Wouldn't Grass Knot be way better than Tera Blast Grass?
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v2 [Update on Post #5186]
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KamenOH
formerly DynamaxBestMeta
It learns grass knot? Isnt that physical and thus hitting the much higher phys defense of garganacl?
Nope, Grass Knot is and always has been special
(it just also makes contact for some reason)
alright because we're all looping like we're on some bad trip, i'll briefly address the points raised in this post, even though i have done so a million times already in this thread. last time until the policy review thread. btw bad news for those expecting anything else than what has been going on around discussion on tera in the public thread, when it comes, lol.
any argument in favour of giving tera any form of special treatment is based solely on completely arbitrary distinctions, when, at the end of the day, it is simply one element as with all others. arguing for balancing tera for the sake of preserving it is unironically identical to arguing to balance any uber pokemon to bring it down, or to the heinous suggestions last generation in complex banning king's rock whilst used on cloyster.
i dismiss out-of-hand any sort of non-binary approach to tiering tera.
if your idea of navigating situations in a novel & competitive manner involves what essentially amounts to near-guesswork as to which pokemon the opponent will tera, and when, then i don't know what to say. "hm, should my opponent here tera their fairy skeledirge as i kowtow with my gambit, i am fucked. should they not tera this turn as i iron head, i am also fucked." - double binds such as these are par for the course with tera.
i am hesitant to call every pokemon having the means to circumvent its nominal checks & counters, at any time, "creativity". it takes zero brainpower in the builder to throw on whatever tera you want on any pokemon & call it a day in matchup-fishing. furthermore, more options is not necessarily a good thing, as there is a balance to be struck in metagames between oversaturation of threats (on a collective scale) & overcentralisation (on an individual scale), as both of these undermine a player's capacity to adequately & reasonably prepare for threats in the metagame whilst building, & to discern the correct course of action in-battle - thus leading to games being more determined by matchup, & near-guess turns as outlined above. tera not only oversaturates the meta, it also creates overcentralisation.
"There’s always a chance you can lose uncommon tera type/ set combination but thats not inherently bad" firstly, it's not just "uncommon tera types" - go look at the tera type index in this subforum. granted, that thread is pre-home, but these are all typings that each pokemon viably ran on a multitude of teams. i am losing my mind at the suggestion that games being decided by factors outside of player expression & decision is not "inherently bad". yes. yes it is. that is the very definition of uncompetitive.
glhf
smogon doesn't balance elements, it bans. there are reasons for this. i neither have the time nor the patience to explain smogon's consistent tiering methodology from first-principles, so i'd suggest you spend a few hours going through the old policy review threads on tiering approaches as to figure out how we got here. also, look at the quagmire that was/is g5 ou, from the policy review threads on the generation, a contemporary meta, and a currently-played generation - people are still unhappy with it to this day, and there have been many post-gen alterations made because of attempts at preservation of elements. another example of an attempt at normalisation was baton pass in g6 ou, which, i'm not sure if you were around for, but it basically caused arrested development of the metagame & allowed for innumerous resurfacings of baton pass still being uncompetitive, until people finally bit the bullet & pulled the weed by the root.
any argument in favour of giving tera any form of special treatment is based solely on completely arbitrary distinctions, when, at the end of the day, it is simply one element as with all others. arguing for balancing tera for the sake of preserving it is unironically identical to arguing to balance any uber pokemon to bring it down, or to the heinous suggestions last generation in complex banning king's rock whilst used on cloyster.
i dismiss out-of-hand any sort of non-binary approach to tiering tera.
grouping these together because your latter point in the first paragraph bleeds into the second
i am hesitant to call every pokemon having the means to circumvent its nominal checks & counters, at any time, "creativity". it takes zero brainpower in the builder to throw on whatever tera you want on any pokemon & call it a day in matchup-fishing. furthermore, more options is not necessarily a good thing, as there is a balance to be struck in metagames between oversaturation of threats (on a collective scale) & overcentralisation (on an individual scale), as both of these undermine a player's capacity to adequately & reasonably prepare for threats in the metagame whilst building, & to discern the correct course of action in-battle - thus leading to games being more determined by matchup, & near-guess turns as outlined above. tera not only oversaturates the meta, it also creates overcentralisation.
"There’s always a chance you can lose uncommon tera type/ set combination but thats not inherently bad" firstly, it's not just "uncommon tera types" - go look at the tera type index in this subforum. granted, that thread is pre-home, but these are all typings that each pokemon viably ran on a multitude of teams. i am losing my mind at the suggestion that games being decided by factors outside of player expression & decision is not "inherently bad". yes. yes it is. that is the very definition of uncompetitive.
there is not much to respond to here, honestly. strange argument that could be applied to any element you wanted - literally everything that is legal (& illegal!!!) could be justified to be ou as "a resource to win". pokemon is a game of imperfect information, risk vs. reward, bluffing, inter-player psychology, planning & execution, adaptation, and the like. tera, in my view, undermines so much of these as to be considered totally banworthy, for reasons that i already outlined in this very post.
glhf
someone has the chance to do the funniest thing rn
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Hello, Very Opinionated Person coming in to spout her crap. Going to try not to use any heated language or call anybody out despite how I feel about this topic and how tired everybody is of hearing about it. This probably isn't the best-informed post since I don't play this gen much atm (because of what I'm about to rant about) but hopefully it gets the point across.
Tera
My first day playing this gen was the day Palafin and Iron Bundle were banned though those bans weren't on ladder so I was playing against them while not using them. I played 20-30 games and by the end of it Tera was 5x the problem in my mind that either of those mons were. I play Ubers all the time, I'm used to fighting stupid broken mons. I'm not used to anything having the ability to survive and/or one-shot anything else based on arbitrary decisions made in the builder. I played vs a Volcarona and had my Glimmora out (very favorable type matchup and I ended up being faster), and if we ignore the fact that Tera Ground or Water would have swept me on the spot from turn 3 (which shouldn't be ignored), they end up clicking Tera Grass and Quiver causing me to lose about 3 mons and get owned by whatever was in the back. I fixed my team to deal with Volc better and ended up getting screwed over by or sweeping with the following "random" threats with little room for counterplay: Bax, Moon, Valiant, Dragonite (not even Normal, it was a DD Fire set which I had no way of knowing), etc. It really felt exactly like month 1 SS with Dynamax, you could just click a button and end games. Again, this was with Palafin and Iron Bundle in the tier who I actually had little issue with the presence of at that time.
On a side note, I have no clue how anybody thinks this mechanic is fun. It's fun to me in the same way that it would be fun to be able to use hackmons in OU when nobody else could. Sure you enjoy using weird BS for 10 games but then there's no fun in being able to win with the same cheap strat in almost every situation. I play the tier to keep up with the meta for around one or two 15-game sessions per week and I usually end up frustrated as Tera just isn't designed for singles the same way Dynamax wasn't. This game is not designed around being able to gain a whole new typing and attack in the same turn (yes this applies to Protean as well although I'm fine with that post-nerf), just as it wasn't designed around being able to survive almost any hit, use a strong move, and boost in 1 turn.
The way I think about it now is, if this game had always been like this, if you could select any single type for any mon to be in the builder, there would be no competitive Pokemon. Why not just combine the highest stats or best boosting move with the best types? Now we have that but actually stronger because you're not "just" a Fairy type, you have the ability to turn Fairy type, which you can use tactically to tank an oncoming Dragon/Fighting/Dark move that you predict. The opponent has no way of knowing what type you picked so they can't be expected to throw resisted hits at something to fish for you to tera. That also explains why I don't think preview fixes anything. The opponent shouldn't have to throw a Grass or Water move at my Bax "in case" I click Tera Ground, even in a situation advantaged for them that just takes it down to a coin flip. It takes very little positioning to win with Tera, there are at least 20 mons still in the tier very capable of winning in 1 turn which they can easily buy themselves with the mechanic.
Tera needs to go ASAP.
It's so toxic I'm amazed it survived one suspect and it'll probably be the first time I get reqs for a suspect the next time it's up. I'm neutral on most bans, late in gens I mostly play Ubers anyway, but this can't stay in this tier.
Thanks for reading my rant and please subscribe.
Tera
My first day playing this gen was the day Palafin and Iron Bundle were banned though those bans weren't on ladder so I was playing against them while not using them. I played 20-30 games and by the end of it Tera was 5x the problem in my mind that either of those mons were. I play Ubers all the time, I'm used to fighting stupid broken mons. I'm not used to anything having the ability to survive and/or one-shot anything else based on arbitrary decisions made in the builder. I played vs a Volcarona and had my Glimmora out (very favorable type matchup and I ended up being faster), and if we ignore the fact that Tera Ground or Water would have swept me on the spot from turn 3 (which shouldn't be ignored), they end up clicking Tera Grass and Quiver causing me to lose about 3 mons and get owned by whatever was in the back. I fixed my team to deal with Volc better and ended up getting screwed over by or sweeping with the following "random" threats with little room for counterplay: Bax, Moon, Valiant, Dragonite (not even Normal, it was a DD Fire set which I had no way of knowing), etc. It really felt exactly like month 1 SS with Dynamax, you could just click a button and end games. Again, this was with Palafin and Iron Bundle in the tier who I actually had little issue with the presence of at that time.
On a side note, I have no clue how anybody thinks this mechanic is fun. It's fun to me in the same way that it would be fun to be able to use hackmons in OU when nobody else could. Sure you enjoy using weird BS for 10 games but then there's no fun in being able to win with the same cheap strat in almost every situation. I play the tier to keep up with the meta for around one or two 15-game sessions per week and I usually end up frustrated as Tera just isn't designed for singles the same way Dynamax wasn't. This game is not designed around being able to gain a whole new typing and attack in the same turn (yes this applies to Protean as well although I'm fine with that post-nerf), just as it wasn't designed around being able to survive almost any hit, use a strong move, and boost in 1 turn.
The way I think about it now is, if this game had always been like this, if you could select any single type for any mon to be in the builder, there would be no competitive Pokemon. Why not just combine the highest stats or best boosting move with the best types? Now we have that but actually stronger because you're not "just" a Fairy type, you have the ability to turn Fairy type, which you can use tactically to tank an oncoming Dragon/Fighting/Dark move that you predict. The opponent has no way of knowing what type you picked so they can't be expected to throw resisted hits at something to fish for you to tera. That also explains why I don't think preview fixes anything. The opponent shouldn't have to throw a Grass or Water move at my Bax "in case" I click Tera Ground, even in a situation advantaged for them that just takes it down to a coin flip. It takes very little positioning to win with Tera, there are at least 20 mons still in the tier very capable of winning in 1 turn which they can easily buy themselves with the mechanic.
Tera needs to go ASAP.
It's so toxic I'm amazed it survived one suspect and it'll probably be the first time I get reqs for a suspect the next time it's up. I'm neutral on most bans, late in gens I mostly play Ubers anyway, but this can't stay in this tier.
Thanks for reading my rant and please subscribe.
This is a dangerous and harmful accusation that is based entirely in speculation. The council is the most transparent it has ever been and was acting on behalf of the community. The argument about the survey being 3.0 is already invalid because Finch explicitly stated that they weren’t going to use results from multiple bans ago.
And I don’t think the council would seriously vote ban on a mon because they don’t want to face it in a tournament. The council has been an overwhelmingly positive force so far.
You can say whatever you want about any accusation but don't pretend that this action was "on behalf of the community". The survey even though it was a bit outdated following Mage and Zama-C bans, still hold relevance as nothing substantial happened that gave both the QB'd mons new tools that made them over the top broken. There was barely any support for such tiering action from the community except 4 posts, which guess what, belonged to the council members themselves.
The post ban backlash clearly suggests the huge lack of support and difference in opinion the community holds against the latest tiering decision from the council. This included not only regular users but also esteemed tournament players/champions, veteran badged users as well as regular ladder toppers.
You can say a lot of things to justify this decision like WCoP stability and what not. But you have absolutely no grounds to say anything close to "on behalf of the community".
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I understand that the bans were lacking in support. However that doesn’t mean you just attack the council. If you want action that isn’t the way to do it. I also don’t think volcarona is entirely QB worthy but we need decisive action if we want a metagame that is competitive and fun.
Gonna repost and clarify that it was not an accusation - because tbh I don't even think most of the council members seriously want Volcarona quick-banned. I believe it was a hasty decision under pressure and that in the heat of the moment individual members voted ban without thinking about the outcome of their vote.
“this totally conspiratorial concoction i said i was “pretty sure” about & said was the only possible explanation, along with a direct accusation of selfishness? yeah no it was NOT an accusation”
fattest copium hit i’ve seen in this site
fattest copium hit i’ve seen in this site
Volcarona ban making people go ballistic against the council
guess orricoro didn't get to have a niche :(
so we can have tera water volcarona and tera ghost zamazenta in the same team the time when they weren't banned. surely this is a healthier metagame
If Tera gets banned or restricted I'll become a Gen 2 OU main
If this string keeps going, I’ll get banned.
don’t tempt me with a good time
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