Banning Pokemon & Ability combinations:

[the_artic_one]

So you're proposing we only tier formes separately for ban tiers and not usage tiers, right?

I still don't like it because it causes headaches whenever something with multiple abilities drops into UU because we'd need to test the abilities separately for BL.

 

[Ulevo]

So you're proposing we only tier formes separately for ban tiers and not usage tiers, right?

I still don't like it because it causes headaches whenever something with multiple abilities drops into UU because we'd need to test the abilities separately for BL.

I hardly see how this causes extra headaches.

Lets assume for example that, Jalorda drops below the OU threshold and in to the UU tier. A month later, Perversity Jalorda is running rampant, destroying everyones beloved UU metagame, so on and so forth.

You would have to test and decide whether or not Jalorda should be banned anyway. The only difference is that now you are left with the open decision to decide whether or not Pervesity Jalroda is the problem, or if the ability has no negative implications on the UU metagame and Jalroda itself needs to go.

In all likelyhood, you wind up with a new (potentially viable) Pokemon in UU.

Again, I foresee this circumstance becoming a rarity. Very few Pokemon have an ability so broken that it makes an otherwise harmless or comfortably viable Pokemon broken within a given tier, even with Dream World abilities.

 

[RBG]

If our banlists consist of Pokemon w/ Ability, why wouldn't our regular tiers be Pokemon w/ Ability as well?

 

[Ulevo]

Admittedly I do not have a consistent answer to this question other than that would add simplicity. Touché

 

[Tleilax]

I hardly see how this causes extra headaches.

Lets assume for example that, Jalorda drops below the OU threshold and in to the UU tier. A month later, Perversity Jalorda is running rampant, destroying everyones beloved UU metagame, so on and so forth.

You would have to test and decide whether or not Jalorda should be banned anyway. The only difference is that now you are left with the open decision to decide whether or not Pervesity Jalroda is the problem, or if the ability has no negative implications on the UU metagame and Jalroda itself needs to go.

In all likelyhood, you wind up with a new (potentially viable) Pokemon in UU.

Again, I foresee this circumstance becoming a rarity. Very few Pokemon have an ability so broken that it makes an otherwise harmless or comfortably viable Pokemon broken within a given tier, even with Dream World abilities.

The problem is that this opens too many cans of worms. Remember how it was sorting UU out when we revamped it from scratch, trying to figure out what was too tough and what wasn't? It already goes through several stages of flux when things drop down. It will be incredibly time consuming to test for abilities as well. Let's take your Jalorda example. It gets dropped to UU and is tearing things up. We ban it, then someone says "Hey, it was Perversity that made it OP, we should try it without Perversity." Which means MORE test time with Perversity-less Jalorda to figure if THAT'S too broken. It takes up precious time that we could be spending on other things. It almost took up until Gen V to sort out DPPt. Now with even MORE options available, do we really want to spend all that time nitpicking at the little details that MIGHT be what's making it broken? And do we want to open the doors to testing, say, Multi Scale Lugia in case it's more OU than Pressure Lugia? I don't we should waste time with such things, and keep it simple with blanket bans, which are just as effective and easier to implement.

 

[Delta 2777]

I realize this thread is pretty old by now, but I wanted to post to raise a point. If we do go and allow the banning of abilities on Pokemon (Inconcistent, possibly Sand Veil / Shadow Tag), we have to consider that if the ability isn't the Dream World ability, we will also be restricting some of the moves that the Pokemon can learn. For example, if we were to declare Pressure a broken ability, and all Pokemon with the ability Pressure were forced to use their alternate ability, then for example Zapdos would not be able to use Heat Wave, as there is no way to obtain a Lighteningrod Zapdos with Heat Wave.

I'm mostly bringing this up for the inevitable debates soon to come if inconsistent is banned (which it looks like it will be) over whether or not its ok to ban certain abilities on certain Pokemon.

Another thing I wanted to ask - are we proposing to ban an ability as a whole if we find it broken, or just on that particular Pokemon (or whichever we prefer in certain circumstances)? In my own personal opinion, I think banning an ability as a whole would be more logical than banning on specific Pokemon (if it is forced to come to that), as that generally avoids confusion with ban lists.

 

[locopoke]

I too would like to know in which cases would we ban the ability rather than the Pokemon. Would we ban Politoed or Drizzle?

 

[Wichu]

I'm in favour of banning abilities rather than whole Pokémon. Why ban, say, Bibarel just because of Inconsistent? It's not useless without it (Simple makes it a good BP recipient, and Unaware is useful for taking down set-up sweepers), and neither is it overpowered. The same could be said for Octillery (also a good BP recipient, and an excellent TrickRain sweeper), and especially Smeargle (we're going to ban one of the most versatile Pokémon in the game just because of an optional ability?).

These, along with Drizzle/Drought, make it plain to me that abilities should be banned rather than Pokémon - although it's more difficult to tier, it means we're not removing Pokémon that have their own niches even without the offending ability.