First let me address that Baton Pass is a team of 6 Pokemon. It is not a playstyle; it is literally one team with 6 defined Pokemon, defined EV spreads, defined movesets, defined abilities, and defined items. Therefore I don't think that the slippery slope argument makes any sense here, as no other play style has achieved this level of perfection.
Is something not a play style because you deemed it not a play style and for no other reason? Second, there are 17 variations on Baton Pass
just from the suggested moves alone under the C/V of Deniss' team. This is discounting people experimenting with BP and its makeup themselves. Baton Pass is
not a "perfected" archtype, even by its own creator.
I won't say that no one is arguing that one requiring more than one countermeasure for Baton Pass on a team is a ludicrous option, because they are, and I'm going to come right out and say that that's the wrong mindset. However, the issue becomes that in a battle, only one of these checks/counters is relevant. When you switch out to something, you have forfeited your momentum and basically lost because now the opponent is probably behind a Substitute, and can boost past whatever your threat is, and you have lost.
Not true. There are early chain checks to BP like Trevenant, and late chain checks like Roar Mega-Gyarados. It is entirely possible to handle BP at any step of its setup if you build to accommodate it.
It is ludicrous to expect a stall team to carry a Curse Trevenant or Haze Quagsire. For one, stall needs all six of its members to handle the metagame as it is. It can hardly afford to run a Baton Pass counter.
Have you considered the possibility that, as everyone is complaining, the average team may lose a bit of relative power in relation to being able to account for Baton Pass themselves, resulting in them staying even with, or even making it easier for Stall to keep them in check?
All in all, Baton Pass is not befitting of a metagame based on skill.
I consider teambuilding a very important skill in this game. BP was masterfully crafted by the person who built it. Likewise, the Suspect Ladder proved those that simply copy/pasted the list didn't do so hot with it, meaning even its use required experience and execution to pull off successfully just like anything else
Im pretty sure you just repeated what i said:. You also missed that i said how you need multiple pokemon to beat a specific team of six (which is what bp is). Usually you can easily counter a given team of six, but it is stupidly with bp as well as being able to hit the other 90%(or whatever the % is) of the meta
Interestingly, if the meta builds to actually start checking BP it won't counter 90% of it anymore. Likewise, you don't need multiple pokemon to check Baton Pass, you, at most, need one dedicated pokemon and your team built to compliment it. Haze on a stall team will do next to nothing because a Stall player can't pressure the substitutes or rack up residual damage as a result. Couple Haze with a high damage infiltrator or damaging sound attacks like Mega-Gardevoir and you're much better off. It isn't as simple as "This move will beat BP" and it shouldn't be. Think about your options and how they work with your team.
Bp is broken because it requires less skill to beat a player with more skill, it also requires gimmick/less viable mons/sets to beat (eg trevenant or haze quagsire).
It requires less skill to beat something you hold a advantage over. When Baton Pass builds to counter a metagame and that metagame refuses to counter Baton Pass, than Baton Pass will dominate it easily. This is basic. Skill is not only in play and execution, but also team building. If you refuse to have a counter in place at team creation then
you are less skilled for leaving yourself unprepared.
Especially against a threat that, for all accounts, you consider nothing more than copy/paste.
This makes this such a pain in the ass to respond to.
So trevenant being useful against a specific team, but trash against every other makes it viable?
See Gothitelle. If you can name anything this pokemon does except break Stall that something else does not do better I would love to hear it. This pokemon is still BL, last I saw.
Well manaphy has a lot of VIABLE counters and checks, most stall teams will be running chansey/blissey, however most standard teams dont want to run a specific check, such as trevenant especcially because it is shit
No, Manaphy does not. Before the advent of Mega-Venusaur Manaphy had
no counters in Stall. That is why it was Ubers in gen 5, Stall literally could not fight it. As for counters now a-days I believe Mega-Venu is still the only thing that can counter the standard Manaphy sets.
[Seismic Toss] doesnt break vaps sub . . . [You can swap out of Curse] so you just invalidated your argument and your reason for running trev.
Vaporeon has no natural recovery side to Leftovers and does not keep Trevenant out, allowing it to come in freely and apply a curse which Vaporeon has to hard swap out of, giving you a free turn to Leech Seed instead. Likewise, if they're hard swapping out of whatever into Vaporeon to ditch a curse and in preparation of Seismic Toss pressure they open themselves up to status (in this case, Toxic) because Vaporeon will not benefit from the protection of a sub upon entering play. In either case it renders Vaporeon's impact negligible. Likewise, for being able to swap out of curse, a turn in which you do not Baton Pass with a sub up to ditch Curse is a turn in which you get Leech Seeded, or Toxiced. (At best you have an Espeon that is going to eat a Seismic Toss to the face) in addition to a good amount of residual damage from Rocks and Spikes if you have them up from forcing all the switches. It is not an enviable Catch 22 for the Baton Pass team.
Have you not seen the amount of hate your posts have got?
. . . you clearly dont dislike being an ignorant idiot
I flipped the order of these two to make things more apparent. A discussion about numbers and pixels for the competitive meta of a video game designed for children does not generate hate, hateful people find an excuse to vomit vitriol where they can.
This will be my final post as it is killing me how stupid and stubborn you are.
The pleasure was mine.
You're mixing up "competitive" and "broken" or "viable". Competitive is that thing that makes people compete for wins. Baton Pass turns it more into a game of "Rock Paper Scissors", which is the exact opposite of what we want.
And it's not that people refuse to change their teams to fit Baton Pass in, it's that they can't. There are limited ways to avoid auto losing to baton pass that are not outright inferior against your standard teams. Since standard teams are more common, a lot of people choose to take a loss here and there in order to not compromise their ability to keep up with everyone else.
This is a natural byproduct of competition and something other competitive games actually cycle through constantly. If A is the current dominant style, then people will flock to A for the highest chance at success. Eventually someone comes along and develops B(p) which beats A. Now, as more people find out about and start using B themselves B will rise in usage until it is more common than A by virtue of beating A and being even with itself. After that someone will develop C(ounters), which beats B but will often times lose to A. Now, while B is most common C will begin to rise in trend until it is consistently performing the best and, in turn, A will rise in popularity as well because it beats C. They will cycle like this in perpetuity until something changes with the system fundamentally.
In this case, A is the current metagame, B is baton pass which counters it, and C are slightly weaker (relative to A) standard teams that have an advantage over BP. If we left things as they are the current A+ standard teams would begin to phase out as Baton Pass teams picked up in favor to beat them for easy rides to the top of the ladder until the A teams are converted to C teams to compete with them, then the metagame would, hopefully, stabilize with a balance of roughly a third of each if they are in harmony with each other. At worst it would be that consistent cycle where one of the triad is at an upswing in popularity and the style it beats is at a low swing keeping in a rotation.
Just injecting to say that this is a great metaphor, but is a little bit more intricate.
Imagine a competitive version of Rock-Paper-Scissors. . . .
This is why I should not read and reply to only one post in sequence. After I just wrote out that wall of text on competitive theory. Anyway, this is close, only we have no reason to believe this R-P-S scenario would stay stagnant with Rock on top when all other real life situations where this effect has been evoked remains fluid between the trifecta.
Over Centralizing the meta is when something, be it a play-style or Pokemon, forces you to carry a counter whose sole purpose is to stop said play-style or Pokemon.
Order of severity. A lot of offensive teams run a Stallbreaker to do just what it says on the tin, break stall, but that doesn't mean Stall is over centralizing. Just as long as the options to it are varied as to prevent stagnation and repetition then it is not unhealthy for the Meta. Now, if the
only answer to stop Baton Pass was something silly like Haze Quagsire, and
everyone had to run Haze Quagsire in order to stop baton pass, like Rocky Helmet Garchomp to stop Khanga, then yes, it would be kind of silly. Baton Pass counters are much more varied than that, though they could stand to be just slightly more-so. This is why option #2 is very viable to remove a little bit of Baton Passes built in redundancy that mitigates its checks.
For the umpteenth time, let us not compare an entire team of 6 to one pokemon. It's not one pokemon setting up in your face, it's 6. It's easier to counter one pokemon; I.e tflame, mPinsir etc than it is an entire team of six.
Case in point for the need to reduce BP's redundancy. If you remove a key component like Scoliopede so it can't Iron Defense, then it should have to sacrifice something to retain the capacity to boost its defenses still later in the match. As it is, in order to actually remove a capability you have to often knock out two pokemon to remove their access to that one specific kind of boost it provides, which isn't impossible, but is a little much.
The differwnce is, Rotom W is a good counter to mang mons, where as trevs is not. You can argue this all day, but you and I both know a lot of these "counters" are off the wall and are simply taking up a slot for a better mon.
I heartily maintain that something is not "better" if it does not perform the job of the thing "inferior" to it. As long as a pokemon handles Baton Pass better than its predecessor then it can stand on its own feet with that merit.
