I'm going to use this lull between HOME and DLC to bring up something once again:
Sleep Clause should be removed in every tier where Sleep Clause is not possible to be replicated on cart, that is intending to replicate cart.
ie. Gen 1 OU we've just decided as a community, ain't fuckin trying. Either with Freeze Mod, the issue of Tradebacks, and not being Stadium for Sleep Clause.
Tiers like Petmods, CAP, most Other Metagames should continue to do whatever they please, but something like Hackmons which also follows cart rules (even if simutaneously breaking them) should also get rid of Sleep Clause.
Every main OU besides Gen 1 should get rid of Sleep Clause, and all tiers below as well, especially SV.
Cartridge over you. I do not give a FUCK what you find more fun, cartridge mechanics over you. Sleep Clause is simply fake shit we adopted from a spinoff that has not been relevant in literal decades. It should never have been used as serious policy.
If this makes sleep broken? Ban it. Not only has Gen 5 OU done this successfully (rare Gen 5 OU W) creating precedent, but there really should not be an argument. If you have to make a mechanic that is not replicatable on cart in order to balance a thing, you just throw it out.
"We don't play on cart anyways" so we should just balance the game however we want, then? Where do we stop the line? Literally just Sleep Clause? Then why even have Sleep Clause, if only removing Sleep Clause immediately puts it in line with the most objective metric for "valid tiering decisions": Can it be done on cart?
Yes I am aware tiering policy makes an exception for Sleep Clause. That's dumb. Imagine reading a rulebook and it says "You can tag any player, except James because if we ban him he won't invite us to his house, and he has a Gamecube so..."
"As a vegan you are not permitted to eat any meat, except for if the meat is on a taco specifically."
that's so silly lmfao
How is Sleep this sacred that we need a several decade long debate to ban it? This is like such an obvious slam dunk. Uncompetitive mechanic, no one likes it (except Gen 1 which is an exception), we have to literally break our own rules in order to make it possible, its only precedent is because we made the initial mistake in the first place, etc.
I hope to be smoking on that Sleep Clause pack within a year, please Big Stall make my wish come true.
I also would like to have Sleep banned in every generation except for RBY, since Sleep is an integral part of the metagame and there is at least precedent from Stadium (although as an aside, there are other mechanics differences from Stadium that aren't implemented on Showdown, like how Focus Energy was fixed in Stadium, but I don't know the reasoning behind that), but if your motivation is to try to be as close to cartridge as possible over all else, you're still going to run into some issues. How could you ban Sleep to remove the Sleep Clause mod but not have to still mod the game to prevent things like Effect Spore and Dire Claw from causing Sleep? I guess you could just ban Sleep moves and hope that things like Dire Claw or Effect Spore don't proc it repeatedly, but what is truly the benefit from opening up that possibility? Also, how would you deal with Freeze Clause in pursuit of making the game more similar to cart? To my knowledge, there isn't any precedent for Freeze Clause (unlike Sleep Clause from Stadium) and the game definitely needs to be modded to implement it, so if you want to get rid of all mods, then you would have to remove Freeze Clause; doing so would almost certainly make RBY a worse tier, and the other tiers that have Freeze Clause (which I think are now GSC, ADV, and DPP) wouldn't improve in any way from Freeze Clause being removed. Even if you say that you're going to leave Freeze Clause in RBY and GSC (where the mechanics are also more punishing than in other generations), how is that any different from Sleep Clause currently being an exception to trying to imitate cartridge play?
I think what it boils down to is that Showdown is ultimately an artificial game to begin with, and certain clauses and mods have been put in place to make the game better. I understand that there needs to be some sort of framework rooted in the idea of staying true to how cart functions, because otherwise the game could stray too far from "actual Pokemon," but Showdown is still clearly different from cartridge play even if you exclude things like Sleep or Freeze Clause. One of the most fundamental parts of playing on Showdown is seeing the HP percents for things like gleaning sets from damage rolls and seeing the likelihood of an attack KOing. If you play on cart without the HP percents, that alone is enough to make the game very different, and yeah, I get that you theoretically could use a ruler and measure the HP bars to calculate HP percents, and while that is hype when it happens in nuzlockes and stuff, it isn't realistic for competitive play. I'm not going to even get into the likelihood of having certain old event moves on various mons (like the famous Wish Chansey/Blissey in previous generations) and those event mons also having proper IVs. So, to me at least, it's good that Smogon tries to emulate how games function on console, but it isn't as important as making the game as competitive and "high quality" as possible. Sure, if you want Sleep banned because you think that it's an uncompetitive mechanic, that's cool, and it's also fine if you want to use the whole Sleep Clause aspect as an additional benefit of just banning Sleep, but I don't feel like trying to completely mimic cartridge play should be the core motivation. It's difficult to come up with an exact framework for how things like this are/should be handled, since it almost feels to me like there is a degree of common sense involved that dictates when cartridge play needs to be deviated from, but it's always difficult to write rules and guidelines that incorporate common sense; it's like in a football game where if they rule a runner down before he fumbled and blow the play dead before a defender scoops up the fumble and has a clear path to the end zone, but they review the play and saw that he lost the ball before his knee hit, the refs can't award the team that was on defense a touchdown, even though the player would have clearly scored (I also know that they try to let plays like that complete before deciding if it was a fumble for this very reason, but they still whistle it dead prematurely sometimes). With all of that said though, Smogon is a relatively small (in relation to Pokemon fandom as a whole) online community dealing with an even more niche form of competitive Pokemon, so it's not like their decisions need to hold up in a court of law or anything. I'm fine with there being some inconsistencies in the competitive ruleset, as long as they contribute to a better player experience.
Hpdsd is probably correct that this doesn't have much to do with metagame discussion, although many of the other posts in this thread don't either, especially while people are just waiting for the DLC. I'll try to get back to relevant metagame discussion though:
What are people's thoughts on
?
I think it's definitely unhealthy for the tier. Dragon Dance sets get in through pivoting or on passive things like Corv, Dragon Dance, Tera to avoid whatever revenge-killer you sent in, Dragon Dances again, and proceeds to sweep you. At this point, your best option is to hope your revenge-killer chipped it enough to let Kingambit sucker punch kill it, but that might require having half of your Pokemon die. For example, say you are running Iron Valiant as your RKer for Bax. You're running Scarf or BE Valiant as your speed control of choice. You Moonblast as it Teras Ice (which is not even a very common Tera type, but just for the example), you do ~50%, it DDs, you die next turn to Icicle Spear/Crash. From that point, you have to have 3 allies fainted with Kingambit before Sucker Punch even has a 50%+ chance to kill the Bax, and 4 dead allies for it to be guaranteed. Meanwhile, +2 Bax is fucking wrecking your team. Keep in mind that if ANY of these variables change (Bax Teras Fairy or Steel and you mispredict with CC/Moonblast, your BE/Scarf has been used up or knocked, Bax just fucking attacks on the Valiant switch instead of setting up, or if Snow from the extremely common Chilly Reception is up), you just straight-up lose. So, what do you do? If you're like most builders, you slot physically defensive Dondozo onto your team. While Dozo does check Dragon Dance Tera Fairy Bax, it struggles against the other Bax set, which is Choice Band. With Choice Band and Tera Dragon, the only real safe way to defensively check it is with Tera Fairy Dozo (I say check because Icicle Crash flinches can still let you beat it 30% of the time). But being forced to run Tera Fairy Dozo on every single team besides extremely hyper offense is overcentralizing and stupid. And what's the opportunity cost for using Bax? Even if your opponent does run Tera Fairy Dozo, Dozo is tasked with handling every physical attacker in the meta and Bax can still use its incredible base attack to fire off Icicle Crashes still. This is why I believe that Bax is dumb and should be banned
I agree, Bax is really dumb. Tera inevitably makes setup sweepers even stronger because sometimes all it takes is one turn of setup for them to snowball. Dondozo helps hold the tier together somewhat against them, but you're right in that it can still be muscled past by mons like Banded Baxcalibur and Gambit, in part thanks to Tera Dragon and Dark respectively. On top of this, Dondozo isn't the poster child for a healthy metagame either because it doesn't feel particularly right to me how it can blank so many physical attackers, although I'm not saying that Dondozo is broken or unhealthy at all. Even without Tera, Bax is still incredibly difficult to answer defensively and it feels very constricting to the metagame.
