Liepard Suspect Discussion (Read post #202)

[Antar]

with either ban, Blaziken would have seen no usage in OU so the simpler ban was picked.

But banning Blaziken from OU banned it from tiers where Blaze Blaziken would have been viable as well. That might not have been an issue at the time. Your argument is short-sighted and ignores the fact that bans are inherited to child tiers. The bottom line is that if we say, "Oh, well only SB Blaziken is broken so just ban that" then it opens the door to saying "Arceus is only broken with Extremespeed or Judgement, so just ban those two moves on Arc."

Every tier are independant when it comes to banning (see: Gothoritelle banned in UU, but deemed not broken in NU, Sand Veil & Snow Cloak ban in OU).

I missed this at first, but this is blatantly untrue. Unless Smogon changed policy without telling me, bans are inherited from upper tiers. Gothitelle is not allowed in NU. Nor are Sand Veil / Snow Cloak.

 

[atomicllamas]

But banning Blaziken from OU banned it from tiers where Blaze Blaziken would have been viable as well. That might not have been an issue at the time. Your argument is short-sighted and ignores the fact that bans are inherited to child tiers. The bottom line is that if we say, "Oh, well only SB Blaziken is broken so just ban that" then it opens the door to saying "Arceus is only broken with Extremespeed or Judgement, so just ban those two moves on Arc."

This is kind of a bad reply for two reasons, one, NU has no child tier so I don't see how this is even a factor in this decision, and two, how does the Shell Smash + Baton Pass, or the drizzle + swift swim not already open the door for this. Banning assist from NU isn't even a complex ban, lol.

I missed this at first, but this is blatantly untrue. Unless Smogon changed policy without telling me, bans are inherited from upper tiers. Gothitelle is not allowed in NU. Nor are Sand Veil / Snow Cloak.

I think, you missed soulgazer's point, suspect tests are conducted individually by each tier, as in gothitelle ban was implemented in UU even though it is an NU mon. Soul was simply saying impacts on other tiers (in this case none, lol) shouldn't be considered in a suspect test, which is absolutely true.

 

[noobcubed]

But banning Blaziken from OU banned it from tiers where Blaze Blaziken would have been viable as well. That might not have been an issue at the time. Your argument is short-sighted and ignores the fact that bans are inherited to child tiers. The bottom line is that if we say, "Oh, well only SB Blaziken is broken so just ban that" then it opens the door to saying "Arceus is only broken with Extremespeed or Judgement, so just ban those two moves on Arc."

Your argument about why complex bans are a bad thing is fair. However, you are guilty of a false dichotomy. You are arguing that NU should ban Liepard because it is a simpler ban than Liepard plus Assist or Prankster + Assist, and I agree. However, better than ALL of these options is a ban on just Assist, which is what I was arguing for.

And I think the community has learnt from the Blaziken affair, which is why, in the recent RU hail suspect, the decision was taken to ban hail rather than Walrein, as, although ultimately Walrein was the most broken thing about hail, it would have prevented NU players using a Pokemon in a metagame where it was certainly not broken.

 

[The Quasar]

Very often there was talking about Liepard in this forum. At first about his Swagger set, very annoying but we can also estimate it like a real "wheel of fortune". There are lots of ways to check "this" Liepard in NU so I've always thought about it. In fact I mostly used Liepard as good Weather supporter, taking advantage of prankster's ability. But now it's different, because you have found a particular combination to makes a mechanical play, you can play headless pushing a button.
This topic and this team are showing like it's so easy to taking advantage from damn effective Assist.I think the inability to use Assist is the best care to ensure playability and fun on entertain among us to play NU.

 

[Antar]

I think, you missed soulgazer's point, suspect tests are conducted individually by each tier, as in gothitelle ban was implemented in UU even though it is an NU mon.

Ah, okay--I get what Soulgazer was saying now. Thanks for the clarification.

how does the Shell Smash + Baton Pass, or the drizzle + swift swim not already open the door for this. Banning assist from NU isn't even a complex ban, lol.

I wasn't discussing whether complex bans are okay. I was saying that we should avoid banning a move unless it's broken in all a large majority of cases. If Liepard is the only viable user of Assist, then sure. I'd have no objection.

NU has no child tier

PU is unofficial and unsupported, but it does exist. But you're right that NU shouldn't care how their decisions affect the PU metagame.

Back to unbanning Blaze Blaziken, I imagine that if it had been "allowable" that the lower tier councils might have been able to persuade OU to unban it. But the reason that didn't happen was antithetical to our ban system.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

 

[Nozzle]

Yeah i personally think just Assist should be banned, Utiliepard is imo a healthy addition to the metagame and the scarf assisters would be annoying. Assist is useless without the strategy we are all agreeing to ban.

 

[Antar]

Yeah i personally think just Assist should be banned, Utiliepard is imo a healthy addition to the metagame and the scarf assisters would be annoying. Assist is useless without the strategy we are all agreeing to ban.

See, I accept this argument. If either (1) there are no other Pokemon (aside from horrible gimmicks) who use Assist in the tier or (2) Scarf Persian Assist is still broken, I have no problem with banning Assist.

If only Prankster+Assist is broken, that's a dumb way of banning Liepard without banning Liepard (also you'd need to convince me that Prankster+Assist Purrloin is broken).

If SwagPlay Liepard is broken/uncompetitive as well, just save everyone the trouble and ban Liepard.

 

[MCBarrett]

If only Prankster+Assist is broken, that's a dumb way of banning Liepard without banning Liepard (also you'd need to convince me that Prankster+Assist Purrloin is broken).

I really don't understand the first part of this statement. As has been said numerous times in this thread Pivot Liepard is thought to be healthy for this metagame. So we wouldn't be "banning Liepard without banning Liepard", we would be banning a broken strategy that Liepard just so happens to be able to pull off. Having to prove that Prankster Assist Purrloin is also broken does make sense though if we wanted to go through with this type of ban.

 

[Antar]

MCBarrett I could have said this more clearly--what I mean is that if a set is broken on a Pokemon, the Pokemon is broken, unless the set is broken on ALL viable Pokemon. So banning Prankster+Assist is the same as banning Pranskter+Assist Liepard... unless Prankster+Assist Purrloin is also broken.

 

[Nozzle]

Prankster assist purrloin is also broken, believe me, I've seen horrible things.
Fuck double cat.

 

[Bughouse]

This is bringing back shades of the RU suspect test where people brought up Dewgong as a concern re: banning Stallrein. They chose to evade the whole problem by offering an IRV list of bannable options in the blind voting, which ended up resulting in banning Hail.

I think an IRV vote would be the best option here again.

 

[Antar]

Prankster assist purrloin is also broken, believe me, I've seen horrible things.
Fuck double cat.

Yes, but you're also the one who said Scarf non-Prankster Assist is broken.

The way I see it, here's the decision tree:

• If you believe Assist is broken on Scarf Persian, Scarf Delcatty or w/e else, vote to ban Assist.
• If Scarf non-Prankster Assist is NOT broken, but SPA Purrloin is broken, vote to ban Prankster+Assist.
• If SPA Purrloin isn't broken either (due to lower speed, perhaps?) but you think SPA Liepard is, then you have no choice but to vote to ban Liepard, even if you feel that none of its other sets are broken.

This is how the voting choices should be presented.

 

[Nozzle]

I haven't seen it in use but i can still see Scarf Assist being hellish to play against.
Not as bad but still hellish due to actually being outsped by every priority attack out there. I can see it needing more support in removing priority users though. The problem is if we ban Liepard, people will simply just start running Purrloin (or Murkrow for SwagPlay). If we ban Prankster+Assist, people would start running Scarf mons. This would be not as hard to deal with but I personally still think it would be broken and not healthy for the tier.

tl;dr (if you are rlly lazy) IMO ban just assist

 

[Axe_Raider]

I have recently seen a rise i the amount of good assists liepard teams. I have relized that i could just won those match had i double switched when he tried to bring his ditto in, but the fact remains that assist phasing is very dificult to deal with, unless you have a dragonair or linoon to just ohko liepard. I say just ban assist as banning liepard would get rid of one of the nicer counters to copycat roar riolu.

 

[noobcubed]

Yes, but you're also the one who said Scarf non-Prankster Assist is broken.

The way I see it, here's the decision tree:

• If you believe Assist is broken on Scarf Persian, Scarf Delcatty or w/e else, vote to ban Assist.
• If Scarf non-Prankster Assist is NOT broken, but SPA Purrloin is broken, vote to ban Prankster+Assist.
• If SPA Purrloin isn't broken either (due to lower speed, perhaps?) but you think SPA Liepard is, then you have no choice but to vote to ban Liepard, even if you feel that none of its other sets are broken.

This is how the voting choices should be presented.

This is great in theory. However, there is an issue: any discussion of how broken the other Assist users are is pure theorymon, as nobody has ever used them due to the fact that Liepard outclasses them all.

 

[Raseri]

Then pro-ban people should use them to find what the issue is, making the theorymon issue obsolete

 

[Antar]

This is great in theory. However, there is an issue: any discussion of how broken the other Assist users are is pure theorymon, as nobody has ever used them due to the fact that Liepard outclasses them all.

I was going to argue that you were wrong, but moveset statistics back you up. The next time Assist appears after Liepard is 2.14% of Spindas (whose usage is only 0.53% to begin with), followed by 4.39% of Delcatty (0.14% usage) and 23.65% of Purrloin (0.06% usage). Still, you might want to ask players who play PU (it was an OMOM a few months back, and plenty of Youtubers post PU battles).

Edit: Another idea is to do as Raseri says--have a suspect test where Liepard is banned and have players use other Assist users to help determine just what is broken.

 

[Aidan LeSauvage]

Personally, whenever A suspect test comes up like this, I always find myself seeing how good it does on my own team. So, I built a standard NU team that carries Liepard. I built two different liepard sets, and tested them. One which was SwagPlay, and one where it ran assist. The SwagPlay set worked decent, it was a 50/50 result, as the set was based on luck. Did they hurt themselves in confusion when I wanted to attack? Thats basically what the set rode on. My assist set worked differently. With some of my pokemon carrying moves to setup, and others carrying a variety of moves, assist worked out well. It seemed to choose super effective moves most of the time that I used it, and it allowed me to sweep some teams. It did have some downsides though, sometimes not choosing good moves and screwing me over, and most of the time, thats when I lost.

Running assist + prankstar gives priority. That is why it is used, so if you can get some attack or sp.atk stat boosts on liepard through baton pass (I used ninjask), then have it spam assist, it will always outspeed you, and smash you with a massive hit. I found it to be broken.

Personally, I think that both sets are based on luck, however the assist set seems to have a higher chance of sucseeding. Prankstar is a gimmick that was uneeded, however adds something to the game. All in all, I believe that liepard itself should not be banned, however banning assist + prankstar is an ok idea.

 

[Chieliee]

i think this is relevant:

Skill
The metagame should require knowledge and practice to become an expert player and to achieve consistent success at the highest levels of play.

from DougJustDoug's Characteristics of a Desirable Metagame

I really don't see any reason to not just ban Assist in general. Even if Assist Purrloin/Persian/Delcatty aren't deemed broken, they won't be a healthy addition to the metagame as they might still demolish otherwise well-built teams. So in terms of banning unhealthy things we're all good. In terms of restricting healthy things..... there are no healthy things that use Assist.

Add to that that banning a move isn't really very complex at all, unlike Prankster+Assist, or Liepard+Assist.

i'll say this again, banning liepard is IMO plain stupid as we'll unnecessarily get rid of a very viable and healthy set in PivotPard.

also Aidan LeSauvage , the assist ban is because you are able to build certain teams wehre assist will only pick Whirlwind. This means you have priority phazing, which is pretty broken. Using assist to call a random move is not broken at all

 

[Fuzznip]

I haven't seen it in use but i can still see Scarf Assist being hellish to play against.
Not as bad but still hellish due to actually being outsped by every priority attack out there. I can see it needing more support in removing priority users though. The problem is if we ban Liepard, people will simply just start running Purrloin (or Murkrow for SwagPlay). If we ban Prankster+Assist, people would start running Scarf mons. This would be not as hard to deal with but I personally still think it would be broken and not healthy for the tier.

tl;dr (if you are rlly lazy) IMO ban just assist

Scarf Assist spam is going to be so awful I can't even describe how awful that would be. Any semi-decent player knows that Assist teams rely on entry hazards to do severe damage, so more often then not, you're going to be playing without any hazards up. There would also be absolutely no way of beating Regenerator Pokemon or, if you do get Stealth Rock up, SR resistant Pokemon with Leftovers, and you'll get stalled out so easily with Protect. You're just wasting both your time and the opponent's time because you will eventually lose guaranteed. Liepard is a different case here because it can set up Substitute/Nasty Plot on predicted moves and stuff like that. If Prankster+Assist is banned, Assist will never be used to decent effect by anything. Not even Purrloin.

Banning Liepard itself is literally the dumbest thing we can do at this point. I'm just going to bluntly put that out there.

 

[saucemonkey1]

For people advocating complex bans in this case instead of banning Liepard. I'd like to remind you all that our policy is that we ban a move, ability or combo only if it's broken on ALL users of that combo, but it is perfectly legitimate to ban a single Pokemon even if only one of its sets are "broken."

Just thought I'd point out that Liepard is literally the only Pokemon (other than Purrloin, who does the same thing but slighly less effectively) able to use the Prankster + Assist combo, since no other Pokemon who learns Assist has Prankster. That technically means that every Pokemon who uses Prankster + Assist is broken (or so many of the people on this thread seem to think.)

Personally, it seems to me like a complex ban for a single Pokemon is uncalled for, but the fact remains that the only other Pokemon we have to compare Prankster + Assist Liepard to is Purrloin, which is a bit unfair if you think about it. Since there are no other Pokemon able to use Assist + Prankster, we have nothing to gauge it against (Like Speed Boost + Baton Pass Ninjask compared to Speed Boost + Baton Pass Blaziken) and thus have no idea if the combination would be just as broken on another Pokemon or if it would be mediocre.

We've already agreed that Prankster in and of itself isn't broken, and that Assist is also not broken either. The combination of these two however, is, but because only one line of Pokemon can use it, it seems strange to advocate a complex ban on something that effects just two Pokemon. We also have the issue that many people here like Liepard and believe that it's other sets (not Assist or SwagPard) are very healthy for the metagame. So what would be the simplest thing to do in this situation? The obvious, and easiest choice is to ban Liepard itself, since it is the vehicle for the broken set (Assist + Prankster) that only it can use. However this wouldn't even be an issue if a totally uncompetetive move like Assist were banned in the first place. While it certainly isn't broken, it's a completely irrelivent move when used on any team but one revolving solely around it. No skilled player would use the move on a well constructed team, but it's broken on teams that focus solely on using it to spam priority phasing. If that isn't telling of Assist being unhealthy for the tier, than I don't know what is.

What I'm trying to get at is that we should be focusing on what actually makes this game fun. I know that Assist wouldn't even be brought up unless Assist Liepard hadn't started gaining popularity, but now we can take a look back at why we banned certain moves in the first place and realize that Assist fits most of the criteria for why there's no Double-Team, Sheer Cold or Guillotine. It's not fun to play against, takes no skill to use and it drags the metagame down when it's abused. Liepard is beloved by many different players, myself included, and banning it because it gets one single uncompetetive move that no other Pokemon can even use reliably seems like a real waste.

 

[Electricstorm252]

Liepard is a great anti-lead, taunt or trick them a specs, and with specs set up nasty plot. Liepard is not broken (and IMO nether is assist). Lots of thinks out speed/+2 priority it, pikachu and swellow come to mind. On top of that if you don't send in your hazard layer and when its dragged in switch out they cant beat you since they can not have and attacking moves (outside of focus punch and attacking phazers) and hazards unless they want to risk it. Plus, if you can get t-spikes in before liepard they lose. Swagpard, just switch every turn or get up a sub with any own tempo poke.

 

[Chieliee]

http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/a-cat-is-fine-too.3488669/#post-4852531

this is the reason assist on liepard is broken, for those who don't know.

 

[soulgazer]

It's not that big of a deal. Pikachu and Swellow beat this set and I mention them because they counter Liepard the best. On top of that a lot of things get magic coat. Cradily and octiliry also beat Liepard.

I wouldn't call them 'counter', as they can only check it. Sure they both have priority able to outspeed Liepard, but same thing can be said for Kangaskhan, Floatzel, and Linoone. All they can succesfully do is to get a hit on Liepard, and that's pretty much it.

Liepard can also easily switch out and come back later, which is easy to do for it since you'll most likely not even try to set up entry hazards like Toxic Spikes since you most likely don't want it to switch on Ditto / use Copycat with Loppuny. I don't want to bring arguments around teammates, as I don't want to change th subject to something else than Liepard itself, but usually these Assist-teams are made so you can beat or cripple the Pokemon who can check or counter Liepard with the rest of your teams.

atomicllamas explained better than me below

 

[atomicllamas]

It's not that big of a deal. Pikachu and Swellow beat this set and I mention them because they counter Liepard the best. On top of that a lot of things get magic coat. Cradily and octiliry also beat Liepard.

Well first of all, Pikachu is a terrible pokemon, so being forced to run Pikachu is definitely a sign that this could be broken, Swellow is pretty good, but isn't exactly easy to fit onto a team. Magic coat users are an invitation for Liepard to set up a sub, a nasty plot or just go for the kill with dark pusle, meaning that they are a shaky check at best, with only Bastiodon being able to do something if it decides to do this (Magic Coat+Roar can play around Liepard, but not just Magic coat). Cradily and octiliry "beating" Liepard isn't true either, since the point of assist teams is to have the rest of the mons using disruptive moves to fuck them over. Soul just ninja'd me, so I will stop.