So some things banned in Smogon obviously destroy the meta so bad it reduces viable teams to 2-3 rosters.
However, even if X, Y, Z are banned, that doesn't mean X,Y,Z are all equally destructive. For example, it is MUCH easier to deal with Evasion than Baton Pass or a Mewtwo in little league. Why don't they exert more of an effort to soft ban things?
>soft ban
You mean like how Japanese tournaments don't ban Akuma but none of the good players ever pick him?
How would you apply that to pokemon?
>soft ban Evasion
how would that even work
similarily to Sleep?
honestly I think it's more GF's fault for not removing the Evasion stages in Gen 2
Just make Evasion non-stackable and now you can deal with it
Smogon/Showdown should remove critical hits, as well as random-chance moves/status. Until that change is made, any conversation pertaining to the competitive viability of Pokémon as a game is pointless.
>Easier to deal with Evasion than Baton Pass
Just run Haze. It answers both equally as well and is applicable against nearly every setup set in the fucking game. Neither of those should be banned to begin with, Smogon's council are just a bunch of faggots that hate things that shit on their teams.
this, evasion is objectively a shit strategy and the only reason it's so obnoxious is that you can stack it 6 times (and then still lose to the first attack because your opponent got lucky)
if you couldn't stack it it wouldn't need to be banned
It doesn't need to be banned as-is, there's a fucking reason nobody runs that shit in real competitive environments.
>Just make Evasion non-stackable and now you can deal with it
I was about to say that Smogon actually did sort of do that by allowing sand and snow veil, which only raises evasion 1 stage for 5-8 turns, but those are banned and the retards forgot to list it on their website.
This but unironically.
If they're going to mod the game to have shit like freeze clause, they might as well just go all-out.
Crits serve an important purpose. They ignore defense boosts, meaning that CM or Bulk Up wars don't last until PP runs out, and "crit me not" sweepers don't become overpowered. Body Press created a niche for sweepers to just boost their defenses to unkillable levels, and without crits, you'd have no way of breaking through. It's all fun and games until Registeel is at +6/+6 and starts spamming Body Press.
The less random chance the better, but you can't really have Pokemon without random chance because Game Freak decreed that Fire Blast has to miss one out of every 3 times you use it.
Why do people get upset that something gets banned in Smogon? If you want to use a banned Pokemon/strategy/item/ability, just play a tier where it isn't banned. Or just play VGC
Evasion fucking sucks ass and should be banned even if it's much easier to deal with than full pass. Because Double Team can be ran on pretty much any mon, you can't have a dedicated evasion answer because one mon can't handle having to answer any of hundreds of potential picks. Even if you could, then you'd be having to run a mon on your team that's likely deadweight in any other scenario just for the possibility of having to face a Double Team spammer. You'd either have to saddle your whole team with dogshit like Aerial Ace or Magnet Bomb, or waste forever chipping it down with hazard damage by phazing it with Roar. There's Haze Toxapex, sure, but Pex has to deal with enough as is, and anyone who isn't a total low elo shitter would be able to answer it anyways.
The problem is that those things aren't broken instant win buttons in the tiers where they aren't banned.
The people who get upset are shitters who use those things as a crutch.
What Smogon members don't understand is that they have a fundamental issue with the game they play that's already been solved by card games
They're being made fun of for being ridiculous because despite having several different formats they're still plagued by cookie cutter team mates with cookie cutter movesets.
Card games have similar issues but their issues can be solved via the introduction of new cards or, like Pokemon, banning the Pokemon that cause these issues.
VGC has the same issues they do because no matter the cause or banlist they only ban specific types of Pokemon or certain abilities that interfere with their cookie cutter "core" Pokemon.
Either the Pokemon is too powerful, which can of course be reasonable, or challenges tactics that they over rely on.
Then they get upset that people point this out, fluff their ego and backpedal into a gatekeeping mentality("Post elo").
They refuse to acknowledge that maybe it's not novices having no clue what they're talking about and perhaps instead it's that even a novice can poke holes in their mentality.
tl;dr even shitters can see how stuff like landorous theiran is broken not because it's overly strong but because it promotes a staler meta with its utility. Smogon are clowns getting laughed at. Not experts getting harrassed.
>tl;dr even shitters can see how stuff like landorous theiran is broken not because it's overly strong but because it promotes a staler meta with its utility.
Objectively incorrect.
Lando compressing so many roles into one slot actually allows more creativity in the other 5 slots.
And you're not forced to use Lando for any of those roles. There's better hazard setters, better hazard removers, better pivots, better wallbreakers, better scarfers...
You don't necessarily need all of those roles on one team, and can choose to forgo Lando's quantity in favor of quality.
You can choose to do that. Or you can do the correct thing and just use Landorus instead, like the overwhelmingly vast majority of players do, which is why it has the bloated as fuck usage stats that it has.
45% is a lot, but it's not the "overwhelmingly vast majority". More than half of the high-level teams don't have it.
And for teams in general, it only has 34% usage. Barely over a third. Again, still a lot, but not an insanely high amount.
user, you do understand that haze is a move with a poor distribution right?
Being forced to always have one of the like 5 pokemon that have haze and are worth a damn on your team would limit things way too much
especially compared to evasion which can be used by literally every pokemon
not to mention, that since your opponent could dedicate a pokemon to taking out your haze user, you in turn would be forced to either bring 2 haze users or a dedicated pokemon to taking out dedicated haze pokemon
the entire teambuilding would quickly devolve into one of 2 strategies: use evasion, or counter evasion which is a whole lot worse than what we actually have
>Just run Haze.
You don't understand what you're asking for.
you don't get it user
pex having 97% usage rates is healthy