Baton Pass in ADV NU

Disjunction

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Hello, it's another thread about changing a tier that barely anyone plays anymore. I've been waiting to bring up the topic of Baton Pass in this tier since last nupl, but there was never sufficient enough evidence to back it up since the player pool is historically very unmotivated and slow to pick up on trends. However, this nupl players are catching onto the fact that full chain baton pass is, predictably, quite cancer and easy to pilot to a win. More on that in a sec.

I'm usually a stickler for not changing these old gen lower tiers, but ADV NU is a pretty different case compared to a lot of other formats. Where a lot of tiers had an active generation to form a foundation of what is good and what is bad, the current iteration of the format did not. It was reformatted by Oglemi sometime in the past 6-8 years (so sometime in bw or xy era) and fundamentally changed with the addition of NFEs and some Pokemon like Sableye. The tier had a handful of active users playing pretty casually with each other for years and metagame developments happened pretty slowly. This is evidenced by the fact that Pokemon like Huntail and Hitmonchan were considered unstoppable metagame forces around 3 years ago, but rarely see much play nowadays. Compound this with the fact that the highest level people competed in was NUPL, where it was pretty common practice to have about 4-6 teams ready before the draft and to get a good player to reuse those teams as the season went on. Where other tiers had at least hundreds of users' battles and experiences to draw on during a critical time of development, ADV NU probably never broke into triple digits in the first year.

I'm explaining this because there was a decision to lock ADV NU's format sometime last year which you can find here. I know "set in stone" Smogon Policy is infamously destructible anyways, but I would feel some far off sense of guilt for not including why I think it's ok that I'm starting this conversation.

On the topic of full pass, the most popular team is one I made last NUPL which you can see here: https://pokepast.es/c5d7c7912c2472e8
Bare in mind this is a team I built probably in half an hour. By no means do I think this is the perfect version of BP and a more cunning and/or motivated player can probably push the playstyle even further. It works well for two reasons: Speed passing is easy in a gen where the fastest mon is 97 Base Speed and there is very little priority to speak of, and the defensive options available are barely passable for the normal status quo of offensive threats. This means you rarely even need over 2 cm boosts to just pressure everything as much as you need to with Octillery.

Here are some replays:
Noitu vs. Disjunction NUPL VII
The debut of the team. Noitu's counterplay is hoping for the correct Explosion roll/crit within the first 5 turns and doesn't get it. The team snowballs because I can get away with barely any speed investment to outspeed his entire team at +2 and set up on just about everything.

Earthworm vs neomon NUPL VIII
neomon's team is decidedly very underprepped for BP, but the little amount of counterplay available makes this less ridiculous than it looks in the replay.

Earthworm vs Triangles NUPL VIII
This is a won game but Triangles gets some timely crits with Mach Punch against subs and EW plays the mid- to end-game incorrectly. A second cm while behind sub and passing into oct wins the game relatively free.

There is counterplay available, but it's very limited. The options I know of are:
  • Offensive Taunt CM Chimecho (good mon but doesn't fit on every team)
  • Perish Song Haunter (outright worse than most other 4th moves)
  • Haze Murkrow (not even guaranteed when there are lines involving restarting the chain and getting plusle in)
  • Taunt Vigoroth (horrible mon and even worse set that I'm pretty sure doesn't even guarantee a win)
Phazing doesn't work because the only Pokemon that can viably run Roar outside of the BP matchup is Wailord, and, depressingly enough, most Roar Wailord builds just lose to a +2 Speed Octillery with no other boosts, so you can just abuse Suction Cups there. There are other picks like Roar Flareon and Whirlwind Noctowl, but they are terrible picks otherwise. In a tier like this where everything is hyper centralized and every slot has a large opportunity cost associated with it, you really cannot afford to flex suboptimal slots like this for extreme cheese like BP.

I bring this up now because it's becoming obvious it will be a problem for the rest of NUPL and it would be nice to nip the problem in the bud before the format devolves into more of this. My ideal solution is to ban statpassing altogether since there are a lot of mons that can make use of drypass (Flareon, Mawile, Plusle to name a few) and I don't think there is a sizable enough playerbase to revisit this decision with the accuracy needed if we chose to only ban speed passing or something like that. If there are people out there with enough dismay over a complex ban, then we can ban the move, but I am adamantly against any other alternative.
 

Rabia

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as one of the three people that actively plays this tier, I can confirm Baton Pass chains are uncompetitive and lack consistent/meaningful counterplay. realistically, your hopes of stopping a chain are having one of the three checks outlined in the OP or Explosion spam sorta? because of how turns work in ADV you can keep up momentum against such builds if you have multiple boom users, but having to sack multiple members to only maybe not lose to this build is really lame ngl. I think the margin for error with these sorts of builds is pretty high too and I've seen people play games absolutely terribly (the earthworm v triangles game is a great example of this) and maintain an advantageous position entirely because of the lack of good counterplay.

yeah sure we locked this tier, but given how the tier was formed and the fact so few people play it I don't see a good reason to not allow it to be further modified given this change is widely supported (from my knowledge) by active players (and no I do not care about charizardfan123's take on this thread). this would be a welcome change to the tier and would greatly improved the health of it.
 

Bughouse

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I don't actually think full baton pass is all that good in ADV NU because imo there are plenty of checks to the team, including some that are not listed in the OP like as Encore Dewgong. Frankly, most Metang can also be a problem since the team lacks physical bulk and Mawile doesn't successfully intimidate it due to Clear Body, and EQ does enough to pressure it. And as the OP noted, heavier boom offenses also pretty naturally check the team despite not having one individual counter. I also think that when the team runs into just about anything that beats it (which imo are not rare or bad mons), it very nearly auto-loses, so this isn't, say XY OU levels of dEnIsSsS Baton Pass broken-ness.

That said, I also don't object to something being done because the style is still so matchup heavy as to be a negative for the tier.

But IMO the better path is just making ADV NU align consistently with the OU clause.
Baton Pass Clause: Teams are limited to a maximum of three Baton Pass users(, and Smeargle cannot have Baton Pass in its moveset - not relevant for NU).

I don't think a full ban on stat passing is necessary, since the OU clause would already address this sort of team pretty well. I also don't think a full stat passing ban truly has minimal impact. Looking through my builder I have numerous teams that use Swords Dance or Iron Defense on BP Mawile as well as a few teams that use Agility Pass on Plusle/Minun. None of this is broken or unhealthy and none of it needs to be banned.
 
I tend to agree with Bughouse here. I don't think full pass is that good in a tier that Encore / Taunt / Phazers are actually pretty common. In addition to the Encore Dewgong, Taunt Glalie (which also has boom) and others already mentioned, I think common mons like Lum/Chesto Flareon match up pretty well as well as Restalk Roar Wailord.

That all being said, I don't care if it's truly banned but getting rid of SlowPass sets is kind of a shame so I would prefer the OU apply. FWIW I also felt the same way with ADV UU. Frankly, the ban of BP basically made the tier strictly toxic+protect spam and I generally feel it is way worse without the threat of BP being there. It is not that hard to include an encore / roar / taunt user.....
 
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Disjunction

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Encore Dewgong makes the matchup less easy for sure, and I forgot to include it, but it's still a toss up on getting the turn right or letting Plusle in for free. It's also not a very popular set nowadays as it was mainly for matching into Defensive Wailord which hardly exists anymore. It's outright worse than offensive Wailord in almost every other matchup because it has more weaknesses, is significantly weaker, and lacks boom.

With regard to explosion, you can watch this replay I had in the op: https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen3nu-442018
You have to get the explosion turn perfectly or you just sack your mon on a Substitute. Even with Salac boost from Veno most of the set up mons outspeed the majority of the tier, and it's not even a question by the time you get ID up with Maw. Metang also lets Mawile set up Iron Defense, it's not good counterplay and you can see this in the replay as well.

Taunt is only effective coming from Chimecho because, again, you outspeed everything in the tier after one turn. Since the Taunt user is expected to be slower, it's pretty common Taunt only stops you from clicking set up on the following turn. The reason other Taunt users like Vigoroth aren't effective is because none of them outscale your ability to set up. Offensive chime has the ability to do this because Delcatty cannot eat enough hits while setting up CM with a turn of downtime. You have plenty of time to

Against any Fire lead the best path is always sub down to Salac with Venomoth and pass the boost into Delcatty who is specially bulky enough to set up on Flareon. You should never risk Sleep Powder.

I think the comments about aligning the ban to OU's clause are coming from a place of having not played with the team. I'm dead positive this will still be a problem even with only 3 Pokemon able to know Baton Pass. Sets like Agility Pass Plusle and SD Pass Mawile see so little use and are pretty bad anyways. A clause like that works for OU because they already have way more counterplay available for BP, and a slight nerf to it is all they need. They also have an extremely active playerbase that can go back and adjust the ban if it's not enough. We don't have either of those luxuries and a second thread coming back to this in a year because BP is still causing problems sounds horrible when we would only be implementing the 3-mon clause to preserve some bad sets nobody uses anymore. Like I said, I think the best way to do this is banning statpassing altogether. It's the best move for the playerbase and preserves the most relevant sets, like drypass.
 
I'll bite. The premise that I think is being missed here is that BP is a "it'll work on you once" kind of style. I think it is blatantly clear from the replays that no one had any clue they were going to face a BP team. I think you could argue a similar effect from a Salac Flail kind of team or psong trap, etc.

Encore Dewgong makes the matchup less easy for sure, and I forgot to include it, but it's still a toss up on getting the turn right or letting Plusle in for free. It's also not a very popular set nowadays as it was mainly for matching into Defensive Wailord which hardly exists anymore. It's outright worse than offensive Wailord in almost every other matchup because it has more weaknesses, is significantly weaker, and lacks boom.

With regard to explosion, you can watch this replay I had in the op: https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen3nu-442018
You have to get the explosion turn perfectly or you just sack your mon on a Substitute. Even with Salac boost from Veno most of the set up mons outspeed the majority of the tier, and it's not even a question by the time you get ID up with Maw. Metang also lets Mawile set up Iron Defense, it's not good counterplay and you can see this in the replay as well.
They have different niches for sure. Dewgong 2hkoes most grasses with Ice Beam and Encore is incredibly powerful in this generation and has more natural speed that lets you abuse it. FYI, Dewgong 2hkoes Plusle and stops Delcatty from setting up anything. Offensive Wailord itself is a pretty solid counter to BP anyway as a mid-chain disruption with boom and hitting hard enough to break Delcatty Subs after a boost or two. .

That all being said, refusal to use mons, moves, or sets that counter BP is not a reason that it's too good. IMO people who go for match up fish and lose it by not bringing this and trying to get that extra move as an edge deserve to lose to BP.

Not that I want to delve too much into this replay because everything is easier to look at in hindsight and I can't say i would have done any better, but there are different some questionable plays after the booms were used up namely not booming with Glalie or Taunting with Glalie. I think if he had checked speed tiers or damage calc of solar beam, it would have been a bit clearer what the play should be.

Taunt is only effective coming from Chimecho because, again, you outspeed everything in the tier after one turn. Since the Taunt user is expected to be slower, it's pretty common Taunt only stops you from clicking set up on the following turn. The reason other Taunt users like Vigoroth aren't effective is because none of them outscale your ability to set up. Offensive chime has the ability to do this because Delcatty cannot eat enough hits while setting up CM with a turn of downtime. You have plenty of time to
Not sure where you were going with this at the end there but I can't imagine it changes anything. I completely disagree with this analysis about Taunt. Taunt literally makes 3/6 pokemon on your team use struggle and 3 of the remaining mons near useless. An early from any Pokemon taunt prevents all set up and forces you to use thunderbolt or sludge bomb, both of which give time to Phaze or flat out out damage.

I think the neomon v ew replay tells two stories. I think first and foremost, if neomon had Taunt on his Sableye (like I told him!), for example, all he needed to do was attack with Hitmonchan and go to Sableye once sleep was taken. He went to Whiscash to take the sleep which is a fine, but a bit greedy play but i don't think the right one with Heal Bell on Chime available for Chan at a later time even if the team wasn't BP. Again, only if Sableye had Taunt. I am not sure why he didn't immediately go to Chimecho to set up Calm Minds either when he saw Ledian but i guess could have been afraid of SD Hp Bug or something.....which is a good segue into the second story: neomon's team had nothing at all for BP - it comes from not expecting it.

Against any Fire lead the best path is always sub down to Salac with Venomoth and pass the boost into Delcatty who is specially bulky enough to set up on Flareon. You should never risk Sleep Powder.
You must have never been against mixed Flareon because that fails against any Flareon with QA. Against Torkoal I don't see how you can set up with Delcatty without taking pretty big damage from Flamethrower off the bat and potentially getting toxiced each timed, and eventually Exploded on. Your best bet is probably to hope they Flamethrower and pass Salac to Oct and force it out.

I think the comments about aligning the ban to OU's clause are coming from a place of having not played with the team. I'm dead positive this will still be a problem even with only 3 Pokemon able to know Baton Pass. Sets like Agility Pass Plusle and SD Pass Mawile see so little use and are pretty bad anyways. A clause like that works for OU because they already have way more counterplay available for BP, and a slight nerf to it is all they need. They also have an extremely active playerbase that can go back and adjust the ban if it's not enough. We don't have either of those luxuries and a second thread coming back to this in a year because BP is still causing problems sounds horrible when we would only be implementing the 3-mon clause to preserve some bad sets nobody uses anymore. Like I said, I think the best way to do this is banning statpassing altogether. It's the best move for the playerbase and preserves the most relevant sets, like drypass.
You could be right, and at the end of the day, I don't really care about protecting this playstyle. But I don't love the idea of having such a low threshold for banning. Honestly I think the move Protect is more harmful to the metagame than BP is.

I don't want to stop the ban from going through if others feel it's worthwhile to do but I think it is lazy and far from the threshold of what constitutes "Bannable" in this generation.
 

Rabia

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I'll bite. The premise that I think is being missed here is that BP is a "it'll work on you once" kind of style. I think it is blatantly clear from the replays that no one had any clue they were going to face a BP team. I think you could argue a similar effect from a Salac Flail kind of team or psong trap, etc.
I really don't see what you're trying to get at here. Why does it matter if people didn't know they were going to face Baton Pass? In any game---particularly in a tournament setting, in which people are more likely to bring random niche stuff and techs---you aren't 100% sure what your opponent will bring. I'd love to know every game beforehand the exact team my opponent was going to bring; it'd make preparing a lot easier. Why should I be expected though to bring specific anti-Baton Pass techs on every team---techs that don't really have a lot of widespread application and force fairly linear building---just for Baton Pass?

They have different niches for sure. Dewgong 2hkoes most grasses with Ice Beam and Encore is incredibly powerful in this generation and has more natural speed that lets you abuse it. FYI, Dewgong 2hkoes Plusle and stops Delcatty from setting up anything. Offensive Wailord itself is a pretty solid counter to BP anyway as a mid-chain disruption with boom and hitting hard enough to break Delcatty Subs after a boost or two. .

That all being said, refusal to use mons, moves, or sets that counter BP is not a reason that it's too good. IMO people who go for match up fish and lose it by not bringing this and trying to get that extra move as an edge deserve to lose to BP.

Not that I want to delve too much into this replay because everything is easier to look at in hindsight and I can't say i would have done any better, but there are different some questionable plays after the booms were used up namely not booming with Glalie or Taunting with Glalie. I think if he had checked speed tiers or damage calc of solar beam, it would have been a bit clearer what the play should be.
It's not a matter of anyone "refusing" to use these Pokemon, moves, sets, or whatever else. It's a matter of these sets being largely irrelevant in matchups outside of the Baton Pass one or being bad in general. Yeah, stuff like Encore Dewgong and Perish Song Haunter to a lesser extent is viable, but I am absolutely not going to recommend commonly using Haze Murkrow or lead Taunt Vigoroth just because "ah yes, my opponent might be running Baton Pass." In the grand scheme of things, you're actively harming your team by employing subpar options to compensate for a single matchup. This is the big reason I feel Baton Pass chains are too overwhelming: the counterplay to them is so niche and otherwise lackluster. Sure, there are options like boom move users, but I generally find the user of said move is not in the driver's seat and is at such a disadvantage compared to the stat booster.
 
I would be 5-0 with BP between CPL and NUPL if I had avoided a couple of crits against Triangles. I probably risked the wrong crits but it barely matters. The so-called counters aren't remotely reliable. I literally brought BP three weeks in a row and have a history of using the same team over and over with completely public replays and people are either not prepping for it or their prep isn't working. My team has told me that my opponents "will be prepared" for BP but they evidently haven't been. I have also tested the team against very good players with numerous supposed counters and they have regularly fallen short of stopping the strategy, which is basically an outright loss. If you want to try your luck with your favourite checks feel free to hit me up.

I am also not sure if allowing a max of three users will be a big enough nerf. It would definitely weaken the strategy a bit though.
 
To be fair, I am not playing adv nu this nupl so I'm not really as involved as you all may be building for it. I can tell you that I did not scout EW's teams for CPL or NUPL for previous BP usage and did not plan for it at all. I did suggest Taunt on Sableye for neomon's game which I think, alone, would have made for a difficult game on EW's part, simply because I thought it would have helped him in other situations too.

I really don't see what you're trying to get at here. Why does it matter if people didn't know they were going to face Baton Pass? In any game---particularly in a tournament setting, in which people are more likely to bring random niche stuff and techs---you aren't 100% sure what your opponent will bring. I'd love to know every game beforehand the exact team my opponent was going to bring; it'd make preparing a lot easier. Why should I be expected though to bring specific anti-Baton Pass techs on every team---techs that don't really have a lot of widespread application and force fairly linear building---just for Baton Pass?
I was unclear (though the interpretation you took would make my point nonsensical).

It is not that they weren't expecting you to see a BP prior to the game but during the game. The way many of those replays played it's as if they didn't realize that a BP chain team was going on until your third BP mon at which point it is obviously too late. I think there are many Taunt users and many leads in particular that nip this strategy in the bud. Maybe my teams are at a disadvantage because I frequently build with BP in the back of my mind, kind of like how I build with Sub Reversal mons in the back of my mind, but, again, it is my view that the people who forego the Taunt, Encore, Roar, etc. (or QA, Mach Punch, etc. for Sub Reversal) on their teams simply deserve to lose to it.

I don't see how you can argue that these mons are not viable. There is plenty of reason to carry Encore on Cacturne, Plusle, Dewgong, etc., or Roar on Wailord, or even haze on Murkrow (as a filler slot, really, what else does it use other than drill peck/HP?) other than BP, WW or Taunt on Golbat, namely stuff like set up Vigoroth, CM Chimecho, BU Chan DD Pupitar and SD Mawile (etc.). Taunt is also helpful to stop the toxic spam ever-present in the tier or contrarily to stop heal bell, or wish. I am not even suggesting using specific mons for BP, I am just saying that if you do have nothing for it, you are not losing because it's broken but because you lost a MU fish.
 

Bughouse

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As I stated in my prior post a year and a half ago, I am unconvinced a clause is even necessary here. That said, I have no objection to applying some sort of clause to limit Baton Pass in ADV NU to prevent the matchup fishing. I would oppose a hard ban, but limitations are generally fine.

I think the old OU clause that was more permissive than the new OU clause would have been plenty sufficient for NU's purposes, but I also don't think the new OU clause is overly restrictive. I don't have a single team that would violate it. On the only teams that I have that even have 2 BPers, at least one, and usually both, are there for SubPass or general pivoting with dry pass.
 

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