So you concede that the players in favor of banning Salamence are merely hopping on the bandwagon? Interesting.
I'm conceding that I think Salamence is broken and have been arguing that since this thread started. I have my own ideas about why I think it's Uber and have outlined them with my posts. Is it really that hard to understand?
And about all this "pro-Ubers are hypocrites" and "ppl keep repeating themselves" bullshit: the reasoning behind Salamence being broken is not complicated. The simplest way to phrase this is that he 2HKOs the metagame and screws over all of his checks between the 50/50 chance you have of encountering either of his two already difficult to counter sets. He is different from the rest of OU because he's nigh impossible to counter, unlike everything else that has solid, universal checks/counters in the form of walls and bulky sweepers.
Pro-Ubers have been paraphrasing that this entire thread because there isn't anything new or groundbreaking to actually cover; anyone with a decent CRE and ladder experience has most likely faced a Salamence player worth half a crap and knows the above is generally true. The only variable in this case would be the player's perspective on whether or not they think this kind of influence has a healthy, stabilizing impact on the metagame. There can always be different perspectives on those without having to be inherently "wrong", so to speak, and quite frankly, I'd be much more satisfied to see those types of responses in this thread rather than the theorymon shitstorm we've been enduring so far.
One thing I will say: Salamence is a good counter-measure to six slot syndrome. No team can really hope to be 100% prepared for every possible threat/set in the metagame, a fact that is amplified on Suspect where if an opponent is carrying a particular defensive core, you either need exactly the right stuff to beat it - or failing that, consistently great prediction - or else they're just going to stall you out. Salamence's greatest advantage, I've found, is that when played well he can be used to prevent the opponent from getting into this advantageous situation; He can break apart their core, or at least injure them badly enough that you don't need exactly the right things to beat them any more. Sometimes, Pokemon matches between equally skilled players can be decided just on the back of which six Pokemon you each bring, but with Salamence, even a player who finds himself with an overall team disadvantage can overcome those odds if they play him well enough. He's the great equalizer, really, and I tend to prefer that to the way Suspect works.
What's ironic about this post is that you've outlined
exactly why Salamence is broken.
Salamence's greatest advantage, I've found, is that when played well he can be used to prevent the opponent from getting into this advantageous situation
but with Salamence, even a player who finds himself with an overall team disadvantage can overcome those odds if they play him well enough.
That's not fair at all. If I build the better team, utilize better tactics, and make no major mistakes, I should win. Period. You're talking about the use of
one Pokemon to completely circumvent the fact that I came better prepared to handle your team than you did mine, yet you have the gall to tell me that's fair game?
As far as I know, every other top OU has a healthy list of checks/counters besides Salamence (for those of you who are confused and like to bitch about terminology, when I say checks/counters, I'm referring to how Salamence is in and if I bring something else in response, I should expect it not to die before I kill Salamence a vast majority of the time). And every Pokemon representative of immense speed, power, bulk, and no healthy list of checks/counters, has proved to have exactly the same centralizing effect as Salamence and was subsequently banned to Ubers. Latias was banned on the basis that Blissey, Scizor and Tyranitar were required to beat it and even they didn't do enough to stop it. So Salamence gets to stay here despite the fact that it doesn't even have the virtue of three consistent checks to make for a decent argument that it could possibly be OU?