I'm not one to judge on most cases, but it seems that more and more people want to ban more and more things. I rarely make posts on Stark(barring Warstories) for fear of them not belonging here, or that they're no intelligent enough. This is getting out of hand though. Over the past few months I've seen things saying "Ban Stealth Rocks, Ban Shaymin-S, Ban this, Ban that, Ban Outrage for cheese and crackers sake!"
I agree with this. It seems that as soon as one person finds something that is inconvenient to him or her, it opens up the door for others to join in and state how its effect on the metagame is terrible.
People say "we should ban Stealth Rocks to open up the Metagame for new pokemon, like Charizard, Moltres and Articuno!" Why? What significance would they have in the OU game? Moltres could be considered an exception to these three, but it doesn't seem like any of them would have much effect and be bumped down to BL.
This is a good point as well, I think. Many people argue that other pokemon would have a chance to shine without Stealth Rock, but why do those pokemon need to be given a chance to shine exactly? What makes them so special that the entire game should be altered just so they see some more use? Also, many of the pokemon that are adversely affected by Stealth Rock (bugs, fire, ice) find their home in UU anyway. Those that are OU even WITH the effects of Stealth Rock are obviously good enough to hold their own; getting rid of one of the checks placed on them would only make them stronger.
Now, have we even considered what that would actually do to the metagame? Stealth Rocks keeps things like SpecsMence from always switching in to deal quite a bit of damage to a team. It also limits Gyarados's sweeping potential (we can all agree that he is a deadly sweeper). "Stealth Rocks is only countered by Taunt and Rapid Spin! Rapid Spin is countered by Ghosts! You can't Taunt Azelf!" This is something that I see frequently. Seven Deadly Sins signature comes in on this point I could say Salamence is broken because Dragon + Fire + Ground is a completely unresisted type combination and with Dragon Dance and a Bulky Water with Salamence is 100% Uber. Does that mean he's Uber? God no, it just means that if someone is forced to have a counter they just want to get rid of it to free up their team of a pokemon.
The check that stealth rock places on several strategies is significant. Take that away, and then people will suddenly start complaining about teams full of Focus Sash sweepers surviving attacks and destroying them. As far as stealth rock's hindering effects on being able to counter pokemon, the fact is that true counters have become few and far between these days. "Gliscor counters Lucario." Not if Gliscor is running less that 280 speed and Lucario has Ice Punch. People keep wanting to play RS pokemon when DP pokemon is much more about checks than counters.
This brings me to my next point, when should we classify something as Uber? Uber is something that means it has counters, but the counters fail some of the time.
Here I disagree. Salamence is not Uber because Hippowdon sometimes fails to counter it, since Hippowdon may take prior damage and then be unable to constantly switch into Salamence. The definition of Uber is something that everyone will disagree on, even the higher-ups of Smogon. Words like overcentralizing, uncounterable, promote hax, etc are thrown around all the time, but we still have no clear definition (and we won't have a definition that everyone agrees upon).
Garchomp is an example, it required you to use TWO fast pokemon that have an Ice attack to get it out of the game. Your opponent could see the ice attacks coming from a mile away and switch to his counter for that. Is Garchomp broken because he require two pokemon to take him down? What if one of those two pokemon die unfortunatly then what does that leave you with? An incredible sweeper who can OH-2HKO your entire team. I would say that Garchomp was broken.
Not only could Garchomp do that, but Garchomp was centralizing to the point where its usage rose by more and more each month, and overcentralization is obviously something we don't like.
Shaymin-s, the recent pokemon to get voted to Ubers, wasn't what we'd define as broken, was broken to some degree, but not enough to get it bumped to Ubers. People, most likely, had a bias against Shaymin-s because they lost a game due to "h4x" or because "it creates luck in the game".
And this is where that personal bias comes in. Some people considered Skymin to be truly too much for OU, and others simply didn't want to deal with it. This raises another issue - do we consider a pokemon inherently OU until clearly proven Uber, or do we consider it Uber until proven OU? Although we don't know what "clearly" consists of, the Skymin vote proves that the division on the issue was great enough as to almost be a tie.
Luck is a two sided coin my friend. At one point their's will run out and you can sweep. That is beside the point I guess since Shaymin-s's counters indeed where counters. Zapdos could switch into Shaymin-s with relitive ease, as could Heatran since people loved to exploit Seed Flare and Air Slash, except when Timid ScarfTran comes about. If Shaymin-s is "broken" because her ability causes an effect, then lets just ban all abilities.
Those who voted Uber on legitimate reasons (i.e. not because they lost once to a bad hax) seem to think that Skymin's hax is worse than Togekiss' or Jirachi's. Skymin isn't bulky enough to be able to afford a non-hax turn. Alot of Skymin's power depends on hax, which means that overall, it cannot be relied on to consistently sweep (like Garchomp).
The people who continually bring up how Stealth Rocks and Shaymin-s is broken because of reasons that they pull out of no where are really only wanting to ban it since they have a personal bias against it, not because they've reasearched it. So really if you're wanting to ban Stealth Rocks because "it'll open up the Metagame for three or four new pokemon" and you wanted Shaymin-s banned because "Seed Flare and Air Slash fucked me over" then that's not good reasoning. It's you carrying a personal bias against what you think is a "suspect".
... how'd I do?
