked drizzle, it was predictable and easy to take down, I will miss it being fodder for my team 85% of the time. I was surprised Dragonite got nomed a few times, it will be interesting to see how its voted out. People seem to hate Doexys-S all of a sudden, so it might get enough of a vote to be automatically suspect next round. What really surprised me is the amount of ban baton pass noms, I guess I wasn't the only one getting raped by espeon.
 
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