I've been laddering a lot on account after account in an attempt to get reqs, but with my own teams, and am going to concede that I'm probably not quite good enough – my "true" GXE is likely somewhere in the 70%–75% range, so in order to make reqs, I would need to either get lucky on one specific suspect run or to use a better team (and I'm not sure that there'd be enough time left now to learn ta new team). Still, it's given me a lot of insight into how Tera works, and I'm really conflicted about it, so I'm not sure how I'd vote if I did have the privilege. In case it's useful to the players who do have reqs, though, I'm going to put my thoughts down here.
First, Tera is obviously incredibly powerful. This is not in its own right a reason to ban a mechanic – for example, if Game Freak decided to increase the number of Pokémon allowed on a team to 7 rather than 6, that would obviously be a ridiculous power boost that every team would have to use, but it would be unlikely to make the game uncompetitive or otherwise be something that needed banning. Instead, we have to look at the effect that it's having on the metagame to see whether it would get better or worse with a ban.
Second, the metagame is obviously broken at the moment, and many bans are going to be required to fix it. It isn't broken
solely because of Tera, though – the problems would still exist and require corrective action even after a Tera ban. For just about every broken situation that exists due to Tera, there's a comparable broken situation that has nothing to do with Tera (with the possible exception of Espathra). So to me, the question that we need to think about is really "we're going to have to ban a lot of things to make this metagame functional – is banning Tera along the way going to be the best way to do that?".
I think there are two main axes along which the metagame is broken. Tera interacts with both of these, but not in a direct "Tera makes this better" or "Tera makes this worse" sort of way, the interactions are more complex than that.
One is that the ability to do a "cleanup sweep" comes too early and is too easy. Something that happens in many Pokémon games, and is often (but not always) the primary strategy for one or both players, is that a player aims to knock out or wear down all the checks to one specific sweeper on their team, allowing them to deploy their sweeper and win the game on the spot (this can happen with both offensive and balance teams, and the designated sweeper can be planned from turn 1 or chosen during the game). That isn't a problem in its own right; the maneuvering to try to get into a position to win the game is a major part of competitive Pokémon and the reason that many of us play it, with the cleanup sweep itself being more of a victory lap at the end. The problem is that the "interesting part" of the game can be mostly obviated by the power of some of the sweepers; right now in OU we have Pokémon that have very few checks if given appropriate setup; this means that there might be no checks on the opponent's team (allowing a sweep from turn 1), and even if there are, they can be very vulnerable to being lured or being overloaded or simply being worn down by the rest of the team, meaning that the interesting part of the game is over quickly. And the problem with
that is that the setup turns are far too easy to come by, meaning that the strategy of denying the setup turn (rather than checking the sweeper) doesn't really work – so teams need multiple checks to just about everything that the opponent could be running.
Tera makes this situation worse in some respects:
- a sweeper can Tera into a radically different type in order to dodge a move that would prevent them setting up, giving a free turn to use a setup move;
- a sweeper can Tera into a type with a difficult-to-stop defensive profile, invalidating some of their usual checks because those checks no longer have a way to do significant damage;
- a Tera into your own type, or into the type of a coverage move that you need to get proper type coverage, or into the type of a priority move that you need in order to beat faster opponents, can make Pokémon significantly better at sweeping than they were beforehand.
Tera also makes this situation better in some respects:
- On Pokémon that your team doesn't normally need to Tera, you generally have free reign to use their Tera type to make them a valid "emergency check" to a cleanup sweeper you'd otherwise struggle with, giving counter-play to the strategy of throwing everything into an early-game cleanup sweep without much of a team-building cost;
- A successful defensive Tera generally gives more of a benefit than a successful offensive Tera, in that it does something that you couldn't do otherwise (the effect of an offensive Tera can generally be replicated with an additional turn or two of setup), so teams that aim to try to stop the brokenness get more of a boost from Tera's existence than teams that aim to exploit it, and removing Tera would tend to remove that balancing factor and make offense even harder to stop.
The problem of cleanup-sweeping being too strong is something that would exist with or without Tera and will likely need a number of bans to fix regardless. On the low end of the ladder (which I've played through quite a bit due to all my attempts to get reqs), doing a Tera sweep is easy and effective – but this falls off as you get higher up, with players knowing how to beat the usual suspects for this, and good sweepers for the purpose exist even without Tera needing to be involved at all. It's possible to beat an unprepared team with a Tera Normal Dragonite with 1 Dragon Dance boost. It's also possible to beat the same unprepared team with an un-Tera'd Dragonite with 2 or 3 Dragon Dance boosts, and by running a little extra bulk on Dragonite, you're likely to be able to get them. There's clearly something wrong with a metagame when I'm running Stealth Rock as
bait: if I throw rocks up and switch to Dragonite, and the unprepared opponent tries to spin with their Great Tusk that doesn't know Ice Spinner, they have lost the game; the turn they spent clicking Rapid Spin gave me two turns of setup (one as they spin, and one as they switch out to something that can 2HKO Dragonite).
So this is a problem that I think is bad at the moment, and Tera contributes to the problem but also helps to fix it. In low ladder, the problem looks like a "Tera problem" because Tera is normally involved in it – but this is more of a case of "when the game's already won, I may as well use my Tera to make sure because it's safer than relying on extra boosts, or surviving hits, to make sure". In high ladder, the problem
still exists but it's no longer particularly caused by Tera; the Tera will normally have a more important use elsewhere, and is probably better used to try to stop the sweep than set it up. There are still broken sweeps going on, but they're set up using lures, or by taking advantage of the opponent wasting time clearing hazards, or by Shed Tail, or by Pokémon that don't need Tera to sweep teams once their checks are dead (e.g. Chi-Yu).
It is also the case, though, that some specific Pokémon are much better at cleaning up a team because of Tera. Espathra is the most obvious example; Annihilape is also much better at cleaning up a team if it can Tera into something with fewer weaknesses. I'm expecting this to be a fairly short list, though, with most Pokémon either being broken even without Tera or reasonable even with Tera. That said, if we don't ban Tera, we can expect to need to ban more Pokémon from OU – it seems probable that we can create a less broken, more competitive, metagame in two different ways, either by banning Tera + some Pokémon or by not banning Tera and banning more Pokémon. For what it's worth, my preference here would be to ban the Pokémon rather than the mechanic – the Pokémon would still be usable in Ubers, and the mechanic would still be usable in lower tiers.
The metagame is also broken in a completely different way: the prevalence of "pure guess" turns, including the infamous "50-50"s. When an entire game comes down to outpredicting your opponent on one specific turn, the game is somewhat unsatisfying, and it's lead to a lot of unfun moments and feeling that the game isn't really competitive. Although this has always been a part of Pokémon, it's much worse than usual this generation.
The reason I'm conflicted about Tera with respect to these is that a) some of these guesses are due to Tera existing, but b) most of them aren't, and the ones that exist independent of Tera are more problematic than the ones caused by Tera. So there's a major problem here, but Tera is only a small portion of that problem. Banning Tera
would help here – but it would only slightly alleviate the issue and it would still be a major problem, and I'm far from convinced that it would help enough to make a relevant difference.
"Tera 50-50s" are one of the main arguments I see in favour of banning Tera, so it makes sense to write down some ways in which they're less problematic than other 50-50s:
- The cost of using your Tera is really, really high: if you use your Tera and the opponent doesn't, you are in effect choosing to lose all the Tera 50-50s for the rest of the match, and also giving your opponent information on what Tera your team will use. Additionally, you are giving up the right to Tera something else. The high cost for one of the two options means that it actually isn't a 50-50 at all; the options are weighted, with one being much more valuable than the other.
- This means that a Tera 50-50 can only be close to a true 50-50 late in a match, and only if you haven't used your Tera yet. This is a rare situation, as sometimes it's correct to use your Tera earlier (e.g. against some teams, it's worth spending a Tera and a Pokémon in order to prevent the opponents removing Toxic Spikes for the rest of the match), and often by the time that "late in a match" happens one team is sufficiently far ahead that even losing the 50-50 wouldn't lose the match. So Tera 50-50s are very rare compared to more normal 50-50s.
- Because the cost of picking the "I use my Tera" option of a 50-50 is so high, it often makes sense to simply predict the opponent to not Tera, because forcing them to spend their Tera is frequently worth sacrificing your Pokémon – after all, if the opponent can't Tera any more, it removes most of the counterplay they'd subsequently have to your sweeping attempts. In this situation, there isn't a guess involved at all.
- Tera 50-50s are therefore the most problematic in situations where you aren't planning to switch out for the rest of the match (such as when you have a set-up Dragonite on the field already) – but those situations are problematic anyway because they're symptoms of a metagame that's broken in other ways. The process of fixing the metagame to make it harder to set up a sweeper and clean-sweep a team with it would also incidentally fix most of the situations in which Tera 50-50s occur.
This isn't to argue that Tera 50-50s are a good thing – they clearly aren't! It's just that they seem like such a minor problem compared to the following, much more common, scenarios (which have nothing to do with Tera):
- Sucker Punch 50-50s, in which you have to guess whether the opponent is planning to attack, or to boost/heal;
- "Which move will the Chi-Yu use" 50-50s, in which your current Pokémon resists neither Dark nor Fire and is slower than Chi-Yu and you have to guess whether to switch to a Dark resist or a Fire resist, or the same situation from the Chi-Yu player's point of view (I've actually resorted to actual randomization on this one before now: it's very frequent, often determines the game result, and it's quite common for the two options to be perfectly balanced)
- Make It Rain 50-50s, in which you have to guess whether to switch out of a Make It Rain or stay in on a Shadow Ball from Gholdengo (getting this guess right normally buys you a setup turn, which in this metagame, can often win the game)
…together with all the less finely balanced guesses that we're familiar with from competitive Pokémon, mostly related to switching in on predicted attacks, or guessing what moves or items an opposing Pokémon has (these guesses are worse than normal because scouting can be too risky in a metagame where setup turns have such impact – scouting can give your opponent a free setup turn, and thus lose you the game)
…together with randomness that isn't pure guesses, which is also more prevalent than usual this generation:
- Critical hits seem to have become more relevant as a game mechanic due to things like Dondozo and Garganacl, in which you often have a limited number of opportunities beat them with a critical hit, maybe 6-8 or so, which puts the chance of getting the crit you need uncomfortably (and uncompetitively) close to 50%;
- Sleep Talk picks moves randomly, which matters a lot on Dondozo (and I also saw someone using Sleep Talk + Revival Blessing which had a huge randomization effect on the game results);
- Misses are interesting, and one argument for banning Tera – significantly-below-100%-accuracy moves for a Pokémon's natural STABs aren't required as often as they used to be, but are often good choices for a STAB gained through Tera (e.g. special Tera Fighting Pokémon are rare but often use Focus Blast when they are used), so banning Tera would probably help with these
So, we have a couple of major problems in the metagame, and banning Tera would make one problem better in some ways but worse in other ways, and would have a very small positive impact on the other problem but not enough to significantly change things. It would also reduce the number of Pokémon bans required to make the metagame functional. Having written all this out, I think I lean towards not banning, but I'm still not sure what I think.
What about the partial-ban suggestions?:
- Banning Tera into a new type (i.e. restricting Tera to STAB only) is going to exacerbate the problem that cleanup-sweeps are too easy, and although it'll address many of the Tera 50-50s, I suspect that this would make things worse on average than either an unban or a total ban.
- Limiting Tera to one specific Pokémon limits the ability to use Tera defensively more than it limits the ability to use it offensively, and thus will likely exacerbate the first issue without fixing the second.
- Showing Tera types in team preview is likely to have only a minimal impact on the issues I've identified here. It takes some of the guesswork out of attempting to set up a sweep of the entire enemy team by meaning that you can do it on "thinner margins" – at present, attempting to do this means that you need a backup strategy in case your opponent has a Tera ready to stop you, whereas if Tera types were shown in team preview, you could safely "go for it" without needing that safety margin. Whether this makes the metagame more or less competitive will depend on player behaviour with Tera unbanned – if the players decide to go for it anyway, then we'll get the occasional Tera blowouts of attempted setup sweeps, whereas if they're more cautious, then the metagame with unrestricted Tera is definitely better. It also means that "Tera 50-50s" become true 50-50s more often: at present, you can sometimes win a 50-50 by concealing the fact that it exists from your opponent, so the situation is asymmetrical and thus not a pure guess; whereas if the Tera type is revealed in team preview, the opponent will know that the 50-50 exists and thus the situation becomes more of a guess than a case of trying to reason out the opponent's team.
As a consequence, none of these seem like a clear improvement over the present situation – I'm leaning towards considering the two best options to be no action and a full Tera ban, with the partial bans being worse than those. I guess that if I had the ability to vote, I'd vote for "no action", but "full ban" as my first choice in the second vote (with "Tera preview" as the next-best option) – but I'm still very unsure and could change my mind! This isn't a "no action" based on the metagame being functional, though – the metagame is very much broken, it's just that I don't think banning Tera will do enough to fix it, and might in fact make things worse. We're going to have to look to harder solutions to fix things, most likely banning quite a lot of Pokémon, and maybe some moves, from OU.
