I strongly believe that action is required on sun and would like drought banned. The main issue with the tier right now (not just in my opinion but others’ as well) is the wide variety of threats, which makes it much harder to build consistent teams. I am not asking for a meta where a team can have a decent matchup into every single threat possible. I understand that it’s not possible to account for every team to handle random off-meta mons (by which I mean stuff like blastoise) in any tier. What I believe we should work towards is allowing teams to have decent outs vs most meta threats such as veil, sun, latios etc. This is just not feasible right now in my opinion, and I believe something should be done about this
“Why sun?”
After some thinking, I do not believe sun is a skill-less archetype; while you get easy matchups more often than standard archetypes, it’s also harder to handle other offensive threats. However, unless you get an extremely unfavorable matchup as a sun user, there are often ways out. It is very easy for a sun user to keep up momentum with pivoting moves or eject button. Additionally, they can use this momentum to heavily punish the opposing team with harc/entei or chloro sweepers. Doubling to pivot slither wing is often a very rewarding move, as not many mons that outspeed it (eg latios/weav) can risk fimp, plus the opposing player needs to guess slither’s set in case it’s scarf or flame charge. Even if the opponent chooses to stay in and attack (and possibly tera) they run the risk of slither being scarf and simply uturning out. When facing sun, there’s often not enough time to scout for sets. More often than not slither simply uturns out to another mon and keeps the momentum going, while also dealing considerable damage. Doubling isn’t gonna save you from uturn.
Slither isn’t the only pivot sun has; slow pivots like mandi and even swampert can switch into attacks and pivot out into breakers to obtain a favorable position. Any damage you land on them is offset by having to switch into venusaur or harc. These slow pivots are also not easy to ohko, meaning that even if you manage to double on the turn they switch in, they might still get a chance to pivot out. Eject button is another tool that sun frequently uses; it’s able to reverse momentum back in the sun user’s favor even if the opponent clicks a pivoting move. This allows them to keep up their pressure while not giving the opponent much room. Sun’s offensive capabilities make it very difficult for the opposing player to make risky plays, as getting the play wrong can have disastrous effects. The point i’m coming to is that sun limits skill expression, not because it takes little skill to play, but because it takes away so much agency from the opposing player, making it so difficult for them to make plays. Unless the opposing player has a very good matchup, making plays against sun will often be harder and less rewarding than for the sun user. I believe that being able to force this dynamic by loading sun is uncompetitive.
“There are sufficient tools in the tier to reliably deal with sun”
I disagree with this. The defensive counters to sun are few and far between, and often require tera to handle sun threats. Even tera water mandi and skarm get 2hko’d by band harc’s head smash. While head smash is not an accurate move, the odds are still in the sun user’s favor. Keldeo is another mon often brought up as being able to handle band harc, but it can’t switch into scarf flare blitz or tera fire band flare blitz. Additionally, keldeo can even lose the 1v1 vs tera fire harc under sun.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9uu-962489 Here, tera fire harc is able to make huge progress, and sun would’ve won if sandy shocks landed twave (i’m not trying to be salty, mons is mons) or if i had hilligant (which i should have brought, that’s on me)
252 Atk Choice Band Tera Fire Arcanine-Hisui Flare Blitz vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Keldeo in Sun: 295-348 (91.3 - 107.7%) -- 50% chance to OHKO
Resetting weather is a good option on paper, but there are limitations to that as well. Ttar is the most common way to reset weather, but it’s not too difficult to punish a ttar switch with a double to band harc or slither wing, after which the sun user can make a lot of progress. Hippo is not as susceptible to such plays, but it’s not as good as ttar, plus it’s still not great vs balloon tran or giga drain venu. It’s less favorable for the sun user than ttar but sun still has decent ways out. Hippo is also not something most teams would want to use with ttar around anyway. While slowking can double into a ninetales switch and reset weather with chilly reception, it can’t switch into most sun threats safely; pert and mandi can just slow pivot out while harc hilli and venu can ohko or 2hko. Slowking has also just not been that amazing recently.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9uu-962598
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9uu-955079
while neither of these was played optimally, they still showcase how ttar doesn't really help that much vs sun.
Stealth rock often brought up as a good way to limit sun teams, and while it helps, getting rocks up means giving the opponent a free switch to a breaker/sweeper, which comes with big risks. Some sun teams have removal, which makes it challenging to keep rocks up. Sun is also very fast paced, which limits the effectiveness of rocks even if you do manage to keep them up.
This leaves us with the offensive options to deal with sun. While sun is frailer than most archetypes, it usually has enough flex slots to fit defensive and utility options such as ebutton mons, cress which can function as a defensive sponge as well as a sweeper, and the slow pivots mentioned above. This means that it’s not that easy to break sun. Lokix is great at revenge killing most sweepers but it takes a while for it to break down sun’s defensive mons. It’s pretty easy for the sun user to switch out of their breaker and into mandi while it’s much harder for the lokix user to click uturn instead of fimp due to potentially losing one of their best mons in the mu. Even they do click uturn, there’s still the problem of ebutton as mentioned above. Breakers like hydreigon and latios are good, but if they aren’t scoring kos fast enough, they’ll get out-offensed by sun, which has sufficient options to force them out. Ninetales is able to stop setup attempts from sinis and hydrei too, meaning immediate offensive power is required. It’s very difficult for sun to switch into specs dracos, but it’s also very difficult to switch into sun breakers. Sun also has more hard hitters than many specs latios teams. This makes it extremely difficult to be good into sun, and you risk sacrificing other matchups to do so.
“The meta has changed enough with tran and ttar dropping”
While the meta has obviously changed, I don’t think this has impacted sun that heavily. As mentioned above, ttar isn’t that great into sun, and while ttar is difficult to switch into, it’s often harder for ttar teams to switch into band harc (which is also faster). Heatran has made scovillain much less common, but sun teams have just used the other chlorophyll sweepers. Heatran stops harc from clicking flare blitz mindlessly but it still gets nuked by head smash (plus it means heatran can’t use flame body which helps vs weav and kix). Balloon tran lets you wall non-giga drain venu and opposing heatran (provided they don’t pulse you on the switch), but you give up the longevity that lefties gives, which makes you worse into bulkier teams. You’re also still struggling vs other sun threats. Not to mention, tran is also a good breaker on sun teams with boosted magma storms and solar beam.
You need many tools to deal with sun due to each of them having considerable limitations, which restricts building. This results in players just ignoring some threats (sun or non-sun) hoping they don’t show up, which makes the game more fishy and less skill based since you’re more likely to face something that destroys your team. The matchup fishiness of sun does not make it inherently unhealthy. Trick room is matchup fishy but i haven’t seen anyone clamoring for it to be banned. It just adds on to the unhealthiness of our metagame due to how much mileage one can get from it and how disastrous it can be to face while not well prepared.
Some would say that action against sun would not be in line with tiering policy, but as django has pointed out, this just isn’t true. The tiering policy framework mentions this:
“With optimal team building skills, the pool of options (Pokemon, moves, items) present in the tier should allow you to build teams addressing the different team archetypes at least decently and offer a solution in-battle to a large majority of the principal threats of the metagame.”
“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.”
“Unhealthy - elements that are neither uncompetitive nor broken, yet are deemed undesirable for the metagame, such that they inhibit "skillful play" to a large extent.”
“These are elements that may not limit either team building or battling skill enough individually, but combine to cause an effect that is undesirable for the metagame.”
“This can also be a state of the metagame. If the metagame has too much diversity wherein team building ability is greatly hampered and battling skill is drastically reduced, we may seek to reduce the number of good-to-great threats. This can also work in reverse; if the metagame is too centralized around a particular set of Pokemon, none of which are broken on their own, we may seek to add Pokemon to increase diversity.”
“This is the most controversial and subjective one and will therefore be used the most sparingly. The Tiering Councils will only use this amidst drastic community outcry and a conviction that the move will noticeably result in the better player winning over the lesser player.”
Can we deny that there has been drastic community outcry with what we’ve seen from 2 the survey results? Can we deny that the meta is too diverse to the point where building and playing is limited? I’m not proposing drastic action, what i’m pushing for with banning drought is in line with tiering policy. Some say that sun is just a random target that’s been chosen for no good reason, yet it has been on people’s radars for months now. I also don’t think we have any better ways to improve our tier than doing something about sun as it stands. Another point i’d like to make is that dealing with sun would come with very little risk to the stability of the tier; it’s not important for keeping any strong threats like latios/keldeo at bay
Now that i’ve established why we should take action against sun, i’ll address why I believe we should ban drought instead of the other options on the table.
Slither wing: While on paper this seems good for hitting two birds with one stone, nerfing both sun and veil, i doubt this will have too much an impact on either archetype. Sun is able to substitute slither for another pivot or sun sweeper. Something like hilligant>lorb slither would be more of a sidegrade rather than a downgrade. Veil doesn’t really care that much either, it’ll just use sweepers like salamence or gyarados more, which while not as good in general, have their own merits over slither. This is why I believe we risk achieving very little by banning slither, which makes it less preferable.
Ninetales: Ninetales has great utility with decently fast encore, hwish and wisp, which helps sun teams avoid getting swept too easily and gives them more longevity. Torkoal, while not as good, has its own upsides. It has spin for hazard removal, rocks for chip and breaking sturdy, is way way more physically bulky. It also has strong body press and clear smog if you really want to deny setup. Additionally while it’s a different meta, torkoal was used over ninetales in sv ou for quite some time. It’s a very different situation from pelipper and politoed on rain; idt politoed is often seriously considered over peli. This leads me to believe that torkoal would not be a sufficient downgrade from ninetales.
Chlorophyll: This is my second most preferred option as sun definitely becomes way worse without having good speed control. However there are many shitty chlorophyll mons which are never used on sun, which makes this less direct than drought imo. Still, I think it would be much more impactful than banning ninetales/slither. I just think it’s a less direct way to nuke sun than drought.
The positives to banning drought:
Doing so would guarantee that we solve the issue with sun. It’s also a direct solution to our problem as our issues stem from having 2 decent sun setters. Some people might take issue with nuking an entire playstyle, which i get, but i feel that a more competitive metagame is more important. Banning drought is a guaranteed step in that direction. I also do not believe in keeping playstyles around for the sake of it if they are unhealthy for the tier (which i think sun is). Reducing the number of threats in the builder will also lead more innovation in building which will help make up for losing sun.
I hope i wasn’t too abrasive, feel free to share your thoughts. It’d be great to hear what the rest of the playerbase thinks about this!
