I won't make any conclusive statements on whether Damp Rock/Rain Dance/Kabutops/Ludicolo/Omastar/whatever is "broken" or not. I don't have any relevant play experience in UU with any of the above to draw any meaningful conclusions. I am concerned about the process we are following, or more specifically, the process we are trying to establish for this.
This thread is a good example of the reasons I am trying to come up with some basic "ground rules" in the
Characteristics of a Desirable Pokemon Metagame thread. Because, the way we proceed with "UU Rain" should be dictated by what we want and what we think is wrong with the status quo. Until we articulate that, it's going to be very difficult to test anything. I'm not saying we need to tie the decisions or actions of this thread to the Characteristics thread I made -- I'm just saying that the motivation of that thread is somewhat applicable here too.
Are we saying that a metagame with rain as a dominant win condition is unacceptable? I don't necessarily think that is true. Over in Ubers, they deal with permanent rain on a far more frequent basis than UU, and that metagame is acceptable to many people. Note that I did not say that Ubers is "balanced" -- I said that it is "acceptable". People are not constantly complaining "Rain is all over the place in Ubers, and that's why Ubers sucks!"
Perhaps the Ubers crowd actually despises perma-rain, but they deal with it because they think we can't really ban anything from ubers. That's not true, but perhaps they think that. In which case, maybe dominant rain is inherently an undesirable thing. I don't believe that is true. I think, the Ubers crowd is fairly happy with Kyogre spamming rain everywhere, and rain teams dominating almost every high-level match. If that is the case, then dominant rain is not inherently a "bad thing" from a standpoint of competitive players enjoying a metagame.
Okay, so if dominant rain isn't "bad" in that way (it might be, but let's suppose it isn't), then how is it bad?
Perhaps, we think dominant rain is bad because it decreases variety. Since people can win so much with such ease when using rain in UU, the metagame has centralized to the point where it is almost the only viable playstyle. Well, if we ban Damp Rock, we are probably effectively banning Rain entirely, because without the ability to use extended rain, people may not be willing to use it at all. Once again, I don't know that this will happen, but let's suppose it does. How far are we willing to go with this sort of thing?
With Rain Dance effectively removed from the metagame, might that create greater incentive for Hail, Sun, and Sand teams, all of which have access to permanent or extended weather? Because, one of the best ways to combat weather, is to change it. If Rain is basically banned from play -- we just made every other form of weather even better. What if one of those other weather conditions becomes consequently broken? Are we prepared to ban/limit it as well?
I am not saying the above will happen. We can theorymon a million possible future consequences of any change we make today. It's the classic "butterfly effect", and I'm not seriously advocating that we avoid taking some action today, for fear of some future theoretical mess. I'm using these examples for us to simply know
"What are we trying to achieve with this change?"
Right now, the problem statement seems to be little more than "People are successfully using rain a lot in UU -- and that sucks." I think we can and should do better than that, before tossing out ideas for stuff to ban. I think there is a clear problem statement out there that we CAN define -- but it has not been presented thus far. Everyone posting in this thread is probably posting under a slightly different assumption of what we are trying to achieve. Which is why this discussion is wandering amongst a bunch of different proposals that range from banning a single item across the board, to banning an entire group of pokemon. If we can refine the problem statement, we might be able to refine the discussion of the solution.
BTW, I have no problems with banning stuff. For the exact reasons Jumpman mentioned. I do think we should exercise caution and restraint, but not because I think Nintendo and Gamefreak's Pokemon game is a sacred cow. I just think that changes are hard to enact, and even harder to revert -- so we should be very deliberate with any actions we take. As such, I think we need to have a clear idea of the goal, before taking steps to achieve it.
I think Teifu is on the right track with his post. He mentioned "playstyle variety" as a desirable end result. I think we should discuss the merits of that goal, and introduce new ones -- before talking about specifics like Damp Rock/Rain Dance/Kabutops/Ludicolo/whatever.