GSC OU The GSC Ruleset and Tiering Process

[Disaster Area]

Item clause is an interesting suggestion...

Increased mechanical purity? What do you mean by that? As in the dynamics are closer to what the original game had in mind? Is that in its self not a little counter intuitive when the same changes propose a total ban of 8 pokemon? Yeah it's not going to be huge deal either way but yah..

I mean you can't enforce Freeze Clause on cartridge, practically.

OK maybe I'll explain myself subjectively rather than just being negative here; this is what I think will happen to the metagame with these proposed rule changes:
Firstly players are going to look at other pokemon to replace Snorlax and Raikou for special defense, so the first 2 that jump out here are Umbreon and Blissey, neither of which are particularly noted for the exciting or fun matches they create. Secondly Tentacruel and Machamp will become very powerful with almost no solid switch in checks; Machamp will stop carrying Rock Slide in favour of Hidden Power Ghost and be able to target its counters with a lot more precision, and with Curse it's becoming close to impossible to check once it starts setting up. Tentacruel, again same thing, it would become almost impossible to counter. But the biggest problem of all will be growtheons, between a Jolteon and Espeon setting up and baton passing, combined with some HP water they would just be unstoppable without Lax or HP legendaries to oppose them, I think they'll be overpowered to the point they feel horribly broken.

I mean if that stuff is horribly broken, i.e. Blissey, Umbreon, Machamp, etc. we can ban that too.

If we ban everything else that becomes horribly broken as a consequence of those bans (what are those?) then is what's left what we're searching for? That is, balanced, reasonably diverse, and not with one or two hyper-dominant Pokémon?

 

[magic9mushroom]

OK, last I heard 1U was going to encorporate ubers? Now we're talking about banning Zapdos, Raikou and Snorlax?

Enigami and I suggested the former. Piexplode/DA suggested the latter.

I'm lost.. I can't contribute much for input here, I believe if something isn't broke it doesn't need fixing and I don't see much wrong with GSC ou as it currently stands?

It's in contravention of PP's stated tiering policy.

I don't really see what we're set to gain by lifting freeze clause either? It just opens a window for someone to lose by terrible hax and that's gonna leave a bitter taste in somebodys mouth.

Increased mechanical purity? What do you mean by that? As in the dynamics are closer to what the original game had in mind? Is that in its self not a little counter intuitive when the same changes propose a total ban of 8 pokemon? Yeah it's not going to be huge deal either way but yah..

You can enforce bans (restrictions on allowable inputs). You can't enforce mechanical clauses (changes to outputs). Freeze Clause is impossible on cartridge, while Pokemon bans are not.

 

[Jorgen]

So the biggest issue with changing rulesets is that what you end up with is not really "GSC" as people recognize it. But a change to something more sensible is what we seem to be after here, rather than appealing to inertia.

As for mon bans, I'd say ban all the current Ubers. They're all wayyyy too tanky to be fun to play with/against. Add Snorlax to that because he's super borked in current GSC OU. Nobody would disagree that he's ridiculously overpowered, instead most people tend to argue that Snorlax's "brand" of overpowered somehow is a good thing (which I feel like is just people rationalizing Stockholm Syndrome, but w/e). Anything beyond that is a pet idea that's super heavy on theorymon. Do Electrics really need to be banned or nerfed with an HP restriction when Lax is gone? Maybe??? Hard to tell. No need to start with it off the bat though.

As for clauses, it'd be nice to have things that are possible in-cart, at least to the extent possible for a game that makes sense. Sleep Clause seems pretty necessary, so it's probably necessary to compromise the ideal of total fidelity on that front. Freeze Clause does not seem necessary, so fuck that.

As for other clauses, OHKO Clause needs to be maintained, but I'm skeptical of just how world-beating Rollout Shuckle really is without evasion clause. My bet is that he's overrated, but then again I haven't been directly on the receiving end of it so my opinion isn't going to be as strong as the one I've formed on Sleep Talk OHKO Tauros.

On items, I think we ultimately want to have something that's reasonably similar in character to current GSC OU. Limiting Leftovers usage changes the dynamic of the game to a ridiculous degree, so I think it'd be undesirable. I think it's different from banning an overcentralizing mon like Lax because there's really not any precedent for declaring items as broken per se (Soul Dew in other gens is banned mostly because of its interaction with Lati@s). Not to mention that all the other items in GSC suck total ass, so it's not like you're opening the door for different viable strategies the way you would by banning a centralizing mon like Lax.

Honestly I'm not opposed to a Mean Look/Spider Web ban like what was (is still?) implemented on the PP server. Just so much brainless bullshit associated with that move, you get free kills just by pulling the lever hoping for the 10% or whatever (and that's even after banning shit like HypnoMissy, and let's not even talk about SporeTrapPass Smeargle). Sure Missy basically goes to shit, and Jynx is a Sleep Trapper that generally isn't too contentious (without Perish Song anyway), but honestly it seems worth it to me because trapping shenanigans (even those "acceptable" ones) are such a dumb way to lose a match lol.

 

[Disaster Area]

Do Electrics really need to be banned or nerfed with an HP restriction when Lax is gone? Maybe??? Hard to tell. No need to start with it off the bat though.

There would not be the HP recstriction on PP ever, and I feel like we could put seasons on hold to go from theorymon to evidence, with the motivation to play and explore being otivated by making the meta and seasons as good as possible.

I'd be interested to see what people think should be banned if we went electrics ban, and test that meta. I kinda feel like the result of that would be a good place for GSC on here, but I don't know too much. Really refreshing to have your opinion on here though Jorgen, really glad to have you.

 

[magic9mushroom]

As for clauses, it'd be nice to have things that are possible in-cart, at least to the extent possible for a game that makes sense. Sleep Clause seems pretty necessary, so it's probably necessary to compromise the ideal of total fidelity on that front.

Nah. There's a version of Sleep Clause that doesn't break fidelity (restrict the selection rather than negate the effect).

I'm not sure it's 100% necessary, since RestTalk is so good in GSC, but I don't have a huge issue with it because as I said it needn't break fidelity (in GSC and RBY, anyway).

Honestly I'm not opposed to a Mean Look/Spider Web ban like what was (is still?) implemented on the PP server. Just so much brainless bullshit associated with that move, you get free kills just by pulling the lever hoping for the 10% or whatever (and that's even after banning shit like HypnoMissy, and let's not even talk about SporeTrapPass Smeargle). Sure Missy basically goes to shit, and Jynx is a Sleep Trapper that generally isn't too contentious (without Perish Song anyway), but honestly it seems worth it to me because trapping shenanigans (even those "acceptable" ones) are such a dumb way to lose a match lol.

Ultimately, this seems like the only simple ban that can do it. Which sucks, but whatever.


Otherwise, you've got agreement on everything except bans. Lax/Celery bans mean Raikou hits 80% usage, and I don't think that's really disputed (what's disputed is how fun that would be). And banning PsychoCats/SuperBirds/Celery/Adipose/Legends Electric is starting to get kinda close to having a functioning tier entirely overhead, so in that case I say make Ubers the 1U tier and the 2U the "OU with bans" one. Mostly a definitional thing.

 

[Ortheore]

@Jame$ G I wouldn't take what we're discussing in these threads as being strictly indicative of where we go- it's all ideas at this stage, and there's a considerable group of ppl who are fine with things the way they are. I don't know what will happen to 1U, at this stage it's just discussion.

Regarding clauses I think things are fine the way they are. OHKO and evasion I think would all be absolutely toxic, regardless of whether or not they are broken. Item clause is interesting, but I agree with Jorgen in that it's just different, and a huge shock to the dynamic of play

EDIT: Should've said that I think we can do away with freeze clause, I'm not a fan of self-KO and sleep ought to be changed to be mechanically accurate

Personally, I'm with Jorgen in not being a fan of Mean Look/Spider Web. When I initially rebooted GSC seasons I was planning to implement that, but ppl weren't happy with it so I opted for PO's ban instead. I think PerishTrap is a really stupidly cheesy way to win games, especially because it's very possible to stack the odds in your favour. That said, when I calculated the odds of PerishTrap actually working I got a probability of roughly 10%, which I don't find too egregious. However that may be just my rby background talking

m9m, about your last comment, the issue with your 1U/2U proposal is that it'd likely be inconsistent with our tiering approach- if we make ubers 1U then use viability to determine 2U there's a lot of stuff that gets caught in 1U that isn't really thought of as potentially bannable in OU. Off the top of my head Steelix and Forry are both A rank in the viability rankings thread, so they'd probably get caught out.

 

[Plancklength]

I'd like to point out that something being in a higher tier doesn't necessarily mean it would be broken in a lower tier, although using an ubers-type tier like GSC without bans with very high degrees of centralization is almost certainly going to lead to strange results.

Also I am in agreement with basically everything jorgen said, and while I think gsc minus leftovers is an interesting thought experiment, I'm generally opposed to item clauses unless it's some sort of horrible hax item (brightpowder, etc.) or is like soul dew where it makes an otherwise non-broken mon broken, without having any impact on any other mons.

Banning trapping seems like a decent idea to me, since it's almost always kinda gross and it eliminates a complex ban (also technically if we banned missy for hypno missy, to get rid of the clause, I would feel like we're obligated to ban all the other users of sleep move+perish song+trapping, which are gastly, haunter, gengar, jynx, smoochum, and smeargle).

Also the way I see it is that traditional gsc ou has 3 mons that are more or less proven broken/overcentralizing, so we ban them, and then we keep banning whatever's broken after their ban until we get a balanced tier, even if we have to do weird looking stuff like banning vaporeon or w/e).

I maintain that hp/shiny restrictions are bad, especially the incredibly specific hp electrics ban.

Also freeze clause seems unnecessary, since freeze actually ends in gsc and is a rarer occurrence, iirc, and if you're that worried about hax, you can keep a cleric around, but yeah ohko/evasion clauses and sleep clauses are important to having a non bs meta, so we should keep them.

 

[Jame$ G]

You can't balance this tier by banning stuff, no matter what you ban there will always be a hierarchy, and there will always be something at the top of it. When the most dominant pokemon in the tier is also the slowest, that is very nice balance, it means there is always a way to beat it. When the dominant pokemon is high up in the speed stats, that's when you have a "dominance" problem; speed differential is the key to your ability to counter your opponent, that is the single biggest fundamental to this game. That is the reason Snorlax was made the strongest, the designers wanted you to use your brain and understand that the principle of this game is that strategy trumps stats. You remove snorlax you are going to create a problem, Snorlax exists to stop everything that would be otherwise "too dominant" while not adversly being too dominant in itself, it was actually a very difficuilt pokemon to create to be able to execute its roll effectively, but believe it or not it works for what it was designed for.

Test your tier proposals and you will see what I mean.

 

[magic9mushroom]

You can't balance this tier by banning stuff, no matter what you ban there will always be a hierarchy, and there will always be something at the top of it. When the most dominant pokemon in the tier is also the slowest, that is very nice balance, it means there is always a way to beat it. When the dominant pokemon is high up in the speed stats, that's when you have a "dominance" problem; speed differential is the key to your ability to counter your opponent, that is the single biggest fundamental to this game. That is the reason Snorlax was made the strongest, the designers wanted you to use your brain and understand that the principle of this game is that strategy trumps stats. You remove snorlax you are going to create a problem, Snorlax exists to stop everything that would be otherwise "too dominant" while not adversly being too dominant in itself, it was actually a very difficuilt pokemon to create to be able to execute its roll effectively, but believe it or not it works for what it was designed for.

Test your tier proposals and you will see what I mean.

>implying GameFreak intended for GSC OU to be the primary tier, when they weren't the ones who defined it

I'd like to see a shred of evidence that this is so. Just a shred.

 

[Disaster Area]

You can't balance this tier by banning stuff, no matter what you ban there will always be a hierarchy, and there will always be something at the top of it. When the most dominant pokemon in the tier is also the slowest, that is very nice balance, it means there is always a way to beat it. When the dominant pokemon is high up in the speed stats, that's when you have a "dominance" problem; speed differential is the key to your ability to counter your opponent, that is the single biggest fundamental to this game. That is the reason Snorlax was made the strongest, the designers wanted you to use your brain and understand that the principle of this game is that strategy trumps stats. You remove snorlax you are going to create a problem, Snorlax exists to stop everything that would be otherwise "too dominant" while not adversly being too dominant in itself, it was actually a very difficuilt pokemon to create to be able to execute its roll effectively, but believe it or not it works for what it was designed for.

Test your tier proposals and you will see what I mean.

I'd also like to question: are you saying there'll always be one or two Pokemon in GSC that will be super-dominant, or are you saying there'll always be a top Pokemon? The latter is fairly trivial and acknowledged in our tiering; the question is more, will there always be a small amount of super-dominant Pokemon in GSC? In RBY, such a thing is pretty evident without doing possibly some ridiculous number of bans, but in GSC I don't know enough to comment. So are you saying that no matter how many bans (within reason) are made, there'll always be a very small number of super-dominant Pokemon?

 

[Jame$ G]

Well Gamefreak actually seperated super legendaries in the official tournaments, so to an extent, yes only they didn't impose the other bans. Sorry I was a little enthusiastic with the last one. But yes someone wrote an article about this many years ago, either on Pojo or Serebi I don't remember and I'm not going to find it. But the gist is that Snorlax works as a game leveller, I've always agreed with that, I certainly find it a lot easier to deal with than a charged up Tentacruel when you have no way to stop it. Lax can always be slept, exploded, encored, destiny bonded, something which is tougher to do to faster pokemon. And yes, I believe you'll always have a top dog, irrespective of what you ban, idk maybe you'll prove me wrong but I can see Tentacruel and growtheons will run havoc when you take out the big 3, ban them and Porygon and Machamp will be a problem, ban them then Muk and T.tar go to the top, and so on and so fourth. I guess the only way to know for sure will be to try it out

 

[magic9mushroom]

And yes, I believe you'll always have a top dog, irrespective of what you ban, idk maybe you'll prove me wrong but I can see Tentacruel and growtheons will run havoc when you take out the big 3, ban them and Porygon and Machamp will be a problem, ban them then Muk and T.tar go to the top, and so on and so fourth. I guess the only way to know for sure will be to try it out

Except DA didn't say "top dog". He said "super-dominant like Lax in OU". I mean even Ubers doesn't have a mon as broken as Lax in OU (Lugia has a full counter in Zapdos).

Also, all the official ones were choose-3-Pokemon, weren't at level 100 and had Item Clause. And the Crystal one only banned event legends.

 

[Jame$ G]

The events I went to were prime cup ruleset, yes but if you turned up with sub lv. 100 pokes you would get laughed at. Anyway this is the kind of team you'll end up with on the proposed changes:

Jolteon
Growth, thunder, hp ice, baton pass

Espeon
Growth, psychic, hp water, Morning sun

Tentacruel
Substitute, swords dance, sludge bomb, hydro pump

Umbreon
Charm, pursuit, baton pass, rest

Skarmory
Toxic, drill peck, whirlwind, rest

Miltank
Psych up, return, heal bell, milk drink

Without the big 3 I just can't see anyway of countering this team other than growtheoning straight back..

 

[Ortheore]

My thoughts at this point are that either we accept the OU ruleset or we scrap it and start again. Either way, I think there ought to be discussion of what clauses are used, because freeze clause just seems totally unnecessary to me.

If we scrap and start again, that simply means starting with Ubers and then banning the pokemon that are unhealthy there. So initially the tier would have all pokemon but then we'd ban whatever's bad, based on playtesting and discussion.

I think starting with all these proposals is a flawed approach because there's just way too much theorymon going on and it's practically impossible to test all these different rulesets. Not to mention that there's no reason the tiering system shouldn't be applied to 1U.

Personally, I think we ought to make a new ruleset, as it's more consistent and I really believe we can create a meta that is more enjoyable than the existing one

 

[Jame$ G]

Only real hangup I have with the freeze clause is you can guaruntee some comedian is going to try a team of 6 pokes with reflect, light screen, sand attack, ice beam and that would probably be about as much fun as hemorrhoids. But y'know it was an open topic so I was just pointing out the possible down sides I see, obviously I'm not in support of it myself but this your proposal, not mine, just wanted to explain my angle

 

[magic9mushroom]

Only real hangup I have with the freeze clause is you can guaruntee some comedian is going to try a team of 6 pokes with reflect, light screen, sand attack, ice beam and that would probably be about as much fun as hemorrhoids.

Heal Bell and RestTalk both deal with this pretty well.

I've no objections to Ubers, but we know the Ubers meta fairly well and if you consider Lugia/Mewtwo/Mew/Snorlax in Ubers to need bans (which I don't, really, but w/e) you might as well start testing with those four gone.

 

[Jame$ G]

I guess so but still, 6 x 16pp = 96pp or fair chance to be able to freeze 9.6 times in a match, heal bell has 8pp, you could probably just about fight back as long your beller doesn't get frozen, I'm also assuming we're not running ice punch over ice beam anywhere, which would be a logical route if the teams function is to freeze spam.

I've had a team made of: Raikou, Cloyster, Snorlax, Ho-Oh, Steelix, Celebi loaded into my emulator for a while now, I've tested against it extensively with both uber and OU teams and I've found it a bit of a handfull with OU; sunnybeam ho-oh is very hard to find an answer for; you really need some legendary thunder to ensure it can't recover off the damage quicker than you can hand it out (due to its titanic special defense stat) and that goes out the window once weather is activated. Rest talk ho-ohs are tricky too, especially if S.fire and A.power are your attacks and it gets a boost, how do you deal with that? Leech seed Celebi is a real bitch to kill too, doesn't really threaten much but it has the ability to cover its counters in ou, as well as simply out last them with leech seed. I'm interested to hear how other people would approach these threats? Snorlax, Suicune and T.tar are the obvious choices but still a bit of a struggle if the said team has switch ins to cover them.

Personally I think Mewtwo is a little better than Snorlax too, it always plays a commanding role, even if at the expense of killing itself. There is actually nothing in the game that Mewtwo is guaranteed to lose against, one movesest to another it can be customized to take down anything. E.g. Lax slayer sets: Barrier, Psychic, Rest, Sleep Talk / Curse, Substitute, Psychic, Selfdestruct. Even my standard Mewtwo set of Reflect, Psychic, Thunder, Recover I find very hard to beat with Snorlax, all you can really do is shoot for the lovely kiss, otherwise you just gotta stall and hope you don't get the special drop.

 

[magic9mushroom]

I guess so but still, 6 x 16pp = 96pp or fair chance to be able to freeze 9.6 times in a match, heal bell has 8pp, you could probably just about fight back as long your beller doesn't get frozen, I'm also assuming we're not running ice punch over ice beam anywhere, which would be a logical route if the teams function is to freeze spam.

If you're spending several Pokemon on dedicated freezers, your opponent can wait until you get 2-3 freezes before Belling. And I mean that specific set is crap because you don't have recovery and you have to spend a third of your turns refreshing your screens; you're fairly unlikely to be able to run the PP dry.

 

[Moon Light]

What centralize the metagame? Snorlax and electrics.

I think that the reason why snorlax is overpowered is the curse set, which always needs at least one dedicated counter or you just lose 6-0 to it.
Once you ban curse on snorlax, it becomes "only" a very strong pokemon, but it isn't anymore a ridicolous bulky mon who can take any hit and isn't scared by explosions.
Drumlax, 4atklax, and the stall-ish 3atk lax+rest aren't something you call uber, do you?

Now, with the ban of curse snorlax, i think electrics become too overpowered, so ban hp electrics too. There are no switchins on hp electric mons apart from snorlax, which with the ban of curse becomes less powerful; banning hp elec means you can have a safe counter for electrics, who wouldn't be so overcentralizing anymore.

In this way (ban curselax+hp electrics) i think we have a less centralized metagame with far more pokemons viable. If your answer is "we not do complex bans", i say this could be the best metagame possible speaking about centralization, and the fact that you usally don't do complex bans isn't a reason not to try them now.

On the other hand, if you just ban snorlax with all his sets and dont ban hp electrics, the electrics will just become the new snorlax, as they have no switchins apart from raikou itself. So it is a very bad idea.

If you want to mantain unbanned snorlax and electrics, i think the best thing to do is to unban also celebi to have a switchin on electrics which isn't raikou or snorlax. Celebi just loses to curselax (unless something like cursing itself or psych up) and isn't so powerful, and depending on the set is walled by many pokes. With celebi OU, more zapdos and raikou would prefer dpeck/crunch instead of hp ice, so the problem of hp electrics would be kinda resolved.

 

[Disaster Area]

What if we banned Lax/Mewtwo/Lugia/Mew and kept Celebi/Ho-oh/Electrics?