To be clear, this post has nothing to do with RU Council discussions, or other members. I hope some would share opinions, but the following is purely my thoughts on tiering in gen 9.
I’ve been RUTL for the majority of this gen, the entirety of gen 8 and a small part of gen 7 at the end, and it’s without question obvious to me than this gen was the worst tiering I have been a part of. This isn’t indicative of the people contributing to tiering as the RU Council stayed very stable for my whole tenure, or how I personally felt about the metagame as I think gen 8 is way less interesting and I was personally less successful at it. Rather, it’s largely due from my opinion that tiering has essentially become a game where we consistently have to nerf Hyper Offence to try to bring it to the level of other playstyles and we have never actually been successful at it.
HO requiring hot fixes isn’t anything new to people familiar with the tiering system. After all, the main idea behind broken mons is that they are insufficiently checked in the builder first, then process to create a distorted environment in game as you have to allocate too many resources to eventually take them down, if they don’t end up cleaning up the game first. HO is obviously a favourable build for these threats, as it makes you stack other mons that allow for immediate pressure and are helped by the presence of something that is by itself extremely hard to countermeasure. It’s why something like Sharpedo spikes or anything Linoone were unbearable in SM RU. Threats that are deemed broken don’t necessarily require a HO build, but are on the whole, favoured by the archetype, hence why they also promote a rise in stall builds that tend to have an easier time stone walling these teams because the walls are required to be more general walls. However, there comes a point where this just… stops being an issue. HO in SWSH RU is very good, but at no point do you look at the builds now and think, geez you might need two or three more bans here. In fact, people are far more likely to complain about Reuniclus being an insane nuisance for balance than they are about HO.
In some cases, HO nerfs happen because of a fun game of whack-a-mole that ends up with a consensual ban of one specific trait. The obvious one when it comes to modern RU is light clay, as for the past two generations the item has been banned from standard play here. Weather still pops up as a playstyle that requires similar action, which targets Rain or Sun usually, but in SWSH NU ended up with the Slush Rush ban. In SV ZU, terrain ended up being a major concern, however in higher tiers it tends to be fine because of the weakness of the abusers past a couple of mons. This is why RU has never bothered to retest Hawlucha and Polteageist. When it comes to these bans it is a little less obvious to get right the first time, but Smogon has generally been very good at identifying the problem and finding a solution that works for the tier asking for it. And, yes, the Dynamax ban in gen 8 absolutely works following that logic.
Here is the problem in SV RU now: All of the bans were supposed to nerf HO, and it failed. Not only that, but everything on the table for potential action are still HO mons.
And this is where I think I have lost the ideal approach for SV tiering. At no point did it ever look like we were doing anything meaningful because as soon as something was banned, something else immediately took its place on the exact same archetype. I know some people were critical of my late tenure which, you know what fair enough, but the why kinda bothered me. I wasn’t quick enough to act on Iron Leaves or Enamorus-Therian, both of which were major problems on HO and significant tera hogs, but look at now… People are complaining mainly about Blastoise, Yanmega, Revavroom, Maushold. All tera hogs, all major players on HO almost exclusively. So, what did banning Iron Leaves do for the tier? Essentially, nothing. This became a far worse problem when we got all the DLCs but not exclusively so. Anyway, I do think there’s a solution to this that would immediately nerf HO across the board, is consistent with the tiering process and would allow the tier to be more flexible in tiering action. But that would require the terastallize option to be opened again. There’s a few reasons why I genuinely think this should be on the table to hopefully save gen 9 before it’s actually too late:
There’s other issues with tera at large that are more about how we proceeded about it to me, that aren’t so linked to RU but do have an effect on it. For example, earlier in the gen, I absolutely agreed with CBB’s great post about tera, particularly about the fact that it did a lot of good for skill expression in the actual game. I think that is honestly still valid and a very good aspect of tera you can use to argue favourably for it. The problem that rises when it comes to tiering though, is that I am more and more unsure this is something that is consistently executed the way it should be. Put another way, over the longer term you are less likely to witness skill expression and more likely to see how tera is far less imaginative and a consistent force that takes over games in a way that nothing else really gets close to. This to me is where it becomes a problem, because tiering at its core requires consistency. It’s why things that are broken require more than one amazing performance in a single game to be considered so: over a longer period of time you see them over and over pop off without anyone being really able to consistently answer them. So they break the balance. In gen 9, tera is the one factor that has affected consistency, because again in RU, it really does not matter what the mons actually are, HO is still way too dominant and people are still hopelessly trying to figure out how to reliably answer it. The one consistent aspect of the gen is a failure in addressing the core issue.
The other problem, simply, is that at a time where Smogon is advocating for more transparency in decisions via council and surveys, we ended up in a scenario where one issue is impossible to solve for a metagame by itself. I used to be way more positive in tera, and I was RUTL at that time, so when people were bothered by it and critical of it, I could just say well, we can’t do anything about it here so. And that is frankly beyond horrible, yet this is exactly how it works. Because we can’t do anything about it, we’re cut off trying possibly the best way to solve metagame issues - as again it is the one common denominator to every suspect and council votes done since the beginning - and we have to deal with the fallout of people being understandably frustrated. We have to be consistent with the tiering method without being able to single out the main reason why frustrations happened over and over. It’s a problem that honestly needs addressing, particularly as GameFreak doesn’t seem likely to stop sending those gimmicks.
Anyway, I don’t quite expect much from this thread honestly, but I wanted to try to discuss it and at least be able to listen to counterpoints or people favourable to my view here. Because frankly, it should have been possible a long time ago. I don’t think it’s fair to tiering leaders to have to deal with the issue consistently while not being able to do anything about it, while having to deal with multiple complaints about the tier being bad or the wrong actions being taken because of one central thing that honestly needs fixing, even if it’s just something small like preview (though for reasons above I wouldn’t expect much from that). I’m basing this post from my experience in RU tiering first and foremost, though I’m not blind to how tiering has been done in other tiers with the same issues I feel are happening.
I’ve been RUTL for the majority of this gen, the entirety of gen 8 and a small part of gen 7 at the end, and it’s without question obvious to me than this gen was the worst tiering I have been a part of. This isn’t indicative of the people contributing to tiering as the RU Council stayed very stable for my whole tenure, or how I personally felt about the metagame as I think gen 8 is way less interesting and I was personally less successful at it. Rather, it’s largely due from my opinion that tiering has essentially become a game where we consistently have to nerf Hyper Offence to try to bring it to the level of other playstyles and we have never actually been successful at it.
HO requiring hot fixes isn’t anything new to people familiar with the tiering system. After all, the main idea behind broken mons is that they are insufficiently checked in the builder first, then process to create a distorted environment in game as you have to allocate too many resources to eventually take them down, if they don’t end up cleaning up the game first. HO is obviously a favourable build for these threats, as it makes you stack other mons that allow for immediate pressure and are helped by the presence of something that is by itself extremely hard to countermeasure. It’s why something like Sharpedo spikes or anything Linoone were unbearable in SM RU. Threats that are deemed broken don’t necessarily require a HO build, but are on the whole, favoured by the archetype, hence why they also promote a rise in stall builds that tend to have an easier time stone walling these teams because the walls are required to be more general walls. However, there comes a point where this just… stops being an issue. HO in SWSH RU is very good, but at no point do you look at the builds now and think, geez you might need two or three more bans here. In fact, people are far more likely to complain about Reuniclus being an insane nuisance for balance than they are about HO.
In some cases, HO nerfs happen because of a fun game of whack-a-mole that ends up with a consensual ban of one specific trait. The obvious one when it comes to modern RU is light clay, as for the past two generations the item has been banned from standard play here. Weather still pops up as a playstyle that requires similar action, which targets Rain or Sun usually, but in SWSH NU ended up with the Slush Rush ban. In SV ZU, terrain ended up being a major concern, however in higher tiers it tends to be fine because of the weakness of the abusers past a couple of mons. This is why RU has never bothered to retest Hawlucha and Polteageist. When it comes to these bans it is a little less obvious to get right the first time, but Smogon has generally been very good at identifying the problem and finding a solution that works for the tier asking for it. And, yes, the Dynamax ban in gen 8 absolutely works following that logic.
Here is the problem in SV RU now: All of the bans were supposed to nerf HO, and it failed. Not only that, but everything on the table for potential action are still HO mons.
And this is where I think I have lost the ideal approach for SV tiering. At no point did it ever look like we were doing anything meaningful because as soon as something was banned, something else immediately took its place on the exact same archetype. I know some people were critical of my late tenure which, you know what fair enough, but the why kinda bothered me. I wasn’t quick enough to act on Iron Leaves or Enamorus-Therian, both of which were major problems on HO and significant tera hogs, but look at now… People are complaining mainly about Blastoise, Yanmega, Revavroom, Maushold. All tera hogs, all major players on HO almost exclusively. So, what did banning Iron Leaves do for the tier? Essentially, nothing. This became a far worse problem when we got all the DLCs but not exclusively so. Anyway, I do think there’s a solution to this that would immediately nerf HO across the board, is consistent with the tiering process and would allow the tier to be more flexible in tiering action. But that would require the terastallize option to be opened again. There’s a few reasons why I genuinely think this should be on the table to hopefully save gen 9 before it’s actually too late:
- Too many suspects happen because of it: A major reason why Dynamax was immediately axed was because the mechanic was so stupidly overpowering there was no rational way to ban mons because of it without the next mon in line to be extremely broken with it. Tera was always known to be more subtle, and understandably after what happened to gen 8 people were less than keen on repeating the same approach. However, it’s not entirely dissimilar. In RU, every mon that is currently on the banlist abused tera and with the maybe exception of Hoopa who was still good on the archetype. Blastoise, Yanmega, Maushold and Revavroom that I talked about earlier are also key tera abusers. You can include Armarouge or Bisharp in that category as they function similarly and have also had chatter about them being a bit too overwhelming… Which also was a thing before other mons took their place as the main HO threats. It doesn’t mean they are less good necessarily, as clearly they perform very well often and are extremely difficult to adequately counter. As such, the situation in RU is a lot closer to what happen when too many good abusers of a mechanic are freed, which is why I insisted on using terrain as an example above. We can lock Hawlucha and Polteageist away because they would be stupid on terrain and no one bats an eye because, duh. But tera is a major reason why these mons are banned and why we have maybe five mons to follow. Because ever time we ban an abuser, another one takes its place without fail.
- A lot of the early tera assumptions should be revisited. Unlike Dynamax, tera is less obviously reactive and proactive. Defensive Dynamax was certainly possible, but obviously far less successful due to the reliance on max guard to be consistent compared to the very diverse options setup sweepers had when clicking Dynamax. In fact, people who played a lot of randbats back then probably remember that your defensive Dynamax that was in reaction to a previous one, ended up being offensive by design. Tera is way less obvious in how it manipulates games, but it does so all the same. You don’t necessarily use tera to answer a tera, you can keep it to answer a specific threat later on, or even use it defensively to answer something in the early game to recover some momentum. However, terastallization is still very much something you use successfully on setup sweepers on wincons. Stats from the recent RU Open seem to support this, as most of the mons with high winrates on clicking the tera button are the setup sweepers people are critical of. Winrate means what it does, but it’s certainly a pattern that is noticeable when it’s shown across the board, while passive mons like Hippowdon, who tera'd fairly often in the tour, had a disastrous winrate because it's simply not how the mechanic works best both in a single game and over a consistent period of time.
- Another thing that seemed to be off in the Open is diversity in tera. People advocating for the option generally liked the idea that tera could be explored in different ways and allow freedom of expression in games through innovation. But again, the stats are not quite in favour of this. Every mon that is top of the pack in terms of tera uses have at least one typing they repeatedly use and take advantage of. Of course other typings are used, but over a longer period of time one is easily favoured and adds to the difficulty you have when dealing with mons that are already a little overbearing.
- It’s extremely difficult to get a tier that’s tiered adequately with tera in mind because it’s way too centralizing in how we conceive mons in gen 9. One thing that ended up happening with RU is the complete lack of dark types lead to multiple issues in the builder. Having to rely on Bisharp - A strong HO wincon, but not necessarily that good outside of it - or… Incineroar? is problematic because you would rather not. Krookodile rose up in usage recently, which, good, but RU suffered from having so many of them locked up behind RUBL because of the way they abused tera with no consequences. Moltres-Galar is a lot worse without it as it doesn’t get past multiple defensive checks anymore. Zarude is rough, but it wants to hit Slither Wing aka its best neutral check, it requires a severe cost to fit Acrobatics whereas tera just doesn’t care about Slither Wing with no consequences. Hoopa is probably still broke LOL but tera was a major reason why it couldn’t be safely handled. Iron Jugulis clicked tera way too easily as well, it’s still very strong but it’s in the Yanmega case I feel where without tera you start thinking a bit more about what you are missing and it adds up a bit. And that's just dark types. The dominance tera has over the tiering process is very much unlike anything else in past gens and is, in my opinion, problematic.
There’s other issues with tera at large that are more about how we proceeded about it to me, that aren’t so linked to RU but do have an effect on it. For example, earlier in the gen, I absolutely agreed with CBB’s great post about tera, particularly about the fact that it did a lot of good for skill expression in the actual game. I think that is honestly still valid and a very good aspect of tera you can use to argue favourably for it. The problem that rises when it comes to tiering though, is that I am more and more unsure this is something that is consistently executed the way it should be. Put another way, over the longer term you are less likely to witness skill expression and more likely to see how tera is far less imaginative and a consistent force that takes over games in a way that nothing else really gets close to. This to me is where it becomes a problem, because tiering at its core requires consistency. It’s why things that are broken require more than one amazing performance in a single game to be considered so: over a longer period of time you see them over and over pop off without anyone being really able to consistently answer them. So they break the balance. In gen 9, tera is the one factor that has affected consistency, because again in RU, it really does not matter what the mons actually are, HO is still way too dominant and people are still hopelessly trying to figure out how to reliably answer it. The one consistent aspect of the gen is a failure in addressing the core issue.
The other problem, simply, is that at a time where Smogon is advocating for more transparency in decisions via council and surveys, we ended up in a scenario where one issue is impossible to solve for a metagame by itself. I used to be way more positive in tera, and I was RUTL at that time, so when people were bothered by it and critical of it, I could just say well, we can’t do anything about it here so. And that is frankly beyond horrible, yet this is exactly how it works. Because we can’t do anything about it, we’re cut off trying possibly the best way to solve metagame issues - as again it is the one common denominator to every suspect and council votes done since the beginning - and we have to deal with the fallout of people being understandably frustrated. We have to be consistent with the tiering method without being able to single out the main reason why frustrations happened over and over. It’s a problem that honestly needs addressing, particularly as GameFreak doesn’t seem likely to stop sending those gimmicks.
Anyway, I don’t quite expect much from this thread honestly, but I wanted to try to discuss it and at least be able to listen to counterpoints or people favourable to my view here. Because frankly, it should have been possible a long time ago. I don’t think it’s fair to tiering leaders to have to deal with the issue consistently while not being able to do anything about it, while having to deal with multiple complaints about the tier being bad or the wrong actions being taken because of one central thing that honestly needs fixing, even if it’s just something small like preview (though for reasons above I wouldn’t expect much from that). I’m basing this post from my experience in RU tiering first and foremost, though I’m not blind to how tiering has been done in other tiers with the same issues I feel are happening.
