NP: UU - Bye Bye Bye

[Bluewind]

No, Blastoise just can't; he doesn't have a reliable recovery move or an outstanding defensive stat like Milotic does. Oh, and the thought of Roserade being lesbian entices me (seriously though, I'll probably comment on it when I have a little more time, as it seems to be one of the few posts that actually has some justified embasement against/in favor of Milotic and Venusaur staying UU).

 

[M BLADE]

Lanturn will become more used IMO as a Houndoom/Moltres counter.
And Regirock.

Ok, they don't have recovery... what can we do?

 

[capefeather]

I don't see why I should elaborate on my no suspects nom. It's just a nom. You don't exactly need to be a genius to write a workable nom. And it's not like I'm holding something back that the nominators don't know about, that would make their noms somehow better than good enough... Plus, I don't think that the no suspects noms do a whole lot unless they're overwhelmingly frequent or something. I might as well write my paragraphs. I mean, I'm pretty sure Rolfkip could copy-paste most of what he posted into his paragraphs lol.

Also Aldaron apparently has a say in who get into the final voting pool (?) so this should be interesting (???).

 

[FlareBlitz]

Kip I appreciate the effort you put into your post but you're wrong.

I just looked at the leaderboard; I play offense, Coldnight plays offense, I'm pretty sure IB plays offense (unless he changed his team), I play offense (yes I show up on the leaderboard twice sorry), "Neat" plays offense, etc. Offense has by no means declined in this metagame; actually, Raikou and Froslass leaving has vastly improved the viability of offense, since you no longer need to run Registeel and company on every team just to avoid being raped by Spikes and Raikou. Raikou does absolutely nothing to reduce Milotic's dominance; you think it's going to stay in and take on a fucking Raikou? No, it'll just switch to sdef venusaur, who'll easily tank, phaze you and synth back up. People who point to Raikou leaving as some sort of boon to stall confuse me. Stall had no issues with Raikou. Offense did.

Given, then, that this current metagame is more favorable towards offense compared to the previous one, we come to the crux of your argument: that offense is getting "bulkier" due to Milotic's presence.
I am not sure I can agree with this; after all, the only significant rise in a Pokemon that is immune/resistant to Water is Toxicroak. What about the rise in Houndoom? Houndoom is a fast, frail, hard-hitting nasty plot sweeper. And the rise in Sceptile? Sceptile is also fast and frail. And Alakazam? The epitome of UU glass cannon sweepers. The idea that Milotic is resulting in few frail sweepers is just wrong; all it means is that people can no longer abuse spikes support to kill it with crappy Pokemon like Swellow, and instead have to resort to powerful set up sweepers, be they frail or not.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that you are correct...so what? So what if the metagame is tending towards bulkier sweepers? All you're doing is pointing out trends in the metagame; that's no reason to ban anything. When you say "teams are using sweepers that can beat Milotic" that IN ITSELF points to Milotic not being broken; after all, if teams can use a diverse set of sweepers that can get past it, it would fail to qualify under the DC.

All in all I think people who evaluate their reasons for thinking Milotic is broken. The reason I'm on the fence? Even teams where I prepare for Milotic occasionally get stalled out by it. Not often, mind. But it happens.

 

[Bad Ass]

If Venusaur is banned, Milotic will not be insurmountable. With Venusaur gone, the metagame will shift in ways detrimental to Milotic's ability to "check everything" as you put it. Although I disagree with the fact that slapping milotic on your team is the be all end all to a large portion of Pokemon since a ton of offensive comboes beat it (Toxicroak + Houndoom, Moltres + Rhyperior, Moltres + Houndoom to name a few!) A few reasons here.

I) Toxic Spikes. With Venusaur being the #1 Pokemon and part Poison type, Toxic Spikes are not as viable as they could be. If Venusaur goes, expect a spike in Toxic Spikes usage, since they maim the metagame pretty badly atm, except of course Venusaur exists. Toxic Spikes obviously wrecks Milotic, and they would keep it in check with Drapion being the only Poison.

II) Other stuff. Since, obviously you are intelligent enough to know, Venusaur isn't the only thing keeping Milotic in check, the other things that beat it will flourish. Things like Chansey, Toxicroak, Clefable, Sceptile, Leafeon, Mismagius, Ludicolo, Poliwrath, and Rotom are just a small sample of the things that check Milotic. Obviously it varies depends on the set (IB, Stalk, Haze, etc). A lot of boosting sweepers also just fuck Milotic up after the boost - stuff like Kabutops, Blaziken, Altaria; even Houndoom deals ~70.

About the "we ban all the offensive shit that beats Milotic". That's because it's overpowered and can power through other stuff. Grass is probably [one of] the best offensive types in UU, due to lack of Steels and the general ability among Grass types to nail Fliers. Raikou just tore the shit out of everything, and Gallade, Staraptor, and Abomasnow were too powerful for everything. IIRC Milotic could actually semi reliably beat Yanmega with some really specially defensive spread. I understand your point of 'if it can break through Milotic, chances are it can break through everything else', but this just isn't the case. Take, for example, Toxicroak. Toxicroak isn't BL material, yet he shits all over non-gimmick Milotic. A lot of stuff beats it through typing / stat spread combined with effective moves. There is a ton of stuff (outlined above) that can beat Milotic. Venusaur is not the only thing keeping Milotic in check. If it was, Milotic would be gone. So using logic, you can deduce that while Milotic would get better, yeah, but broken? No.

 

[Rolf]

The crux of my points I felt were actually in my first and last points and had nothing to do with the offense points. That's why I stuck those in the middle, they were the weakest.

I didn't deny you used offense, but I do think that offense is getting bulkier. Houndoom in my opinion rose in the wake of Toxicroak's stallbreaking capabilities, not the other way around. Alakazam is a offensive behemoth and an exception, that is true. He still doesn't have the sheer power to muscle through Moltres and Rhyperior and Milotic that frail offense needs. Almost 25% of Alakazams were used in the lead position. If you don't count lead Alakazam it falls to number 17 or 18 in the statistics. Don't say that Milotic in no way contributes to this - my point wasn't that it was the sole purpose, but that it helped.

To clarify things, and I meant to put it in the post but it would probably have weakened the strength of the initial argument if I put it there: I still am on the fence about Milotic and Venusaur. For now I'm playing something of the devil's advocate for the sake of discussion. The main reason I want to focus on Milotic is because we have never truly had a defensive suspect nomination. Sure, Cresselia, but really that was only nominated defensive because it used those defenses to set up sweeps for itself. There has to be a way to make points about a defensive suspect being broken, and I feel looking at non-tangibles helps immensely more than the tangibles in this case. I think it would do good if we had a base to make a defensive suspect if we ever need one in the future. (gen5?) Not to say that it can't sway anyone's opinion, I'm sure it could - writing it sure changed mine and let me look at the argument from both sides - but the purpose isn't to get the masses to believe Milotic is BL. After writing that my earlier posts sound naive and stupid to me, and I think I've placed why I think Milotic could be our first defensive characteristic suspect, well, ever, in front of peoples eyes and hopefully clear enough others can understand.

b_a: It's not. You're right. But there has always been a grass to accompany Milotic and be the main thing that keeps it in check. There's plenty of other stuff that checks Milotic, counters it. But the rise of a grass type to check Milotic is always the most dominant trend - If Venusaur left I have a feeling Sceptile with a small investment in spD would rise quite a lot. At least, that's what I would use. It's a common thread in every metagame that leads back to Milotic every time, the dominance of a grass type in the face of Milotic. And that grass type has almost always been #1, 2, or 3 in usage with Milotic very close behind.

 

[Flamewheeler]

To be honest here, I find these arguments for/against Milotic and Venusaur to be absolutely ridiculous. I would go as far to say, stupid. I actually only nominated milotic because I didn't want to feel like I wasted a bunch of time playing only to do nothing at the end. That sounds terrible, I know and I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but it's the truth. I actually believe that these arguments are steming from the same reasons I even nominated Milotic. For one, it's pretty much a force of habit because I don't ever remember having a suspect-less metagame in my entire UU career. For the sake of clarity, that was before Crobat, Froslass, and Staraptor were nominated/banned. I wasn't playing during the Abomosnow period. =(

Moving on, I think we're all just looking for something to pick out because it's habitual. Albeit, not everyone has done this. Actually, I was one of the people who hated this metagame at the start, but as it progressed, I found it to be one of the best since I started. I can use some much shit I couldn't use before and it remains viable!

Also, I really hate to bring up the whole "what will happen to the metagame if this poke is banned" argument, but if we really think about it, what will? Everyone remembers the beginning of this round, right? Well checking all of that random shit was hard enough and without our main defensive backbone, that being Venusaur and Milotic, obviously, what will we use to keep these threats at bay? Blastoise? Vileplume? I mean seriously? Don't get me wrong, they both can be effective in the right hands, but they can't fend off what we need them to as effectively as Venusaur or Milotic. That's a terrible point, I know, but I really feel it's just a start to a steady downfall of the entire UU metagame.

Just as Jabba has said before, think about your votes and how they will effect you and everyone else. And to make this clear, I am not trying to sway anyone to believe my opinions, but I want everyone to take this seriously and not just ban shit because everyone says they should/ should not. Actually, I'm on the verge of deleteing my entire Milotic nomination because it's a pretty crappy argument and I'm not absoulutely sure about it myself, hence why the write-up is is so shitty to begin with xD.

tl;dr Be a smart voter!

Edit: On the subject of offense declining: I actually played both stall and offense this round. Stall was effective for a while, but I found myself netting more wins with offense. Just abusing CBKangaskan and Tauros, I've raped so many teams...

 

[whistle]

@ "grass types"
there is a difference between correlation and causation. grass types are strong in uu due to the relatively low number of dragon and steel types, which means less pokemon resist their most powerful stab. tyranitar doesn't exist in uu and hippopotas is rare, which means suddenly synthesis is an attractive and reliable recovery option. it would be silly of me to argue that the popularity of grass type pokemon in uu has nothing to do with milotic, but tbh it is equally silly to argue that milotic is the main reason grass types are popular.

when shaymin was banned, roserade became the most popular grass pokemon -- was this because milotic would become unbeatable without shaymin? not necessarily -- shaymin was preferred over roserade when it was uu because of its higher overall bulk and seed flare; when it got banned, people started to look for other grass types to use since they are inherently strong in uu. the ability to take on milotic easily probably is one of the reasons grass type pokemon are good in uu, but it is not the only reason. i think it is a lot more accurate to proscribe their popularity to that larger set of reasons than to claim that it is solely milotic's fault that they are used.

@ "offense declining"
i'm also not sure how the supposed decrease in offense is a reason milotic is broken. as you mentioned, milotic has been popular through most of new uu; the reason it moved from #7 or whatever to #2 is probably because a lot of pokemon in front of it got banned; even so, it's not the numerical rank that matters, since it is not used much much more than the rest of uu percentagewise (so saying it has gotten "more" popular is not a very quantifiable argument and is a relatively moot point). if milotic has been in uu and popular for the length of the current cycle (since january 2009), how does a trend that only started recently give us any clues about milotic's metagame effect?

finally -- i agree with all the stuff about defensive suspects being annoying but i haven't given much thought to the matter, so i'll post what i think at some later date.

 

[Heysup]

I just looked at the leaderboard; I play offense, Coldnight plays offense, I'm pretty sure IB plays offense (unless he changed his team), I play offense (yes I show up on the leaderboard twice sorry), "Neat" plays offense, etc. Offense has by no means declined in this metagame; actually, Raikou and Froslass leaving has vastly improved the viability of offense, since you no longer need to run Registeel and company on every team just to avoid being raped by Spikes and Raikou. Raikou does absolutely nothing to reduce Milotic's dominance; you think it's going to stay in and take on a fucking Raikou? No, it'll just switch to sdef venusaur, who'll easily tank, phaze you and synth back up. People who point to Raikou leaving as some sort of boon to stall confuse me. Stall had no issues with Raikou. Offense did.

Predictable FlareBlitz preaching his "leaderboard means everything" ideals. I hate to burst your bubble, but the leaderboard doesn't mean much...especially this metagame. Also, Raikou and Spikes were really the reasons Milotic wasn't broken as it is this metagame. It used Milotic as set up bait, and barely anything reliable can switch in after just one turn of set up (if I hear SpD Venusaur as a counter for Raikou again I will punch my computer screen - it is not).

While I agree that offense has not declined, I'm definitely agreeing with Rolfkip that it has become bulkier. Milotic basically influences every team, so it's a pretty hard argument to make that Milotic doesn't have to do with this.

Given, then, that this current metagame is more favorable towards offense compared to the previous one, we come to the crux of your argument: that offense is getting "bulkier" due to Milotic's presence.
I am not sure I can agree with this; after all, the only significant rise in a Pokemon that is immune/resistant to Water is Toxicroak. What about the rise in Houndoom? Houndoom is a fast, frail, hard-hitting nasty plot sweeper. And the rise in Sceptile? Sceptile is also fast and frail. And Alakazam? The epitome of UU glass cannon sweepers. The idea that Milotic is resulting in few frail sweepers is just wrong; all it means is that people can no longer abuse spikes support to kill it with crappy Pokemon like Swellow, and instead have to resort to powerful set up sweepers, be they frail or not.

All you've proven is:

Anti-Milotic sweepers have moved up, and Pokemon who have good synergy with those Pokemon have moved along with them.

And you could never counter Milotic with Swellow...where did you even get that from? I needed to run Venusaur and Raikou to deal with Milotic.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that you are correct...so what? So what if the metagame is tending towards bulkier sweepers? All you're doing is pointing out trends in the metagame; that's no reason to ban anything. When you say "teams are using sweepers that can beat Milotic" that IN ITSELF points to Milotic not being broken; after all, if teams can use a diverse set of sweepers that can get past it, it would fail to qualify under the DC.

It shows that teams are centralized around Milotic...and they still have a stupid hard time taking out it. Kind of like Crobat.

If Venusaur is banned, Milotic will not be insurmountable. With Venusaur gone, the metagame will shift in ways detrimental to Milotic's ability to "check everything" as you put it.

The same can be said for Kyogre. If Kyogre was allowed in UU randomly the metagame would shift to be detrimental to its ability to destroy everything. So even if your speculation was "fact" (it is a very reasonable prediction though, I would probably agree), it would prove nothing.

Although I disagree with the fact that slapping milotic on your team is the be all end all to a large portion of Pokemon since a ton of offensive comboes beat it (Toxicroak + Houndoom, Moltres + Rhyperior, Moltres + Houndoom to name a few!) A few reasons here.

Toxicroak comes in...eats HP Psychic or Milotic switches out. Houndoom takes Surf to the face etc. I'm not going to bother with the Moltres ones simply because it doesn't make sense to bring up another suspect Pokemon in an argument. In any event why are you so adamant in proving that you can use teams of two sweepers to beat Milotic? Do you not realize that that helps our case? If you need to use defensive combos like sacrificing Rhyperior to get rid of Milotic then that's broken - it automatically gets one kill and leaves Moltres at 40% after SR + Life Orb.

Gotta go now

 

[FlareBlitz]

Roflkip instead of responding to you I'm just going to respond to Heysup who parroted most of what you said anyway, if there's anything in particular that I miss let me know.

Predictable FlareBlitz preaching his "leaderboard means everything" ideals.

First of all, I don't have a "leaderboard means everything" ideal. Roflkip's argument was that offense is declining. The quickest way to prove him wrong was to point out that the most successful players on the leaderboard use offense. Hopefully you're intelligent enough to see that this does not constitute a life philosophy or anything.

Also, Raikou and Spikes were really the reasons Milotic wasn't broken as it is this metagame. It used Milotic as set up bait, and barely anything reliable can switch in after just one turn of set up

Except Registeel and Chansey, two things that you JUST MIGHT see on stall. Also a few other things depending on HP choice (steelix, quagsire).

SDEF venu does counter SubCM kou, its best set. Have fun using LO Kou and then immediately getting revenged by the Dugtrio-obsessed metagame.

While I agree that offense has not declined, I'm definitely agreeing with Rolfkip that it has become bulkier. Milotic basically influences every team, so it's a pretty hard argument to make that Milotic doesn't have to do with this.

It might have become "bulkier", but that's not because of Milotic. Offense's best ways to get past Milotic are Houndoom, CMKazam, Sceptile, and Toxicroak. Those are not bulky. I'd say offense becoming bulkier is more because of the lack of spikes turning ohko's into 2hko's, meaning sweepers now need to either take hits or kill in one shot without spikes.

All you've proven is:

Anti-Milotic sweepers have moved up, and Pokemon who have good synergy with those Pokemon have moved along with them.

It shows that teams are centralized around Milotic...and they still have a stupid hard time taking out it. Kind of like Crobat.

"Centralized around Milotic"? Until Toxicroak breaches #20 in usage and Arcanine drops past the top 10 I'll just go ahead and disagree with you. In fact, a lot of the top 20 pokes are pretty easily walled by Milotic; how is that centralization?

Don't be another victim of the poorly worded and impossible defensive characteristic definition. The fact that Milotic walls and checks "too many Pokemon" is reason enough for it to be bannable under the defensive characteristic. We through Crobat under support because we didn't know what else to call it, but the reasons are quite similar between the two.

If you want to bitch about how terrible the DC is, go make a post in PR and get it changed. Until then I'll be following the guidelines set forth as the tiering policy of this entire site thanks.
Don't compare Crobat to Milotic until Milotic gets Taunt and U-Turn. And has a STAB nothing is immune to. And doesn't die to the most common pokemon in the tier. Actually...just don't compare the two.

 

[Bad Ass]

No. You don't need two pokemon to beat Milotic. That was just an example of two pokemon that milotic is supposed to wall beating Milotic. Jeez. You want me to list every pokemon that can beat Milotic only to have you pic it apart with your flawed logic?

"Milotic switches out". And it doesn't do this against Venusaur?

Moltres isn't a suspect.

Citing Kyogre or anything else of the like is a gross overstatement. Milotic can't do anything near what Kyogre can. Don't do that.

 

[Rolf]

@ "grass types"

Not THE main reason, but A main reason. From what I can tell, there are a couple main factors in UU that contribute to the dominance of the grass type. You pointed out that sandstorm is used a lot less (according to the stats about 3% of the time, which actually surprises me that it's that high) and of course the relatively low number of grass resists compared to OU, but in there fits the need to counter the beast that the bulky water is. Anyways, it's just something that points a little towards a centralization towards Milotic in my eyes. Centralization itself does not mean something is broken, that's just the metagame adjusting to recent changes. When something like this comes up though where a relatively poor attacking type (7 of the top 20 pokemon used still resist Grass, almost half) keeps popping up in unexpected places something is happening to make them keep coming. The omnipresence of Milotic right up there in pretty much every single metagame shows something at the very least and a lot at most.

@ "offense declining"

The percentage difference right now between Milotic and the rest of the metagame is very substantial, I'm not sure what you mean. Venusaur beats Milotic by four percentage points, Milotic beats Missy by three, and Missy beats Uxie by about one and a half. After that everything is withing decimals of each other. A three percent difference is pretty giant when things are as closely packed as they are. Anyways, Milotic hasn't necessarily gotten more popular over the last year and a half. That is possibly due to increasingly desperate metagame shifts to take it out handily which is quite possibly the reason why nobody suspects it to be a defensive nominee, at least until now when we've banned just about everything that can take it out single-handedly.

I'm actually interested in diving deeper into the stats and seeing if I can pull anything else out for better or for worse. After I finish my Eagle Scout project papers tomorrow I'll try and get to it.

EDIT: Flare, hi. By offense declining I mean declining into bulky offense. I definitely don't mean offense sucks. It's good. The 2nd point really just let the post flow more, I tried combining them and it sounded like a run-on. The main point of those: offense is getting bulkier and it is due somewhat to Milotic forcing offense to either all beat it, (impossible because we banned most of the stuff that could) running one-two combos to get rid of it, or just get bulkier so they could take weaker Surfs and Ice Beams. Sceptile and Toxicroak both do this well, and as I said Houndoom rose I believe mostly because of the defensive synergy it has with Toxicroak. Toxicroak's usage rose for two reasons: 1) It is a decent stallbreaker and 2) It sets up on Milotic which very few frail-yet-powerful offensive mons can sport this period.

...CMZam is 100% countered by Spiritomb anyways who by the way is Milotic's #2 teammate other than Venusaur.

 

[whistle]

the problem i have with your grass-type argument is that since you are trying to prove something about milotic that sets it apart from other pokemon, you need to show that it is the main factor that makes people use grass types. there needs to be some way to "prove" that milotic alone causes people to use grass types (and not, you know, some pokemon that has one of the many other types that grass resists).

yes, people use grass types because of milotic, but they also use grass types because of azumarill, slowking, slowbro, other grass types, high bst, dual stab, sd/sleep powder, etc etc. unless there's something specific to milotic that sets it apart from these other factors in the context of the utility of grass types, all you're really "proving" is just that milotic is a good pokemon by virtue of usage stats. what i mean by the proper context is that if you say milotic has haze so it's better than slowking/azumarill, you've given a generic reason to use milotic over those pokemon. but you're not trying to show that milotic is good because of haze; you're trying to show that milotic is good because of grass types. we both agree that milotic is one of the factors that make grass types popular. but until there's some reason to believe it's the largest and most significant factor (or the contrapositive, which would be that grass types wouldn't be used nearly as much in a metagame without milotic), it feels like i'm just getting an obvious metagame observation (grass counters water) rather than something that signals an "imbalance".

and... 6 of the top 20 also resist fire... does that make fire a terrible attacking type in uu? not to mention (although i am about to which makes that figure of speech pretty stupid) stuff like swellow for all intents and purposes does not resist grass, while sceptile loses to sludge bomb venusaur even if it switches into a leaf storm. but that gets into the land of theorymon and i hate him so lets just say it's 7 vs 6 but that neither proves much about how good an attacking type is.

i guess i was just too lazy to actually look at the stats but i'll do that now i suppose. in november-april milotic was kinda around the same percentage as a bunch of other stuff. in october arcanine was tied for 19% with honchkrow and a few percentage points above the rest of the pokemon but it was used more because of metagame trends (intimidate countering); was arcanine broken? no, it was just used more cause it countered stuff that was popular. in september and august milotic was in a group of a few pokemon that were used a few percentage points more than the rest of the top 10, but that was largely for the same reason as arcanine being popular in october. beyond that it's stuff like crobat and shaymin so whatever.

regardless, i don't think its rank on usage stats can actually show anything, mostly since shifts near the top are based on relative effectiveness and metagame trends; stuff jumps around a lot anyways. a month or two of stats don't mean much unless there's a fucking massive jump like 20% 20% 20% -> 40% WOAH WHAT THE FUCK in life orb raikou usage in the four months before it was banned.

my point is not that milotic was used a lot or wasn't used a lot -- it was used "about the same" through all of new uu. you say that this is because milotic's usage is somehow being suppressed by "desperate attempts to take it out"... if this isn't the definition of clutching at straws, i don't know what is. not only is that nearly impossible to argue/prove beyond, if it's true then it means milotic can be "suppressed" (whatever that means) easily. maybe offense became more bulky as a response to raikou who tore through frail offense teams. maybe everyone with frail sweepers got tired of getting rolled by rain dance. even if you show that offense has become "bulkier" and the correlation between milotic usage and offense becoming bulkier... i don't know how the hell you'd prove a causation there. stuff became bulkier to switch into ice beams and surfs ??? so people were retarded for five months and ran teams without a safe milotic switch and suddenly somehow they realized oh damn i need to be able to switch into it ?_?

 

[Aeroblacktyl]

Can we please just let UU be...a lot of you guys are making huge mountains out of fire ant hills....WHICH MILOTIC CHECKS AHAHAHAHA but yeah, UU's fine as it is IMO. I guess people just want to nominate something for the sake of it but it's good to know there's a metagame that's 'fine'. Let's keep it that way!

 

[Rolf]

I guess fundamentally conjecture from stats doesn't work to prove a pokemon bl then. It's still a heck of a lot of fun to make connections there. But I guess if you can't prove it it doesn't really change anything as I could argue all day long and never be wrong per se but never totally be right. Nope, won't do. I'll work on getting more data, again for better or worse, on Milotic first and then others. Maybe then I can post something not based on possible explanations. (That still might be true, just have to do more research to try and prove what you said I need to prove - that the main reason grass types has risen is because of the presence of a need to beat Milotic)

--sleepykip from itouch

 

[Heysup]

Roflkip instead of responding to you I'm just going to respond to Heysup who parroted most of what you said anyway, if there's anything in particular that I miss let me know.

Everything is going according to plan :)

First of all, I don't have a "leaderboard means everything" ideal. Roflkip's argument was that offense is declining. The quickest way to prove him wrong was to point out that the most successful players on the leaderboard use offense. Hopefully you're intelligent enough to see that this does not constitute a life philosophy or anything.

Offense is a quick way to get high on the leader board (I've been on the leaderboard too, in fact usually in the top 5 until I realized how pointless it is). While I will still agree that offense isn't declining, I don't think saying "look top 5 on the leaderboard are offense it's the most prominent style" is a valid way to prove this. Remember when hail was 4 teams of the top 5?

And that life philosophy was mainly a joke that I hoped you'd laugh at but I'm apparently not very funny :(

Except Registeel and Chansey, two things that you JUST MIGHT see on stall. Also a few other things depending on HP choice (steelix, quagsire).

SDEF venu does counter SubCM kou, its best set. Have fun using LO Kou and then immediately getting revenged by the Dugtrio-obsessed metagame.

Chansey is the only Raikou counter. It is the only Pokemon that can switch against Raikou n amount of times and beat it 100% of the time (barring retarded paralysis hax).

Registeel is not a surefire counter to Raikou. Venusaur need to predict Substitute vs the SubCM variant because it can't actually beat Raikou if it comes in on a Calm Mind without Sleep Powder. It doesn't even 2HKO min/min Raikou with Earthquake (43.5% - 51.6%) while Raikou also 3HKOes Venusaur (can 2HKO with Stealth Rock - doesn't apply to Raikou because Venusaur is switching in and Raikou would have recovered most of Stealth Rock damage anyway).

Anyway why am I arguing about Raikou? Offense and stall both had trouble with it (because neither have Chansey). This is about Milotic, and Raikou was Milotic's main problem. Raikou is now banned. Milotic is now free of the main thing holding it back from being stupidly difficult to handle.

It might have become "bulkier", but that's not because of Milotic. Offense's best ways to get past Milotic are Houndoom, CMKazam, Sceptile, and Toxicroak. Those are not bulky. I'd say offense becoming bulkier is more because of the lack of spikes turning ohko's into 2hko's, meaning sweepers now need to either take hits or kill in one shot without spikes.

That may be true, but either way Milotic has a lot to do with not being OHKOed or 2HKOEd. Milotic is the thing not being OHKOed or 2HKOed. Spikes aren't there to make Milotic "weaker". I'd say Spikes are more to deal with Milotic then anything else, considering Moltres was clearly the number one Spikes abuser.

"Centralized around Milotic"? Until Toxicroak breaches #20 in usage and Arcanine drops past the top 10 I'll just go ahead and disagree with you. In fact, a lot of the top 20 pokes are pretty easily walled by Milotic; how is that centralization?

You mentioned that anti-milotic sweepers are rising up.You brought this up not me.

No. You don't need two pokemon to beat Milotic. That was just an example of two pokemon that milotic is supposed to wall beating Milotic. Jeez. You want me to list every pokemon that can beat Milotic only to have you pic it apart with your flawed logic?

You can't say "here are offensive combo's that beat Milotic" and expect that to hold weight when you're assuredly sacrificing one Pokemon. You can list all of the Pokemon that beat Milotic (I listed ones that 2HKO it or OHKO it after a boost (while outspeeding it) in my nomination, though I think I missed 1-2 mons), but you'll really not want to post the list here because there are a significantly small amount of viable Pokemon that do this.

Moltres isn't a suspect.

Sorry a "potential suspect".

Citing Kyogre or anything else of the like is a gross overstatement. Milotic can't do anything near what Kyogre can. Don't do that.

If Kyogre moves to UU the metagame will shift to stop it from being effective. If Milotic is UU the metagame will shift to stop it from being effective. That doesn't mean the Pokemon isn't broken, that has nothing to do with it really. I mentioned that it's an overstatement but the point still stands; you didn't even refute it. You refuted the argument "Milotic is as good as Kyogre" which has nothing to do with the point as it stands.

 

[Aeroblacktyl]

Calm Rest Sleep Talk Raikou beats Chansey :)

 

[Stagnant]

^

I swore by RestTalk Kou.

 

[Meru]

If Kyogre moves to UU the metagame will shift to stop it from being effective. If Milotic is UU the metagame will shift to stop it from being effective. That doesn't mean the Pokemon isn't broken, that has nothing to do with it really. I mentioned that it's an overstatement but the point still stands; you didn't even refute it. You refuted the argument "Milotic is as good as Kyogre" which has nothing to do with the point as it stands.

I agree with this. Last round, the metagame completely shifted to Shed Shell Chansey/Registeel to counter Raikou/Dugtrio combo. It "fixed" the problem of Raikou being effective, but caused insane overcentralization that made UU an annoying metagame.

It's harder to tell if Milotic has done that because a Defensive Character is a lot easier to bypass than an Offensive Character.

 

[capefeather]

I don't really think that the wording of the characteristics matters. What does it really mean to have a "defensive Suspect"? If a Pokémon is too good at being a "tank" or "wallbreaker" or "generic glue" then do we really need to put them into specific characteristics? The characteristics do exactly what they're supposed to do.

 

[Ekanselttar]

Now I wish it was last period so I could troll people with a Shed Shell Raikou.

 

[FlareBlitz]

Man some of these Milotics are really ticking me off. HP Psychic? Hypnosis? Fucking Mirror Coat? Really metagame? You wanna go there? Really the only things preventing me from supporting a ban on Milotic are the fact that Venusaur and other powerful grass types still handily beat it and that it's 2hko'd by most LO/Banded fighting types if it's running SDEF (which it needs to for moltres).

I was wondering why I didn't seem to have problems with Milotic before; in fact Slowbro was WAY more annoying than Milotic for me. Then I realized that it was because most of my prior teams had strong fighters and grass types, while in this metagame I'm using more of a fire/rock/ice oriented offensive blitz. I still have Toxicroak of course but the quad weakness makes me very afraid of leaving it on Milotic in case it trolls me with HP Psychic; in fact I've taken to running some SDEF on my Toxicroak just to guarantee survival against HP Psychic from Milotic with slight SATK investment. Ultimately though, what I posted all the way back during the cress meta still holds true: the defensive characteristic is very poorly defined, and it's defined in such a way that meeting it is very very very difficult merely because it's way harder to stall a team of 6 then it is to sweep a team of 6. While we could just say "okay fuck the characteristics just nominate something if you think it's broken enough" that kind of defeats the whole purpose of objective, informed tiering procedures.

I can't see Milotic being banned having any negative consequences; there are so many Pokemon that can fulfill each of its individual niches as well or better than it can...they just can't fulfill all the niches at once like Milotic. However, I always lean towards "not broken" until enough playtesting convinces me otherwise and, given that I didn't think Milotic was broken in Yanmega meta or Higher Ground or any other meta I've played without Raikou/Whorelass (although Honchkrow was still there, I never used it), I'm hesitant to suddenly bring out the pitchforks now. It definitely gives credence to the idea that we'll ban whatever is annoying if there's no other significant suspect, and I think I'll need at least one more round to conclusively make up my mind either way. Anyway, just wanted to share my thoughts.

Oh and I didn't mention venusaur because it really isn't worth consideration as a BL candidate. Any good player will play around venusaur through substitute or resistances (grass/poison isn't exactly ground/dragon). I know some good players have nominated Venusaur, and that's fine, but I can only base my opinion off my experiences and it just doesn't trouble me. It really did last meta though, to the point where I ran a dedicated resttalk altaria specifically for it! Odd how that works.

 

[Heysup]

Man some of these Milotics are really ticking me off. HP Psychic? Hypnosis? Fucking Mirror Coat? Really metagame? You wanna go there? Really the only things preventing me from supporting a ban on Milotic are the fact that Venusaur and other powerful grass types still handily beat it and that it's 2hko'd by most LO/Banded fighting types if it's running SDEF (which it needs to for moltres).

I want to make it a matter of public record that FlareBlitz just complained about gimmicks.

While we could just say "okay fuck the characteristics just nominate something if you think it's broken enough" that kind of defeats the whole purpose of objective, informed tiering procedures.

Objective? The characteristics are deliberately subjective.....I mean come on "a significant portion of the metagame" and using vague terms like "sweep" and "with little support" or whatever. Those aren't defined well enough to even be objective and not be interpretable. I think we should just use them as guidelines as I have said before.

 

[Rolf]

This is hard to explain and I'm a bad "explainer" so... bear with me. This also might be a stupid post so yeah. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this. Have fun.

Like I said in my earlier post, every single Pokemon ever banned in any tier has been because of the offensive or support characteristic except the existing ubers from last gen. (Lugia, Ho-oh, Deoxys-D, Giratina to name a few) They do fulfill the defensive characteristic although Lugia, Ho-oh, and Giratina at least from past experiences would probably be banned for their Calm Mind RestTalk sets rather than anything else. Other then these rediculously powerful Pokemon that were, well, created by GameFreak to be uber, is it detrimental to use the defensive characteristic to ban Pokemon?

Since "new UU" started we have had a set base of defensive Pokemon and a base of strong offensive mons. The metagame has no doubt centralized around the existing defensive threats in the metagame. It makes sense to ban any initial Pokemon that can set up and/or break through these walls and then on through the rest of teams. I think (I hope since I'm about to base a case on this) I can safely say that UU has been built on the backs of Milotic, Venusaur, Registeel, and later Arcanine. If any one of them were moved up into OU during our recent stint at creating the metagame we know now it would be vastly different then it is currently. If we are aiming to create a stable and balanced metagame by banning overbearing suspects, it is 100% detrimental to ban one of the Pokemon that we have based all of our previous offensive bans around. If we instead look at it from a "past and future doesn't matter, only present" outlook, it could be nice to get rid of Milotic and Venusaur.

Are the characteristics to define an uber meant to be used to create a stable, balanced metagame (which I believe we have right now) or to be used solely to ban suspect threats based on the present state of the metagame (In which banning Milotic/Venusaur might hold credence)?

Hopefully you got the gist of what I was saying because I still don't think I expressed it all too well.

 

[capefeather]

To be fair, I do not believe at all that the "Apocalypse Theory" is a valid counterargument against a BL argument. I know I've sort of complained before, but I also voted Raikou UU in the ducks metagame and attempted to do the same last metagame. Not to mention I wasn't exactly boycotting the metagame, either. I don't believe in boycotting metagames.

Ultimately though, what I posted all the way back during the cress meta still holds true: the defensive characteristic is very poorly defined, and it's defined in such a way that meeting it is very very very difficult merely because it's way harder to stall a team of 6 then it is to sweep a team of 6. While we could just say "okay fuck the characteristics just nominate something if you think it's broken enough" that kind of defeats the whole purpose of objective, informed tiering procedures.

What I was saying wasn't to "fuck the characteristics". We just shouldn't expect any Pokémon to fit perfectly into them. Each situation is essentially a "linear combination" of characteristics. Also, the assertion that the DC is hard to achieve is simply due to how the game is now. The Life Orb item alone has made defensive play much less straightforward than it was in previous generations. If we went back to ADV, I'm pretty certain that quite a few of the Ubers there could be classified under the DC.