Sunday, January 29, 2012

OU suspect tests done and over with?

Ever since Deoxys-E was banned in early December, absolutely nothing happened on that front, meaning for the first time since this generation began we now get to play around in a stable metagame that's never threatened by changes in the immediate future. To be honest, it's not that much of a surprise to me, as Dragonite and Volcarona were the two that were allegedly next in line according to many. And any prospect of a ban on them was brutally shot down by JabbaTheGriffin in his explanation of the Deoxys-E ban, as he explicitly said these two were considered excellent at their job, but by no means OP. And if the "council" doesn't even consider them to be even remotely close to a problem, don't expect them to go any time soon.

This newfound stability comes at the best of times, as if you remember, when Excadrill and Thundurus were banned I said that if even one additional ban occured as a result of weather, they should really start looking at the inducers as the major problem, and not the abusers. So for those who favor keeping weather in the game to increase the number of viable team builds (hi2u Aldaron), this seems to be a close call that ended up in their favor.

Now, a question worth asking is, with Gray almost certainly coming out later this year, how will tiers be handled, not just in OU, but across the board? Clearly tutors are going to shake up the metagame, not only with weak Pokémon becoming better, which can just be banned from their respective tier, but also with Pokémon previously banned from their given metagame becoming much less of a problem. The latter is more interesting, as it's much harder to gauge when no one gets to use said Pokémon. To be continued...

3 comments:

  1. Finally, stability. Do you remember how long it took for the DPP metagame to become stable? I don't remember the adjustment period being nearly as long, not even close to BW's year and a half. Of course, this metagame shift is much more significant, with the uber tier now accepting more than just legendaries and the Wobbuffet line. I guess such an adjustment period was necessary and expected.

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    1. Yeah, and weather wasn't as much of a concern, hail always sucked and sand barely had anything beyond Garchomp. But maybe the biggest factor is, you know, suspect testing not even existing in early gen 4, the very first one was when Garchomp was banned.

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    2. That's what I meant, mostly. The adjustment period I was referring to was the reorganization of the tiers to accommodate the new Pokemon and old Pokemon with new moves/abilities. I realized halfway through my post that Generation 5 came with a lot more to think about. One other example is that the power creep became even more pronounced, forcing even old favorites (like Heracross)to retire from OU.

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