BW Tiering 1U: Autoweather

Relevant threads:

What are Tiers and Why Do We Have Them?
Tiering System
Tiering Philosophy (Discussion Thread) - Recommended reading and recommended that you post your opinions too.

---

The question:

Should our BW tiering aim to preserve the autoweather-based aspect of the game? It's likely that at some point in our tiering there will be some weather-related issues. On Smogon, they have been through a number of issues which contributed to their current clausing restricting it so that you cannot run an automatic weather ability (Drizzle / Sand Stream / Drought) and the associated speed-boosting ability (Swift Swim / Sand Rush / Chlorophyll) [note Slush Rush doesn't exist in gen 6].

 

Obligatory disclaimer that I have no interest in BW2. Also I never played any gen 5 tier much besides ubers and a little PO NU. I just wanna offer my perspective, but my thoughts shouldn't hold any direct influence on decision making.

Personally I see no reason to say from the outset that we'll preserve or remove weather wars. It's really inorganic and arbitrary, and is sorta counter to the whole idea of playing through the process and implementing rules as they're needed. Furthermore the best solution to various problems can be wildly different in different cases- to compare to PO/smog OU, in the case of Sand Rush, I would ban Exca since it's the only problematic user of the ability, while for rain I might lean more to a ban on Swift Swim since as I understand it there are multiple cases where it's broken (I'm just talking theory here though, idk how it would be in reality).

Although weather wars I think are very interesting strategically, that should not stand in the way of making optimal tiering decisions

 

What about banning Swift Swim vs banning Drizzle + Swift Swim?

 

Personally I think I would ban Swift Swim. I don't really like the idea of implementing such a broad ban, especially since there are a lot of non-broken users, but I'd rather that than that kind of complex ban. The thing that makes the most sense with my personal approach is to ban the broken users, but I genuinely don't know if that's reasonable, especially since we're talking about tiers that haven't even been made yet, there could just be too many broken pokemon, at which point you start to look at Swift Swim as a whole

 

I understand that in BW OU there was issues with Swift Swim and several users (Ludicolo Kingdra Omastar Kabutops etc.) and there were similar issues with the other weathers too (Excadrill with Sand Rush, and Venusaur and one or two other things maybe for Chlorophyll). But yea early BW days it was very clear that Swift Swim was deeply problematic so the question is whether you ban the ability itself or ban it in combination with weather or if you ban the weather; there have been some issues with the weathers themselves although the main issue has been with Swift Swim and similar abilities, but arguably there have been points in time where it's arguable the weather itself is the issue.

 

Just slap the autoweathers on the initial banlist, and then we can test if they're not broken later. Same with Scald.