Whoever here is cribbing about rain obviously has not played much on the PO Smogon server. Rain is perfectly manageable, even more so if you throw in hippowdon or tyrantitar, both who easily outlast politoed for the victory. Nattorei is pretty much a full stop to kingdra for at least 2 switch-ins. Doryuuzu in sand on the other hand...is much much harder to deal with.
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np: OU Suspect Testing Round 2 - Who am I to break tradition?
- Thread starter Philip7086
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You really need to read more of this thread
I'll take the credentials of experience over theorymon, thank you.
Buddy, I don't want to say this again but...ALL THESE POKES WERE COMPLETELY BALANCED WITH 8-TURN RAIN IN GENIV! Please understand that. All the genIV all still allowed, and have not been nerfed. 8-turn rain can be stalled out quite simply with a good team. Please think before posting
If you have 1 setup rain dancer, your team is gonna get only 8 turns of rain, then when you switch to set up again he's gonna get wasted. Happens all the time... hence why you put rain dance on one or two (most commonly ludicolo or kingdra as they have good bulk/typing) to re-up without a switch... its way less risky than switching, especially now with an environ where your opponent can notepad your whole team and guess which extras could carry rain dance.
And lol at rain being the most used strategy in gen 4... Most people considered it a gimmick. Against a bulky para or sub para pokes it almost always lost because it could never get a switch in without losing a poke's speed advantage. It was viable, but hard to apply practically. the best applications actually being things that supported them selves, like special rain dance or double dance or sub/dance kingdra. As the only weather user on a team.
You'll notice that in gen 4, all of the swift swim users were UU except kingdra. While I know this is a different meta, testing before drizzle showed us that it was very similar to the gen 4 rain... So what makes UU pokemon uber now?
Expanded versatility and immediate setup at any time in the game. You can take almost any offensive UU poke, tell them they can switch in with +2 speed and +1 stab whenever they'd like, and I guarantee you'll have a way different feel of the pokemon's balance in every meta. Hell, even giving some NU or NFE pokes that skill could make them viable in the OU tier...
But for any of those pokemon, I doubt if requiring a turn to set it up and only lasting 8 turns would change any of their tiers (maybe NU to UU, but only if no pokes in UU could do the same). This may be a new meta, but the principal that Expanded versatility and immediate setup on most offensive pokemon are broken is without question. Drizzle may not work on all pokemon, but these facts demonstrate that it is not the swift swimmers themselves, as in drizzle if you just tank with each swimmer till it dies, odds are they'll end up getting 0-2 kills each a game depending on which teams you face... the same amount that any boosted sweeper expects to get. The problem is that the boost is free, and not just free at first, but any time down the line. It's not free if you need to use rain dance.
Wait, no they weren't! Rain was a huge fucking issue in Gen IV UU and many of these Pokemon went under suspect (iirc).
Damp rock or the rain sweepers would have been banned to ou... where they were certainly never even called into question.
wait, aren't we talking about OU right now since there is no UU? hm... I bet if we took MOST ou pokes and used them in UU it'd be broken or at least suspect... doesn't change what we're talking about here.
We're talking about Rain, their (past) tier placement is irrelevant. They were still called into question as something that was indeed "unbalanced". But it was never the Pokemon themselves iirc, just the Rain that boosted them :E
Of course I could be totally wrong so if someone would correct me that would be nice~
Of course I could be totally wrong so if someone would correct me that would be nice~
Saying that last gen something was suspect in UU (but not found broken even at that low level) proves literally nothing. And there was a debate between damp rock ban and swift swim ban in uu... i think someone linked it earlier actually. Ended up being a vote for damp rock ban, which didn't pass (this is what I was told, correct me if I'm wrong).
All of those pokemon are balanced if they can't use water moves.
All of those pokemon are balanced if they can't have Swift Swim.
It's not a matter of just trying to balance them; there's infinitely many things we could do to balance them.
It's a matter of finding the best solution to the problem; just because banning Drizzle will do SOMETHING about the problem doesn't mean it'll be better than the other options.
And it isn't better than just banning the pokemon themselves.
What do you lose if you suspect test and possibly ban Kingdra, Ludicolo, Kabutops, and co?
You lose the ability to use the non-rain versions of 2-3 pokemon. Furthermore, the idea of preserving a non-sandstorm version of Doryuuzu is absurd; why should we care about a non-rain version of Kingdra if other swift swimmers can easily fill the empty slots?
What do you lose if you ban Drizzle?
Right off of the bat, you lose the non-broken rain stall. You restrict non-broken swift swimmers like Huntail and co. even though they weren't broken. You lose most of the potency of rain offensive, reducing it back to an uncommon strategy at BEST, even though you're aiming to keep rain offence from being an overcentralizing force, not from being a common threat.
By banning Drizzle, you might be keeping the overcentralizing down, but only by simultaneously neutering many other viable aspects of the metagame that aren't even broken, even though there are other alternatives that achieve the same goal of lowering the centralization without restricting what isn't broken.
Rain wasn't easy to pull off in OU due to the prevalence of Sandstorm (coupled with the fact that Tyranitar/Hippowdon were the only good weather inducers while Rain was solely dependent on Rain Dance + Damp Rock). We've never had Rain as the "standard". In fact, if Rain was called into suspect in UU last gen with simply 8 turns of Rain, and is now a permanent weather in standard and is yet again being called into suspect, shouldn't that be a testament to how powerful it is :I? Rain isn't nearly as powerful without Drizzle though.
Of course, I'm still on the fence on it's brokenness, as no one has managed to post an argument I find extremely comprehensive and convincing (or I simply have missed it in this 1564 post thread).
@TheValkyries: It's completely obvious that Rain is nowhere near broken without Drizzle. It doesn't matter that our previous experience with Rain minus Drizzle was Gen 4. That's like saying "maybe we shouldn't have autobanned Ho-Oh; we don't know what it's like in Gen 5." Claiming that Rain is broken even without Drizzle is absolutely ludicrous, and claiming that the only reason we think that is because of our experiences in Gen 4, and refusing to acknowledge the difficulty of using Rain without Drizzle, are equally preposterous.
@Cshadow: Rain was a suspect in UU in Gen 4 because the pokemon that could abuse it to deadly effect were not very powerful outside of it, making them UU; Rain was very difficult to pull off in OU in Gen 4 because of the prevalence of auto-Sandstorm, and the difficulty in pulling off a sweep before the Rain let up. The fact that it was virtually unused in OU really shows how difficult it is to pull off without Drizzle.
@Cshadow: Rain was a suspect in UU in Gen 4 because the pokemon that could abuse it to deadly effect were not very powerful outside of it, making them UU; Rain was very difficult to pull off in OU in Gen 4 because of the prevalence of auto-Sandstorm, and the difficulty in pulling off a sweep before the Rain let up. The fact that it was virtually unused in OU really shows how difficult it is to pull off without Drizzle.
So ~3 months of play with Rain isn't "experience." Gotcha.
Also, from a few pages back, but to clarify:
Yes, I would be a hypocrite if I was using those arguments to justify a Drizzle ban over a Swift Swim one, or vice versa.
Except I'm NOT, if you've seen any of my actual arguments...
Both are, in essence, EQUALLY just as bad, and provide little advantages over just banning the pokemon themselves.
Yes, I would be a hypocrite if I was using those arguments to justify a Drizzle ban over a Swift Swim one, or vice versa.
Except I'm NOT, if you've seen any of my actual arguments...
Both are, in essence, EQUALLY just as bad, and provide little advantages over just banning the pokemon themselves.
Ah, that makes more sense. I appreciate the clarification~
Look directly up from your post and read mine, in which I explain the real reason people want to ban drizzle instead of a few pokemon that it facilitates.
http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3239959&postcount=1114 <-explains what will more than likely happen to the meta from each change. When I posted this I was having trouble making up my mind on what to ban, so I was posting a summary objectively.
http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3246304&postcount=1557 <- explains why the pokemon themselves are not broken, nor is the ability swift swim.
XienZo, have you read any of of the opposing side's arguments that refute the one you posted? Evidently not. There are many Rain-abusing pokemon besides Swift Swimmers, including most Water- and Electric-types; for example, Agility SubPetaya Empoleon 2HKOs Blissey in the rain with Surf, losing its biggest counter. If we just ban Swift Swim, we only remove the ones that boost their speed automatically. Removing Swift Swim is not removing the broken part, it's just removing the pokemon that seem to be most bothersome, and just leads to further bans of pokemon that can take advantage of the weather, instead of removing the actual object that breaks them all, which is the everlasting rain. That's been stated many times throughout the thread.
Alright, it's hard to tell from your reply, so let me get this straight.
Do you understand I'm attacking BOTH a Drizzle ban AND a Swift Swim ban?
We went over this already....
You directed me to this post at least once before, and I responded it once before, and we came to an agreement already. I'll find the post if you want me to, it's in the last 15 pages or something.
And I already went over how I vehemently disagree on Gen IV standards being used for Gen V bans.
To recap, it doesn't matter what order the support, the abuser, the w/e came in. It doesn't matter if something wasn't broken before. In the characteristics of an Uber, there is no clause that states, "BTW, if a pokemon was UU in the gen before, these characteristics don't apply."
And finally, once again, both a Drizzle ban and a Swift Swim ban restrict indiscriminately, hurting both what is broken and what isn't. On the other hand, the idea of a non-rain Kingdra being banned indiscriminately is as absurd of an idea as a non-broken special-sweeping Garchomp being banned indiscriminately when SD Garchomp was found to be broken.
Edit:
Some stuff I missed:
That hardly justifies restricting it when there is an alternative that doesn't hurt it at all.
This is basically the polar opposite of the other counterargument I've heard: That the lesser swift swim sweepers will rise up and become broken as well.
Clearly, if people believe that the remaining sweepers could either potentially rise up ALL the way to Uber or never rise above UU, there is a much more significant, likely event where they actually end up somewhere in the middle, where they rise up to become viable, but don't suddenly end up in Uber.
Either way, both such arguments are basically attacking the most extreme, unlikely scenario, either of which would still result in less "collateral" damage than either the Drizzle or Swift Swim bans.
Because things go perfectly you're way every game? You always catch that Rain Dancer on the switch in, right?
Ummm, what are you talking about? I never said that.
4th gen tiering has literally no weight in any conversation in 5th gen tiering. And the assumption that just because they were UU in 4th gen means they aren't broken in 5th gen is a very bad one, since things don't become broken overnight with zero game mechanic changes.
Now, at this point you're thinking, "But Drizzle makes them broken." The problem is that's simply not true. Drizzle sets the greatest conditions in which they are broken, but it does nothing more. Rain makes them broken, and Rain comes in multiple facets. Banning the easiest facet to use doesn't ban what's broken, it bans something in hopes that it will hopefully nerf something that genuinely is broken. How is that right? Especially now when our goal is to create a balanced and diverse metagame. Banning Drizzle bans an immense amount of options in team building and checks on other weather. Banning two to three of the abusers leaves a very versatile weather condition and its multitudes of playstyles in the game. Honestly, the core of this issue boils down to weather people prefer a Weather based metagame, or if they want to go back to a 4th gen and previous style metagame with limited weather.
All in all, the key thing to remember here is that Rain makes these Swift Swimmers broken. Not Drizzle. Drizzle just happens to be the best inducer of Rain, since the other option is limited and easy to keep off the field. But if Rain does get up, then these sweepers are most definitely broken. Just honestly, why would we ever want to overban and even remotely leave the chance, the tiniest chance, that they could still be broken. Why not make the right decision in the first place?
Please don't tell me this was addressed to me, or I'm going to have to start stating in bold in every post that I'm arguing both the Swift Swim ban and the Drizzle ban are faulty and not the best choice.
you missed a word in the bold there... infinate. No one is going to run politoed just to counter other weather, or for stall, so stop kidding yourself.
You say it completely removes an immense amount of options? like which, may I ask? Please list these options that can't happen in 8 turn rain.
Aparently from what I'm seeing here, your only argument that I haven't already countered completely without you rebutting is one that many other people have already proven wrong.
It was in gen 5 before drizzle and was not broken. It does not destroy any playstyle, though it will obviously force you to rethink the movesets to use them (not like these were set in stone anyway for Never Used Strategies like rain stall).
Rain Dance teams have been countered for a long time. The begining of gen 5 showed us that this gen is MORE than up to the task, with priority taunters and stronger counters than there were before. Don't turn a blind eye to the fact that Those voting to ban drizzle based on the premise that neither swift swim nor the pokemon that use them are broken have already been proven right in this meta without drizzle around. Literally these teams were not broken until the day drizzle was released. Period.
then what are you arguing is the best choice? ban neither and leave it as is?
Banning Drizzle still allows for those same sweepers to do their thing, but not on an eternal rampage. Banning the pokes outright kills rain offense. Pleas address this point in your next post rather than restating the same thing. If you need my reasoning for this, check back on my earlier posts.
This is true.
Those pokemon weren't broken until Drizzle was released. And it was only since Drizzle was released, they've become broken.
And guess what? We ban broken pokemon. "Became" broken, "made" broken, "forced to become" broken, no matter HOW it became broken, they're broken now. There's no excuse to keep a broken pokemon in OU for whatever reason; that would go against basically, all of smogon policy.
Do people not read my posts when they reply to them or something? (not aimed at you in particular.)
Ahem, basically, the base of my argument is, normally, for suspect testing, we find what pokemon are causing overcentralization. Find them, test them, and possibly ban them depending on the results.
So, why do we give a different treatment to rain sweepers? Those pokemon (Kingdra, Ludicolo, and Kabutops) shouldn't be treated differently if the normal suspect testing system still works on them.
And it's also a matter of not creating a double standard; we're testing Dory in sand, not Sand Stream. As a matter of fact, we've already BANNED Manaphy under the normal suspect testing. Having a Drizzle/Swift Swim ban would be treating the trio (Kingdra, Ludicolo, and Kabutops) differently from other suspects for fairly arbitrary reasons. (They were UU BEFORE? Drizzle/Swift Swim ban would work anyway, so why not randomly change to those?)
Finally, we have the fact that Drizzle/Swift Swim bans cause collateral damage. There are plenty of rain abusers and swift swimmers that are viable but not broken, but those pokemon would be penalized not for being OP, but for some other random 3 pokemon being OP. Meanwhile, with a normal pokemon ban, the only "collateral damage" you could argue is that a non-rain version of Kingdra and co would be banned unfairly, but that's basically claiming that a walling version of Deoxys-A got banned unfairly; it's simply absurd, we measure if a pokemon is broken from the BEST it can do, not how well it can do with a few restrictions.
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