To start off, here are the paragraphs on hail. I only have 5/7 of these, but oh well.
Snunch still hasn't gotten me his paragraphs, so if he'd like to post those ASAP, that'd be nice. kd24 "quit" smogon and therefore will no longer take part in the UU Senate. He will be replaced by reachzero. So join me in welcoming him aboard. His experience and insight into the tiering process is much welcome.
The big hot button issue right now is obviously Spikes. So continue that discussion from the other thread. The questions to go to the Senate at this point in time is which of the big three spikers is worthy of being voted on: one or two of Froslass, Roserade, Deoxys-D or all three of them?
SJCrew said:It's pretty hard to do anything in this metagame when the ubiquity of hail restricts your team options down to so little. You're not allowed to check Froslass with things slower than it. You're not allowed to use Life Orb unless you're immune to its recoil or the Hail. Trust me when I say doing any of the aforementioned against my advice is asking to lose. Take Arcanine, for instance. While normally a pretty solid Pokemon on his own, he is not a good Froslass counter. Once she forces another mon out and gets under the protection of her sub, she can easily Thunder Wave him and continue to sub while fishing for a miss or full paralysis, all the while Arcanine slowly kills itself through Flare Blitz recoil. This is a common pattern amongst slower checks; most Ground-types are weak to her Blizzard even if they can avoid a Thunder Wave, and faster checks are immediately neutered by status, allowing her to set up on them too.
The antics described above are just one of the many reasons to use Hail. While plagued with their accursed Ice-typing and Stealth Rock weakness, it's hard to ignore the number of benefits that come from using it. For one, it's permanent; Hail is really the only common auto-weather in the tier. Specialized teams such as Rain and Sand can catch it off guard every now and then, but Hippopotas can't switch in on anything in a Hail team, and Rain teams have trouble keeping their weather up when Abomasnow can easily switch in and cancel it out right away. If it can't switch in, it will revenge, and steal the weather advantage for free anyway.
Under these conditions, most of your opponent's Pokemon will be taking an instant 6% in damage every turn, a burden Hail teams can shrug off being mostly Ice types. You also get Abomasnow, who counters the bulky Water-types that his teammates generally have trouble with and Leech Seeds any potential switch-ins for more longevity and free damage, Froslass, who sets up infinite Spikes and makes them nearly impossible to spin, and Mamoswine, who's exceedingly dangerous even on a normal team, and becomes overkill due to the free evasion Hail provides. Between all of the Spikes, the missing, the Blizzards and the Earthquakes, regular offensive teams of any kind have difficulty keeping up. Revered 'Hail counters', such as Machamp, Escavalier, Darmanitan, and Chandelure simply don't last long enough to take away more than one kill from Hail (and sometimes none, if you're unlucky).
I was formerly of the opinion that the only broken aspect of Hail was Snow Cloak, but now I believe it's simply unfair to only nerf a playstyle that uses not one, but every single tool in its arsenal to make a snowy hell out of the UU ladder. The problem is not just Snow Cloak or 'BlizzSpam', the problem is Hail teams. We need to cut the problem off at the source immediately by banning Snow Warning.
Moo said:Well, I think most people are of the opinion that Hail is broken. One of the reasons for this is Snow Cloak abuse. In the case of Froslass, it can spam Substitute and Thunder Wave and hax you until it gets 3 layers of Spikes up. But Froslass isn't the only problem, which some people seem to think. If Froslass was the only problem, we'd be voting on that. Mamoswine and Glaceon can be more dangerous if you miss against them. Sure, an 20% chance to miss isn't that bad right? Wrong. It becomes a problem when that one miss is against your Mamoswine counter, which is now dead because it missed. Combine that with the fact that most Hail teams have multiple Snow Cloak abusers, and the problem escalates. Sure, it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it really ruins the game. Blizzard spam is also a problem. Pokemon spamming 120 base power moves with STAB and perfect accuracy can be a bit overpowering. The Pokemon that can tank Blizzards are Mamoswine food, so Hail teams won't be cock-blocked by Empoleon or Snorlax. Blizzard spam isn't the major problem imo, but it's a factor that breaks Snow Warning. I think that with Snow Warning gone, UU will be a much more enjoyable environment, and if people still want to use hail, they can just use a weather team, like you have to do with Rain Dance / Sunny Day
Ban
Heysup said:I'm not going to argue why Snow Warning should be the suspect we vote on or not, because my view is the same on it and other aspects of hail though my preferred ban may change slightly.
To start, we all know what brought Snow Cloak to our attention. It was that +0 / -10000000 battle on the ladder where you are outplaying some moron. You got your hazards up, your Pursuit Weavile / Escavalier is on Froslass and you have your CS Heracross ready to plow through 2 more Ice-types and also get an easy KO on Empoleon. You use Pursuit, it misses, Froslass uses Thunder Wave. You are FP'd the next time, Froslass uses Blizzard. You hit Froslass this next time with Pursuit. After, he uses Substitute. You hit him again. He uses Substitute, you miss. He Blizzards, you're fully paralyzed. He Blizzards, you faint.
Rinse repeat x 6.
The chances of that happening that many times in a row are incredibly low. It still happens every battle against in some way (you miss, they freeze, the one time you hit them 5 times in a row, they critfreeze you), and you cannot do anything about it.
So to put it more clearly, the aspect of Snow Warning that I find the most difficult to deal with is Snow Cloak. For Snow Cloak itself being broken, it must have little or no effective ways to deal with it. Let's see what the best ways to deal with it are:
a) Weather change: So to win in UU, you are going to be forced to use RD/SD, carry Hippopotas, or carry a useless weather changing Pokemon? That is not reasonable and limits your creativity and ability to play against non hail teams.
b) Aerial Ace / Faint Attack / Shock Wave / etc: What can do any sort of significant damage with any of those attacks that can actually beat a Snow Cloak Pokemon? I don't think there is a single Pokemon that uses Aerial Ace effectively, while Faint Attack is useful only on Weavile, but you still can only dent Froslass with it, not the other Pokemon. It would take Specs Modest Kyogre Shock Wave to have a chance to 2HKO a 0/0 Froslass. That's the extent of how shitty you are at Pokemon if you use those moves to beat hail.
What about the percentages? If a Snow Cloak Pokemon comes in on something slower, you have a pathetic 33.8% to hit them 5 (amount of Substitutes) times in a row. Of course, you should be able to take a hit from most of them and beat them, but the game is effectively out of your hands. I'm particularly adamant about this part. Having a competitive game effectively out of my hands defeats of the purpose of me trying at all. If I'm playing better, and losing, there is no competitiveness. It's like gambling for online Pokemon ladder rating. There's a reason why there isn't an online roulette ladder. The difference between this and (for example) Flamethrower, is that you have to actually use Flamethrower to get the burn. It isn't just there. You can't just sit there hitting Substitute until it happens. You actually have to survive to hax, while in this case you simply survive by haxing.
In short, Snow Cloak is most difficult to deal with because it's literally impossible to deal with effectively. This isn't an exaggeration, I have shown that the methods that take away the evasion should be defined as ineffective. This leaves us with no effective way to get around Snow Cloak.
Since Snow Warning is the suspect, we can't ignore the ice-ing on the cake that has earned the name "BlizzSpam". This nickname is pretty self explanatory. With the free turns, hazards, hail damage, and power of Blizzard, many Pokemon can just keep clicking Blizzard until the opponent's entire team dies even if they carry a couple resists. Most Pokemon will die to 1-2 Blizzards and even if they can tank a couple, they can't actually reliably get through those Pokemon due to Snow Cloak in the first place. There are only a few Pokemon who can even remotely heal off hail damage, and most of them tickle hail Pokemon. Slowbro, Milotic, Suicune can deal with some hail BlizzSpammers, but hail has room for these very similar and specific BlizzSpam counters.
In summary, Snow Warning is broken for one main reason. Snow Cloak takes the game out of the player's hands and there is no effective way to deal with this. To push Snow Warning even further over the line, there is the aspect of 100% accurate STAB Blizzard spamming to plow through almost any team with ease.
DetroitLolcat said:Okay, I really don't want to eliminate an entire playstyle from the UU metagame but honestly it's just about the only thing that will fix UU at the moment. Unlike last gen's UU, Abomasnow isn't the culprit; SJCrew's logs and a bit of testing will show that. Though I would prefer a ban on Abomasnow and Snover, a ban on Snow Warning accomplishes the same goal.
If we look at what Snow Warning gives us, we see there are three effects that impact the UU metagame:
1. It gives 6.25% passive damage to everything that's not an Ice type
2. Blizzard isn't missing
3. Snow Cloak mons get a90%20% evasion boost.
Now, these three effects seem pretty minor by themselves, but Hail is nearly impossible to stop (requires another weather. Hail has the advantage over every other weather) and Hail abusers can take great advantage from all three aspects of Hail.
First, most effective Hail teams carry a wall that can shrug off the hits that Hail abusers can't take. This is where the first aspect of Hail comes in, as most things that can break the walls seen on Hail teams use Life Orb. Life Orb combined with Hail damage and Spikes set up by the ubiquitous Froslass (who will get up 2 or 3 layers every time AND spinblock) make most threats to Hail teams take about 30% before even attacking and another 16% every time they attack. This fact makes Hail teams easily able to outstall any threats that could take them down.
Second, Hail teams can abuse the 100% accurate Blizzards to destroy opposing Pokemon. The abusers of this are Abomasnow, Froslass, and Glaceon. It's no secret that Ice is one of the best offensive types in the game because it can hit everything barring four types neutrally. Fire types and Ice types are weak to SR and will probably be 2KO'd by common Blizzards (besides Froslass), so Steel and Water types bear the sole burden of resisting Blizzards that Hail monsters like GLACEON can spam.
Now, right off the bat Abomasnow can beat Steels and Waters with EQ/FB/HP Fire and Grass Knot, respectively. Glaceon can HP Electric, and Froslass can just sit there and Spike. Or Toxic if it's not running Thunder Wave.
The worst part of Blizzard Spam is Freezing, though. Since BlizzSpam teams shockingly like to spam Blizzard, every time they attack with that move they have a 10% chance to take an opposing Pokemon out of the match indefinitely. Hello Froslass set-up bait!
And last but not least, we have Snow Cloak. This is available to three Hail abusers: Froslass, Mamoswine, and Glaceon. A miss against any of those three is pretty bad. Honestly I don't think Snow Cloak is broken in UU by itself, but combined with the other aspects of Hail Snow Cloak goes from minor annoyance to major setback if you miss. Glaceon can get an extra Blizzard in, Froslass can Spike a little more, and Mamoswine can launch another Earthquake (oh by the way Steel types have fun beating Mamosine :D).
I'm not going to cop out can say Snow Warning is broken because of Snow Cloak, but one can't deny that Snow Cloak really starts to push Hail over the edge. Froslass, because of Snow Cloak, can guarantee enough Spikes to almost ensure a sweep by GLaceon or Mamoswine just about every time, and non-Hail teams are fighting an enormous uphill battle when facing a hail team.
I think I'm echoing the sentiment of both the Senate and the community when I vote BL on Snow Warning.
ToF said:Since it's the holiday season and Hail is pretty obviously broken, these paragraphs are going to be rather short and sweet. Hail is such a difficult field condition to best because of the myriad of effects it causes during the course of the game. Snow Cloak is such an annoying ability that can cost well-deserved wins against a player that played better over the course of a game. Froslass, being one of the prime abusers of this ability, can get hazards up relatively easily. A hazard plagued metagame makes it even easier for BlizzSpam users to wear down and defeat said Hail "counters", which include Escavalier, Arcanine, Chandelure, etc. It's not like these things take Blizzard very well anyway, and hazards combined with the residual Hail damage add up.
I'm not gonna complain about one single Pokemon on a hail team, it's the combination of Pokemon on a Hail team that just become too much to handle. Froslass gets Spikes up too easily with Hail, Substitute, Thunder Wave, and Snow Cloak. The resulting Spikes make it easier for Substitute Mamoswine to sweep teams because of it's immense power. What sucks is that when facing Hail, you could have the perfect counterteam and wins will still be taken away from you because of Snow Cloak or crazy Blizzard freezes. Sand can't even negate Hail because, well most of a Sand team dies to BlizzSpam.
There are just too many external factors of Hail that limit the skill-aspect of the game. Blizzard freezes, Snow Cloak misses, and very powerful abusers make it a very simple no from me. The other members of the council covered Hail very thoroughly, so please do read their paragraphs as well for a more complete picture.
The big hot button issue right now is obviously Spikes. So continue that discussion from the other thread. The questions to go to the Senate at this point in time is which of the big three spikers is worthy of being voted on: one or two of Froslass, Roserade, Deoxys-D or all three of them?
