all right, so i actually am going to respond to this for real because i couldn't just let this go. i am going to engage you in polite, nuanced, and evidence-based discussion this time, mr. cinnamon toast crunch, and i would appreciate if you did the same
Revisionists are saying gouging was always broken when it has not been the case.
gouging was broken in the last suspect, and before that too. people were sounding the alarm on it as potentially unhealthy as early as late december. please don't begin your post by calling people you disagree with revisionists, it's unhelpful
Looking at all tournaments with gouging pre moth ban, its winrate was a sad sub 50 or barely 50, with behemoths like za bolt scor creeping near 55.
you've been told multiple times, including by the tier leader, that winrate doesn't equate to brokenness. let's do a bit of a thought experiment to prove that winrate isn't inherently tied to brokenness: picture if you will a pokemon with 255 in every stat and wonder guard that is inexplicably allowed to be legal for some tournament or other. now, you'd consider that broken, right? anyone with an iota of sense would. it's so broken, in fact, that literally every single team would bring it. so it would end up having a winrate of 100%, right?
wrong. it ends up with a winrate of 50% because all the losing teams
also brought one. so a seemingly low winrate is not necessarily an indicator of non-brokenness, in part because there will be matches where both players bring something (and there are also other, more complicated factors i won't go into). now, on the other hand, an extremely
high winrate
can be—and often is—a reliable indicator that something is a problem, like how archaludon rain structures had a winrate of something like 80% during the rain hellscape period of the meta, but that doesn't mean low winrate automatically equals not broken
A lot of circumstantial changes brought about the rise of gouging, including the decline of physdef gliscor, lack of tera fairy fatties like garg and dirge due to the meta min maxing to have knock and hazards on every style, and no dragon moth to force u on the back foot when gouging is behind. Another thing is in volc meta there was almost always a fire idef zama on ho for other ho, but now ho is more diverse with dual fire fires to overwhelm fat teams. Stall is also more geared for the long game w alo disappearing from the style almost entirely and pdef scor not being staple, as otherwise the many gouging sets are much more easily managed, even sub outrage. The issue most fat teams have is just sub rage destroying all the passive checks, while the offense mu for gouging has roughly been the same always. Force tera, go to ur speed booster or za, trade.
yes, this is a solid analysis of many of the reasons that gouging is on the rise right now, but none of this contraindicates it being broken. natural meta evolution, including bans, can reveal things as unhealthy that were previously regarded as completely healthy. for example, remember that people who thought gliscor was broken were laughed at towards the beginning of dlc1 (and i'll freely admit i was one of the ones doing the laughing), but it ended up being absolute cancer and getting banned for it. some bans did contribute to that, but you also mentioned the volc ban as a relevant factor here, so i feel it's a fine comparison. my point is, i don't think the fact that you consider the meta changes leading to gouging's dominance "circumstantial" should change anything
If we get rid of tera blast and bring back volc and free regi, there would be many more answers freed up for gouging such as repopulated garg and dirge usage (dirge was healthily ou while now it’s non existent).
i don't necessarily disagree with this—getting rid of tera blast would free some things that would change the meta in ways that are bad for gouging, in addition to eliminating gouging's new tera blast techs that were part of the reason eyebrows were raised in the first place. but that's not what we're discussing right now, and i doubt we'll get to that point for a while. we shouldn't be trying to look for alternative answers until
after the immediate problem is dealt with
Banning gouging is conducive to the meta being a fat jerk fest as gouging is one of the best fat breakers on ho and bo, also sun becomes utterly neutered.
i don't think this is true. regarding fat: please stop using fat balance and stall as some sort of boogeyman. at no point has gen 9 been anywhere close to a "fat jerk fest"; even during the gliscor era and the so-called zap-king-lu era (which was greatly exaggerated), ho and bo were thriving. even aside from all this, ho and bo aren't going to suddenly wither and die because one big stupid setup sweeper went away in a generation full of big stupid setup sweepers. regarding sun: torkoal usage, which serves as a good indicator of how good sun is as a playstyle at a given moment, is down by 1.5 percentage points from july to august, so sun seems to somehow be getting worse on its own even as gouging has gotten better. why this is happening i can only guess, but i don't think a ban on gouging will kill sun much deader than it already is
(other notes: ninetales usage did see a very slight bump from july to august, but far less than torkoal's drop, so fewer people overall are using sun. torkoal's usage has also been dropping in uu, where gouging fire has never been legal, to the point where it would have dropped to ru this month if we'd done tier shifts. what i think this indicates is that sun overall is not in a good spot right now regardless of gouging fire's legality)
Back in the day we had rain, and if we freed archaludon with a eshot ban rai would be more viable again leading to a natural curbing of gouging.
i actually agree that it would be perfectly fine to ban electro shot and retest archaludon, but that's not within the scope of this discussion. that's not even within the scope of
meta discussion. it's a policy discussion that we should be saving for a more stable time. we shouldn't be trying to look at how to "get around" gouging fire by changing other things around. those aren't options right now. if it's a problem, we ban it and
then we have the discussion about alternative workarounds
All the bans have proven to reduce diversity and cause new threats to become broken, who’s to say some shit like sd gliscor fat won’t be the next overwhelming lame style to face should we curb its best natural counter which is gouging ho with its variety of ways to break?
well, see, the thing about this is, if gliscor ends up becoming broken, we can just ban that too. i don't buy into the "reducing diversity" thing either—the vr currently has something like 120 mons on it, and that number has
grown as things have been banned
Stay vigilant, don’t buy in to propaganda especially from players who don’t know how to think for themselves.
framing people who disagree with you this way is unnecessary and frankly downright rude. this sort of behavior brings nothing to the table except vitriol and bad vibes. please do not do that
