This thread is to run parallel with the RBY UU Agility + Partial Trapping Policy Review thread. Post here if you can't post in Policy Review, we'll monitor both threads!
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Announcement RBY UU Agility + Partial Trapping (APT) Suspect Test [APT banned]
- Thread starter phoopes
- Start date
- Status
So is it for Agility + wrap/clamp/spin ban, or speed manipulation + wrap/clamp/spin ban?
Because if it's the former I'd think a Dnite/air might opt for a Plan B of dropping Agility for Thunder Wave. On one hand this would probably give it an immensely poor matchup against Dugtrio who is immune, outspeeds and would punish with Rock slide. But on the other I wonder if this could lead to some poor future if that strat gained steam and made every UU team have to run a mandatory Duggy out of phobia to that interaction.
Because if it's the former I'd think a Dnite/air might opt for a Plan B of dropping Agility for Thunder Wave. On one hand this would probably give it an immensely poor matchup against Dugtrio who is immune, outspeeds and would punish with Rock slide. But on the other I wonder if this could lead to some poor future if that strat gained steam and made every UU team have to run a mandatory Duggy out of phobia to that interaction.
Ban this set thanks
About Agi+wrap(AGT) Dnite,It really has no technical content and enough to give players a bad experience on RBY UU metagame,when we againest Dnite，1 We use toxic(Persian,Dugtrio,Venusaur,Aerodactyl etc.），when we use toxic,Dnite's Blizzard will greatly reduce our pokemon's HP,then when we met Dugtrio/Persian/Dodrio，We are likely to lose the whole game.2 We will waiting Dnit's wrap miss and our Tentacruel(water type） use Blizzard to 0hko Dnit.This is simply to deliver a game to unreliable probability,and we must waiting a real chance to defact AGT Dnit.
About Agi+wrap(AGT) Dnite,It really has no technical content and enough to give players a bad experience on RBY UU metagame,when we againest Dnite，1 We use toxic(Persian,Dugtrio,Venusaur,Aerodactyl etc.），when we use toxic,Dnite's Blizzard will greatly reduce our pokemon's HP,then when we met Dugtrio/Persian/Dodrio，We are likely to lose the whole game.2 We will waiting Dnit's wrap miss and our Tentacruel(water type） use Blizzard to 0hko Dnit.This is simply to deliver a game to unreliable probability,and we must waiting a real chance to defact AGT Dnit.
I have a few questions regarding this suspect/decision:
Why, specifically, is the route being taken a complex ban of this nature? Is it solely because the Dragonite suspect failed to ban Dragonite last year? It seems like a complex ban such as this should be discouraged over straight banning the problematic pokemon in question, which here, is Dragonite.
Do other pokemon cause issues in RBY UU with agility + partial trapping moves? For example, is Agility + Fire Spin Rapidash seen as problematic in the tier? If that example is too silly, what about Moltres? Would it be problematic in the tier if Dragonite was no longer in the tier?
I know that some say Dragonite is otherwise healthy if not for the APT. But what makes that any different from banning X "broken" combo on Z mon instead of banning Z mon? Is it because we just want to keep Dragonite in the tier, and if so is this train of thought the way these decisions should be made?
If the problem really was APT and not Dragonite, then why was Dragonite even tested last year first? Would you be testing APT right now (again, since other mons get it), if Dragonite ended up being banned last year?
The RBY UU tier/community seems to be growing/changing/evolving very well and constantly. However the voting requirements for this suspect seem to be very rigid and based on past tours. Why wasn't there a suspect tour this time around for newcomers to the tier who only recently started getting into it?
For the record I don't have a strong opinion on actually banning APT, if the RBY UU council seems to think it's dumb then they probably have the right idea. But I am extremely curious about the answers to these questions, as it seems to be mostly going against tiering guidelines.
Why, specifically, is the route being taken a complex ban of this nature? Is it solely because the Dragonite suspect failed to ban Dragonite last year? It seems like a complex ban such as this should be discouraged over straight banning the problematic pokemon in question, which here, is Dragonite.
Do other pokemon cause issues in RBY UU with agility + partial trapping moves? For example, is Agility + Fire Spin Rapidash seen as problematic in the tier? If that example is too silly, what about Moltres? Would it be problematic in the tier if Dragonite was no longer in the tier?
I know that some say Dragonite is otherwise healthy if not for the APT. But what makes that any different from banning X "broken" combo on Z mon instead of banning Z mon? Is it because we just want to keep Dragonite in the tier, and if so is this train of thought the way these decisions should be made?
If the problem really was APT and not Dragonite, then why was Dragonite even tested last year first? Would you be testing APT right now (again, since other mons get it), if Dragonite ended up being banned last year?
The RBY UU tier/community seems to be growing/changing/evolving very well and constantly. However the voting requirements for this suspect seem to be very rigid and based on past tours. Why wasn't there a suspect tour this time around for newcomers to the tier who only recently started getting into it?
For the record I don't have a strong opinion on actually banning APT, if the RBY UU council seems to think it's dumb then they probably have the right idea. But I am extremely curious about the answers to these questions, as it seems to be mostly going against tiering guidelines.
Going to try and remain as neutral and impartial as I can when answering these questions (except for the part where I say "putting in my personal opinion" or something like that. My answers are not the end all be all when it comes to this discussion so feel free to make additional comments/add/disagree/whatever to what I'm saying.
It's Agility + Partial Trapping, not the latter.
As for your concern about dropping Agility for Thunder Wave, you're right that it does give Dragonite a worse Dugtrio matchup but Dragonite Blizzard does like 90+% to Dugtrio while Rock slide only does like 25+% to Dragonite (that's from memory I didn't really bother to calc) so Dragonite still does pretty well. I think the difference is this: you only need to set up Agility once to be a menace, and there are easier ways of doing it (coming in on a Resting Pokemon or coming in on a predicted Hyper Beam). With Thunder Wave strats you can't just simply come in on a sleeping Pokemon and set up, which is a big difference Plus you would need to use Thunder Wave against multiple Pokemon instead of just one Agility, which means Dragonite taking more hits/more chances to be statused. Hope that answers your question as to what the difference is.
---
I'd say in short, community consensus. Last year, when Dragonite was being suspected, the community wasn't necessarily happy with that. It was a compromise decision made with tiering leadership at the time to suspect Dragonite instead of APT. The promise was that APT as a whole would be suspected only if Dragonite was banned first, but that never came to pass since Dragonite remained unbanned. The feeling among a lot of the community is that without APT Dragonite is a strong but healthy force in the metagame; it's only with APT that it becomes a problem.
Dragonite is the major player here, with Dragonair being a distant second. Moltres is used probably as much as if not less than Dragonair, and Fire Spin's PP and accuracy make it not nearly as good. Any other Fire-type with AgiliSpin sees no play in the tier. I thiiiiink that most people would say Dragonair with AgiliWrap or Moltres with AgiliSpin wouldn't be problematic if Dragonite were no longer in the tier, but I can't speak for other people.
Throwing in my personal opinion: I don't think it would be problematic in the tier if Dragonite were gone but that comes with the caveat that I don't think it's problematic now haha (but I realize I'm probably in the minority on that one). There is an argument to be made though that if Dragonite is banned, Dragonair will simply see more play using the same strategy but it's hard to say because no one has really played a no-Dragonite meta extensively.
Forgive me on this because I'm not an expert on other gens' tiering decisions (yet anyway, haha) but from my understanding banning X "broken" combo on Z mon here to keep X mon in the tier doesn't seem all that different to me than later gens jumping through hoops to keep Baton Pass around with all the conditionals that have been tried and everything. Again if I'm way off base here let me know, that was just the first "complex ban" that came to mind. I would say the train of thought here isn't "we want to keep Dragonite in the tier because we like it," but moreso "we want to ban an uncompetitive strategy from an otherwise healthy metagame presence."
I kind of accidentally already answered this one oops. But to reiterate, Dragonite was tested last year first because the community wanted an APT ban but the tiering leadership at the time didn't want a complex ban. So there was a compromise made to test Dragonite instead, with the condition that if Dragonite was banned, an APT test would be on the table that would return Dragonite to the tier if it went through. So yes, if Dragonite had been banned, we would have (probably already) have tested APT.
I don't want to speak for the council entirely here, but when I asked if they wanted to have suspect live tours like there were for the Dragonite suspect test, the response was either "no" or kind of lukewarm from everyone. I think this is because this suspect test has been coming for a long time due to community opinion and they wanted to serve the community better by suspecting APT as quickly as possible. I'd like for a council member to step in and correct me I'm wrong though.
There's also an argument to be made that there was a chance for newer players to get involved. That was earlier this year with the RBY Invitational Last Chance Qualifiers, a tournament that was very well advertised (in my opinion) in the RBY Discord and even the UU Discord. This tour attracted 18 players who were not already invited to the Invitational, many of whom were new to the tier. And in the end, though it was not promised from the start, the council decided to take the top four from these last chance qualifiers to flesh out the voting pool a bit more. A formal suspect tour would have most likely attracted some more different players to try and get voting reqs, but I wanted to point out that there is some newer player representation in the voting pool for sure.
I wanted to comment on this about going against tiering guidelines. As far as I know, tiering guidelines have been set in the Tiering Policy Framework thread and I want to go over it to defend the council's decision (and my approval of their decision) to go for an APT test (spoilering because you didn't actually ask this question and this section is turning out to be a little long):
In short, I feel like this suspect test is justified for the reasons listed above and that it does not "mostly go against tiering guidelines."
---
Hopefully this answered your questions in a fair and impartial manner! I know I kind of spoke for some people in some of these answers so please jump and correct me if I've misrepresented anything. Thanks for reading!
It's Agility + Partial Trapping, not the latter.
As for your concern about dropping Agility for Thunder Wave, you're right that it does give Dragonite a worse Dugtrio matchup but Dragonite Blizzard does like 90+% to Dugtrio while Rock slide only does like 25+% to Dragonite (that's from memory I didn't really bother to calc) so Dragonite still does pretty well. I think the difference is this: you only need to set up Agility once to be a menace, and there are easier ways of doing it (coming in on a Resting Pokemon or coming in on a predicted Hyper Beam). With Thunder Wave strats you can't just simply come in on a sleeping Pokemon and set up, which is a big difference Plus you would need to use Thunder Wave against multiple Pokemon instead of just one Agility, which means Dragonite taking more hits/more chances to be statused. Hope that answers your question as to what the difference is.
---
I'd say in short, community consensus. Last year, when Dragonite was being suspected, the community wasn't necessarily happy with that. It was a compromise decision made with tiering leadership at the time to suspect Dragonite instead of APT. The promise was that APT as a whole would be suspected only if Dragonite was banned first, but that never came to pass since Dragonite remained unbanned. The feeling among a lot of the community is that without APT Dragonite is a strong but healthy force in the metagame; it's only with APT that it becomes a problem.
Dragonite is the major player here, with Dragonair being a distant second. Moltres is used probably as much as if not less than Dragonair, and Fire Spin's PP and accuracy make it not nearly as good. Any other Fire-type with AgiliSpin sees no play in the tier. I thiiiiink that most people would say Dragonair with AgiliWrap or Moltres with AgiliSpin wouldn't be problematic if Dragonite were no longer in the tier, but I can't speak for other people.
Throwing in my personal opinion: I don't think it would be problematic in the tier if Dragonite were gone but that comes with the caveat that I don't think it's problematic now haha (but I realize I'm probably in the minority on that one). There is an argument to be made though that if Dragonite is banned, Dragonair will simply see more play using the same strategy but it's hard to say because no one has really played a no-Dragonite meta extensively.
Forgive me on this because I'm not an expert on other gens' tiering decisions (yet anyway, haha) but from my understanding banning X "broken" combo on Z mon here to keep X mon in the tier doesn't seem all that different to me than later gens jumping through hoops to keep Baton Pass around with all the conditionals that have been tried and everything. Again if I'm way off base here let me know, that was just the first "complex ban" that came to mind. I would say the train of thought here isn't "we want to keep Dragonite in the tier because we like it," but moreso "we want to ban an uncompetitive strategy from an otherwise healthy metagame presence."
I kind of accidentally already answered this one oops. But to reiterate, Dragonite was tested last year first because the community wanted an APT ban but the tiering leadership at the time didn't want a complex ban. So there was a compromise made to test Dragonite instead, with the condition that if Dragonite was banned, an APT test would be on the table that would return Dragonite to the tier if it went through. So yes, if Dragonite had been banned, we would have (probably already) have tested APT.
I don't want to speak for the council entirely here, but when I asked if they wanted to have suspect live tours like there were for the Dragonite suspect test, the response was either "no" or kind of lukewarm from everyone. I think this is because this suspect test has been coming for a long time due to community opinion and they wanted to serve the community better by suspecting APT as quickly as possible. I'd like for a council member to step in and correct me I'm wrong though.
There's also an argument to be made that there was a chance for newer players to get involved. That was earlier this year with the RBY Invitational Last Chance Qualifiers, a tournament that was very well advertised (in my opinion) in the RBY Discord and even the UU Discord. This tour attracted 18 players who were not already invited to the Invitational, many of whom were new to the tier. And in the end, though it was not promised from the start, the council decided to take the top four from these last chance qualifiers to flesh out the voting pool a bit more. A formal suspect tour would have most likely attracted some more different players to try and get voting reqs, but I wanted to point out that there is some newer player representation in the voting pool for sure.
I wanted to comment on this about going against tiering guidelines. As far as I know, tiering guidelines have been set in the Tiering Policy Framework thread and I want to go over it to defend the council's decision (and my approval of their decision) to go for an APT test (spoilering because you didn't actually ask this question and this section is turning out to be a little long):
"I. We play, to the best of our simulator's capabilities, with the mechanics given to us on the cartridge."
-Not really relevant here IMO as it's not like we're inherently changing anything about the game (like with Freeze Clause), we would simply be creating a "house rule" to not play with Agility + Partial Trapping.
"II.) We cater to both ladder players (the higher end of the ladder) and tournament players."
-Not 100% relevant because there's only an RBY UU ladder for one month out of the year, but as far as catering to tournament players, I can assure you that it's not only people new to/outside the tier that have been calling for APT's ban. Tournament players have been calling for this suspect test too.
"III.) The onus of providing justification is on the side changing the status quo."
-You'll be seeing a lot of this in upcoming posts from voters I'm sure, either in this thread or the Policy Review thread.
"IV.) Probability management is a part of the game."
-I think a big reason why a lot of people want to see APT gone is this "probability management." There's been many a scenario in RBY UU over the past few years where, if the player opposing the APT user doesn't hit that 85% chance to land Toxic, they lose. That's a steep cost. Probability management doesn't mean accepting everything, it means accepting things that aren't "too much." And many RBY UU players feel that APT is "too much."
"V.) Team matchup management is a part of the game."
-The argument here is that the possibility of our opponent using APT is very restrictive when it comes to teambuilding because it forces almost every Pokemon on your team to prepare for APT in some way or else you have a good chance to lose to it. Lots of players say this is "too much" because of things like having to run Toxic on Dugtrio or Persian, who would otherwise not use the move.
"VI.) Even though some of these assumptions limit us, we will, within those limitations, work to maximize the concept of "player skill" determining the result of a match the majority of the time."
-The player skill element is I think a big factor in the council deciding on this suspect test. While it is a matter of skill to prevent your opponent from setting up APT, sometimes shit just happens and it doesn't work out, like missing an 85% chance to Toxic. Sometimes, APT can "steal" a game from the more deserving/skillful player, and while part of that comes down to probability management, the player skill factor cannot be ignored.
-Not really relevant here IMO as it's not like we're inherently changing anything about the game (like with Freeze Clause), we would simply be creating a "house rule" to not play with Agility + Partial Trapping.
"II.) We cater to both ladder players (the higher end of the ladder) and tournament players."
-Not 100% relevant because there's only an RBY UU ladder for one month out of the year, but as far as catering to tournament players, I can assure you that it's not only people new to/outside the tier that have been calling for APT's ban. Tournament players have been calling for this suspect test too.
"III.) The onus of providing justification is on the side changing the status quo."
-You'll be seeing a lot of this in upcoming posts from voters I'm sure, either in this thread or the Policy Review thread.
"IV.) Probability management is a part of the game."
-I think a big reason why a lot of people want to see APT gone is this "probability management." There's been many a scenario in RBY UU over the past few years where, if the player opposing the APT user doesn't hit that 85% chance to land Toxic, they lose. That's a steep cost. Probability management doesn't mean accepting everything, it means accepting things that aren't "too much." And many RBY UU players feel that APT is "too much."
"V.) Team matchup management is a part of the game."
-The argument here is that the possibility of our opponent using APT is very restrictive when it comes to teambuilding because it forces almost every Pokemon on your team to prepare for APT in some way or else you have a good chance to lose to it. Lots of players say this is "too much" because of things like having to run Toxic on Dugtrio or Persian, who would otherwise not use the move.
"VI.) Even though some of these assumptions limit us, we will, within those limitations, work to maximize the concept of "player skill" determining the result of a match the majority of the time."
-The player skill element is I think a big factor in the council deciding on this suspect test. While it is a matter of skill to prevent your opponent from setting up APT, sometimes shit just happens and it doesn't work out, like missing an 85% chance to Toxic. Sometimes, APT can "steal" a game from the more deserving/skillful player, and while part of that comes down to probability management, the player skill factor cannot be ignored.
In short, I feel like this suspect test is justified for the reasons listed above and that it does not "mostly go against tiering guidelines."
---
Hopefully this answered your questions in a fair and impartial manner! I know I kind of spoke for some people in some of these answers so please jump and correct me if I've misrepresented anything. Thanks for reading!
It's Agility + Wrap/Fire Spin, given legal combinations. Agility is the only speed-boosting move, and only Wrap and Fire Spin are possible alongside it; Rapidash, Moltres, and Dragonite are what's affected. Dragonite's Dugtrio matchup would be largely unaffected because Blizzard just kills it. There are Dragonite sets that don't use Agility already, this set is just egregious.
It's because of the strategy itself being notorious for screeching games to a halt for what can be a very long time. It's considered to be unhealthy and uncompetitive to an extreme degree: nobody actually likes this strategy. This is the basis for the suspect test. Its brokenness is completely RNG-centric, and while it's mathematically improbable for it to actually go the full stretch, the damage it deals on average is usually way too much for what can be just a single, seemingly inconsequential turn, in a metagame that often lasts an upwards of 50 turns. I agree that only Dragonite is viable out of these, but we're treating this like a Brightpowder situation: nobody likes to deal with it, it adds nothing but bother to the tier, let's remove it.
The Dragonite suspect test was a failure. We wanted it to be this way before but there was a lot of pulling around and communication wasn't great. We were effectively holding Dragonite hostage for a route to actually getting to this test, and that's kind of low if you ask me. The community aren't guinea pigs and the test was more about upholding archaic policies than actually making a suspect test that answers people's queries. Many No Ban voters stated they would have voted Ban on the mechanic itself.
I've used Rapidash and Volk has used Moltres. Here's my Rapidash team with a lead set, which can be improved upon. They're not broken, but Moltres is certainly viable and has been ranked before.
phoopes answered the rest while I was typing this so weeeee
Granted, I am no RBY UU super expert, I've played with and against APT quite a reasonable amount, both with just Dragonite and with Dragonite + Dragonair combination with and against top UU players. I've also used Agi-Spin Moltres in UU, though I'd rather click Fire Blast in nearly all circumstances with Moltres.
So here is my uniformed opinion.
APT in my opinion is not broken and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest as such. When referencing the main abuser, Dragonite, it is not a centralising force in the metagame (I ranked it at around 8th best) and is a strong but flawed pokemon with a wide multitude of weaknesses, teams without a Haunter or a Rock don't lose to APT because it's not that good. An APT ban has a limited amount of influence in how good Dragonite is in the metagame IMO and I probably personally wouldn't change its ranking or perhaps move it one or two places downwards. Furthermore, a lot of the counterplay to prevent setup consists of using some of the most broken moves in the game (Blizzard, Twave etc.) that pokemon that learn these moves want to run anyways. Toxic is a consideration since it is used on pokemon like Dugtrio that Dragonite check and are used as evidence for the metagame warping around APT but the alternatives to Toxic in the 4th slot are limited and really Dug only has Five reasonable moves to use.
APT seems good because it takes place over a variety of turns and you can essentially do very little during these turns assuming you manage to get into this position. If you condensed all that APT did into one very RNG laden calculation where you could skip to the outcome in a singular second, it probably would not even be mentioned here as an issue. APT is more of an annoyance and obnoxious to deal with, anti-competitive because it removes agency in those turns and heavily RNG dependent on how much it achieves. There is a certain amount to be said about the psychological factor and general annoyance that not being able to play the game for 20+ turns can do to the general enjoyment of a tier which probably puts off people coming into the scene from playing RBY UU. It also thrives on heavy mistakes, the likes that players newer to RBY and who do not position well are likely to make and it feels significantly worse at that level.
If I was merely balancing for the enjoyment of playing a tier, I think APT ban is a no brainer. It gets more complex when you factor in how good is it actually and the counterplay that exists to it.
Either ways, I'll be interested in the result and will probably reference this suspect sometime down the line for NU's Poliwhirl Hypnosis + Amnesia demon if it ever comes to that.
So here is my uniformed opinion.
APT in my opinion is not broken and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest as such. When referencing the main abuser, Dragonite, it is not a centralising force in the metagame (I ranked it at around 8th best) and is a strong but flawed pokemon with a wide multitude of weaknesses, teams without a Haunter or a Rock don't lose to APT because it's not that good. An APT ban has a limited amount of influence in how good Dragonite is in the metagame IMO and I probably personally wouldn't change its ranking or perhaps move it one or two places downwards. Furthermore, a lot of the counterplay to prevent setup consists of using some of the most broken moves in the game (Blizzard, Twave etc.) that pokemon that learn these moves want to run anyways. Toxic is a consideration since it is used on pokemon like Dugtrio that Dragonite check and are used as evidence for the metagame warping around APT but the alternatives to Toxic in the 4th slot are limited and really Dug only has Five reasonable moves to use.
APT seems good because it takes place over a variety of turns and you can essentially do very little during these turns assuming you manage to get into this position. If you condensed all that APT did into one very RNG laden calculation where you could skip to the outcome in a singular second, it probably would not even be mentioned here as an issue. APT is more of an annoyance and obnoxious to deal with, anti-competitive because it removes agency in those turns and heavily RNG dependent on how much it achieves. There is a certain amount to be said about the psychological factor and general annoyance that not being able to play the game for 20+ turns can do to the general enjoyment of a tier which probably puts off people coming into the scene from playing RBY UU. It also thrives on heavy mistakes, the likes that players newer to RBY and who do not position well are likely to make and it feels significantly worse at that level.
If I was merely balancing for the enjoyment of playing a tier, I think APT ban is a no brainer. It gets more complex when you factor in how good is it actually and the counterplay that exists to it.
Either ways, I'll be interested in the result and will probably reference this suspect sometime down the line for NU's Poliwhirl Hypnosis + Amnesia demon if it ever comes to that.
Last edited:
[i didnt do the form thing for permissions to reply to the other thread, ill just put any comment(s) i have here]
for now i mainly want to make a note @ phoopes compilation of games from lcq which is appreciated (i have now put all the invitational pools replays up as well, which obv anyone is free to go through similarly, but at the time of phoopes’ post i hadnt done that yet) ~
there are several games in phoopes’ compilation where apt choked, including sage vs me in the finals, and phoopes labelled these as ‘nothing to see here’ or something along those lines. i disagree with that way of analyzing, by looking at the games where apt was set up and only considering the ones where it went well or reasonably well.
if you were to analyze a mechanic like evasion, youd want to look at both times it worked and times it didnt. if apt was always or almost always very good when it set up, then it basically by definition wouldnt be uncompetitive because the uncompetitiveness *is* in the extreme inconsistency/randomness. (tbc, that wouldnt rule out it being broken.) ignoring the games where apt choked is to me almost missing the entire reason behind the suspect test.
in the lcq finals game between me and sage, i almost certainly misplayed letting the dnite setup (or at best, i made a wrong prediction). but more to the point, i was pretty significantly behind in that game, basically any late game mon wouldve won for sage there. however agiliwrap dragonite is the most unreliable mon in the tier, it choked after like two wrap turns (and even at that point i still was maybe a lil behind). ofc in rby there are 255s and like articuno relies heavily on a 90% acc move so it does miss sweeps sometimes bc of that, but its not comparable to dnite’s inconsistency.
compare that game to say this game between us in pool 4 tiebreak (which i havent posted to the replays thread yet sry, evthg other than pool 4 tiebreaks is there tho). https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1uu-619942
here i was way ahead but then nite got set up, and almost certainly had a decent chance to win (but choked v early again and didnt).
with any other late game sweeper, ie anything competitive, the lcq finals game would almost always be a win for sage, and the pool tiebreak game would almost always be a win for me. this is the ‘normal’ expectation when it comes to sweepers, that if your team is healthy you will be fine, but if ur too weakened then u should expect to lose.
apt doesnt remotely follow this, it more like improves your odds somewhat against it the healthier your team is. a team thats lost outside of 255s to a persian, is maybe only 70%? to lose to an agiliwrap nite. vs a team that is completely solid against any other agility sweeper other than maybe an articuno that gets a freeze and also a crit, or a dodrio that gets multiple crit hbeams; but vs an agiliwrap nite it is maybe 30-40%? to lose bc of all the various things that can happen even assuming you take the distributing damage route.
(these numerical percentages are not remotely precise, there are so many different things that can happen that its not plausible for a human to calculate such a probability even in one given game state. but the point is that the range goes nowhere near 100% and also nowhere near 0%.)
also, this is only addressing sweeping w agiliwrap rather than midgame agiliwrap which some might argue is more problematic bc distributing damage will almost inevitably open you up to a different sweeper afterward, particularly if that mon isnt revealed so u dont know what to (try to) preserve when distributing damage.
a sweeping mechanic where its own rng variance has a bigger impact on the outcome than all the prior gameplay is uncompetitive (and prob very similar to sub sd sand veil gligar in adv, where the rest of the game state does matter in terms of eg how many misses gligar needs to get, but the whole mechanic still depends on rng fishing; but i barely know that tier).
anyway my point here is that you absolutely have to consider the games where agiliwrap chokes exactly as much as u consider the ones where it does well, because the entire issue of uncompetitiveness is about the *variance/distribution* of how effective it is.
~ ~ ~
also i see the ‘complex ban’ issue coming up again, adv sand veil is a complex ban lol. its a ban on sand veil in combination with permanent sand (either from your own or the opposing team). sleep clause is a complex ban. there are also some implicitly complex bans, like bans on damp rock etc or terrain extender in new gens which are as far as i know always really bans on them in combination with the respective auto-setters, but obv no one would use these items outside the autosetters so they just ban the item bc the effect is equivalent. (and in rare cases where the item could actually be relevant without autosetters, ive seen at least one discussion of whether the item ban needed to be revised to be explicitly only banning it on the autosetter(s) idr where.)
i dont have a wide range of knowledge abt all different tiers but you use complex bans when the thing ur targeting clearly requires that. here, targeting st other than agiliwrap like dragonite is basically j exploiting the fact that its a small dex and theres a v small number of mons with access to both agility and a trapping move to begin with.
for now i mainly want to make a note @ phoopes compilation of games from lcq which is appreciated (i have now put all the invitational pools replays up as well, which obv anyone is free to go through similarly, but at the time of phoopes’ post i hadnt done that yet) ~
there are several games in phoopes’ compilation where apt choked, including sage vs me in the finals, and phoopes labelled these as ‘nothing to see here’ or something along those lines. i disagree with that way of analyzing, by looking at the games where apt was set up and only considering the ones where it went well or reasonably well.
if you were to analyze a mechanic like evasion, youd want to look at both times it worked and times it didnt. if apt was always or almost always very good when it set up, then it basically by definition wouldnt be uncompetitive because the uncompetitiveness *is* in the extreme inconsistency/randomness. (tbc, that wouldnt rule out it being broken.) ignoring the games where apt choked is to me almost missing the entire reason behind the suspect test.
in the lcq finals game between me and sage, i almost certainly misplayed letting the dnite setup (or at best, i made a wrong prediction). but more to the point, i was pretty significantly behind in that game, basically any late game mon wouldve won for sage there. however agiliwrap dragonite is the most unreliable mon in the tier, it choked after like two wrap turns (and even at that point i still was maybe a lil behind). ofc in rby there are 255s and like articuno relies heavily on a 90% acc move so it does miss sweeps sometimes bc of that, but its not comparable to dnite’s inconsistency.
compare that game to say this game between us in pool 4 tiebreak (which i havent posted to the replays thread yet sry, evthg other than pool 4 tiebreaks is there tho). https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1uu-619942
here i was way ahead but then nite got set up, and almost certainly had a decent chance to win (but choked v early again and didnt).
with any other late game sweeper, ie anything competitive, the lcq finals game would almost always be a win for sage, and the pool tiebreak game would almost always be a win for me. this is the ‘normal’ expectation when it comes to sweepers, that if your team is healthy you will be fine, but if ur too weakened then u should expect to lose.
apt doesnt remotely follow this, it more like improves your odds somewhat against it the healthier your team is. a team thats lost outside of 255s to a persian, is maybe only 70%? to lose to an agiliwrap nite. vs a team that is completely solid against any other agility sweeper other than maybe an articuno that gets a freeze and also a crit, or a dodrio that gets multiple crit hbeams; but vs an agiliwrap nite it is maybe 30-40%? to lose bc of all the various things that can happen even assuming you take the distributing damage route.
(these numerical percentages are not remotely precise, there are so many different things that can happen that its not plausible for a human to calculate such a probability even in one given game state. but the point is that the range goes nowhere near 100% and also nowhere near 0%.)
also, this is only addressing sweeping w agiliwrap rather than midgame agiliwrap which some might argue is more problematic bc distributing damage will almost inevitably open you up to a different sweeper afterward, particularly if that mon isnt revealed so u dont know what to (try to) preserve when distributing damage.
a sweeping mechanic where its own rng variance has a bigger impact on the outcome than all the prior gameplay is uncompetitive (and prob very similar to sub sd sand veil gligar in adv, where the rest of the game state does matter in terms of eg how many misses gligar needs to get, but the whole mechanic still depends on rng fishing; but i barely know that tier).
anyway my point here is that you absolutely have to consider the games where agiliwrap chokes exactly as much as u consider the ones where it does well, because the entire issue of uncompetitiveness is about the *variance/distribution* of how effective it is.
~ ~ ~
also i see the ‘complex ban’ issue coming up again, adv sand veil is a complex ban lol. its a ban on sand veil in combination with permanent sand (either from your own or the opposing team). sleep clause is a complex ban. there are also some implicitly complex bans, like bans on damp rock etc or terrain extender in new gens which are as far as i know always really bans on them in combination with the respective auto-setters, but obv no one would use these items outside the autosetters so they just ban the item bc the effect is equivalent. (and in rare cases where the item could actually be relevant without autosetters, ive seen at least one discussion of whether the item ban needed to be revised to be explicitly only banning it on the autosetter(s) idr where.)
i dont have a wide range of knowledge abt all different tiers but you use complex bans when the thing ur targeting clearly requires that. here, targeting st other than agiliwrap like dragonite is basically j exploiting the fact that its a small dex and theres a v small number of mons with access to both agility and a trapping move to begin with.
Juoean's two games vs Sage:
G1 -
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen1uu-1511259594
Dragonite definitely does lose a game it had every chance of winning here. But, its certainly not the only thing that could have choked that endgame. Dodrio misses hyperbeam against Clef and its sweep is over. Persian takes a thunderwave and it can FP to death before doing anything more. There's a lot of things that could have won that game or lost it.
G2 -
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1uu-619942
Persian absolutely could win this. You win the speed tie, then go back to gyara against hypno, click hyperbeam, and if it catches hypno youve basically won, if it catches tenta, then you just need to not get hypnosised. It definitely involves a little more traditional battling than the nite sweep, but only a little.
I think we all can agree that Dragonite is a very good sweeper, the fact that it is able to sweep in conditions where it is harder for other mons isnt exactly damning against APT.
We should also all be able to agree that APT, in relying on usually multiple hits of an 85% accurate attack has issues with reliability (Which is exacerbated by Dragonite being 4x weak to ice). The question is whether the lack of reliability of APT is so extreme that its uncompetitive.
And from the logs I have seen, I dont really think so. What we are mostly seeing are very tight games, often with a bit of unbalance (eg. 6 weakened pokemon vs 3 healthy pokemon), where the success or failure of one of the top threats in the tier is able to prove decisive. It's basically what we expect from a top tier threat that is known to be a little unreliable.
G1 -
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen1uu-1511259594
Dragonite definitely does lose a game it had every chance of winning here. But, its certainly not the only thing that could have choked that endgame. Dodrio misses hyperbeam against Clef and its sweep is over. Persian takes a thunderwave and it can FP to death before doing anything more. There's a lot of things that could have won that game or lost it.
G2 -
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1uu-619942
Persian absolutely could win this. You win the speed tie, then go back to gyara against hypno, click hyperbeam, and if it catches hypno youve basically won, if it catches tenta, then you just need to not get hypnosised. It definitely involves a little more traditional battling than the nite sweep, but only a little.
I think we all can agree that Dragonite is a very good sweeper, the fact that it is able to sweep in conditions where it is harder for other mons isnt exactly damning against APT.
We should also all be able to agree that APT, in relying on usually multiple hits of an 85% accurate attack has issues with reliability (Which is exacerbated by Dragonite being 4x weak to ice). The question is whether the lack of reliability of APT is so extreme that its uncompetitive.
And from the logs I have seen, I dont really think so. What we are mostly seeing are very tight games, often with a bit of unbalance (eg. 6 weakened pokemon vs 3 healthy pokemon), where the success or failure of one of the top threats in the tier is able to prove decisive. It's basically what we expect from a top tier threat that is known to be a little unreliable.
Response to juoean:
I thought I was pretty fair in my assessments of all the games in which Dragonite appeared, both in the match-by-match analysis and the tl;dr. I did consider when APT went well and when APT went poorly and everything in between. I went into detail in every match in the spoilered section of my post, and I even split the "APT didn't make a noticeable impact" and "APT choked" into different categories in the tl;dr so I'm not exactly sure what you're disagreeing with here when it comes to looking at both times where it worked and times it didn't. I didn't "ignore" the games where APT choked; I categorized everything. If you want me to focus on the games where APT didn't do anything/choked more though, I certainly can. I thought everyone had an issue with the rare successes, but I'm happy to talk more about APT's failures haha.
If I understand correctly you're arguing that if APT was more consistent, it would be broken, but because it's not, it's uncompetitive due to it being too RNG heavy. I think this sets up a kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario for APT, which I think is a little unfair. We've pretty much agreed at this point that APT isn't broken, but as far as uncompetitive, I'm going to bring up the Tiering Policy Framework again, specifically one of the sub-bullet points under uncompetitive:
"This can be probability management issues; think OHKOs, evasion, or Moody, all of which turned the battle from emphasizing battling skill to emphasizing the result of the RNG more often than not."
This probability management is something that I've already touched on and said that I'm willing to accept. As the player using APT, I have to realize what my risk vs. reward is here. The reward can range from absolutely nothing in the worst-case scenario to potentially winning the game in the best-case scenario. As I've mentioned before though, just winning the game doesn't necessarily mean it's uncompetitive. I think I made that point clear when highlighting the game where Vextal won with APT. To me, the only reward that really fits the bill here of emphasizing RNG more than battling skill is when APT "steals" a game, i.e. the opponent makes all the right plays to stop it, gets unlucky once so the APT user is unable to set up, then gets unlucky again with APT whittling down their team instead of choking. However, this happens so infrequently that I chalk it up to being one of the many probabilities that you need to manage in this game. APT "stealing" a game, isn't the only time you can potentially get screwed over even when making all the right plays. Let me try to visualize it for everyone.
APT works only about 5% of the time in the games analyzed where it actually sets up Agility, as opposed to a ~30% chance to hit for OHKO moves and a ~33.3% chance to miss a 100% accuracy move if I'm correct on the mechanics. So let's try a crude visual that I came up with in like two minutes because I didn't feel like using an outside graph maker or whatever haha.
|____x____a______b____________y__z________________|_________________________________________________|
0%........................................................................................50%......................................................................................100%
z = the ~33% chance to miss a 100% accuracy move after an evasion boost, which we do not accept
y = the ~30% chance to land an OHKO move, which we do not accept
b = the ~17% chance for Articuno to critical hit, which we accept (I picked this because Agility Articuno fishes for DE crits against Rest Looping Tentacruel, which you could argue is "emphasizes the result of RNG more often than not")
c = the ~10% chance for Blizzard to freeze, which we accept
x = the ~5% chance for APT to "steal" games, which we are debating right now.
I threw in the Blizzard freeze chance and the Articuno crit rate just for a little bit more context for these numbers. In RBY, it's widely accepted that a freeze is basically the same as an OHKO. And I would argue that fishing for crits is similar to fishing for an evasion miss, as again, you could argue that both "emphasize the result of the RNG more often than not." I know t's not a perfect equivalence, but I wanted to bring it up anyway, just to give everyone something to think about.
But even if you ignore "a" and "b" in my little graph, I think you can see a stark difference between "x" and "y/z," which is the difference between APT "stealing" a game and the OHKO/evasion moves. 5% vs. 30+% is a huge difference when it comes to RNG, and I think the ~5% is pretty manageable in a game where we deal with probability all the time (again, that's why I threw in the freeze chance/Articuno crit chance).
The question I think we're aiming to answer here is, "Where is the line for what we deem unacceptable?" and some people have different definitions of where "the line" is for what we should accept. I don't exactly know where my "line" is, but I know for sure that I believe it's somewhere between "x" and "y," meaning that we haven't crossed it. But that's just me. If the voters as a whole think that the line is somewhere to the left of "x" in my graph, then I will accept defeat haha. But I again think for a lot of people, they feel that "the line" should be further left than it really should be due to it "feeling" worse to lose to than a conventional sweep, or from a perspective of it being boring from a spectator's perspective.
I think I hit all the points in my rebuttal, but if I left something unanswered let me know. As always, thanks for reading!
I thought I was pretty fair in my assessments of all the games in which Dragonite appeared, both in the match-by-match analysis and the tl;dr. I did consider when APT went well and when APT went poorly and everything in between. I went into detail in every match in the spoilered section of my post, and I even split the "APT didn't make a noticeable impact" and "APT choked" into different categories in the tl;dr so I'm not exactly sure what you're disagreeing with here when it comes to looking at both times where it worked and times it didn't. I didn't "ignore" the games where APT choked; I categorized everything. If you want me to focus on the games where APT didn't do anything/choked more though, I certainly can. I thought everyone had an issue with the rare successes, but I'm happy to talk more about APT's failures haha.
If I understand correctly you're arguing that if APT was more consistent, it would be broken, but because it's not, it's uncompetitive due to it being too RNG heavy. I think this sets up a kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario for APT, which I think is a little unfair. We've pretty much agreed at this point that APT isn't broken, but as far as uncompetitive, I'm going to bring up the Tiering Policy Framework again, specifically one of the sub-bullet points under uncompetitive:
"This can be probability management issues; think OHKOs, evasion, or Moody, all of which turned the battle from emphasizing battling skill to emphasizing the result of the RNG more often than not."
This probability management is something that I've already touched on and said that I'm willing to accept. As the player using APT, I have to realize what my risk vs. reward is here. The reward can range from absolutely nothing in the worst-case scenario to potentially winning the game in the best-case scenario. As I've mentioned before though, just winning the game doesn't necessarily mean it's uncompetitive. I think I made that point clear when highlighting the game where Vextal won with APT. To me, the only reward that really fits the bill here of emphasizing RNG more than battling skill is when APT "steals" a game, i.e. the opponent makes all the right plays to stop it, gets unlucky once so the APT user is unable to set up, then gets unlucky again with APT whittling down their team instead of choking. However, this happens so infrequently that I chalk it up to being one of the many probabilities that you need to manage in this game. APT "stealing" a game, isn't the only time you can potentially get screwed over even when making all the right plays. Let me try to visualize it for everyone.
APT works only about 5% of the time in the games analyzed where it actually sets up Agility, as opposed to a ~30% chance to hit for OHKO moves and a ~33.3% chance to miss a 100% accuracy move if I'm correct on the mechanics. So let's try a crude visual that I came up with in like two minutes because I didn't feel like using an outside graph maker or whatever haha.
|____x____a______b____________y__z________________|_________________________________________________|
0%........................................................................................50%......................................................................................100%
z = the ~33% chance to miss a 100% accuracy move after an evasion boost, which we do not accept
y = the ~30% chance to land an OHKO move, which we do not accept
b = the ~17% chance for Articuno to critical hit, which we accept (I picked this because Agility Articuno fishes for DE crits against Rest Looping Tentacruel, which you could argue is "emphasizes the result of RNG more often than not")
c = the ~10% chance for Blizzard to freeze, which we accept
x = the ~5% chance for APT to "steal" games, which we are debating right now.
I threw in the Blizzard freeze chance and the Articuno crit rate just for a little bit more context for these numbers. In RBY, it's widely accepted that a freeze is basically the same as an OHKO. And I would argue that fishing for crits is similar to fishing for an evasion miss, as again, you could argue that both "emphasize the result of the RNG more often than not." I know t's not a perfect equivalence, but I wanted to bring it up anyway, just to give everyone something to think about.
But even if you ignore "a" and "b" in my little graph, I think you can see a stark difference between "x" and "y/z," which is the difference between APT "stealing" a game and the OHKO/evasion moves. 5% vs. 30+% is a huge difference when it comes to RNG, and I think the ~5% is pretty manageable in a game where we deal with probability all the time (again, that's why I threw in the freeze chance/Articuno crit chance).
The question I think we're aiming to answer here is, "Where is the line for what we deem unacceptable?" and some people have different definitions of where "the line" is for what we should accept. I don't exactly know where my "line" is, but I know for sure that I believe it's somewhere between "x" and "y," meaning that we haven't crossed it. But that's just me. If the voters as a whole think that the line is somewhere to the left of "x" in my graph, then I will accept defeat haha. But I again think for a lot of people, they feel that "the line" should be further left than it really should be due to it "feeling" worse to lose to than a conventional sweep, or from a perspective of it being boring from a spectator's perspective.
I think I hit all the points in my rebuttal, but if I left something unanswered let me know. As always, thanks for reading!
sorry phoopes i think i got confused by some of the wording and formatting of your post before.
things like the decision to bold games where apt went well, and to not bold the games where it choked, confused me / gave me this impression, as well as wording like “had no impact”. and tbh i had trouble with the ‘categories’ you put at the bottom in general, i will try to read those again later, but so i got confused there as well. (u can ofc write however u want im j elaborating as to how i got confused).
things like the decision to bold games where apt went well, and to not bold the games where it choked, confused me / gave me this impression, as well as wording like “had no impact”. and tbh i had trouble with the ‘categories’ you put at the bottom in general, i will try to read those again later, but so i got confused there as well. (u can ofc write however u want im j elaborating as to how i got confused).
I haven't really played much UU, but I remember last time when this was brought up, a statistic thing, that was basically "out of so many competitive games, maybe like 80? there was only one instance where Dragonite won the game singlehandedly, and was also the only Pokemon whose ability to Agiliwrap made it the only one who could possibly sweep in such as a situation, over a more typical sweeper"
That's what I always think back to when this gets brought up, so I honestly don't resonate with banning it, but again, I haven't played UU, or RBY in general, in ages.
There's also the fact that Wrap's accuracy is kinda piss and that Golem and Haunter are things
EDIT: apparently it was 30, way overestimated, i feel my point stands though
That's what I always think back to when this gets brought up, so I honestly don't resonate with banning it, but again, I haven't played UU, or RBY in general, in ages.
There's also the fact that Wrap's accuracy is kinda piss and that Golem and Haunter are things
EDIT: apparently it was 30, way overestimated, i feel my point stands though
Last edited:
ok i have reread thru phoopes' compilation resource a few times now, honestly theres still a couple places im not sure i followed, but i think i understand most of phoopes' descriptive analysis and also commentary, enough for me to respond more effectively (i hope).
[absolutely agree that apt is not broken, im only discussing whether it is competitive which i think for pretty much everyone is the (potential) issue.
~ so the first 'step' phoopes used was separating games when dnite used agility and when it didnt. idk if this was just for simplicity but i kind of think this is not rly a helpful/relevant starting point.
if we are going to look at setup turn(s), and ill just say its dugtrio vs dragonite just to make writing this easier but u can substitute whatever other mon for dugtrio, i think there are four (not two) general initial outcomes to consider: 1 [dugtrio] clicks toxic/twave and dragonite predicts this, crippling or koing [dugtrio] 2 [dugtrio] clicks toxic/twave correctly predicting agility 3a [dugtrio] switches out, or 3b didnt have a move in the teambuilder to cripple dnite, and dragonite gets an agility setup 4 [dugtrio] switches out correctly predicting dragonite to click a non-agility move.
of course all four outcomes may not actually be possible in a given game state, option two is not possible if the non-dnite mon doesnt have toxic or twave, options two and three are not possible if the dnite doesnt have agility, and option one isnt possible if eg its dnite vs persian and the dnite doesnt have twave. but since the player 'defending against dnite' doesnt know what moves the dnite actually has, all four potential outcomes always have to be considered.
to me evaluating competitiveness on the setup turn is very complicated, and im not rly sure what i think about it, its also not something that really anyone has talked about at least not in detail so ive kind of j ignored it. '50/50' predictions are always a part of mons, but these specific 50/50s almost certainly have 'more' impact than others. but there is always variation in the importance of getting a 50/50 right; 50/50s in lgpe against zapdos when rocks are not up yet comes to mind as another case of a 50/50 with massive impact on the game [tho less so now that rocks mew is so much more universal].
there is also a question of to what extent it is really a 50/50; for example when i run dug + persian, one of the specific purposes is so that one of them can toxic dragonite even if it means getting crippled, and then the other one no longer has any 50/50 to worry about bc the dnite is already toxicd. but ofc it still depends on game state, there will still be times where you have to go for the 50/50. on the other hand if you have only one faster than tent mon (either in the teambuilder or at that point in the game), say persian, then persian taking twave is often disastrous and you may have to go for 50/50 predictions vs dnite.
then ofc theres movesets in the teambuilder on mons like persian, dodrio, and kangaskhan, this aspect has been discussed somewhat at is it uncompetitive for these mons to consider running toxic, particularly since even without toxic at least two of the three have stab body slam which has 30% to paralyze dnite on setup turn, which obv means even more variance in dnite's effectiveness / a much lower chance for agiliwrap to go well, and personally i def have concern that dragonite choosing to setup on body slam means it is deliberately relying on a setup opportunity that no doubt has less than a 50% chance to be effective when u combine the paraslam chance with the chance to choke afterward (that sounds uncompetitive to me if ur using a strat that will completely fail half the time.)
then there is also the setting up on rest, which was discussed a lot in the last suspect, frankly this is v minimally relevant to me because rest / staying in with sleeping mons is pretty difficult at least in the current meta anyway. i think the only example in phoopes compilation of dnite setting up on a sleeping mon was me vs sage, and iirc the reason i took that risk is that i thought the game state was so bad for me that my best chance was to hope for a quick wakeup from gyara. (maybe my analysis of the game state wasnt accurate, but the point is that dnite setting up on rest is rly fringe rn.)
there are im sure other factors that im either forgetting or hadnt considered in terms of evaluating setup turns.
if one did want to analyze setup turns in phoopes' compilation, it would be necessary to look at all four cases not just the agility uses. when dragonite got the 50/50 right and kod dug or whatever in exchange for toxic, what was the impact of winning this 50/50, is that impact seen as an acceptable part of 50/50s or is it too drastic by whatever measure(s) that ppl think its uncompetitive. idk like i said theres so much to consider in terms of setup turns and im not really sure how to go about analyzing that, but i do feel i can confidently say that eg persian switching out of dnite predicting twave but instead it agilities (assuming the persian even had toxic), i dont think that is automatically a 'misplay', it is getting the 50/50 wrong. unless the persian user is still in a good game state if it trades toxic on nite for taking twave, then yes itd be a misplay. reducing dnite setup to either skillful or a misplay ignores the fact that idk probably 80%-90% of potential dnite setups actually come on 50/50s (or things that at least potentially are 50/50s. there is also potential 'skill' involved in analyzing the game state and whether one needs to go for the 50/50. ie im not automatically saying its uncompetitive bc of the 50/50s; but its j not accurate to pretend that the 50/50s arent there and call losing the 50/50 a misplay.)
~ ~ ~
'putting aside' setup turns, and focusing on the threat of agiliwrap 'itself', the only cases to look at are (3) above [not both three and four which my perception of what phoopes' categories were doing.] if dragonite was toxic'd setting up agility, agiliwrap is inherently impossible to be effective bc toxic damage is more than wrap. dragonite can still potentially pose a threat with its other moves, as eg in the other sage vs me game in phoopes' compilation (tho iirc it was a misplay by me that led to the toxicd dnite koing my tent), but this obv has nothing to do with wrap, agility + three attacks dragonite would still be legal if apt is banned.
(a +2 paralyzed dragonite could potentially be considered separately, if people are concerned that paralyzing dnite is insufficient to cripple agiliwrap, but thats an entirely separate analysis and ive only seen one player actually concerned about that.)
this means that out of phoopes lcq compilation there are ~8 or so actual instances of +2 dragonite to look at (not eighteen or whatever), which obv is a small sample but regardless i will try to go through them a lil later.
and also, i dont think the 'was the dragonite setup skillful in this instance' or not is a useful criterion to apply here, its not like the way agiliwrap goes in a given game is somehow mathematically dependent on whether the prior setup was skillful. these are two separate things: is the setup turn skillful, which would be along the lines of the discussion i put above; and is the outcome of agiliwrap when it is setup succesfully competitive which means analyzing the variance of outcomes and whether that variance is 'acceptable' [by whatever metric(s)]. the two aspects are mathematically completely independent (in a large enough sample, there would be no correlation between the skillfulness of setup and where the outcome of agiliwrap falls within the distribution of its potential effectiveness), there is no reason to mix the two questions together and imo it is just confusing to do so.
one last thing, i am confused by the comparison to ohko moves and if i understood correctly phoopes is saying that if agiliwrap's threat level falls above "30%" [in whatever sense that percentage is defined, eg as i said i the denominator should be ~8, not ~18, but also agiliwrap's effectiveness is distributional it seems a bit weird to say either "it worked" or "it didnt" in x scenario], then thatd be competitively acceptable.
if anything, it is their low accuracy that makes ohko moves uncompetitive. if ohko moves were 80% accurate or something, they would presumably be broken, but if anything theyd be less uncompetitive. ohko moves that were 5% accurate wouldnt be any less 'competitive', although maybe if they were that horrendous then no one would ever use them and we wouldn't bother with banning them. focusing on the percentage of the ohko chance isnt really the point, id maybe say that the main point about ohko moves is that either they ko the target or they do nothing. when we talk about blizzard freezes, yea freeze is an effective ohko, in fact sometimes its even better than a ohko bc it gives you a free turn and ofc theres the freeze hbeam glitch lol, but 'in general' you are not clicking blizzard just to try to freeze. (tho ofc there are some game states where you may resort to fishing for that). and in cases like ou jynx where blizzard is more of a freeze fish button, that is always of greater competitive concern.
if you take say something with agility + ohko move, and lets say for simplicity that it only had those two moves, the effectiveness of this mon is basically completely unrelated to the game state. its just how many time(s) does horn drill hit before missing and it doesnt matter what the opposing mons are, how healthy they are, etc. that is i think the center of why that is completely uncompetitive, it totally disregards prior play and it is all about the mechanic's own rng.
agiliwrap ofc is not to that extreme, but is there 'enough' limitation on the variation in its effectiveness (again by whatever measures)? hipmonlee says that the examples i gave were not 'extreme' enough in terms of what other sweepers would/wouldnt be able to do, im not sure if i agree but regardless to me what is more important is are there (tbh even totally contrived, like six healthy mons) significant gamestates where agiliwrap would not have any reasonable chance to sweep? also, there is obv some variation based on the opposing mons used. is a dug + kadabra team just automatically vulnerable to a (potential) dnite sweep at any time given setup opp, is that seen as an acceptable cost of the team structure, in comparison to st like hypno + clef + bulky water which has better chances for dnite to choke against them, or maybe even has some possibility that you could be far enough ahead that even with bad luck you could not auto-lose to a agilinite (i really doubt it @ any realistic possibility).
hipmonlee has previously suggested that the variance in dnite's effectiveness might actually be lower than many of us think due to rng spread out over turns, i dont rly think thats true but as i said its super hard to calculate evthg with all the various outcomes and ways wrap misses on certain turns can change things, this is 'the kind of thing' that imo makes sense to consider. but not like comparing was the setup skillful with the outcome, when "mathematically" we know those two 'variables' have zero correlation bc they are completely independent.
[absolutely agree that apt is not broken, im only discussing whether it is competitive which i think for pretty much everyone is the (potential) issue.
~ so the first 'step' phoopes used was separating games when dnite used agility and when it didnt. idk if this was just for simplicity but i kind of think this is not rly a helpful/relevant starting point.
if we are going to look at setup turn(s), and ill just say its dugtrio vs dragonite just to make writing this easier but u can substitute whatever other mon for dugtrio, i think there are four (not two) general initial outcomes to consider: 1 [dugtrio] clicks toxic/twave and dragonite predicts this, crippling or koing [dugtrio] 2 [dugtrio] clicks toxic/twave correctly predicting agility 3a [dugtrio] switches out, or 3b didnt have a move in the teambuilder to cripple dnite, and dragonite gets an agility setup 4 [dugtrio] switches out correctly predicting dragonite to click a non-agility move.
of course all four outcomes may not actually be possible in a given game state, option two is not possible if the non-dnite mon doesnt have toxic or twave, options two and three are not possible if the dnite doesnt have agility, and option one isnt possible if eg its dnite vs persian and the dnite doesnt have twave. but since the player 'defending against dnite' doesnt know what moves the dnite actually has, all four potential outcomes always have to be considered.
to me evaluating competitiveness on the setup turn is very complicated, and im not rly sure what i think about it, its also not something that really anyone has talked about at least not in detail so ive kind of j ignored it. '50/50' predictions are always a part of mons, but these specific 50/50s almost certainly have 'more' impact than others. but there is always variation in the importance of getting a 50/50 right; 50/50s in lgpe against zapdos when rocks are not up yet comes to mind as another case of a 50/50 with massive impact on the game [tho less so now that rocks mew is so much more universal].
there is also a question of to what extent it is really a 50/50; for example when i run dug + persian, one of the specific purposes is so that one of them can toxic dragonite even if it means getting crippled, and then the other one no longer has any 50/50 to worry about bc the dnite is already toxicd. but ofc it still depends on game state, there will still be times where you have to go for the 50/50. on the other hand if you have only one faster than tent mon (either in the teambuilder or at that point in the game), say persian, then persian taking twave is often disastrous and you may have to go for 50/50 predictions vs dnite.
then ofc theres movesets in the teambuilder on mons like persian, dodrio, and kangaskhan, this aspect has been discussed somewhat at is it uncompetitive for these mons to consider running toxic, particularly since even without toxic at least two of the three have stab body slam which has 30% to paralyze dnite on setup turn, which obv means even more variance in dnite's effectiveness / a much lower chance for agiliwrap to go well, and personally i def have concern that dragonite choosing to setup on body slam means it is deliberately relying on a setup opportunity that no doubt has less than a 50% chance to be effective when u combine the paraslam chance with the chance to choke afterward (that sounds uncompetitive to me if ur using a strat that will completely fail half the time.)
then there is also the setting up on rest, which was discussed a lot in the last suspect, frankly this is v minimally relevant to me because rest / staying in with sleeping mons is pretty difficult at least in the current meta anyway. i think the only example in phoopes compilation of dnite setting up on a sleeping mon was me vs sage, and iirc the reason i took that risk is that i thought the game state was so bad for me that my best chance was to hope for a quick wakeup from gyara. (maybe my analysis of the game state wasnt accurate, but the point is that dnite setting up on rest is rly fringe rn.)
there are im sure other factors that im either forgetting or hadnt considered in terms of evaluating setup turns.
if one did want to analyze setup turns in phoopes' compilation, it would be necessary to look at all four cases not just the agility uses. when dragonite got the 50/50 right and kod dug or whatever in exchange for toxic, what was the impact of winning this 50/50, is that impact seen as an acceptable part of 50/50s or is it too drastic by whatever measure(s) that ppl think its uncompetitive. idk like i said theres so much to consider in terms of setup turns and im not really sure how to go about analyzing that, but i do feel i can confidently say that eg persian switching out of dnite predicting twave but instead it agilities (assuming the persian even had toxic), i dont think that is automatically a 'misplay', it is getting the 50/50 wrong. unless the persian user is still in a good game state if it trades toxic on nite for taking twave, then yes itd be a misplay. reducing dnite setup to either skillful or a misplay ignores the fact that idk probably 80%-90% of potential dnite setups actually come on 50/50s (or things that at least potentially are 50/50s. there is also potential 'skill' involved in analyzing the game state and whether one needs to go for the 50/50. ie im not automatically saying its uncompetitive bc of the 50/50s; but its j not accurate to pretend that the 50/50s arent there and call losing the 50/50 a misplay.)
~ ~ ~
'putting aside' setup turns, and focusing on the threat of agiliwrap 'itself', the only cases to look at are (3) above [not both three and four which my perception of what phoopes' categories were doing.] if dragonite was toxic'd setting up agility, agiliwrap is inherently impossible to be effective bc toxic damage is more than wrap. dragonite can still potentially pose a threat with its other moves, as eg in the other sage vs me game in phoopes' compilation (tho iirc it was a misplay by me that led to the toxicd dnite koing my tent), but this obv has nothing to do with wrap, agility + three attacks dragonite would still be legal if apt is banned.
(a +2 paralyzed dragonite could potentially be considered separately, if people are concerned that paralyzing dnite is insufficient to cripple agiliwrap, but thats an entirely separate analysis and ive only seen one player actually concerned about that.)
this means that out of phoopes lcq compilation there are ~8 or so actual instances of +2 dragonite to look at (not eighteen or whatever), which obv is a small sample but regardless i will try to go through them a lil later.
and also, i dont think the 'was the dragonite setup skillful in this instance' or not is a useful criterion to apply here, its not like the way agiliwrap goes in a given game is somehow mathematically dependent on whether the prior setup was skillful. these are two separate things: is the setup turn skillful, which would be along the lines of the discussion i put above; and is the outcome of agiliwrap when it is setup succesfully competitive which means analyzing the variance of outcomes and whether that variance is 'acceptable' [by whatever metric(s)]. the two aspects are mathematically completely independent (in a large enough sample, there would be no correlation between the skillfulness of setup and where the outcome of agiliwrap falls within the distribution of its potential effectiveness), there is no reason to mix the two questions together and imo it is just confusing to do so.
one last thing, i am confused by the comparison to ohko moves and if i understood correctly phoopes is saying that if agiliwrap's threat level falls above "30%" [in whatever sense that percentage is defined, eg as i said i the denominator should be ~8, not ~18, but also agiliwrap's effectiveness is distributional it seems a bit weird to say either "it worked" or "it didnt" in x scenario], then thatd be competitively acceptable.
if anything, it is their low accuracy that makes ohko moves uncompetitive. if ohko moves were 80% accurate or something, they would presumably be broken, but if anything theyd be less uncompetitive. ohko moves that were 5% accurate wouldnt be any less 'competitive', although maybe if they were that horrendous then no one would ever use them and we wouldn't bother with banning them. focusing on the percentage of the ohko chance isnt really the point, id maybe say that the main point about ohko moves is that either they ko the target or they do nothing. when we talk about blizzard freezes, yea freeze is an effective ohko, in fact sometimes its even better than a ohko bc it gives you a free turn and ofc theres the freeze hbeam glitch lol, but 'in general' you are not clicking blizzard just to try to freeze. (tho ofc there are some game states where you may resort to fishing for that). and in cases like ou jynx where blizzard is more of a freeze fish button, that is always of greater competitive concern.
if you take say something with agility + ohko move, and lets say for simplicity that it only had those two moves, the effectiveness of this mon is basically completely unrelated to the game state. its just how many time(s) does horn drill hit before missing and it doesnt matter what the opposing mons are, how healthy they are, etc. that is i think the center of why that is completely uncompetitive, it totally disregards prior play and it is all about the mechanic's own rng.
agiliwrap ofc is not to that extreme, but is there 'enough' limitation on the variation in its effectiveness (again by whatever measures)? hipmonlee says that the examples i gave were not 'extreme' enough in terms of what other sweepers would/wouldnt be able to do, im not sure if i agree but regardless to me what is more important is are there (tbh even totally contrived, like six healthy mons) significant gamestates where agiliwrap would not have any reasonable chance to sweep? also, there is obv some variation based on the opposing mons used. is a dug + kadabra team just automatically vulnerable to a (potential) dnite sweep at any time given setup opp, is that seen as an acceptable cost of the team structure, in comparison to st like hypno + clef + bulky water which has better chances for dnite to choke against them, or maybe even has some possibility that you could be far enough ahead that even with bad luck you could not auto-lose to a agilinite (i really doubt it @ any realistic possibility).
hipmonlee has previously suggested that the variance in dnite's effectiveness might actually be lower than many of us think due to rng spread out over turns, i dont rly think thats true but as i said its super hard to calculate evthg with all the various outcomes and ways wrap misses on certain turns can change things, this is 'the kind of thing' that imo makes sense to consider. but not like comparing was the setup skillful with the outcome, when "mathematically" we know those two 'variables' have zero correlation bc they are completely independent.
ok since punishing rest is now being discussed on the other thread, i want to address st about that.
i really dont even agree that agiliwrap dragonite is (‘in general’) a better punish to a predicted rest than persian/kang/dodrio. every uu player knows how switching into the normals ‘generally’ means j sacing something and shell went into more detail on that so im going to focus on the other side, how good is agiliwrap actually at punishing rest?
we are usually talking about hypno here @ rest punish, it could perhaps also be st like vaporeon but ill j focus on hypno (apt def isnt any better at punishing a vap rest, anyway).
dnite switches in on hypno rest, clicks agility on the first rest turn. now dnite gets one turn lets say to click bslam before hypno wakes up. if bslam didnt crit, hypno is at 70-75% and obviously dnite has to lock into wrap. (if blizz instead of bslam, then hyp is at 75-80%). thats a 15% chance right there to get crippled and be in a clearly worse off situation than you were before hypno rested, much less compared to having basically gotten a free ko with a kang or drio predicting rest. now lets say you do hit the first wrap, the opponent still has one of the better uu mons for taking wraps at 70-75% health ofc as well as whatever other mons they may have like waters or clef that can make the odds not at all clearly favorable for dnite. ofc it certainly depends on the team game state etc, and whether this is punishing an early rest or later (to me this is more often an early game dynamic tho).
and theres always the option for dnite to abandon the agiliwrap sweep, but in that case it almost certainly was worse than just using drio/kang to punish to begin with.
i am honestly not even sure that clicking agility after the rest is better than bslaming twice getting hypno down to 40-50% and then wrapping it. and i definitely think agiliwrap dnite is ‘typically’ much less of a punish than bringing in kang or dodrio, (or even persian or pinsir for ‘most’ teams), where the free turn for kang/drio gives a very umambiguous advantage to that team and this is not a tier where that is ‘generally’ easy to come back from.
the idea that agiliwrap is a good way to punish rest, idk maybe is bc some people think that agiliwrap is a lot better than i think it is, or maybe its more a psychological thing bc people hate playing against it so much (lol) so its like ‘ugh i was predictable with rest and that let them set up agiliwrap’, even if actually a kang or dodrio wouldve mathematically been a better punish to the rest.
[also, switching dragonite into a predicted rest is way riskier than kang/drio, if you misread and switch your kang/drio into a twave, you still outspeed (since the context is pretty much always that hypno is parad) and threaten hypno with an hbeam ko, ofc thats another prediction based play @ potential hbeam but its not like clicking bslam is ~bad~ if hyp stays in, esp with drio which 3hkos hypno with bslam, it rly isnt that bad of a spot.
if you mispredict and switch dnite into twave, its quite bad, dnite hbeam is 75% to ko the 173 hp hypno if dnite even has hbeam in its moveset, otherwise hypno can rest pretty safely / ud have to now bring in a different rest punish, and j generally for later a parad dnite (that is running agility and wrap) is much more severely crippled than a parad drio or kang (particularly kang). so thats another factor that makes drio/kang generally a better punish to hypno rest than agiliwrap dnite.]
i really dont even agree that agiliwrap dragonite is (‘in general’) a better punish to a predicted rest than persian/kang/dodrio. every uu player knows how switching into the normals ‘generally’ means j sacing something and shell went into more detail on that so im going to focus on the other side, how good is agiliwrap actually at punishing rest?
we are usually talking about hypno here @ rest punish, it could perhaps also be st like vaporeon but ill j focus on hypno (apt def isnt any better at punishing a vap rest, anyway).
dnite switches in on hypno rest, clicks agility on the first rest turn. now dnite gets one turn lets say to click bslam before hypno wakes up. if bslam didnt crit, hypno is at 70-75% and obviously dnite has to lock into wrap. (if blizz instead of bslam, then hyp is at 75-80%). thats a 15% chance right there to get crippled and be in a clearly worse off situation than you were before hypno rested, much less compared to having basically gotten a free ko with a kang or drio predicting rest. now lets say you do hit the first wrap, the opponent still has one of the better uu mons for taking wraps at 70-75% health ofc as well as whatever other mons they may have like waters or clef that can make the odds not at all clearly favorable for dnite. ofc it certainly depends on the team game state etc, and whether this is punishing an early rest or later (to me this is more often an early game dynamic tho).
and theres always the option for dnite to abandon the agiliwrap sweep, but in that case it almost certainly was worse than just using drio/kang to punish to begin with.
i am honestly not even sure that clicking agility after the rest is better than bslaming twice getting hypno down to 40-50% and then wrapping it. and i definitely think agiliwrap dnite is ‘typically’ much less of a punish than bringing in kang or dodrio, (or even persian or pinsir for ‘most’ teams), where the free turn for kang/drio gives a very umambiguous advantage to that team and this is not a tier where that is ‘generally’ easy to come back from.
the idea that agiliwrap is a good way to punish rest, idk maybe is bc some people think that agiliwrap is a lot better than i think it is, or maybe its more a psychological thing bc people hate playing against it so much (lol) so its like ‘ugh i was predictable with rest and that let them set up agiliwrap’, even if actually a kang or dodrio wouldve mathematically been a better punish to the rest.
[also, switching dragonite into a predicted rest is way riskier than kang/drio, if you misread and switch your kang/drio into a twave, you still outspeed (since the context is pretty much always that hypno is parad) and threaten hypno with an hbeam ko, ofc thats another prediction based play @ potential hbeam but its not like clicking bslam is ~bad~ if hyp stays in, esp with drio which 3hkos hypno with bslam, it rly isnt that bad of a spot.
if you mispredict and switch dnite into twave, its quite bad, dnite hbeam is 75% to ko the 173 hp hypno if dnite even has hbeam in its moveset, otherwise hypno can rest pretty safely / ud have to now bring in a different rest punish, and j generally for later a parad dnite (that is running agility and wrap) is much more severely crippled than a parad drio or kang (particularly kang). so thats another factor that makes drio/kang generally a better punish to hypno rest than agiliwrap dnite.]
I just wanted to touch on this point because I probably know far more about Moody than most and was an infamous moody/minimize abuser and have been called an unskilled player many a time for abusing such strategies. I wrote in 2018 about Moody Glalie in BSS, talking about in particular its consistency over long stretches of time and that the ability is actually a lot less dependent on RNG than you think:
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/bss-viability-rankings.3605970/page-8#post-7892075
My general point here is that, these abilities beyond the Hail Mary element reward game skill and positioning and evasion/moody can be very consistent when considering large data points beyond the individual turn aspect.
These things are still unhealthy and unfun to play against. Trust me I would know.
I want to say thank you to phoopes and May for answering my previous questions, as it helped clarify a lot of things that I'm sure many people were wondering. But I still have some issues with this suspect test and don't believe it should be happening, for a variety of reasons I will list here:
1) The timing is just terrible. There's currently an RBY Invitational Tour ongoing, and even though it's not "technically" a Smogon tournament, this suspect test is allowing players from the LCQ bracket to vote, so it's clearly important enough to garner attention and making a large tiering decision before it's complete seems a bit unfair. In particular, the meta will change with Dragonite no longer able to agiliwrap, and not all participants in that tour are builders and will not be able to adjust as quickly as others who have been around the tier for a while. If you think this is insignificant, I can assure you it is not, and any slight advantage in knowing now what your Dugtrio/Persian should run, how your Dragonite should look, etc., is more easily achieved by those who have been writing RBY UU VR posts for 2 years than someone who picked up the tier in January. I understand that this tour has been going on for 100000 years but it seriously is going to be over soon I promise.
In addition, UUFPL is also still ongoing. While that is a farm team tour, it again has shown it is important enough to allow people from last year's UUFPL to vote in this suspect. The same reasoning applies to this in why it creates a bit of a fairness issue. Also, I doubt that if RBYPL was ongoing that this suspect would happen, and that is actually mostly skilled RBY UU veterans playing. It would wait until it was over most likely. I think the same consideration should be given here for these tours.
2) After reading all of the arguments here (I read all of them), it seems clear that APT is not actually broken at all. The problem is clearly Dragonite using APT, not APT as a whole. I have yet to see anyone explain why Rapidash is overbearing, or why Dragonair is overbearing, or why Moltres is overbearing, etc. None of these pokemon seem to cause any issues and using them for APT seems mostly like a meme. In fact, it seems most people want to ban APT agree that none of these pokemon with APT are problematic at all except for Dragonite. So, I don't see how APT is actually a problem at all. Dragonite is the problem, and if there was no Dragonite, then APT would not be an issue. Also, Phoopes has laid out a good argument on how APT does have some competitive value to it, so it cannot be called clearly "uncompetitive". It sure does have uncompetitive aspects to it, but to say it has no competitive value is obviously incorrect since there are many situations where you are using it for positioning in a competitive manner. It's not the equivalent of something like Brightpowder that clearly has no value other than hoping for a lucky miss and nothing more.
Basically, the only argument I am seeing on why APT is being suspected and not Dragonite is that A) the Dragonite suspect failed so APT lives on the chagrin of some, and B) people don't want to let Dragonite go because they find it beneficial. I don't think the B) argument is something to be considered in making a tiering decision like this - there are many "broken" mons that can be beneficial to a tier if you remove their broken aspect (Golduck might be just fine in NU without Amnesia?). And the A) argument is also obviously not a good reasoning for moving forward with this suspect as it opens the door to suspect basically the same thing multiple times until the desired result is achieved.
3) People are downplaying how much of a complex ban this is. I see a lot of comparisons to simple complex bans like Sand Veil, Damp Rock, Luck items, etc., and this is just totally different than that. You are banning a combination of one type of move (trapping move) with another move (Agility) on the same pokemon. The only comparable complex ban that has precedent with this is the multiple failed baton pass restrictions that have been tried over and over again (i.e. no baton passing + speed boosting, or no baton passing + any stat boosts, or only 3 baton pass users per team, etc.). When you combine that with the point above, it seems like such a crazy attempt to keep Dragonite in the tier that you are trying to create a group of moves that you don't like Dragonite using that nothing else has issues with, just so that you can have this ban push through while keeping Dragonite. It just seems contrary to how tiering is supposed to be done. And if this was allowed, then what else are we able to do? Can we decide to ban Amnesia + Hypnosis if people believed it was broken or uncompetitive? I'm not saying it is broken or uncompetitive at all, I'm just saying that, if people thought it was, then would banning that over the only real abuser (Poliwrath) be something to do? What about banning Agility + Fiery Wrath in SS UU instead of banning Galarian Moltres? The problem is very clearly Dragonite, and only Dragonite, and I haven't seen any replays or any arguments that really suggest otherwise other than complaints about APT (which is an artificially created concept/combination) being uncompetitive when Dragonite uses it.
4) I don't like how the voting list was made, but that's not really that important. I do think there should be live tours, as a suspect test for this type of thing, with no opportunity for anyone to actually try to get reqs to vote on it (e.g. a suspect tour), is just kinda silly for anyone that was hoping to vote in it. I think all of the people on the current list are certainly qualified to vote, but it seems very shut to not allow anyone else to try to get these reqs to vote in any way.
That's all, thank you for reading. I expect this post to soon be eviscerated by others.
1) The timing is just terrible. There's currently an RBY Invitational Tour ongoing, and even though it's not "technically" a Smogon tournament, this suspect test is allowing players from the LCQ bracket to vote, so it's clearly important enough to garner attention and making a large tiering decision before it's complete seems a bit unfair. In particular, the meta will change with Dragonite no longer able to agiliwrap, and not all participants in that tour are builders and will not be able to adjust as quickly as others who have been around the tier for a while. If you think this is insignificant, I can assure you it is not, and any slight advantage in knowing now what your Dugtrio/Persian should run, how your Dragonite should look, etc., is more easily achieved by those who have been writing RBY UU VR posts for 2 years than someone who picked up the tier in January. I understand that this tour has been going on for 100000 years but it seriously is going to be over soon I promise.
In addition, UUFPL is also still ongoing. While that is a farm team tour, it again has shown it is important enough to allow people from last year's UUFPL to vote in this suspect. The same reasoning applies to this in why it creates a bit of a fairness issue. Also, I doubt that if RBYPL was ongoing that this suspect would happen, and that is actually mostly skilled RBY UU veterans playing. It would wait until it was over most likely. I think the same consideration should be given here for these tours.
2) After reading all of the arguments here (I read all of them), it seems clear that APT is not actually broken at all. The problem is clearly Dragonite using APT, not APT as a whole. I have yet to see anyone explain why Rapidash is overbearing, or why Dragonair is overbearing, or why Moltres is overbearing, etc. None of these pokemon seem to cause any issues and using them for APT seems mostly like a meme. In fact, it seems most people want to ban APT agree that none of these pokemon with APT are problematic at all except for Dragonite. So, I don't see how APT is actually a problem at all. Dragonite is the problem, and if there was no Dragonite, then APT would not be an issue. Also, Phoopes has laid out a good argument on how APT does have some competitive value to it, so it cannot be called clearly "uncompetitive". It sure does have uncompetitive aspects to it, but to say it has no competitive value is obviously incorrect since there are many situations where you are using it for positioning in a competitive manner. It's not the equivalent of something like Brightpowder that clearly has no value other than hoping for a lucky miss and nothing more.
Basically, the only argument I am seeing on why APT is being suspected and not Dragonite is that A) the Dragonite suspect failed so APT lives on the chagrin of some, and B) people don't want to let Dragonite go because they find it beneficial. I don't think the B) argument is something to be considered in making a tiering decision like this - there are many "broken" mons that can be beneficial to a tier if you remove their broken aspect (Golduck might be just fine in NU without Amnesia?). And the A) argument is also obviously not a good reasoning for moving forward with this suspect as it opens the door to suspect basically the same thing multiple times until the desired result is achieved.
3) People are downplaying how much of a complex ban this is. I see a lot of comparisons to simple complex bans like Sand Veil, Damp Rock, Luck items, etc., and this is just totally different than that. You are banning a combination of one type of move (trapping move) with another move (Agility) on the same pokemon. The only comparable complex ban that has precedent with this is the multiple failed baton pass restrictions that have been tried over and over again (i.e. no baton passing + speed boosting, or no baton passing + any stat boosts, or only 3 baton pass users per team, etc.). When you combine that with the point above, it seems like such a crazy attempt to keep Dragonite in the tier that you are trying to create a group of moves that you don't like Dragonite using that nothing else has issues with, just so that you can have this ban push through while keeping Dragonite. It just seems contrary to how tiering is supposed to be done. And if this was allowed, then what else are we able to do? Can we decide to ban Amnesia + Hypnosis if people believed it was broken or uncompetitive? I'm not saying it is broken or uncompetitive at all, I'm just saying that, if people thought it was, then would banning that over the only real abuser (Poliwrath) be something to do? What about banning Agility + Fiery Wrath in SS UU instead of banning Galarian Moltres? The problem is very clearly Dragonite, and only Dragonite, and I haven't seen any replays or any arguments that really suggest otherwise other than complaints about APT (which is an artificially created concept/combination) being uncompetitive when Dragonite uses it.
4) I don't like how the voting list was made, but that's not really that important. I do think there should be live tours, as a suspect test for this type of thing, with no opportunity for anyone to actually try to get reqs to vote on it (e.g. a suspect tour), is just kinda silly for anyone that was hoping to vote in it. I think all of the people on the current list are certainly qualified to vote, but it seems very shut to not allow anyone else to try to get these reqs to vote in any way.
That's all, thank you for reading. I expect this post to soon be eviscerated by others.
briefly @ bfm’s post above,
1. im pretty sure that the suspect test will not impact any ongoing tournaments. i def agree with you that wouldnt make sense and would be a significant problem to force players to suddenly make new teams etc mid-tourn. (im not sure exactly what the timeline is for the suspect test anyway)
2. i absolutely dont think apt is broken, i dont even think its good. i think its uncompetitive.
i eg disagree that it is a skillful play for punishing rest because i think its a bad rest punish (compared to other mons that punish rest), for the reasons i said above.
the only ‘new’ thing i have to say here is i dont think something has to have zero skillful aspect to be uncompetitive. there is very little if anything in mons that has zero skillful aspect. to me the question is more like, is the primary aspect of the strategy uncompetitive. since (in my view) agili + wrap is on average bad, but has a notable chance of defying those odds and performing very well, that makes it uncompetitive.
[to try again to word this, it is choosing a mathematically unfavorable strategy, but it is a strat that has very high variance, and has favorable outcomes on the high end of that variance. (tbc i am not claiming that players choose to use the strat because of the uncompetitiveness, ppl choose certain strats for all kinds of reasons including stylistic ones. im not talking about ppl’s subjective choices, just a descriptive analysis of a strategy that is only advantageous when you are behind due to its median performance being quite poor.)]
and ofc with uncompetitive strats, the strat is targeted and not the mon. eg arena trap not dugtrio in [various tiers]
[i dont think its being done differently bc of the outcome of the last vote, its being done differently bc the structure of the last vote (suspecting dragonite) was disagreed with by the vast majority of the playerbase, also the structure of the last suspect was essentially based on the false assumption that this was a suspect for brokenness rather than uncompetitiveness. you keep saying its clearly not uncompetitive but i dont think anyone is arguing apt is broken, *everyone* who supports banning it takes that position on the basis of uncompetitiveness. if im wrong / leaving someone out who does think its broken, pls correct me
3. well i dont rly agree with smogon tiering philosophy on this point, so maybe thats an aspect of this. but maybe a good comparison is the ban on electrify + sceptilite in mix&mega.
i dont know what “simple complex ban” means, i dont know how those examples of complex bans are different than this, just because its two moves on a moveset rather than interaction of two abilities or item + ability or move + ability or etc? idk why that is significant.
rby doesnt have items or abilities, and there is no move like rby partial trapping that exists in any other gen.
while i rly dont rly have an issue with discussing complex banning hypnosis + amnesia, i also dont think its the same. this is combining a speed boosting move to a move that prevents any slower mon from doing anything, its not like a random combination of two things. hypnosis + amnesia (or sleep + swords dance) is more about rby sleep mechanics being broken (guaranteeing one free turn) and amnesia ‘happens to be’ the move that takes advantage of that free turn but on paper theres a hundred other things that also could do that.
wrap is a move that is 100x better to click when u outspeed, there is no move that exists in rby that could make wrap problematic other than agility. (or in stabmons prior to it being banned, the tier’s fastest viable mon getting wrap).
i think another very important thing to note here, and maybe this should get its own post, is that if the claim that agiliwrap isnt uncompetitive is based on the option to pp stall wrap for counterplay, this is counterplay that is completely impossible on cart, it exists on the simulator solely due to the fact that the sim requires using full pp ups to be used on every mon. (i assume bc it wouldve been extra labor in programming to let u choose max pp and that it was assumed not to matter, outside of rby).
u cant really stop ‘taking advantage’ of incorrect sim mechs, but i think to decide not to ban something solely on the basis of a strategy that doesnt exist on cart, is something else entirely.
4. i absolutely agree that there should be a suspect tour or some other opportunity to get reqs. i assume that the reasoning was bc of the last semi-recent suspect, but player base is always changing and it rly wasnt ~that~ recent. there are clearly people who care about this, who as far as i know did not play rby uu at the time of the last test.
i dont see any way to interpret the decision other than as excluding players who are newer to the tier, and theres no good reason for that. idk if it just wasnt thought through or ? there wasnt any explanation given for that decision or not that i saw so i dont want to make assumptions about the reason(s). bc since lcq is the only recent result allowed to qualify, u are limiting to 4 new players max (and its not four bc i have played uu off and on for a few years even tho i didnt play in tourns, i cant speak to the other three ppl who qualified from lcq)
1. im pretty sure that the suspect test will not impact any ongoing tournaments. i def agree with you that wouldnt make sense and would be a significant problem to force players to suddenly make new teams etc mid-tourn. (im not sure exactly what the timeline is for the suspect test anyway)
2. i absolutely dont think apt is broken, i dont even think its good. i think its uncompetitive.
i eg disagree that it is a skillful play for punishing rest because i think its a bad rest punish (compared to other mons that punish rest), for the reasons i said above.
the only ‘new’ thing i have to say here is i dont think something has to have zero skillful aspect to be uncompetitive. there is very little if anything in mons that has zero skillful aspect. to me the question is more like, is the primary aspect of the strategy uncompetitive. since (in my view) agili + wrap is on average bad, but has a notable chance of defying those odds and performing very well, that makes it uncompetitive.
[to try again to word this, it is choosing a mathematically unfavorable strategy, but it is a strat that has very high variance, and has favorable outcomes on the high end of that variance. (tbc i am not claiming that players choose to use the strat because of the uncompetitiveness, ppl choose certain strats for all kinds of reasons including stylistic ones. im not talking about ppl’s subjective choices, just a descriptive analysis of a strategy that is only advantageous when you are behind due to its median performance being quite poor.)]
and ofc with uncompetitive strats, the strat is targeted and not the mon. eg arena trap not dugtrio in [various tiers]
[i dont think its being done differently bc of the outcome of the last vote, its being done differently bc the structure of the last vote (suspecting dragonite) was disagreed with by the vast majority of the playerbase, also the structure of the last suspect was essentially based on the false assumption that this was a suspect for brokenness rather than uncompetitiveness. you keep saying its clearly not uncompetitive but i dont think anyone is arguing apt is broken, *everyone* who supports banning it takes that position on the basis of uncompetitiveness. if im wrong / leaving someone out who does think its broken, pls correct me
3. well i dont rly agree with smogon tiering philosophy on this point, so maybe thats an aspect of this. but maybe a good comparison is the ban on electrify + sceptilite in mix&mega.
i dont know what “simple complex ban” means, i dont know how those examples of complex bans are different than this, just because its two moves on a moveset rather than interaction of two abilities or item + ability or move + ability or etc? idk why that is significant.
rby doesnt have items or abilities, and there is no move like rby partial trapping that exists in any other gen.
while i rly dont rly have an issue with discussing complex banning hypnosis + amnesia, i also dont think its the same. this is combining a speed boosting move to a move that prevents any slower mon from doing anything, its not like a random combination of two things. hypnosis + amnesia (or sleep + swords dance) is more about rby sleep mechanics being broken (guaranteeing one free turn) and amnesia ‘happens to be’ the move that takes advantage of that free turn but on paper theres a hundred other things that also could do that.
wrap is a move that is 100x better to click when u outspeed, there is no move that exists in rby that could make wrap problematic other than agility. (or in stabmons prior to it being banned, the tier’s fastest viable mon getting wrap).
i think another very important thing to note here, and maybe this should get its own post, is that if the claim that agiliwrap isnt uncompetitive is based on the option to pp stall wrap for counterplay, this is counterplay that is completely impossible on cart, it exists on the simulator solely due to the fact that the sim requires using full pp ups to be used on every mon. (i assume bc it wouldve been extra labor in programming to let u choose max pp and that it was assumed not to matter, outside of rby).
u cant really stop ‘taking advantage’ of incorrect sim mechs, but i think to decide not to ban something solely on the basis of a strategy that doesnt exist on cart, is something else entirely.
4. i absolutely agree that there should be a suspect tour or some other opportunity to get reqs. i assume that the reasoning was bc of the last semi-recent suspect, but player base is always changing and it rly wasnt ~that~ recent. there are clearly people who care about this, who as far as i know did not play rby uu at the time of the last test.
i dont see any way to interpret the decision other than as excluding players who are newer to the tier, and theres no good reason for that. idk if it just wasnt thought through or ? there wasnt any explanation given for that decision or not that i saw so i dont want to make assumptions about the reason(s). bc since lcq is the only recent result allowed to qualify, u are limiting to 4 new players max (and its not four bc i have played uu off and on for a few years even tho i didnt play in tourns, i cant speak to the other three ppl who qualified from lcq)
Max PP ups is required in cart battles as well. This is just a clause that we dont bother to talk about on the sim because its enforced by default.
Tiering decisions happening during tours isn't exactly abnormal and doing so allows for the result to see tournament play immediately. Additionally, APT's presence in these tournaments - and many prior - has garnered criticism from insiders and outsiders. It is more efficient to move with a potential ban immediately and make use of the experience players have been having. RBYPL running would have made no difference as to whether we would run the test, we are not trampling on anyone here. Note that a significant portion of the council who decided to run this test are actually playing in the tournaments: this decision was not made lightly. The benefits to running it at this point seem superior to waiting until after, seeing another potential tournament, and shelving this yet again with some stupid "we'll do it tomorrow" mentality.
Brokenness is not and has never been the discussion. I don't know why this is continually being brought up when not one person has argued it ever.
People have claimed that all of the users are problematic - Volk, Shellnuts, myself, etc - on account of APT itself being problematic. Dragonite is the best user; if APT is "broken", then Dragonite would be what breaks it. This is the rationale that was made for the original test, but the test failed because Dragonite is, overall, not "broken". It was a misfire because it failed to address the thing that people actually don't like, that being APT itself. See how Dragonair has been rising in usage solely for being an APT user during the invitational, among other things. If you ban Dragonite, people who want to use APT will move to Dragonair.
APT is problematic for the extensive reasoning Shellnuts and others have given in the Policy Review thread, and I feel as though dismissing them is a bit misleading. Uncompetitive mechanics will be used for competitive reasons, but this doesn't necessarily mean they aren't uncompetitive. It's not black and white: remember Gen 6 Aegislash? Very competitive Pokemon, but forced a lot of 50/50s that contributed to people deeming it such and banning it. There are so many occasions like this across Smogon's history, and that's off the top of my head. It's believed to be uncompetitive for completely warping the game state once active; removing turn-by-turn play, revealing extreme amounts of information early, and arguably breaking PT's design. Again, top of my head.
The suspect test was started because the first one missed the mark and left many voters dissatisfied. Note that even with that test, we promised to eventually go on with this test if it was banned to see if Dragonite was banned and APT was still a problem. APT has continued to be a problem, with Dragonair becoming a bit more popular, and while I argue it isn't a big deal, it is enough for others to want to act on it. We are trying to find the root of the problem and get rid of it, and after significant discussion, this is what dropped out. This isn't a Libero Cinderace situation or whatnot, we are quashing a mechanic that dumbs down interactions to "missing" an OHKO every turn and bleeding damage until the sacred 15% chance of a miss happens.
There's a lot of loaded accusations in this that seem a bit weird, but I'll bite.
Yes, we are banning a combination of moves that allow for extremely unbalanced, non-interactive game states that form arguably the most unhealthy mechanic in the history of the franchise. I do not think this is a controversial stance to take for the reason given at the end of my last paragraph. You are missing the point in the same way the initial test did: Dragonite just happens to use it and while, yes, it did bring attention to the mechanic, it did not break it, which is why the previous test ended the way it did. The mechanic itself is just terrible and hurts the tier in numerous warped ways. Shellnuts explains this well in the context of Dragonite. People did not feel strongly enough to ban Dragonite because it was the wrong move to make, essentially holding this test hostage in a pseudoscientific manner. We did not answer what the playerbase was actually asking for and were not transparent enough in reasoning.
The whataboutery after "it just seems contrary to how tiering is supposed to be done" is plain ridiculous and I'm not going to entertain it at all. Nothing mentioned even compares and the point has been so thoroughly missed it seems to be flying into orbit.
The suspect tours were done to get a higher voter pool due to the initial one being easily swung, as well as add some last-minute tournaments to improve the player pool in general. You can see this in the original PR thread: they were advertised as "for those interested in the tier". The tours themselves, despite an actual week of planning, were panned by participants due to being BO1 Single Elimination - the only way to make them function, mind you - and resulted in a lot of round robin finals that the hosts barely managed to have time for. It wasn't a good experience for anyone participating and any more games would have led to them being 2-day live tournaments instead. Given the increased pool of tournaments now that allows us to have more voters, these uncompetitive tournaments were deemed unnecessary for this test. This does mean we don't have a pseudo-laddering method of participation, but the extremely negative feedback - of which was very valid - made it best to keep these on the shelf. Even the results of these tournaments garnered ire because some of them were quite odd.
If you want to say "just make them double elim BO3", you have no idea how much time this adds to the tournament. You were already slated to play for about 5-6 hours in the originals, and the hosts do indeed have lives. It also makes it much more difficult for the Friday tournament to work, because people - get this - have lives in general. It's hard to put into words just how close these tournaments were to not working, and because it only scraped by functionality, it rightfully got scorned. I've played in tournaments like this in the past in other communities - particularly Yu-Gi-Oh - and they really do expect you to sit there for 9 hours if you manage to get to the finals. RBY UU has games about as long as those. I don't think any of you would remotely want that, and it was a nightmare to find hosts as-is. I don't think any of the ones who previously did this want to sit through it again and get hit with the same ire as they did before. This is completely unfeasible.
I don't get how this aspect of the test - which was by far the most controversial and got me endless messages about them sucking - is now being framed as something sacred that should be used again? People complained about literally every aspect of this tournament down to defaming at least one of the winners if my memory serves. Can't win here, I swear.
Hi all, just wanted to add some points.
This is my first suspect test so apologies if this has already been cleared elsewhere, but I'm not understanding why we are looking at banning APT only in rby uu.
My understanding is that the main reason why we would ban such combination is because is either uncompetitive or unhealthy, rather than broken. If that's the case, what makes the combination unhealthy only in rby UU rather than in all tiers? If indeed the problem is that APT is just a bright powder in reverse, where players don't show any skill but just pray for misses and hits doesn't this problem appear in all the tiers where APT is currently allowed?
If I misunderstood the general sentiment and we are looking at APT specifically at rby UU because it's broken and we are not looking at similar bans in other tiers because it's neither uncompetitive in general and not broken in said tiers, then it would mean that it's broken only when used by some mons which are either not allowed (in lower tiers) or too weak to make an impact (in higher tiers). The only example I can think of would be Dragonite and Dragonite was not deemed broken last year.
Are we really just scared of APT spam (so Dragonite+Dragonair+Moltres)? Are we saying that 1 mon with access to ATP is still healthy for the tier while allowing the strategy as a whole ruins the tier?
Or is something else entirely that I've missed?
This is my first suspect test so apologies if this has already been cleared elsewhere, but I'm not understanding why we are looking at banning APT only in rby uu.
My understanding is that the main reason why we would ban such combination is because is either uncompetitive or unhealthy, rather than broken. If that's the case, what makes the combination unhealthy only in rby UU rather than in all tiers? If indeed the problem is that APT is just a bright powder in reverse, where players don't show any skill but just pray for misses and hits doesn't this problem appear in all the tiers where APT is currently allowed?
If I misunderstood the general sentiment and we are looking at APT specifically at rby UU because it's broken and we are not looking at similar bans in other tiers because it's neither uncompetitive in general and not broken in said tiers, then it would mean that it's broken only when used by some mons which are either not allowed (in lower tiers) or too weak to make an impact (in higher tiers). The only example I can think of would be Dragonite and Dragonite was not deemed broken last year.
Are we really just scared of APT spam (so Dragonite+Dragonair+Moltres)? Are we saying that 1 mon with access to ATP is still healthy for the tier while allowing the strategy as a whole ruins the tier?
Or is something else entirely that I've missed?
There isn't one. There's separate councils for each RBY tier now, and thus each one would need to decide on a ban. My positions do not reflect the entire council; honestly, I think I'm in the minority with my opinions.
A "global" suspect test is unfeasible and kind of unfair. You'd have to go through every tier and how it's affected, and in some, it'll be less powerful than in others. OU has never taken action on AgiliWrap because the tier is almost comically prepared for Dragonite, and the massive bulk the tier has is also helpful. Moltres isn't breaking Starmie and Dragonite isn't breaking Reflect Chansey or Snorlax, ever. NU could, Ubers could, but I don't know, because, well, it's not the UU Council's decision. There's a lot of context behind each ban and reducing it to individual tiers isn't a good idea. If they want to ban it, they'll suspect it, but timing is key and discussions need to be had.
So you could say UU is starting it, but whether it'll finish it is another story. Simple as that.
And again, nobody has ever argued that it's overpowered, broken, etc. I don't know why people keep gravitating towards a discussion that doesn't exist. It's uncompetitive, and that's the main reason the UU Council is suspecting it. Whether others do that is another ballgame.
Hi, thanks for the response.
I understand that the main arguments for a ban are around APT competitiveness or unhealthiness, but I was making the argument that it seems to me to be more of a Dragonite in UU problem rather than an APT problem. Mostly because this issue seems to be central to UU specifically rather than to all tiers and because Dragonite seems to be the only abuser. I wasn't suggesting we should do a global ban skipping suspects in all tiers, as I agree with you it would be unfeasible and unfair.
I see Agliwrap Dragonite as healthy part of our metagame, being one of the few punishes to the physical offense spam (mainly khanga+persian) and dugtrio. You could argue that twave Dragonite accomplishes the same thing, but I believe that without Agliwrap Dragonite those same threats would be free to not run toxic and opt instead for coverage, reducing the amount of checks and centralising the metagame further
I understand that the main arguments for a ban are around APT competitiveness or unhealthiness, but I was making the argument that it seems to me to be more of a Dragonite in UU problem rather than an APT problem. Mostly because this issue seems to be central to UU specifically rather than to all tiers and because Dragonite seems to be the only abuser. I wasn't suggesting we should do a global ban skipping suspects in all tiers, as I agree with you it would be unfeasible and unfair.
I see Agliwrap Dragonite as healthy part of our metagame, being one of the few punishes to the physical offense spam (mainly khanga+persian) and dugtrio. You could argue that twave Dragonite accomplishes the same thing, but I believe that without Agliwrap Dragonite those same threats would be free to not run toxic and opt instead for coverage, reducing the amount of checks and centralising the metagame further
There are a couple of problems with this argument.
First of all, while yes Dragonite is a good answer to Physical Offence, it also constrains other Pokemon that can help play around or punish the use of Kangaskhan, Persian, and Dugtrio—such as Aerodactyl, Poliwrath, Vaporeon, Gyarados, Hypno, and Venusaur. This makes it overall harder to play around those threats than it would be if AgiliWrap was banned, you could more easily use Rest with Hypno or Vaporeon without risking letting Dragonite switch onto the field, and Aerodactyl could drop Toxic to run Rest more often, letting it check Dugtrio and Kangaskhan for longer, you could afford to run more coverage options which would make it easier to fit on teams, Venusaur could run Swords Dance and Hyper Beam to more effectively punish Dugtrio when it comes in, etc. You lose one strong answer to these threats, AgiliWrap, but open the door to more soft answers which are easier to fit on teams, and you still have Dragonite as an option to check them available without AgiliWrap, you still have Thunder Wave to handle them, so overall removing Agility + Partial Trapping makes it easier to handle Physical Attackers.
"But wait, won't the extra coverage gained by dropping Toxic help these physical attackers play around the newer checks?" I hear you typing, On paper, this is true, not running Toxic would let these threats run more coverage options, but in practice, this isn't as relevant as you would think. Bubble Beam on Persian is mostly irrelevant outside of being good against Golem, a Pokemon that's completely irrelevant, so Persian wouldn't change much at all. Dugtrio being able to run Substitute and Slash would be nice for its role as a sweeper and reducing the amount of prediction you need to do with it, but the damage taken by Substitute is enough to turn the next attack Dugtrio takes into a KO, so your still getting 2HKO'd by its checks in the midgame, just with a bit less prediction in exchange for Dugtrio losing the ability to take the 1 key attack later in the game it normally could, so while Dugtrio gets a bit better, it's not as drastic as you would think. Lastly, Kangaskhan does get a lot more flexibility since it can now run Rock Slide, Counter, or Blizzard, over Toxic, which would make it harder to play around. However, this also makes it easier for teams running Kangaskhan to handle threats such as Articuno, allowing them to use other Pokemon, such as Vaporeon, to handle the aforementioned Physical Attackers, without being as vulnerable to Articuno sweeping later in the game, which, when combined with the greater number of checks to Kangaskhan that would be available, would counteract this greater flexibility and help balance Kangaskhan out again. So overall, while yes the Normal-types and Dugtrio get more freedom in their movesets, it wouldn't be enough to completely break the tier.
Lastly, I want to just touch on the unhealthy side of the argument again, this isn't just banning Agility + Wrap, this is banning Agility + Partial Trapping as a whole because it fundamentally is problematic, giving something like Moltres or Dragonair a single free turn turns the game into a dice roll just as Dragonite does, that's not a healthy dynamic in the tier at all. Being able to win the game off a single turn and some good luck is just unenjoyable and unhealthy to deal with, hence why we are doing this suspect in the first place.
imo agiliwrap dragonite doesnt do much to keep physical offense in check. i can agree about dragonite against dug and persian, largely due to the ‘arena trap’ aspect where if the mons switch out rather than toxic they take twave or big damage respectively that turn (and many players argue that the trap aspect is uncompetitive, as has been discussed), but dnite in general also checks both dug and persian, and would still do so even if apt were banned.
i dont think agiliwrap dnite does much of anything to keep kang in check, it means kang chooses between rock slide for cuno and toxic for nite, but even without toxic its far from favorable to try to setup agiliwrap in front of a (strong) body slam. same largely goes for dnite vs dodrio, except drio takes big damage from dnite’s blizzard. vs pinsir it just magnifies the impact of bind missing (or potentially doesnt, if agiliwrap flops lol). vs clef agility is irrelevant, as dnite is just clicking wrap since clef has twave. aero is mostly in the same place as persian in that it has to toxic dragonite and absorb twave or else switch out and risk giving it an agility.
dug and persian are obv very important as mons that outspeed tent, but in terms of any ‘dominance of physical offense’ in general, i dont think that can be attributed to primarily dug and persian, especially not to duggy (but u mainly said persian and kang, anyway). we prob shouldn’t be overly considering ‘how the meta might change’ for evaluating an apt ban anyway, but i dont see why eg kang having to choose between rock slide and toxic is good for the meta in any way, i doubt anyone thinks that making articuno better improves metagame balance.
if shellnuts is saying that the freed moveslot is not a big deal on persian and dug, then i dont agree. first of all there are some structures like electrode + persian + dodrio team that imo should never be dropping bubblebeam on persian, even if golem usage is like 1% or less rn, and in general if u just pretend golem doesnt exist and never run bbeam someone will bring golem against you to punish that. even putting aside bubblebeam, there is still body slam, which has shown sufficient effectiveness over sporadic use on persian, which would doubtless be a consideration if toxic were not needed and you wanted to drop bubblebeam. as for dugtrio, substitute + body slam is much more dangerous at least most of the time than substitute + slash, without the extra moveslot for substitute it is harder to justify body slam > slash as dug’s bslam lets kangaskhan in quite freely. i would expect sub + bslam to maybe even become the dominant dugtrio set with apt banned, and this is an rng element all of us planning to vote ban should be prepared to accept. aerodactyl also gets to run a fourth move, rest could be a useful option against kang/drio, or perhaps sky attack if haunter usage continues rising.
as a uu player who uses a lot of physical offense teams, i do not find apt dnite to rly be a big issue for physical offense at all, generally articuno is the biggest threat to heavy physical offense teams. the 50/50s with apt dnite on the ‘arena trap’ turn, and the moveslot issues, are annoying for sure but they really do not make apt dnite a bad matchup, even if eg kang has to run rock slide instead of toxic in order to threaten articuno.
if anything i think dug + persian teams are ‘generally’ less bothered by apt dnite than teams with only one of duggy and persian, bc they can afford to trade one of them for toxic and chip damage on dnite in order to open up the other one. (same to some extent with dug + aero.)
i dont think agiliwrap dnite does much of anything to keep kang in check, it means kang chooses between rock slide for cuno and toxic for nite, but even without toxic its far from favorable to try to setup agiliwrap in front of a (strong) body slam. same largely goes for dnite vs dodrio, except drio takes big damage from dnite’s blizzard. vs pinsir it just magnifies the impact of bind missing (or potentially doesnt, if agiliwrap flops lol). vs clef agility is irrelevant, as dnite is just clicking wrap since clef has twave. aero is mostly in the same place as persian in that it has to toxic dragonite and absorb twave or else switch out and risk giving it an agility.
dug and persian are obv very important as mons that outspeed tent, but in terms of any ‘dominance of physical offense’ in general, i dont think that can be attributed to primarily dug and persian, especially not to duggy (but u mainly said persian and kang, anyway). we prob shouldn’t be overly considering ‘how the meta might change’ for evaluating an apt ban anyway, but i dont see why eg kang having to choose between rock slide and toxic is good for the meta in any way, i doubt anyone thinks that making articuno better improves metagame balance.
if shellnuts is saying that the freed moveslot is not a big deal on persian and dug, then i dont agree. first of all there are some structures like electrode + persian + dodrio team that imo should never be dropping bubblebeam on persian, even if golem usage is like 1% or less rn, and in general if u just pretend golem doesnt exist and never run bbeam someone will bring golem against you to punish that. even putting aside bubblebeam, there is still body slam, which has shown sufficient effectiveness over sporadic use on persian, which would doubtless be a consideration if toxic were not needed and you wanted to drop bubblebeam. as for dugtrio, substitute + body slam is much more dangerous at least most of the time than substitute + slash, without the extra moveslot for substitute it is harder to justify body slam > slash as dug’s bslam lets kangaskhan in quite freely. i would expect sub + bslam to maybe even become the dominant dugtrio set with apt banned, and this is an rng element all of us planning to vote ban should be prepared to accept. aerodactyl also gets to run a fourth move, rest could be a useful option against kang/drio, or perhaps sky attack if haunter usage continues rising.
as a uu player who uses a lot of physical offense teams, i do not find apt dnite to rly be a big issue for physical offense at all, generally articuno is the biggest threat to heavy physical offense teams. the 50/50s with apt dnite on the ‘arena trap’ turn, and the moveslot issues, are annoying for sure but they really do not make apt dnite a bad matchup, even if eg kang has to run rock slide instead of toxic in order to threaten articuno.
if anything i think dug + persian teams are ‘generally’ less bothered by apt dnite than teams with only one of duggy and persian, bc they can afford to trade one of them for toxic and chip damage on dnite in order to open up the other one. (same to some extent with dug + aero.)
- Status