FlareBlitz was the only person there at the time. We discussed their performance against some of the top bulky waters in the metagame and he eventually agreed that there is a difference between the two.
Of course there's a difference - Snover is clearly worse. But it's not worse enough that banning Abomasnow would have been a significant enough nerf to hail as a playstyle. If you recall, you said "abomasnow's wood hammer lets it beat bulky waters easier" and I pointed out that snover's leech seed / wood hammer did the exact same thing against every major bulky water, since unless both pokemon use Leech Seed first, they will both lose to offensive variants of things like Suicune. I certainly don't recall agreeing that there's a difference between the two pokemon such that hail's existence wouldn't still make hail overpowered.
Incidentally I think IRC - the UU channel at least - has too much politics to be enjoyable. Did you know that one day when you weren't there, certain people got into a discussion about how horrible the senators are, and how in particular your post about why Deoxys-S should be OU is laughable?
I think politics would be something like "man I don't really like whistle he's a major slut". Discussing the merits of someone's post or their official capacity in real time is what IRC is for.
alexwolf said:
Anyway since you brought it up, Snover AND Abomasnow should be retested!
No. The council should definitely have better things to do with their time than bringing hail back into the tier.
Re: spikes in general.
I don't like the reasons people are giving in support of the existence of such easy spikes in this metagame. Probably the most convincing post on the matter was from Heysup last time (the thread was closed before I had time to respond and I don't really want to drag it here), where he acknowledges that spikes are easy to get but questions their value in breaking certain offensive threats. That's a fair argument. "Most spikes players are dum-dums" is not a fair argument.
We have an incredibly large number of extremely powerful Pokemon in the tier. The only thing that prevents these pokemon from blowing right through teams is that they have certain extremely common counters (bulky waters, bulky psychics, etc). Spikes, however, makes it difficult for these pokemon to wall the things that someone who is building a team intends for them to wall. If I put a slowbro on my team with the express purpose of walling darmantian and my opponent gets full hazards on my side, well, slowbro will no longer be walling darmantian. And before someone points out the obvious, yes, this may mean I have full hazards on my opponent's side too. That does not solve the problem, it just exacerbates it - it turns offense into "who can set up / switch in first" instead of "who can play around threats using resistances the best".
There are some people who do not believe this is the case, that even with spikes, a counter can either still beat a pokemon, or was never going to beat it in the first place; so they ask, why isolate spikes? There are also people who acknowledge that this phenomenon exists in the metagame, and ask "who cares?" Which are fair questions - why should we care about the state of offense, and even if we should, what makes the existence of easy hazards "broken"?
These are questions that I, and others I'm sure, hope to eventually answer. For now, I would mostly like to ask that people focus on these topics when it comes to a discussion on spikes. I think we should first determine what their place in the metagame is before we start looking at individual spikers.
