A buncha random thoughts on the game right now.
I think what a lot of people are learning, both new and old players, is that hazard stacking always fucking sucked! Yeah what goldilocks here is doing isn't inherently that much different from the pre defog days of spin blocking. But that style of play was nightmarish to deal with. Gen 3's most popular teams are based around mons immune to spikes and sandstorm. The current most popular gen 5 playstyle is hazard stack sandstorm with mons immune to passive damage. One of the best Pokemon in ubers for those generations was a mon whose entire shtick was to stack a bunch of spikes at the start of games. It sucked, and it always sucked, and the game got better for the widespread use of defog.
At least now there's an item that ignores hazards. I have legit run into teams with 5 of their mons rocking those fashionable boots. Seeing mold breaker Hawlucha become a legitimate mon is hilarious. I'm not sure if this is healthy long-term. It may be a return to what Pokemon used to be, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. I'm not even sure if banning Gholdengo will solve the problem when the defoggers and spinners are much more limited compared to the hazard stackers. It will be interesting to see how UU shapes out. Will defog Noivern single-handedly hold the tier together from being a hazard stack nightmare, or will it end up looking very similar to current OU?
BTW I do recommend building a team with mostly boots. It is very funny to watch your opponent sac mons to get up ultimately useless hazards.
The Chinese breakers are nuts. We knew this from very early on, but the fact that they haven't completely torn the tier apart yet is crazy. Weavile was already borderline broken last gen, and here we have Mega Weavile. Yet it's....like, not completely broken? It ultimately plays exactly like Weavile so counterplay ends up feeling the same.
Chi-Yu meanwhile feels a lot like Tapu Lele. Lele wasn't weak to rocks, was immune to priority, had psyshock to hit special walls, and had team support options like future sight. However Chi-Yu is slightly faster, hits harder, has a nuke button in overheat, can use weather to boost its nuke to stupid levels, doesn't have its dual stab resisted by a single type, and has access to nasty plot. Imagine what Lele could do with nasty plot. Weirdly I never see the bonkers fire fish use nasty plot. The meta is too fast, slow teams are packed full of unaware mons, and it hits hard enough that it almost doesn't need it.
Both are nuts and I wouldn't be surprised to see them both go eventually, but for now I'm happy to see them stick around.
Anyone who suggests banning booster energy should be laughed out the room. Neither of the mons banned have been broken due to booster energy. Hands, Treads, Thorns, Jugalis, Scream Tail, Slither Wing, and Brute Bonnet clearly aren't breaking anything right now, booster energy or not. Which leaves us with Iron Moth, Roaring Moon, Iron Valiant, and Great Tusk.
Moth has a pretty great agility fiery dance set that uses booster energy, but it's a long way off being broken. Tusk is pretty threatening after booster attack plus rapid spin, but it has 4mss and isn't that hard to stop (plus it's one of the only mons holding the meta together right now). Iron Valiant loves the speed boost on end game sweeps, but can get forced out by a lot of stuff, wasting the booster. Roaring Moon might be broken right now, especially with tera flying acrobatics, but that's more a problem with tera.
In short there's at most 4 mons who really abuse booster energy. One of them isn't busted at all. One is a meta superstar who is a big glue piece and would cause more harm than good to remove. One is pretty damn strong with it but ban calls have completely died away after the first few days. And then there's one who might be busted, but is due to having the correct tools to abuse new and old mechanics together to create this monster.
Tl;dr booster energy breaks, at most, 2 mons, maybe only 1, and even then it's a string of other factors at play that makes it strong. You don't ban an item because it makes 1 mon too strong. Unless you want to ban Leftovers for breaking sub glare Zygarde.
Please stop with the "we banned baton pass so obviously we should ban shed tail". Baton Pass was banned primarily due to its ability to pass stats, not due to the power of sub pass. You're being disingenuous if that's your entire argument.
Saying it grants a free turn of setup is a bit weak of an argument too. Memento kinda does the same thing for example. At least with Memento you have to kill yourself to use it, but then the problem with shed tail is specific to Cyclizard and its ability to do it repeatedly over the course of a game.
If I had a nickel for every time Gamefreak introduced a 300 base power physical ghost move in generation 9, I'd have 2 nickels etc.
This is a mon, or more specifically a move, I think might actually be broken. It could just be a tera thing, so we can wait. I'm amused by the idea of using Primeape for the same role though, as some people mentioned earlier in the thread.
Oh right, giving this thing physical ghost STAB breaks it. Boosting the power of its shadow balls also breaks it. I am shocked by these totally unforeseeable developments. On the other hand, it is the main thing holding back Cyclizar from tearing the game apart, but that sounds like "broken checks broken" sooooo.
It's weird how little Ditto I've seen. For all the little jabs at tera I've had, the relative lack of Ditto at least tells us that we aren't anywhere close to the level of chaos Dynamax was.
Although apparently Ditto doesn't copy your stabs after you tera away from your original type, and there was the part where you could dmax Ditto to avoid its choice lock, and yeah OK maybe not the best comparison. But still, the relative lack of Ditto has been notable.
Iron Moth is another good one. Using a wacky AV set for a sun team and it's kinda neat role compression.
