Proposal Baton Pass in ORAS Ubers

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Recently with ORASCL II and ORAS Ubers Cup IX going on, there have been quite a few complaints about the presence of Baton Pass in ORAS Ubers and how unhealthy it can be. The goal of this thread is to elicit further discussion about Baton Pass and potentially take action before Ubers Classic Playoffs and UPL begin.

Baton Pass in Ubers primarily exists through a few structures:

:smeargle:
Smeargle-based teams include a fast taunter (Deo-S / Mewtwo), Primal Groudon, Arceus-Ghost for improof, a special breaker with good coverage (ex: Diancie-Mega), and then Smeargle itself who usually has the moves Shell Smash/Geomancy, Ingrain, Spore, and Baton Pass. These teams rely on Smeargle Smash/GeoPassing with the combination of Spore/Ingrain to circumvent general counterplay.

Some recent replays involving this structure:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6ubers-915389

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6ubers-917943

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6ubers-918696

:scolipede:
Scolipede-based teams rely on Ingrain Rest Xerneas, Primal Groudon, some Arceus form, Scolipede with Toxic Spikes, Iron Defense, Baton Pass, and Protect, and then can vary based on the builder. The gameplan of these teams are to pass ID to Xerneas, who then utilizes Ingrain + Geomancy + Rest to beat out teams that can't immediately punish Scolipede before it can pass.

Some recent replays involving this structure:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen6ubers-2310058180-3xvf9dq1w6tgwg1doenrhyx5uttmag8pw?p2

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen6ubers-2331206184-a11xfn1g1n6aanxwcxwtinikkabaqtypw?p2

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6ubers-780157

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen6ubers-2562743050-gg8bdpvjn4qn5abs5vuqicegye859oupw?p2

There are various other niche Baton Passers, but for the sake of this post, the only relevant ones are these two. Both of these teams have very specific measures of counterplay that can differ from structure to structure. Typical ways to beat Baton Pass are to:
- pressure the passers off lead, which can be difficult for BP structures that vary their lead
- phase the Baton Passers before they can set up both boosts or have an ingrain ready, which generally requires a fast Taunt user alongside a form of phasing
- have strong priority to take out the Passer after they boost or to revenge the BP recipient
- have a sleep absorber for sleep-based BP structures, which also has variance based on sleep turns / sleep talk calls


Generally, these teams are very auto-win/lose on preview, and in the past have been more fishy. However, with Smeargle and Scolipede, there is an additional layer of frustration in that both of these Pokemon exist in the metagame on similar looking structures. Smeargle is a very common Webs setter, and the lines vs different Smeargle sets can make it harder to formulate a reasonable plan both in the builder and in-game vs Smeargle. The same goes for Scolipede since you have to consider Endeavor sets when playing around it.

ORAS Ubers is already a very high power metagame, and teams are stretched thin to cover the large number of viable structures. The removal of Baton Pass would have very limited impacts on the tier as a whole, other than slightly weakening the potency of Sticky Webs Smeargle and hazard Scolipede teams.


Tagging players who have either played in UPL XIII, UWC IV, UWL III or regularly contribute to discuss this:
keys
Hack
Remnonc
Evuelf

UPL XIII
byronthewellwell
MZ
Fardin
Kafkafka
Gondra
Mysterious M
Splendid Silver Star
DugZa
susciety
baconeatinassassin
Mashing
Premonitions
Crossia
magialice
aerobee
Sheik :
squinn
Indulge in dreams
Lasen
skimmythegod

UWC IV
Perry
Ruffles
Fantos13
Frixel
Horii
Leroipolux
Premonitions
Real FV13
Glue
Ithi
Hisoka
rahul_3301
Tenebricite
HSBT
Mada
thajester
Donopan
jyusaan
Alkione
Terracotta


UWL III
Melle2402
Thiago Nunes
obii
velvet
Ayu
RichardMillePlain
Endill
NotVeryCake
Hacker
TDR
Isa

Also thanks Crossia, keys, Nineveh for helping me write this up
 
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I have been tightly involved and active within this tier since at least 2016 and have played it at a high level in our flagship tournaments for the better part of a decade so I feel like I have a strong pulse on the impacts of Baton Pass and it's effects on the health of ORAS Ubers. Until around 2024 or so, I would have always argued that Baton Pass did not warrant a ban due to it always having been quite inconsistent and gimmicky at best, not really being viable or strong enough to warrant any further look as anything more than a desperate attempt at catching your opponent by surprise on the one or two matchups it could possibly do something in. The team you would almost always see before that time would be the smeargle version where the entire team was built around getting a Baton Pass off with the boosted stats (smash or geopass into threats) and while it could still load into some autowin matchups, you would very often see that team fall flat on it's face due to it's very telegraphed ideas and the counterplay being fairly common overall. Due to this, you would rarely see Baton Pass being used over the course of our main tournaments and when it did it would usually struggle to generate wins (like in this example from UPL 2019).

However, things changed around 2024 when Hack started to experiment with Baton Pass structures and started moving towards teams that did not require Baton Pass to function and were instead built around other more solid strategies and would only include Baton Pass as another tool rather than the whole package, which substantially elevated the effectiveness and consistency of Baton Pass as a gamebreaking move that would put opposing teams in constant lose/lose situations and would essentially turn battles into pure guessing games surrounding movesets and clicks, with one "misstep" being enough to entirely lose you the battle on the opposing side. The counterplay surrounding leads like Scolipede, Venomoth and Smeargle (and i guess Volbeat although that one is more gimmicky) is so vastly different depending on the moves they carry and they can do their hazard jobs so incredibly well even without clicking Baton Pass that the pass user now had a massive advantage that was enough to change Baton Pass teams from a gimmicky afterthought into a powerful and much more consistent option. Matchups were swung much more in those teams' favour now that you could just play without Baton Pass in games where you know it is not worth using and you essentially have a 100% win button vs those teams that you would already have demolished originally with Baton Pass anyway, meaning you are much more enticed to bring these structures in the first place since they can beat a much wider spectrum of teams and styles, and that has been exactly what we have seen in the 2 years since, with Baton Pass teams dramatically rising in popularity and effectiveness and essentially taking over our ORAS tournaments. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen in UPL finals from last year, where Venomoth got flinched turn 1 and never got to click a move but instead of instantly folding, the BP team still has enough tools now to play the game out normally regardless of the usage of Baton Pass, which makes those teams much more dangerous and consistent. Another example of a team that can function without Baton Pass but becomes much scarier when the move comes into play when anti-hazard strategies are attempted (like magic coat Arceus trying to beat tspikes from Scolipede) can be seen in UPL 2024 where you can see how easy generating a free turn with these mons is given how vastly different the counterplay can be between different Baton Pass users' sets and how that alone can turn the tides in the Baton Pass user's favour.

Of course there is counterplay to Baton Pass and ways to beat it in this tier, but I think the inherent nature of the strategy leads to very uninspiring gameplay (especially when other things like spore are involved in tandem with it), with most of those games being either decided at preview and opposition being mostly powerless to affect the outcome of a match where Baton Pass is brought, leading to it being a "fish" of sorts for players looking to cheese their way into a free win or a constant string of mind numbing 50:50s that lead to extremely linear and unenjoyable gameplay. It also leads to a much lower variety of strategies and Pokemon being available to use since so many things now will just auto-lose to Baton Pass that you are always walking that tightrope when you decide to bring them to a tournament match, essentially shrinking down our tier into something much more stale and uninteresting. The beauty of ORAS Ubers was always it's ability to walk that fine line between the extremely powerful attackers and the insane defensive versatility and role compression that it's top mons provided, giving players a chance to cover multiple structures and ideas with shrewd teambuilding and timely plays, but the advancements made with Baton Pass have thrown a lot of that balance away and have invalidated a lot of what has made this tier so much fun to watch and play.

I truly believe the move Baton Pass should be permanently removed from this generation in all forms (there is no incentive to keep "drypassing" since it does not feature in any capacity within this tier and any half measures are capable of not fully addressing this issue and having us need to revisit this in the future) and I would hazard a guess that most other top ORAS Ubers players would strongly agree with this sentiment. I hope we can push for a vote and get this addressed before UPL so we can have some proper matches that will be enjoyable to play and spectate for all our ORAS playerbase.
 
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I would like to add to Keys' point with my own viewpoint.

I may only be a newcomer, but I immediately came to realize how cheesy baton-pass is as a general strategy. Yes, it's technically not impossible to have an answer of some kind to sweepers in general, but the argument of "l2p" or "l2b" can only go so far. When there's already so many powerful threats in the tier requiring vastly different answers, you're often hard-pressed to find a sure-fire way to defeat batonpass unless you simply never let it go off.


This style of gameplay is incredibly unfun and generally unengaging to what I think is an incredible tier to learn and play as time goes on. Just to give an example! Scolipede can iron defense to baton pass, making it so xern could in fact brute force past the likes of gyro ball users, especially behind a sub. Or how volbeat can just do volbeat things, and don't even get me started on smeargle being able to potentially pass off a geomancy boost!

While it isn't the top-tier strategy, the fact that this is a genuine strategy you have to keep an eye out for and can straight up lose to just based on your team structure is incredibly toxic to the ubers environment as a whole.

The best way I can describe my point is, keeping baton pass is like trying to ride a bicycle with low pressure tires. Technically you can do it, but it's really going to do more harm than good, and eventually be the reason why you fall over when your legs are so tired from not addressing the issue.
 
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There doesn’t seem to me a good argument to keep this around. It is obviously incredibly cheesey and fishy and having to go out of your way to add counterplay to this for every team you build sounds nauseating. While keeping it around doesnt add anything worthwhile to the Meta aside from making sure old timers like Lasen get the occasional win (jk I love you). I remember when baton pass was around in cg XY OU, it was cancer.

There’s also no need to discuss stuff like dry passing as this is not smth ORAS does

The best way to do this is to have the tiering folks make you a survey and have the players who fulfill a certain criteria vote on this
 
Argument is regurgitated at some point but it is better to ban it, adds too many variance on a tier that honestly dances on a very thin balanced wire. Extremely strong threats that just become absolutely unbearable, like baton passing some stuff to a mon with very limited switch-ins like Mixed PDon (or any offensive PDon being honest), Xerneas with the right coverage, etc, etc.

Wouldnt be missed, good riddance if it can happen
 
I think it is fun to use baton pass.

In the context of ORAS Ubers, I believe baton pass is healthy and adds positively to the tier. I know people have strong thoughts about bp in general, but I don't believe it is currently an issue in ORAS Ubers. The common bp structures are not oppressive, with lots of counterplay both in-game and in the builder. If something like full pass was good in tier, I would feel differently, but in the current state it is fine.

ORAS Ubers is a very stale tier, the stalest of any Ubers old gen (relative to the amount of "Ubers" available), with essentially the same 5-10 teams recycled every game. The tier has lacked innovation in recent years, with the main exception being the Scolipede quick pass structures. I think it would be a shame to ban bp and revert back to an old and stale metagame. Instead, people should adapt their current teams and build new things to combat this exciting new development of the metagame.

I feel strongly that bp should be allowed in as many Ubers tiers as possible (very sad about the adv dry pass / mean pass bans), as it is of the appropriate power level alongside the powerful legendaries allowed in these formats. Obviously, there are exceptions to this when the team comps reach an oppressive power level (such as Eevee pass in SM), but I don't believe ORAS bp has reached that point or is even that close to reaching that point.
 
Perry said:
I don't understand why we keep BP in older gens... just get rid of it everywhere and Ubers will be better because of it
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Replying to this just to say that I don't think it's ideal to tackle this in the general sense (nor do I think it will happen to be fair). Balancing of moves and mechanics work very differently depending on the generation you're playing and it's probably not a good idea to give them the same treatment everywhere.

Using the topic of discussion as an example, regardless of how people may feel about Baton Pass in ORAS, I can probably say it is completely fine in BW Ubers and I dare say the tier would probably be slightly worse if it was banned. Even if I thought it was a toxic element in the past, I don't think it has the same reach it has in ORAS and banning it in gen 5 is unnecessary.

TL;DR let's keep the focus of the discussion gen (ORAS) specific.
 
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Agree with Edgar because it's not really an issue in GSC out of the older gens where you can use it currently, at least to me. I agree with both keys and 64 for different reasons. Most of keys points, but 64's in that there's a lot of monotony in ORAS Ubers due to how reliable certain 6 are so maybe this can be considered development that was needed? Idk, people still loading the same stalls, hyper offense, same teams every single tour I've witnessed or helped tour prep in, now we're just loading BP and short pass in a format already pretty strapped for checking some of the big stuff and archetypes you need to cover. Attempting to cheese or at least partially is not really innovation in the way that's going to push anything meaningful at this point. It's wishful thinking to believe that the 5-10 or so people who actually build and not recycle some variation of old stuff will be inspired or build when the adaptation to most of these teams is going to just put random phasing on a mon that normally wouldn't be using it otherwise.

I don't feel strongly about the end-result as I'm mostly retired from most of the stuff on this site but if there's any consolation could just be treating next big tour (UPL I suppose?) to just not have BP in ORAS Ubers slots and then come back to this. For what it's worth this might just also be a Spore/Sleep Clause issue. The stronger variants of BP utilize Sleep, the Scoli stuff tends to be a bit more fishy.
 
64 Squares said:
I think it is fun to use baton pass.

In the context of ORAS Ubers, I believe baton pass is healthy and adds positively to the tier. I know people have strong thoughts about bp in general, but I don't believe it is currently an issue in ORAS Ubers. The common bp structures are not oppressive, with lots of counterplay both in-game and in the builder. If something like full pass was good in tier, I would feel differently, but in the current state it is fine.

ORAS Ubers is a very stale tier, the stalest of any Ubers old gen (relative to the amount of "Ubers" available), with essentially the same 5-10 teams recycled every game. The tier has lacked innovation in recent years, with the main exception being the Scolipede quick pass structures. I think it would be a shame to ban bp and revert back to an old and stale metagame. Instead, people should adapt their current teams and build new things to combat this exciting new development of the metagame.

I feel strongly that bp should be allowed in as many Ubers tiers as possible (very sad about the adv dry pass / mean pass bans), as it is of the appropriate power level alongside the powerful legendaries allowed in these formats. Obviously, there are exceptions to this when the team comps reach an oppressive power level (such as Eevee pass in SM), but I don't believe ORAS bp has reached that point or is even that close to reaching that point.
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I must respectfully disagree with this assessment of BP in regards to the metagame. There is imho, nothing wrong with teams being recycled, that's just something that will naturally occur b/c they've consistently proven to be top-contenders time and time again. As for how a bunch of teams are pumped into the metagame is an entirely different matter. Considering there's even fewer builders, and said builders can decide whether or not they want to actually dump their teams for public use.

Having solved structures does not equate to a lack of diversity, now as for whether or not that suits your tastes is also an entirely different matter. I've already addressed while BP is not THE top-tier strategy, the fact you're kind of hoping and praying that you don't get run over by some random bp is fundamentally the definition of uncompetitive.

Mons like scoli and smeargle will still be doing their things even without BP, just that now it's a far more playable mu! It's obvious BP has infinitely more cons than pros in regards to dealing with it in the builder and ingame.
 
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