Except Zygarde-10% was not the only form with Power Construct. 50% had it too and Power Construct was broken on that too. And this happened BEFORE Zygarde-50% proved itself broken enough to get banned on its own merits anyway.
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4 [Kyurem suspect now up]
- Thread starter TPP
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Except Zygarde-10% was not the only form with Power Construct. 50% had it too and Power Construct was broken on that too. And this happened BEFORE Zygarde-50% proved itself broken enough to get banned on its own merits anyway.
That's true, but at the same time Serperior doesn't need to stop its offensive momentum in order to set up - its strongest STAB literally also functions as Nasty Plot - additionally, Serperior invalidates whole playstyles like Sticky Webs thanks to Contrary and its MU fishing is more deadly than Volc's imo due to the ease of Tera Fire/Tera Ground melting things.
Enamorus is better right now than it was in Pre-DLC or DLC1 by a pretty notable margin (especially Scarf variants as they can outspeed Deo-S). STAB Moonblast combined with Earth Power, Contrary Superpower, Sludge Bomb, etc. is POTENT right now.
Except then we banned Zygarde-50% anyway, so it only made one Pokémon broken that was OU legal in the end, that’s my point. Zygarde-10% was not broken without its signature ability, yet we banned the signature ability. But we DIDN’T ban Gorilla Tactics or Libero in the past to balance the Pokémon they were attached to despite being collateral-less bans. Why did only Power Construct stay banned then? Why didn’t we ban Zygarde-10%? As far as I can tell, that’s literally OU precedent to ban a signature tool on one Pokémon to keep a 700 BST mon out of the tier, not Ubers precedent.
And “oh but we banned it when it was on two Pokémon” is incredibly semantic and doesn’t hold water when we continued to uphold the ban once one of those two got banned regardless. I see no reason why we’re not allowed a Policy Review DISCUSSION at the very least on Terapagos considering it literally cannot be compared to any single Pokémon, including Ogerpon and therefore sets an entirely new precedent. I’ll shut up if the Zygarde point is addressed, but as someone who is usually very supportive of the council, I genuinely do not like the decision to seemingly brush this off with hand-wavey inaccurate comparisons.
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btw does anyone know effective set to use this guy?
I assume its decent Pokemon but best idea I got was Scarf set for Ribombee and revenge killing. Funny since as soon as I dropped it off the team I was using, I immediately encounter Ribombee because of course I would.
Iron Crown @ Grassy Seed
Ability: Quark Drive
Tera Type: Water/Fighting
EVs: 252 Hp / 144 SpA / 112 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Agility / Iron Defense
- Calm Mind
- Tachyon Cutter / Focus Blast
- Stored Power
A Stored Power set in both Screens and Grassy Terrain
This is a good thing actually, fuck Webs being good. When Gholdengo goes (forgot to mention it in my original post, its worse for OU Meta than Gliscor despite me thinking Gliscor not belonging either), Webs will be a respectable playstyle, right now its another form of HO, which needs to be nerfed in several ways.
Hi, imo comparing Terapagos to Ogerpon is misleading. Tiering is based on Pokemon forms, which are define by typing + stats. Terapagos-Stellar has different stats from Terapagos-Terastal. This means Terapagos-Terastal and Terapagos-Stellar should be two different forms based on the current definition and allow them to be tiered separately. Imo it would make more sense to compare Terapagos-Stellar / Terastal to mega evolutions than to Ogerpon.
I'll throw my hat in the ring about the turtle of a very healthy mmeta while I'm here. Stellar-Terapagos is most definetly too much for the tier, no notes, and if base terapagos needs to go as well, then so be it, policy is policy. I just feel like as a community, we let ourselves get held back by relying on precedents all the time. Generally, they're for the best, they're followed for a reason, but gf doesn't balance around our meticulous rules, and mons like terapagos are most definetly one that really lacks a precedent. Gamefreak never dropped a mon like it and likely never will again, and it's gimmick form is def staying entirely in this gen. But I feel like our dedication to bureaucracy and procedure would potentially end up barring something that might be a healthy and well-needed part of the meta, and we would be remiss to let something that potentially be so beneficial to pass us by without giving it a try if nothing else. If anything, I advocate for some tournament of OU in the future once all the immediate problems get axed and things stabilize, that is sort of a trial test of terapagos where its super form is banned, to gauge if its positive qualities are enough to consider giving it a special ban. Complex bans are like, iffy, I know, but sometimes the hand thats dealt to us is, complex. Then again I'm no big shot, im a mid player at best so im probably just spouting nonsense, but it's my thoughts on the matter, idealistic and wishful as it is.
Even though I agree that bans on the early days of any meta should be delayed and I absolutely love and adore the chaos-pit status of OU right now (and any budding meta, for that matter), Terapagos-S is way too broken to allow it to stay any further and should be banned ASAP. It deserved to be tested because it's a new mon that is kind of a Box Legendary, kind of a Mythical pokemon, kind of a semi-legendary, so we didn't know where it would fit and OU is the "by default" location for such mons; but with the tera form available to it, it leans too badly into "Box legendary" territory to be allowed for longer than a week. If we can make that time-span 2~3 days, then even better!
There are plenty other mons that may require attention, my personal number 2 problem being Deoxys-S, but none of them are urgent and we can have a few weeks/month with them without major issues. Terapagos-Stellar IS urgent, imo.
Also still think that we should do something about hazards, but after LITERALLY ZERO new defoggers came out in DLC2, yet a whole new bunch of Rockers and Spikers appeared, I do fully agree now that "ban Gholdengo" is just not enough anymore. But something will have to be done eventually.
More importantly, while I don't really care about keeping or not the base form of Terapagos, and do think that base Firepon being "balanced and ok for OU" is VERY debatable (it's just better Waterpon offensively, and Waterpon was already borderline), I do think there's a more important point to start considering here, and that is the potential need for precedent on banning exclusive moves and battle forms.
Mega were introduced in Gen 6 as a battle form added to many pokemons. Multiple of these were broken (all additions to the game since Abilities have broken some things here or there), but the mechanic required an item, so tiering against it could be done without stepping into new precedents by just banning the item (although PS! actually has it as "can't have X specific item on Y specific pokemon" complex ban-like). Then they released Mega-Rayquaza, which was the next step in this direction of battle forms that could Mega with no item, instead needing to have specific, exclusive move and "clicking the funny button". But because that was a Rayquaza thing, it was Ubers' problem, and they're the ones that had to come up with a solution. Could've banned the exclusive move, could've banned Rayquaza entirely, could've banned the Mega-form alone. And they made a choice.
Gen 7 brought Z-Moves, which were divisive themselves, but only caused form-changes on Necrozma (again Ubers' problem) and OU didn't have to care about forms. Exclusive moves and abilities, specially abilities, started to become more common, but not really problematic.
Gen 8 brought Dynamax and Gigantamax. Most gigantamax forms were not as broken as Dynamax itself, and the mechanic was simply banned entirely because of how ridiculously stupid it was. But we could start to see how game design for Pokemons started to drift from the more "normal" designs of old times where differences between mons were in the details, into more "blatantly unique" designs with exclusive moves, exclusive abilities and exclusive forms being given to many pokemons. Again, we didn't have to care about the details here because Dynamax was broken on its own, and most Gigantamax were actually usually less broken.
In terms of exclusive moves, Bolt Beak and Fishious Rend were contentious, but we leaned to just ban the broken abusers due to other 2 mons existing that technically could use them, but were too slow on their own to make any good use of them.
But now, in Gen 9, we're still seeing these same tendencies. We had to spend time with Houndstone and Cyclizar banned because of Last Respects and Shed Tail and "policy giving priority to banning pokemons over moves", only to end up months later having to ban the moves anyway when other mons got it (Basculegion) or the other mons with it became OU for no other reason (Orthworm).
We also have the new mechanic of Tera, which effectively gave every pokemon a "battle form change" of sorts, and added additional exclusive forms to Ogerpon and Terapagos, which this time are OU by default of not being box legendaries and so this time, for the first time, OU has to make a decision. And the decision is to "follow precedent" and banned the whole whenever one of its parts gets broken. Which is fair. But let's not forget that there was discussion of making a Tera-banlist back in the day, and banning specific mons that abused the mechanic too much not only was considered, but was argued to be close, if not in form, at least in spirit to how Megas were treated.
Like, what I'm trying to say with all that is that, even if I don't disagree with any of these individual decisions, when seen as a whole, I can't help but feel like the established precedent is reaching the limits of its utility, and that modern Pokemon's game design will force us to shift these policies sooner rather than later. That we will need to be more open to make bans to moves, abilities and forms over whole pokemons as a way to adapt our policies to the new form of Pokemon as a game, whether or not we agree on this new design policy. And if so, now is as good a time as any to start.
But again, just a feeling; not trying to tell anyone how they should do their job. Maybe I'm just hurting from the ridiculous power creep and poor balancing of this gen as a whole and I'm reading too much into it.
There are plenty other mons that may require attention, my personal number 2 problem being Deoxys-S, but none of them are urgent and we can have a few weeks/month with them without major issues. Terapagos-Stellar IS urgent, imo.
Also still think that we should do something about hazards, but after LITERALLY ZERO new defoggers came out in DLC2, yet a whole new bunch of Rockers and Spikers appeared, I do fully agree now that "ban Gholdengo" is just not enough anymore. But something will have to be done eventually.
More importantly, while I don't really care about keeping or not the base form of Terapagos, and do think that base Firepon being "balanced and ok for OU" is VERY debatable (it's just better Waterpon offensively, and Waterpon was already borderline), I do think there's a more important point to start considering here, and that is the potential need for precedent on banning exclusive moves and battle forms.
Mega were introduced in Gen 6 as a battle form added to many pokemons. Multiple of these were broken (all additions to the game since Abilities have broken some things here or there), but the mechanic required an item, so tiering against it could be done without stepping into new precedents by just banning the item (although PS! actually has it as "can't have X specific item on Y specific pokemon" complex ban-like). Then they released Mega-Rayquaza, which was the next step in this direction of battle forms that could Mega with no item, instead needing to have specific, exclusive move and "clicking the funny button". But because that was a Rayquaza thing, it was Ubers' problem, and they're the ones that had to come up with a solution. Could've banned the exclusive move, could've banned Rayquaza entirely, could've banned the Mega-form alone. And they made a choice.
Gen 7 brought Z-Moves, which were divisive themselves, but only caused form-changes on Necrozma (again Ubers' problem) and OU didn't have to care about forms. Exclusive moves and abilities, specially abilities, started to become more common, but not really problematic.
Gen 8 brought Dynamax and Gigantamax. Most gigantamax forms were not as broken as Dynamax itself, and the mechanic was simply banned entirely because of how ridiculously stupid it was. But we could start to see how game design for Pokemons started to drift from the more "normal" designs of old times where differences between mons were in the details, into more "blatantly unique" designs with exclusive moves, exclusive abilities and exclusive forms being given to many pokemons. Again, we didn't have to care about the details here because Dynamax was broken on its own, and most Gigantamax were actually usually less broken.
In terms of exclusive moves, Bolt Beak and Fishious Rend were contentious, but we leaned to just ban the broken abusers due to other 2 mons existing that technically could use them, but were too slow on their own to make any good use of them.
But now, in Gen 9, we're still seeing these same tendencies. We had to spend time with Houndstone and Cyclizar banned because of Last Respects and Shed Tail and "policy giving priority to banning pokemons over moves", only to end up months later having to ban the moves anyway when other mons got it (Basculegion) or the other mons with it became OU for no other reason (Orthworm).
We also have the new mechanic of Tera, which effectively gave every pokemon a "battle form change" of sorts, and added additional exclusive forms to Ogerpon and Terapagos, which this time are OU by default of not being box legendaries and so this time, for the first time, OU has to make a decision. And the decision is to "follow precedent" and banned the whole whenever one of its parts gets broken. Which is fair. But let's not forget that there was discussion of making a Tera-banlist back in the day, and banning specific mons that abused the mechanic too much not only was considered, but was argued to be close, if not in form, at least in spirit to how Megas were treated.
Like, what I'm trying to say with all that is that, even if I don't disagree with any of these individual decisions, when seen as a whole, I can't help but feel like the established precedent is reaching the limits of its utility, and that modern Pokemon's game design will force us to shift these policies sooner rather than later. That we will need to be more open to make bans to moves, abilities and forms over whole pokemons as a way to adapt our policies to the new form of Pokemon as a game, whether or not we agree on this new design policy. And if so, now is as good a time as any to start.
But again, just a feeling; not trying to tell anyone how they should do their job. Maybe I'm just hurting from the ridiculous power creep and poor balancing of this gen as a whole and I'm reading too much into it.
The same reason rage fist wasn't banned despite ape being broken with it
There has to be proof that the move breaks the pokemon, and not the pokemon just being broken with that tool
Lets run through the chain of events
>Zygod drops his merciful ass upon us
>we ban the ability power construct because multiple "mons" could have it, and i guess it was a different time point is we banned the ability on everything that had it
>some time later, zygarde 50 is also banned
>we just never get to zy10 because its pitiful in comparison. Low tier OU the mon
Basically, we banned the ability, then a mon, and fucking hell if we're gonna unban PC because a heckin doggarino is the only legal mon with it
There was a long time between these bans. Zygaede-50% was perfectly legal when Power Construct was banned. Your entire post is aimless and moot.
I understand the chain of events. The end result is the same. We banned an ability only one Pokémon could even use because it broke that Pokémon SPECIFICALLY by turning it into an entirely different form, a 708 BST demon. At the time we banned the ability, it broke two Pokémon. This doesn’t change my argument.
I mean you’re entitled to draw whatever distinction you want, but tiering doesn’t subscribe to this cross-section that you point out and that’s a larger discussion that goes way over my head.
Within the current rules and precedent, the Pokemon ban is clearly proper.
Honestly, I think these DLC drops have hampered Gholdengo quite a bit. Don't get me wrong, it's still a GREAT mon, definitely an OU staple, but there are a lot more options to deal with it now. Gholdengo does not like the reign of Dark-types in OU right now, nor the presence of beefy threats like Raging Bolt, Gouging Fire, and others. Any time I see Gholdengo come in, it's usually just coming in to try and get a 'Make It Rain' off before its air balloon gets popped. HO getting nerfed would be one of the best benefits of a Serp yeet imo, even if you don't like Webs being good, Serp can blow holes in specific team cores in a way that's impossible to properly prepare for.
Hi, can you reconcile these two differing statements? Did it break one pokemon, or two?
There's no point of trying to argue about Terapagos. It's going to end up banned and all possible criticism/comparisons will either be shrugged off or be answered with non-responses. It'll be freed again when Tera gets the boot anyways.
How's everyone feeling about Volcarona? I missed using it so much and it's such a blast to use when it gets going with QD's. Missed this thing a lot.
How's everyone feeling about Volcarona? I missed using it so much and it's such a blast to use when it gets going with QD's. Missed this thing a lot.
I feel like most Ubers would feel like that first day. Of course they have their counters even in regular Pokemon, but are banned because they are overwhelming and because those counters end up being checks as more sets raise up. Also pretty sure most Ubers you can’t just bring 1 Pokemon and expect to win against competent players, besides maybe Calyrex-S.
Terapagos can easily adapt by running Specs sets, using Stored Power + Aura Sphere, running Toxic, etc.
Also I don’t bother running much bulk on Terapagos. I prefer hitting key speed benchmarks and max SpA, as Terapagos is already absurdly bulky. It also can run Rest+Chesto to make it less killable too.
This shit is so fucking annoying. I spent an hour of my day discussing this with council/tiering admin and then giving the actual responses. Brushing it off as a “non-response” is absurdly rude.
Bans get revisited often. We’ve had lower tiers adjust their banning policy to unban certain Pokémon once abilities or items they could use or abuse get banned instead. We specifically did not adjust for Zygarde-10% being the only Pokémon to use Power Construct. That was a conscious decision, and one I happen to agree with.
As an aside, you’re normally a very respectful poster, so I have to admit it feels a bit rude to be told things like my post is “aimless and moot”. I understand you’re under a lot of stress right now with the new tier and people being rude to you and all, but when it comes to Terapagos, it feels like you’ve been a bit more dismissive in terms of tackling actual comparisons, and I’m a bit hurt. Maybe I’m just being sensitive, I dunno.
It seemed like it broke two Pokémon at first, but then it turned out one of those two was broken by its own merit. So the correct answer is it broke one Pokémon. Honestly I don’t think it matters whether it broke two or one that much, but yeah, it only broke one Pokémon.
Anyway, I’ll end it here. Finch is clearly stressed and I’ve made my point as fine as I can. I just want at least a Policy Review discussion to happen on Terapagos ideally, but at the end of the day, if regular Terapagos gets banned too, I’ll live.
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Your initial post said something that was moot and framed the situation without the only important context, so I called it moot.
As a moderator, discussion of this was disallowed pages ago with approval on the decision from tiering admins, yet you guys continue to discuss it and outright miss information. That is far more rude than me just stating factual information: the ban of Power Construct was due to multiple Pokemon using it.
It seems like things are getting heated in here regarding Terapagos; I've avoided talking about it for a reason, but I'd like to make my as neutral as possible viewpoints known on it for the record because it seems like the entire meta-discussion is just jumping between dismissals, frustrations, and cyclical discussion.
- I do feel it's banworthy, but IMO it's banworthy due to its wide variety of moveset options, not its power. It's possible to stop if you're prepared for it, but you can't be prepared for all variants, too much teambuilding pressure. If it was less bulky I'd say staying could be a possibility, but it can take hits way too well.
- The conversation of "complex bans" feels reductive. As Finchinator stated, Zygarde-100%/50% are different Pokemon entirely where Zygarde's ability activation for 100% is based entirely on an HP threshold rather than Terapagos's user input for a meta-wide mechanic "Stellar Tera". That is the major difference between Zygarde and Terror Turtle, at least in my eyes; Power Construct is a Pokemon-specific warp, while Stellar Tera can apply to all Pokemon but is arguably only broken on Terapagos.
Edit: Didn't see discussion was disallowed on this because posts were flying in so fast, my bad.
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I apologize; I read the pages and I didn’t see anyone state anywhere that discussion was banned on it. I will stop here.
EDIT: Nevermind, my initial post didn’t mention 50%, I apologize. I just clarified it in additional posts.
It’s all good. It’s very clear people are passionate about the subject and I respect that a ton, but I also think there’s a whole tier of new Pokemon to discuss and just don’t want everyone to get burnt out on this
That's my view on it. When you look at its stats and typing, Terapagos doesn't look all that threatening, but then you look at its Movepool and... jesus. That's a lot of stuff. You can never be sure WHAT Terapagos is running- it's got a movepool to rival Mew, with stats better than Mew, and an ability that is so much better than Mew's it's ridiculous.
You can never truly be sure of what Terapagos is running, because it could always potentially have the fringe option to beat your designated Terapagos checks (there are no counters).
In that case...
I would like to apologize to Raging Bolt, I thought he was going to be mid in OU, but its pretty good bulk and dumb as hell signature move coming off of a base 137 SpA
Any other mons you guys underestimated going into the DLC?
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