BW Of Ubers and 1U

Yeah you're kind of right: if everyone really thinks BW2 OU is fine and BW Ubers isn't, then there's an argument to put it under established old gens. But I'm pushing for people to actually ask whether BW Ubers is fine first before just defaulting to that.

Lately I've not really heard much of these complaints. (past few months) That being said, I don't think the meta can be said to have stood the test of time yet, and I think BW Ubers sans ghostceus makes a compelling case for 1U.

 

There's two issues I have with your arguments, but i'll go into the former first.

Firstly, putting this out there that I don't think either Volcarona or Magic guard users should be banned in the format (If it were to go with the ou route). Since yes, Volcarona is hard to switch into and counter because its great coverage can't be covered by any single mon, however there are still quite a good amount of mons that do check it as its setting up a quiver dance. Pokemon like scarf Garchomp, Dragonite, Heatran, Specially Defensive Tyranitar even, can all switch in and reliably beat it depending on the set it runs. Those are just a few examples but I think you get my point. Secondly Magic Guard users I never really understood the argument for since even though they aren't effected by hazards, they can still be beaten by a decent amount of pokemon. Theres a good amount but a few options that work well vs the two most common Magic Guard users, Alakazam and Reuniclus, are Jirachi, Mew, Chople Specially Defensive Tyranitar, Skarmory, Bulky SD Scizor, and those are just the ones that come to the top of my head. If anything, a metagame without Volcarona in BW could be cool, since it has much fewer choices when it comes to dealing with it.

This absolutely makes no sense as to why you would ever want to ban Ghostceus and not Kyogre. Kyogre in BW2 Ubers requires two ways of pressuring it to just deal with the specs set alone, and then you still have to be able to beat its more defensive and specially defensive sets so that generally means you will be running a offensive pokemon that can switch into both offensive and defensive sets and beat it(like Palkia with 4 attacks and thunder) and one other check (like Ferrothorn or Latios/Latias) that still resists its water moves but can check most defensive variants so your primary check won't have to take the hits from defensive and offensive variants. The main way you beat kyogre in bw2 ubers is by pressuring it though, and that's also where the argument falls apart for banning Ghostceus, as Ghostceus helps the tier if anything, giving it at least some spin-blocker not named Giratina-O, and another option against ekiller, instead of just relying on using Skarmory, Giratina-O, or Bronzong to shut it down.

Cheers.

 

As I much as I'd love to have a second place to play my favorite meta, starting with Ubers is an interesting idea. However I'm little to no experienced in BW Ubers, so I can't really judge if the metagame is fine by itself, my main question is why would BW starts off Ubers and then ban maybe one or two things when every other tiers (afaik) started off the Smogon OU banlist? It doesn't make much sense to me, why would any veteran find a known metagame when they come here to play some tour but not the BW OU players? Why would those players need to adapt to something different? I mean most of players here are also Smogon players, and when it comes to past gen, I don't think many of us want a very different metagame from what we are used to on Smogon, even if we are not perfectly fine with it.

That being said, BW OU is far from being perfect to everyone as it's been pointed out previously and some things need to be adressed if we choose to go with it (Ojama's clause, Volcarona, Magic Guard, etc), what I do believe is important is an active Council for older gen because even if they are less played they are still active and tiering decision are sometimes necessary.

 

1-4 started off of the same banlist. 6/7 didn't.

 

i say we keep 1-5 gens standard as they are really cemented in history while we can move 6 onward to or own unique banlist. with that said i say we take a smogon ou esque approach to the banlist and tweak things when nessecary (we can choose to suspect volc magic guard sand veil etc etc)

 

volcarona is garbage and banning it would be a farce

nothing really needs to be changed about bw. maybe allow stoutland on sand teams or something but other than that its fine

 

First off, let me say that I never actively played BW. Neither do I have any experience in GSC and ADV and very little in DPP, which is what kept me from posting in Enigami's thread back in February. But anyway, I think I can contribute something to the discussion.

Starting with BW OU is a bad idea. Like DA said, this isn't a discussion about whether Smogon OU is a decent starting point, but about the underlying tiering philosophy. PP has its philosophy clearly stated and should adhere to it. Of course, there is an exception for GSC and ADV which have had their rules and playerbases cemented for over a decade now, so it wouldn't make sense to reconstruct the Gen 2 or 3 tiering from the start. But BW is a whole different case.

With the power creep that came with Gen 5, it's impossible to identify a clear cutoff between power levels like it exists in ADV. Smogon approached the situation by pretending it was still Gen 4 and removing all cover legends with a sledgehammer, resulting in a tier where single mons like Deo-N or Darkrai reigned supreme, which ended with quickbans against basically everything. Even though it later turned out that the original cutoff was in fact not well-reasoned (as you can see from the fact that Kyu-B is now A- rank on the OU viability rankings), the Gen 5 banlist pretty much served as a reference for the initial OU list in Gen 6 and 7. Ironically most of you dislike the Smogon ORAS/SM OU tiers, but the tiering philosophy that caused them to be like this didn't originate at the start of XY. It came with BW.

I'm now going to address the two main pro-OU arguments I've seen so far.

"BW is an established old gen, there is no point in playing a different BW tier."
Except that it's not. The BW playerbase doesn't consist of a few veterans that have played everything there is to play like in GSC. Hell, PO even has a different banlist than Smogon and many bans have been controversial, unlike the few, clear bans in DPP where everyone knew the tier was changed for the better. There is by no means one single, perfect BW OU Smogon may or may not have arrived at.
If you look at RBY or GSC, PP mainly serves as a place for the veteran players from Smogon to keep training their old, stable tier that will never change anyway. That might be a sufficient reason to run over the PP tiering philosophy with a freight train like we did. But you can't tell me that's the case in BW lol.

"There's no point in going through the process again, I just want Smogon OU asap."
There are multiple things wrong with this. First off, this is not Smogon. If you want Smogon OU, go to Smogon, the BW community there is still very active and - unlike in Gen 1-3 - is not completely identical with the PP crowd. When it comes to Gen 5-7, we are our own community and have our own bans, anyone who reads our rules knows that it should be like this. Seriously this mentality needs to stop.
Also, if we actually went through a decent process that doesn't involve banning all cover legendaries with a hammer, I doubt very much that we'd arrive at the same or even any similar tier as Smogon.

Now about possible solutions.

Smogon OU with retests is a very bad idea, as seems to be the consensus in this thread. We'd just end up reversing the Smogon process, never actually ending up at a stable tier.

Like Ortheore said, Ubers relies much more on broken stuff checking each other than the standard OU/1U tier. BW Ubers may be a stable tier, but it may not quite have the level of diversity we want for our 1U. That, however, doesn't mean that we have to ban a lot of Ubers at once, essentially starting with a lower tier. I propose that we instead ban a few key threats, similar to MMence/PDon/MGar in Gen 6/7, and start from there until we have a sufficient level of decentralization. I firmly believe that this point will be reached long before we arrive at the number of bans Smogon has on their OU.

The solution, in my eyes, is therefore to ban Kyogre first since it apparently has the most influence on the dynamics of BW Ubers with the weather it sets (correct me if I'm wrong), then perhaps follow immediately with Arceus-Ghost if the new tier doesn't suddenly make it less overpowered. I would prefer this order because I think banning Kyogre might fundamentally change the tier as a whole, while banning Arc-Ghost would just remove a single strong threat and maybe influence the viability of some archetypes. But since I'm not an active BW2 player, I don't think I'm quite the right person to judge whether Kyogre or Arceus-Ghost should go first. I would really love to hear your opinions about this. As it stands, both would most leave the tier within a few weeks of each other no matter in what order we ban them (but again, if you think one of them might be less OP in a tier without the other, tell me your opinion).

 

I suppose I ought to say something now since I probably did a shit job of communicating it earlier: the intention behind discussing what would be banned from 1U if we opt for ubers=1U isn't that we ban everything based on theorymon, but instead to just get a rough idea of what our line of attack would be. I don't intend to ever ban something without testing it and opening it to a vote. Also if we were to opt for Ubers=1U I would follow that up by opening a new frontiers tour for it.

Anyway, if it wsn't obvious from my previous posts I strongly agree with what Linkin Karp has posted. I think there's a very good point made in that there's a very different ideology in play when comparing gen 1-3 and 5 onwards, with 4 serving as something of an intermediate step