as the guy who proposed the baton pass clause thats currently applied in OU, i feel like i have to express my feelings and share my thoughts cause after lurking through these bp threads for so long without saying anything, i felt my mind was gonna explode.
why do people want to preserve this:
- Baton Pass Clause: Players cannot have more than one Pokémon with the move Baton Pass. Furthermore, a Pokémon cannot have Baton Pass while also having a move or ability that boosts Speed and a move or ability that boosts another stat.
yes, that thing looks ugly as fuck, but my original proposal was to ban speed pass as well, and even though people argued that it was not broken, i still tried to convince them to just ignore this so the clause would look way less ugly and it would be much easier to understand (for newcomers), but for some reason i conceded for something i didnt really agree with, and i do regret about that.
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/unifying-baton-pass-clause.3588048/ do not pass speed boosts was the most voted option, so i guess im not alone regarding this topic.
"Baton Pass Clause: Players cannot have more than one Pokémon with the move Baton Pass. Furthermore, a Pokémon cannot have Baton Pass while also having a move or ability that boosts Speed."
doesnt look as bad, right? :s
but at the end of oras, people like njnp managed to reinvent the playstyle, which was considered as dead at some point, in an non broken way (people may argue that it was indeed a broken thing, but here is my last post about this subject:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/baton-pass-yes-again.3573973/page-4#post-6990292), and that is pretty cool IMO. anyway i just wanna say that i still support my old proposal JUST for aesthetics (and maybe to make people finally stop complaining about speedpass scolipass lol), but it would also be fine if you guys keep the way it is right now.
the "oh but blaze blaziken, torrent greninja, shadow tag wynaut etc arent broken so why they got banned" logic annoys me a lot. how can you compare irrelevant stuff like this with something that brings a whole unique dynamism to the game? non broken forms of baton pass existed since ever, and it would be a shame if we just get rid of that because of... aesthetics or whatever other arguments you can come up with. i also just dont get the "bp is a broken move" logic.
regarding the main topic of that thread, im against "unifying" baton pass clause (lol every single lower tier banned bp or is about to ban it) because when i was trying to figure out the root of the baton pass issue, i only had the ou tier in mind. the bp clause basically covers so many things such as bp chains, geopass, irondef scolipass, smashpass, and other less broken, but still annoying forms of bp such as speedless chains, quiverpass, NP/SD + rock polish mew and SD + rock polish gliscor; while still preserves many things such as drypass lopunny (this + a strong pursuit user is pretty nice. got wrecked by it when i laddered for olt), nastypass mew (once used by BLOO and tesung), bulk up mew (used by abr in spl), SD gliscorpass (tesung used that in some tour weeks. it was also brought in the ghosting tour finals lol), medicham (i still remember bluwing bringing it in some tour week against me) and many other things such as celebi, togekiss, scizor, shedinja etc. keep in mind that not every single player focus on the competitive side of the game, some just play for fun, so preserving stuff like tailglow volbeat and contrary spinda is cool.
i got slightly annoyed to see every lower tier copying ou's clause because they didnt need to do that (once again, the clause was specifically designed for the ou tier). it seems they are all going to ban bp anyway but ou really shouldnt be bothered about that because we have resources to deal with every single bp strategy. try to think a single recipient capable of being brought in safely in a metagame full of extremely powerful threats, and also not be annoyed by any sort of status, phaze etc (espeon sucks). i cant speak for sm because i havent played that enough to have a solid opinion, but im pretty sure that ONLY speedpass has potential to be annoying to deal with in this new meta considering how talonflame, twave, prankster and priority moves in general got much worse. if scolipass ever gets annoying in sm, and theres enough people bitching about it, please do not ban the move, just change the clause into what once was my ORIGINAL proposal. as long as a threat has no speed boosts, it is possible to revenge kill, strike with a powerful hit, set up alongside, trick, taunt, spread status, crit etc. sharpedo sucks in ou, so SD pass into sharpedo is not an issue.
lastly, i just wanna say that if a non speed pass strategy ever gets troublesome to deal with in ou, only then i will support a full bp ban because i would finally be convinced that my theory and all the work ive done so far no longer serve any purpose. im not good with words, and people have refuted to every single anti bp ban post here very well, but lets please use the common sense. you guys are about to remove a freaking move that has been used since gsc and has impacted many games during smogon's history. since ou is smogon's main tier cause it is the most played on the ladder and is the most featured in official tournaments, there is a need to think very carefully here before doing anything.