There are some important things that you guys are all missing about Hail, and more importantly Walrein (or dewgong or whatever, don't even get me started there because just no.)
First of all, it's worth noting that when a counter to Walrein comes in (e.g. Escavalier), there really is nothing Walrein can do against it. Sure, it might be able to hit it with a weak surf, but then it's forced to switch out after its sub is gone, take 25-50% damage from hazards on re-entry and lose a lot of momentum. The fact remains that if one of Walrein's counters is present, or even a threat, Walrein can't safely or comfortably set up. Sure, it can roar it out, but your sub will be down, and if you roar something like a Rotom-C in you're screwed.
Uhh, not really? Walrein's Surf 3HKOes Escavalier the majority of the time after rocks. If it's banded, you can even pp stall that out of whatever move it's using in desperate situations (Iron Head, Megahorn) as well lol, which forces it out and means you just severely crippled one of your opponent's best answers to hail. Not to mention that the stuff that actually beats Roar Walrein with a Substitute up are few and far between. Furthermore, if Walrein is still somehow forced out, that isn't even that much of a problem when you consider just how ridiculously easy it is for it to get up a Substitute, even with Stealth Rock up, simply due to its absurd bulk.
Finally, I'd like to address the notion that "running a move to counter hail shows how broken it is".
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Hail is a playstyle.
You know what else is a playstyle?
SR/Spike Stacking.
There's this move called oh what was it I forgot now gosh mmm it removes hazards or something ugh its on the tip of my tongue oh right Rapid Spin.
You have 24 moves on your pokemon. Sacrificing one of those moves to basically guarantee a win against a playstyle that 5% of the metagame uses that is apparentally so broken shouldn't be an issue. People are willing to run coverage moves on pokemon for the pure sake of hitting 2 things in a tier. That's a whole moveslot they're dedicating to get rid of something - see basically any set that runs Hidden Power (Raikou and Zapdos in UU, running HP Ice/HP Grass to deal with Flygon/Gligar and Swampert/Rhyperior respectively). And yet, you guys are saying that expecting people to run one move to completely screw over the entire playstyle is unfair or broken?
Except...like Rapid Spin, using a weather move doesn't necessarily mean you auto-win vs hail either. Snover itself is not great, yeah, but it's perfectly capable of surviving a decent amount of time throughout the match if you're actually willing to not sac it (I generally don't even like saccing Snover first turns anymore, since it's actually super useful as death fodder or providing a somewhat decent switch-in to Rotom-C). Furthermore, like spikestacking offense when hazards are spun away, hail is not completely useless with its weather gone. Hail only tends to run one or two actual abusers of hail; the rest of the team are regular Pokemon like Slowking / Golurk / Escavalier capable of checking things that give Hail issues. Because of this, hail can actually still survive decently well without perma hail on these Pokemon (and it's not like stuff like Rotom-F, Glaceon, and Walrein are entirely useless without hail either), even though it's obviously not ideal.
The underlying problem here isn't that hail is broken, it's that people haven't accounted for it. In a mostly hail-less environment, RU players have been able to get away without having a distinct hail counter on their teams, and when they teambuild, they haven't taken it into account. Rain teams are pretty prevalent in RU, no? And you'll get completely swept by a Rain team if you lack the proper counters, right? It's the same thing - you can't call something broken just because it forces you to take notice of its existence and attempt to create a counter to it before you go out and start laddering.
I'd like to point to UU, where hail gets a couple of other fun toys to play with and is completely balanced in the metagame. Rain Dance Kingdra and Empoleon are run partly because they're good pokemon in their own right, but also because they're amazing counters to hail. I've also seen random Rain Dance/Sunny Day Bronzongs/Sableyes that completely caught my hail team off guard. And unlike UU, where you get the very powerful Abomasnow as a means to reliably re-set up Hail (if it doesn't die early), RU is forced to rely on the undeniably weaker Snover.
What really annoys me about this conversation is how much of it is focused on people talking about hail's strengths. Hail has so many giant weaknesses - e.g. the only type that really benefits from it being up (ice) is weak to 4 types including Rock, anything else on your team that isn't ice will also suffer the 6.25% per turn, Ice is only resistant to itself so strong things can have a field day and build up an insane amount of momentum, etc., etc.
In conclusion, I think you guys need to take a step back and look at the arguments you're presenting and then ask yourself if you're saying why hail is broken, or merely just highlighting its strengths as a viable playstyle. If anything, this suspect test is good merely because it increases the usage and discussion of hail - which should hopefully force people to start running counters to it rather than adopting the quick-fix technique of a ban.
Uhh, just so you know, Rain is hardly prevalent in RU; it has like, 1% usage at best rofl. Imo, the thing that makes hail (and especially stuff like Walrein) broken is that you can prepare for it well enough, but unless you go through almost ridiculous lengths to ensure you're not hail weak (like using 6 mons that give Walrein no chance of set up, or running 4 Pokemon resistant to Blizzard), you're still going to find that you're going to have issues against someone who actually knows how to play Hail, simply because, like stated earlier in this thread, if Walrein sets up, you're probably going to lose at least a Pokemon in trying to beat it, probably more in fact due to just how strong it is. In a similar vein, hail offense is equally strong, because the stuff that can actually take Blizzards repeatedly (Slowking, Cryogonal) are so easy to remove with a little support. And that's really the thing about hail; people ARE running counters to it, and they ARE trying to deal with it, but it's still incredibly difficult to deal with as a whole, simply because of those two aforementioned factors. There's no denying that hail has some big flaws, such as having to use Snover and having a lot of weaknesses to certain types, but they're not overly difficult to deal with with good teambuilding. And once well-built, it becomes devastatingly powerful between its residual damage, 100% accurate STAB Blizzards, and ability to outstall huge portions of the metagame between Substitute + Protect, and that's why so many people are calling for a ban of some sort.
