Unifying Baton Pass Clause

Baton Pass Clause should be:

  • "Do not pass Speed boosts"

    Votes: 31 37.8%
  • different in every tier

    Votes: 24 29.3%
  • other

    Votes: 27 32.9%

  • Total voters
    82
  • Poll closed .
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Zarel

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So, the state of Baton Pass:

Gen 7 OU: passing +Spe/+others at the same time is banned, but apparently some tier leaders want to make an exception for Z-moves
Gen 6 OU: passing +Spe/+others at the same time is banned
Gen 6 UU: Baton Pass is banned
Gen 6 RU: passing +Spe/+others at the same time is banned
Gen 6 NU: passing +Spe is banned
Gen 6 PU: passing +Spe/+others at the same time is banned

My personal preference would be to unify every tier under the same clause (the Gen 6 NU clause: passing +Spe is banned), but I think most people can agree that this situation is not great and should be fixed.

Disjunction made a post defending having the clause be different in every tier, and while I agree that there are situations where different tiers need different clauses, I don't it's worth it to do that with Baton Pass yet.

Remember, a vote for a unified Baton Pass Clause isn't permanent. If, in the future, a tier decides they want to unilaterally change their Baton Pass ban, that's still possible, but I'm just saying, I don't think there's need for fragmentation yet.

This is a quick, NON-BINDING POLL to gauge what PR as a whole thinks should happen here.
 

Josh

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Well I disagree with cross-generational uniformity but tier uniformity within a generation is absolutely ideal.

Anyways, I thought I'd reply to your last post in the other thread:
The question is, why did UU outright ban Baton Pass? Did they think that non-Speed BP or drypassing is overpowered (I 100% doubt the latter), or did they just ban it because they're sick of constantly revisiting the BP ban?
pomman bitched enough I can't speak for them, tagging dodmen if he'd like to post, but the initial reason for the suspect was largely due to Celebi, particularly WP pass, nastypass, and sd pass. These were all variants of Baton Pass that did not pass speed period and yet were still stupidly good. You could argue Celebi was the culprit, that was definitely a discussion, but it is the stat passing that pushed Celebi over the edge. In the end, it's about net gain. Drypassing was not and probably will never be broken, you're absolutely right. The thing is, Smogon at least claims to be anti-complex-banning, and there comes a point where it's just not needed. Gamefreak didn't design Baton Pass to escape Pursuit trappers or to maintain momentum on choice item users -- they designed it to pass boosts. The very very minor benefits to the tier keeping drypassing around were outweighed by the fact BP has been nerfed again and again when it should've just been banned to begin with. Sylveon's specs set can't pivot and Celebi can be pursuit trapped -- I guess bandfoo can't pivot either? That's basically all that was lost for UU by not keeping drypassing around, and a couple extremely niche SD passers were all that would have stayed around with a Celebi ban instead. It was ultimately decided Celebi wasn't the problem, Baton Pass was, and the move was just not competitive.

If you want uniformity the move should be globally (obviously Ubers is excluded) banned. Why people are even arguing so hard for drypassing to stay around is beyond me, it's nearly irrelevant rofl. And, I completely agree. It is very weird there are currently 3 different clauses around BP within gen 6 tiering.
 

Disjunction

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I was in the middle of writing a response to your post from the old thread, so I'll post it here.

The question is, why did UU outright ban Baton Pass? Did they think that non-Speed BP or drypassing is overpowered (I 100% doubt the latter), or did they just ban it because they're sick of constantly revisiting the BP ban?
I cannot answer this question because I am not a UU player, but I have more faith in the UU council than to just assume they banned it out of laziness.
I think there's a lot of benefit to having the tiers share as many of their clauses as possible. It makes it much easier for people to learn new tiers if the only difference is the list of available Pokémon.
It's not hard for a new user to figure out that Speed Passing is banned in NU considering their main outlet for learning the tier will be through the ladder and sharing teams in the PS NU room wherein both options will quickly inform the user of what they are doing wrong. Yes, maybe this means that a couple new users will have to waste half an hour building a team they will eventually learn is illegal, but I think that is a perfectly acceptable sacrifice in the name of preserving a skill-oriented metagame at high levels in both tournament and ladder play.
If there's a need for separate Baton Pass clauses for each tier, I'd support that, but I still don't think it's actually a need. I just think some people are sick of constantly revisiting the Baton Pass ban, and while I can empathize with that, I still think having the same clause in each tier is more important than that fatigue.
As I said, Baton Pass has different impacts on different tiers. This is because not every tier will have viable mons that can fully take advantage of certain passable boosts. For example, Speed passing was broken in NU due in large part to the viability of passing to several bulky sweepers that have significantly weakers impacts on metagames outside of NU. You may not find the same consistency in speed passing in every tier because you may not have the viable equivalents of Xatu, Malamar, and others for receiving the boosts. The reverse is also true where not every tier is covered by another tier's decided upon clause. NU clearly still suffered after the complex ban from OU, and UU presumably felt the same. Assuming the emphasis on uniformity is enforced here, why should they have to suffer without being able to ban anything and/or why should their decision prompt other tiers to conform to their policy when their metagames were not affected in the same way?

Josh posted in the middle of me finishing up, too, which is great because now I know the UU perspective. Adopting a Speed pass ban from anywhere else would not have helped UU. They still would have ended up fragmenting a uniform policy because that's what their tier needed.
 
Long story short, we've had to deal with Baton Pass throughout almost all of sixth gen in UU. Throughout XY and ORAS, we've banned the move Geomancy, then Smeargle, then Venomoth, then almost Gorebyss/Huntail (the current BP clause was implemented around this time so we didn't end up having to do this), THEN we went back and freed Smeargle and Venomoth. Then the problem of Celebi came around and had nothing to do with Speed passing at all, and we decided to stop fucking around and just ban the broken element.

Hogg made an excellent post about BP in UU here highlighting a couple more reasons, such as why Baton Pass may be an inherently broken move: http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...pect-see-post-110.3582473/page-6#post-7064491
That thread in general has some pretty good discussion.

edit: if Baton Pass isn't universally banned then each tier should just have its own clause.
 
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I've always thought that if a move needs this many modifications just to be balanced, it absolutely should just be banned outright. The fact that limiting the number of users per team to one STILL didn't make the move balanced should have been a huge red flag and a sign that the move itself should have been banned. Sure, banning BP + stats is an option, but it's way messier than it seems when you consider the following:

- a sleep clause style ban is out of the question because it can be caused by your opponent through moves such as flatter
- a teambuilder ban is really messy because moves, abilities, and items can all cause stat raising. Sure, you can remove items from the equation because they're not broken on anything, but at that point your ban is more complex regardless (and it is anyway).

Ban Baton Pass. All other options are bad and unnecessary and / or just waste time that should be spent on other things.
 

Hogg

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The question is, why did UU outright ban Baton Pass? Did they think that non-Speed BP or drypassing is overpowered (I 100% doubt the latter), or did they just ban it because they're sick of constantly revisiting the BP ban?
Regarding non-Speed Baton Pass: yes, we explicitly found non-Speed BP overpowered. CelePass was the particular problem that prompted our new focus on BP, and that involved no Speed passing at all, but rather Swords Dance or Nasty Plot (and sometimes Weakness Policy) passing. Speed passing was also a gross presence in UU (although luckily it was considered gimmicky enough that it never grew popular), but in this most recent instance it was not what compelled us to take a closer look at Baton Pass and eventually ban the move itself.
 

Disjunction

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For the record, my support is behind either a full bp ban or just leaving it up to the tiers to decide what their complex bans should be. It seems to me that every tier agrees Baton Pass is broken in some capacity in their respective tiers. Regardless of how Baton Pass specifically warps a tier, whether it be from full pass chains to simple Speed pass, the only solution that should cater to uniformity within tiers would be just banning the move. This prevents stuff like NastyPass and SDPass from becoming broken in tiers its currently allowed in for the future, does away with the complex bans, and makes both sides happy by promoting easy to understand uniformity.

However, if SS or most of the tier leaders don't like the idea of banning the move, then you shouldn't relegate each tier to having the same clause. If we're going to have complex rulings, each tier should have the right to control the degree to which that clause fits them. Otherwise you should just fix all of the problems by eliminating it from the source.
 
Largely agreeing to the post above. I would let you guys Baton Pass as a whole only if it is a decision to make the clause universal because there is no evidence that the move is broken in the PU tier after the last nerf happened in OU so i struggle to see the benefits outside of continuity
 

Andy Snype

Mr. Music
The only thing that matters about tiering within a generation that should be consistent is pkmn usage. We don't tier moves in this respect. It ain't like U-Turn / SR is banned from lower-usage tiers because it's used too much in a higher-usage tier because the only thing that really defines the metas we have today is pkmn usage.

If a non-Pokemon element is deemed too strong for a usage-based tier, I think it should be up to the discretion of that tier's management/community because the moves don't have the same practical effect in all tiers. based off this situation, it's obvious here that this is not a case where all the tier communities think BP is a stupid move that should be wholly banned among all these tiers. Therefore, each community/tier management should handle the approach to their tier their own way.
 
Hi, teal6 here, long time Pokemon player first time OU main. I would like to suggest that indeed we ban the utterly absurd Z-Move Boost Passing, as something like Umbreon becomes immediately unkillable immediately and can pass quite well. Thanks for the consideration and god bless
 

Zarel

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is a Site Content Manageris a Battle Simulator Administratoris a Programmeris a Pokemon Researcheris an Administrator
Creator of PS
Long story short, we've had to deal with Baton Pass throughout almost all of sixth gen in UU. Throughout XY and ORAS, we've banned the move Geomancy, then Smeargle, then Venomoth, then almost Gorebyss/Huntail (the current BP clause was implemented around this time so we didn't end up having to do this), THEN we went back and freed Smeargle and Venomoth. Then the problem of Celebi came around and had nothing to do with Speed passing at all, and we decided to stop fucking around and just ban the broken element.

Hogg made an excellent post about BP in UU here highlighting a couple more reasons, such as why Baton Pass may be an inherently broken move: http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...pect-see-post-110.3582473/page-6#post-7064491
That thread in general has some pretty good discussion.

edit: if Baton Pass isn't universally banned then each tier should just have its own clause.
It looks like your problem is SpeedPass and Celebi. Celebi NastyPass has been brought up multiple times in the past as a reason not to ban Baton Pass wholesale, and I think most people agree that Celebi isn't broken in OU.

It looks like "Do not pass Speed boosts" + banning Celebi to BL would be a better solution here. It still looks to me like a unified Baton Pass Clause is feasible.

I cannot answer this question because I am not a UU player, but I have more faith in the UU council than to just assume they banned it out of laziness.
"Laziness" may be a strong word, but I still don't really see any reason why "Baton Pass Speed Clause" + banning Celebi was a bad choice. The only reason anyone's really given is "Baton Pass users and Baton Pass strategies have been repeatedly banned, and we'd really like to have to stop dealing with it once and for all". I can see why you'd call that 'laziness', but I'd prefer to use a nicer word like 'fatigue'.

It's not hard for a new user to figure out that Speed Passing is banned in NU considering their main outlet for learning the tier will be through the ladder and sharing teams in the PS NU room wherein both options will quickly inform the user of what they are doing wrong. Yes, maybe this means that a couple new users will have to waste half an hour building a team they will eventually learn is illegal, but I think that is a perfectly acceptable sacrifice in the name of preserving a skill-oriented metagame at high levels in both tournament and ladder play.
I'm proposing banning Speed Passing everywhere, so this wouldn't change that at all.

As I said, Baton Pass has different impacts on different tiers. This is because not every tier will have viable mons that can fully take advantage of certain passable boosts. For example, Speed passing was broken in NU due in large part to the viability of passing to several bulky sweepers that have significantly weakers impacts on metagames outside of NU. You may not find the same consistency in speed passing in every tier because you may not have the viable equivalents of Xatu, Malamar, and others for receiving the boosts. The reverse is also true where not every tier is covered by another tier's decided upon clause. NU clearly still suffered after the complex ban from OU, and UU presumably felt the same. Assuming the emphasis on uniformity is enforced here, why should they have to suffer without being able to ban anything and/or why should their decision prompt other tiers to conform to their policy when their metagames were not affected in the same way?
I think if Speed passing is broken in multiple Pokémon in multiple tiers, it is probably worth being banned in all tiers. I mean, if it's broken on that many Pokémon, one of them is going to move up and down tiers. I think it's worth banning globally instead of playing even more Baton Pass whack-a-mole with tier shifts.

I'm not saying they should suffer without being able to ban anything, I'm saying that tier-specific bans should be a last resort and I don't think BP has reached that stage yet.

Josh posted in the middle of me finishing up, too, which is great because now I know the UU perspective. Adopting a Speed pass ban from anywhere else would not have helped UU. They still would have ended up fragmenting a uniform policy because that's what their tier needed.
I still believe that it would have. That and a Celebi ban would have been fine.
 

LeoLancaster

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I think if Speed passing is broken in multiple Pokémon in multiple tiers, it is probably worth being banned in all tiers.
I want to highlight this because it seems to me to be equivalent to Baton Pass as a whole, i.e. Baton Pass is broken in multiple Pokemon in multiple tiers, and has continued to be after several severe nerfs. How can you say Speed passing + Celebi in UU is the problem instead of just BP when we've been trying for years to isolate the specific part(s) of BP that are broken and after numerous severe restrictions it still continues to find ways to be a problem? Sure, there's only one instance of passing without Speed boosts being broken under the current clause. But 1) Speed-less passing is only not broken in other situations when the number of users per team is limited (as dEnIsSsS showed here, albeit in a dated example, but I highly doubt Speed-less full chains wouldn't be broken), and 2) there's no guarantee that Speed-less passing under the current limitations won't become a problem again in the future. These are key because the claim that Speed passing is the ultimate problem with BP is only true in the specific situations we currently have in ORAS (1 BP user per team + current metagames).

Speed passing cannot be the ultimate problem because it still requires another nerf and BP is broken in other situations besides. I believe we're well passed the point where we can say any isolated part of Baton Pass is the ultimate culprit. Baton Pass itself is the problem.
 

Kiyo

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I believe we're well passed the point where we can say any isolated part of Baton Pass is the ultimate culprit. Baton Pass itself is the problem.
I disagree with this statement. i think we can all agree that the ability to pass stats is the "ultimate culprit" it's been brought up before and shot down for various reasons but if senior staff are willing to let nu complex ban and uu outright ban a move im not sure why the decision hasn't just been made to disallow baton passing with boosts.
 
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Zarel

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Creator of PS
I want to highlight this because it seems to me to be equivalent to Baton Pass as a whole, i.e. Baton Pass is broken in multiple Pokemon in multiple tiers, and has continued to be after several severe nerfs. How can you say Speed passing + Celebi in UU is the problem instead of just BP when we've been trying for years to isolate the specific part(s) of BP that are broken and after numerous severe restrictions it still continues to find ways to be a problem? Sure, there's only one instance of passing without Speed boosts being broken under the current clause. But 1) Speed-less passing is only not broken in other situations when the number of users per team is limited (as dEnIsSsS showed here, albeit in a dated example, but I highly doubt Speed-less full chains wouldn't be broken), and 2) there's no guarantee that Speed-less passing under the current limitations won't become a problem again in the future. These are key because the claim that Speed passing is the ultimate problem with BP is only true in the specific situations we currently have in ORAS (1 BP user per team + current metagames).

Speed passing cannot be the ultimate problem because it still requires another nerf and BP is broken in other situations besides. I believe we're well passed the point where we can say any isolated part of Baton Pass is the ultimate culprit. Baton Pass itself is the problem.
At this point, I'd be willing to ban Baton Pass globally if that meant that we could get the same clause in every tier.

...honestly, after more reflection, I think that might be easier than trying to get people to agree on Baton Pass Speed Clause, anyway.

I wrote a piece in another thread about why I think it's important to have the same clause in every tier: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/handling-broken-sets-with-z-moves.3588070/page-3#post-7111229
 

Josh

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I disagree with this statement. i think we can all agree that the ability to pass stats is the "ultimate culprit" it's been brought up before and shot down for various reasons but if senior staff are willing to let nu complex ban and uu outright ban a move im not sure why the decision hasn't just been made to disallow baton passing with boosts.
Passing stats is why the move was made. Preventing passing boosts but allowing drypassing is a joke. Now, remove 'ing with boosts' and you've got a good statement.
 
I already explained why banning BP + boosts is more complex than it appears to be and isn't a good idea:
- a sleep clause style ban is out of the question because it can be caused by your opponent through moves such as flatter
- a teambuilder ban is really messy because moves, abilities, and items can all cause stat raising. Sure, you can remove items from the equation because they're not broken on anything, but at that point your ban is more complex regardless (and it is anyway).
Sure we could implement our clause from last generation, but the fact that it didn't work in every tier is a huge red flag to me, not because we need uniformity across tiers or anything, but because it means that even with the ridiculous number of modifications it's had, Baton Pass was STILL broken in some metagames. We need to stop wasting our time. The move is broken, ban it.
 
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