The Chicken or the Egg?

[Kevin Garrett]

Happy 2013, PokeBeach. I haven't been around in a while, so I should I share a topic for debate:

• What is the true suspect of this generation, the weather starter or the weather abuser?
• Is any of it suspect at all?

With the recent suspect test of Keldeo and Tornadus-Therian, it begs the question of what is truly suspect. This thread is not supposed to be centered around Drizzle. I am intending this more as a philosophical question. With the banning of any single weather, the rest would be likely left to follow. The current status quo is to view the abusers as suspect. Disregarding the actual policy, what are your thoughts on this topic? Since the situation with abundant weather abuse is new to this generation, feel free to call upon examples existing in past generations. Additionally, the philosophy to ban Pokemon in recent generations has become more streamlined. Once again, disregarding the policy, should any of the suspects in this generation be suspect at all? Likewise, feel free to draw conclusions from past examples in the history of Pokemon.

 

[PMJ]

I have probably written and rewritten a response to this question like five or six times and I still can't settle on one decision. On the one hand, weather is definitely a powerful force that makes a lot of Pokemon better (Venusaur, Excadrill, Tornadus to name a few).

Taking that away wouldn't make the above Pokemon completely unviable--Rain Dance + Damp Rock and Sunny Day + Heat Rock still exist, after all--but it would certainly make it harder for them to do their jobs. Rain teams existed in gen 4 and functioned just fine.

That said, we've had ~2 years of permanent weather, and only a handful of all the suspects have come about as a result of the weather, so one could definitely argue that the weather isn't the problem, it's the abuser; not only that, but not every Pokemon who can take advantage of the weather is broken.

I honestly don't know which, if either, is the more suspect.

 

[One Approved]

I have to admit, I haven't really looked at both sides of the argument until PMJ brought it up. Pretty much from the start, I've been one of the "ban all the things" people. We have suspected or almost suspected a few weather abusers that I never felt were broken (Keldeo, Landorus-I in bw1) and I always felt it would be simpler to just take the problem out by the roots, in a sense, and just ban the weather abilities. In reality, it probably would be a lot simpler, but that doesn't necessarily make it better.

As PMJ pointed out, we have had a weather-infested metagame for roughly 2 years now, and only a handful of abusers were suspected. To this day, only two weather-relying pokemon have been banned. (Excadrill and Sand Veil Garchomp being the two. Thundurus and Blaziken definitely get a boost from weather, but they do not rely on them in the same way.) If weather was so broken, why haven't more abusers been banned yet? Perhaps it is actually a case-by-case basis, and only specific abusers need to be banned, as opposed to the weather as a whole. That seemed to be the case for UU, anyways. I remember when Hail was banned because everybody knew of how "broken" it was, when in actuality, it wasn't that bad. After Kyurem and Snow Cloak got banned, they re-tested hail, and ended up bringing it back. So I can definitely see this kind of situation applying for OU as well. Perhaps the weathers aren't as bad as I originally thought they were, and maybe it's just a few abusers.