Decided to finally give my input on some of those earlier questions regarding clauses/tiering action.
Tera is often seen as divisive in OMs given how volatile it can be. You could argue Tera can be used defensively, but it would seemingly benefit offense more here.
Smart defensive Tera can only reward good play with a single type’s set of resistances/immunities, but given Linked’s mechanic of stacked attacks, allowing Tera super-STABs or STAB on coverage options (including Tera Blast) in tandem with Linked moves may skew the meta harder into offense, making using balance and stall archetypes difficult to justify.
Would you like to see Tera banned for the sake of better exploring the defensive possibilities of Linked?
I am incredibly biased (most of the OMs im interested in end up banning tera, like AAA and MnM), but
i dont think tera can stay. Its defensive capabilities are a decent bit lower now, since you could always just link a strong stab with something that covers its resistances (EQ + Ice Spinner, EQ + Stone Edge, BoltBeam, etc). Offensively i think it affects much less, as well as affecting it positively regardless. I’m not sure how much of my opinion is skewed by metas like AAA/MnM, but I personally
advocate to suspect tera at the very least
I have no particular opinions on the second set of questions. I can see why a speed boost like protosynthesis could be a problem, but on the other hand gutting 14 mons in a metagame all at once seems pretty rough.
Restrict Imprison from being Linked: This is basically for Imprison + Transform Mew, which lets it shut down anything slower than it, or any switch in. Given it got restricted last gen for being uncompetitive, the precident exists to just hit it already.
Restrict Night Shade / Seismic Toss from being Linked: More Gen 8 ban precedent. Preset damage moves enable savage breaking with other attacking moves, as in the cases of Ruination and Super Fang, which are already banned. However, Night Shade and Seismic Toss have only been watched, as of now.
Dragapult or Gengar w/ Shadow Ball + Night Shade is a potentially example of this being silly. Seismic Toss doesn’t have fast users though, so that is more up in the air.
Restrict Taunt from being Linked: Restricting Taunt is intended to give defensive mons another small, but needed buff. An attack move + Taunt allows essentially any offensive mon to wear out its defensive checks over the course of a game by preventing healing (outside Regenerator) and other status with a customizable and more powerful pseudo-Psychic Noise.
Imprison: While i do understand that mew got its moveset completely demolished in SV, i still think shutting down any slow mon at all only serves to not only be uncompetitive, but also to push the meta further into high offense, which is the main argument i used against tera.
I advocate to restrict imprison
Night Shade/Seismic Toss: Being able to wear down checks that normally wall you is a bit strong, but realistically only night shade has the distribution to accomplish this.
Seismic toss in particular: The only seismic toss users i can see being a problem are Iron Hands and ursaluna, both of which are weak on their special defense and are quite slow to boot, which could make them easy to force out. Iron hands could be an issue of bdrum sets get out of hand, but i see no world where ursaluna is a problem and so tiering standards would have hands banned instead, regardless.
Night shade in particular: this move, in contrast, has a lot more users that could get use out of it. Gengar, darkrai, and hisuian zoroark are all fast and strong special attackers, pecharunt is bulky and can stay in on things, threatening toxic on top of night shade chip with malignant chain, Ceruledge i can already see being an amazing abuser, the list goes on. IMO this better pool of abusers will be just enough to push night shade over the edge.
Overall my final verdict is as follows:
Seismic toss might be fine, Night Shade probably isn’t.
Taunt: I’m willing to see how the meta develops before forming an opinion on this. For now, i have no opinions on taunt
