Metagame np: SS DOU Stage 1: When I Grow Up | Dynamax Banned

[Ezrael]

I feel like, in the responses to my post, the nuance of my arguments has been lost. I will do my best to restore that with a point by point analysis.

I'd say that resorting to the argument that Dynamax is "automatically accessible to both players" is actually more of an indictment of how unhealthy it is in this current game. You're literally suggesting countering a strategy by using that same exact strategy yourself. Should Zacian-C, Moody, or Double Team be legal for that reason as well? Because this exact same argument could be rehashed in order to suggest that they should be.

This is a false equivalence, and completely misses the point I made. My claim was that, as opposed to Zacian-C, Moody, and Double Team, each of which is a move/ability/mon that requires opportunity cost in the teambuilder to use, Dynamax does not have an opportunity cost to use as it is always available to each player. I am not saying that that is a reason that Dynamax should not be banned, but instead arguing that the context of discussing its ban is different than that of discussing the ban of an individual pokemon. One of the reasons that we ban Zacian-C is because of its likely centralizing effect--there would basically be no reason to use a team without Zacian-C and it would make teams all look identical. With Dynamax, there is no builder restriction, so even if Dynamax is legal, it doesn't necessarily force the same type of teambuilder restrictions. Further, moody is unbanned actually, so it's not a great example for you. Your last example, Double Team, isn't banned because of teambuilder restrictions, it's banned because we believe that evasion moves add too much of a luck element to the game, and are non-competitive. Dynamax isn't about luck. It's about resource management. My point is merely that we should evaluate Dynamax for what it is, not as if it was something else.
You say that Dynamax is unhealthy because it is accessible to both players in response to me, but that is missing the point. I am saying in this quote merely that Dynamax doesn't place the same type of teambuilding restrictions that individual mons might.

Not really. It's banning one mechanic that causes many moves and items to be unhealthy instead of trying to find every single thing that Dynamax takes over the top and banning all of them one at a time.

You seem to have missed the point I was making here. Smogon policy dictates avoiding complex bans when possible, in part to reduce the number of clauses and to make the ban list more explainable to newcomers. However, we should not get bogged down by that idea and assume that, just because a banlist has fewer clauses, that it is ideal. If we ban 2 pokemon to save Dynamax, we have banned 2 more things, but the thing we save is a big deal.

I disagree. When virtually every single item or move brought to the chopping block revolves around something Dynamaxing, banning the latter isn't so much throwing the baby out with the bathwater as it is cutting out a tumor so the problems it causes will eventually go away. That's not to say that banning Dynamax would be some miracle pill that would magically solve every problem, but if it is the reason why so many things are problematic, it does no good to let it continue to fester and potentially make even more items or moves banworthy. Is it really worth moving heaven and earth in order to keep Dynamax intact when banning the mechanic would keep them from being problematic in the first place?

So you're right on this in principle, but wrong in actuality. I agree, we should not move heaven and earth to keep dynamax. if it turns out that Ultra Beasts are broken with Dynamax and also many other pokemon that drop in DLC, I am more than happy to ban dynamax at that point rather than ban 20-30 pokemon. That is, most emphatically, not what is the case at this point. What is on the chopping block is: a single item, a single move, and potentially a single pokemon in addition (if we decide Zard is broken). That is neither heaven, nor earth. it is 3 things.
Unsurprisingly, when new mechanics are introduced, many of the bans relate to the ability to interact with the new mechanic. Many bans in gen 6 were megas or about the ability of pokemon to interact with megas in a given context (rachi azu probably wouldn't have been as strong as it was if there wasn't a phenomenal fake out user to make azu viable on its own). That does not mean banning megas was correct, nor does it mean that banning dynamax is correct.
But even further, you misrepresent my argument. my claim is along the lines of: if in order to save dynamax we had to ban caterpie and weedle, because they turned out to be broken with dynamax, then i'm totally down with that. Similarly, my claim is that Weakness policy has not been a consistently important item in DOU, as it has had a grand total of 1 consistent user for the past 3 years, and wasn't used in gen 6. Banning Sitrus Berry to save Dynamax would give me a lot more pause, as Sitrus berry is an important part of doubles. WP isn't, and neither is Beat Up.

I don't see preserving a "massive mechanic" as a convincing reason to believe Dynamax should be kept around instead of the other things you listed. You yourself just correctly admitted that Beat Up and Weakness Policy were hardly ever used last gen. Why did they, as well as the other things you listed, become problematic in the first place? Because of Dynamaxing (and I suppose, in the case of Beat Up, Dragapult being able to spam Ally Switch and status moves may have also contributed). Again, what good is it to save a "massive mechanic" if that "massive mechanic" is what is causing WP and Beat Up to be broken in the first place?

First, banning a mechanic is completely unprecedented, except for in singles formats where Dynamax was banned. In those singles formats, Dynamax was banned because it made the game play itself entirely uncompetitive. Although this analogy is not perfect, banning Dynamax is like banning all items--having an item is an option that every pokemon has and is central to gameplay. I am not saying banning dynamax would be as bad of a decision as banning all items, but I am saying that it should be understood to a very high degree of seriousness. Mechanics are not the same as individual pokemon, individual moves, or individual items. They are of a higher order of importance. WP and Beat Up aren't anywhere near as important.

I'm not buying this comparison. You could only use one Z-Move per game, you had to give up an item slot in order for a Pokemon to use it, you could only use a Z-Move of the corresponding type to the Z-Crystal it held, and if the Pokemon holding a Z-Crystal got KOed before it could use its Z-Move, the only way to get the chance to use another would be if you had another Pokemon on your team holding one. With Dynamax, there are no such strings attached. Yes, there are ways to play around opposing Dynamaxes. Yes, it requires a degree of skill to use Dynamax effectively yourself. And once again, someone could potentially use those same arguments to imply that Zacian-C is healthy for this metagame too.

You seem to be missing the argument. Once the dynamax has revealed itself, it is relatively easy to manage. The problem with Dynamax, in my mind, comes from the pressure of it not having been used yet, and the mindgames related to that. My point here was that these mindgames about a resource not having been used are familiar, and we have played with them before.
My point is not that Z moves are the same as Dynamax. My point is merely that the type of decisions forced by Dynamax, even though they are arguably unhealthy, are not fundamentally different. This was an argument brought up in the OU discussion of banning dynamax, namely, that for them Z moves were somewhat swingy and difficult to play around because of hidden information. However, in OU at least, the key point made was that Dynamax was far more swingy and made long term decisionmaking insufficiently relevant. I do not believe that this is the case for Dynamax as it stands in DOU. There are many situations where my opponent and I trade dynamax turn 1 and then we have to play a real game of DOU after that. Or I can preserve my resource to dynamax, but might not get a chance to use it efficiently later as all my mons might be chipped. In DOU, Dynamax isn't anywhere near as swingy as it was in OU and, potentially contrary to popular belief, I don't believe that using your dynamax best ends the game. Consider this game vs memoric. We effectively traded Dynamax and Togekiss by the end of turn 2, and as a result we had a 4v4 game of pokemon to play, in which I had to predict hitmontop's sucker punches and so forth. It was just a game of pokemon.
Zacian has insufficient counterplay. There is, however, quite reasonable counterplay to Dynamax. Just because a pokemon is maxed doesn't mean it kills resists.

We have BSS and VGC for that (and Ubers as well). Being a flagship feature of a generation doesn't mean that it's good for the game.

Being a flagship feature doesn't mean it's good for the game, yes. I personally think that megas and z moves were not great for the game. However, I didn't advocate banning them as mechanics because they weren't broken. That was just the way pokemon was, and now Dynamax is just the way pokemon is. Unless the format is horrendously not-skill based, we should try to respect pokemon the way that it is, as much as possible.

In my ideal world, I would ban every pokemon besides Thalks and just play Thalks mirrors every game. It would be enjoyable for me, I find the gameplay interactive and interesting, and I would have a great time. However, that's not pokemon. I didn't advocate banning the things I didn't like just because I didn't like them, because they weren't broken. Dynamax isn't broken. You not liking it doesn't change that.

finally, I generally agree with Qwello and Stratos' posts--I think they are well said and correct.

 

[Stratos]

I think we can all agree that neither dynamax nor weakness policy are banworthy in a vacuum, the problem is the union of the two.

Just a quick note to clear things up: This is not true. The whole reason we are having this suspect, instead of banning WP, is that a lot of people including the majority of the council think that even after a theoretical WP ban, Dynamax would just be a completely unhealthy mechanic on its own. For a more detailed look at their arguments, see tree's post here.

unfortunately just about every other pro-ban post has been "ban dynamax to save wp" so thats what the majority of the argument has been focused around (please DONT fucking do this) but talkingtree's points are more valid reasons to vote ban. I mainly dont agree with them and would like to respond to them sometime in the near future, but these kind of points are what I would hope this thread becomes focused around in the future.

 

[HottieLamatie]

Oeps! I didn't finish my thoughts on WP :P So...I was trying to say that it feels like it's harder to answer directly to WP this Generation. There aren't Megas and Z-Moves, so if D-Max gets removed, it's even harder to defend against. (That said, D-Max PLUS WP is even worse) The access to moves and/or Pokémon which can deal with WP is more restricted now: for example, there are less Pokémon with Psych Up (with I think only Espeon being OU material), Unaware doesn't seem that viable, and there isn't the same access to heavyweights who can answer WP Pokémon. On my last point: I do think that losing access to, say Tapu Bulu, makes WP Tyranitar far less risky to run. It feels like Weakness Policy gained the top spot because when the movepool and range of Pokémon narrowed, a lot of its counters were removed. Should it be banned? I don't know. I do know that it's really difficult to deal with and I'm glad it's being looked at. It does seem like it's warping at least VGC and OU - the number of teams that run it far outnumber the teams that don't, and given that it's not specific in application to a narrow set of Pokémon, this seems problematic. Also, I would like to rescind my unfinished comment about Snatch - that move is not directly relevant :P

I don't know if this is feasible, we might have to follow the precedent set by OU, which considered dynamax and gigantamax the same thing for the purpose of tiering.

I mean, that would definitely be the simplest, yes. Could you please explain why this doesn't seem feasible? Well, actually...when I suggested this, I was thinking about Pokémon Showdown! specifically - it would be possible (at least in theory) to remove the D-Max button from all the Pokémon who aren't coded as their G-Max form. When it comes to playing via Sword & Shield, in theory it's a matter of knowing which Pokémon can G-Max and only using it on one of them. But in practise, I do see a glaring problem with banning D-Max but not G-Max: the D-Max button will still be there on every Pokémon, just a single press away, which means that it'd be awfully easy to accidentally (or "accidentally") hit the button; because of this, trying to design fair rules for handling illegal D-Maxing really seems like a nightmare. :( Would be nice if it could work, but the problem I thought of makes it seem like it never would! (Still interested in hearing what your thinking on it was, though!)

This has already been discussed before (I can't find the post though ) and not every G-max pokemon is available in-game with the lowest possible dynamax level, so you would have to ban those without them being broken or uncompetitve. Also, having a 1.5x multiplier rather then a 2x is all but guaranteed to solve the problem.

Yes, I mean something like that - setting the multiplier to a specific amount that is <2x. 1,5 is worth testing for sure. Would still be concerned about Snorlax and Lapras specifically, but changing to 1,5x HP specifically mitigates their potential when G-Maxing.

 

[Bughouse]

I'm somewhat reminded of the arguments I made here re: Ally Switch last generation: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ally-switch.3623344/#post-7617676

1) Ally Switch existed in the past
2) Ally Switch was never broken in the past, despite there being a few viable users
3) No mechanics of Ally Switch changed
4) Instead, a large group of new users suddenly learned Ally Switch, many of which were very bulky and could use it effectively
5) Since the mechanic of Ally Switch itself was not broken, I would have preferred suspecting a few individual Pokemon, unless we had to suspect so many that it just makes more sense to remove Ally Switch and preserve all of the Pokemon

Compare that now to...

1) Weakness Policy existed in the past
2) Weakness Policy was never broken in the past, despite there being a few viable users
3) No mechanics of Weakness Policy changed
4) Instead, a large group of new users suddenly can Dynamax, which makes them very bulky and lets them use it effectively
5) Here's where it breaks down... Weakness Policy + Dynamax actually is broken. It lets you accumulate far too many boosts too quickly due to insane bulk that nothing has ever had in the past, and you also have access to strong attacks that provide you with additional boosts at the same time, creating far too large of a snowball effect.

Weakness Policy itself is most likely still not broken. If there were a ban on Dynamaxing Pokemon holding Weakness Policy, I doubt the item would be all that much more popular or better than it was in past gens. But obviously this is a complex, in-battle ban, which is a huge no-no.

If we believe Dynamax + WP is broken, we kinda have to ban one or the other.

I personally agree it doesn't come down to the framing of "ban Dynamax to save WP," since I would say Dynamax is broken in isolation of that. I don't really care about saving WP as a policy consideration. But... really, which of the two do you think is the bigger problem? The element that has existed in past generations, never been broken, and was never used on the vast majority of teams, or the element that's new this generation and is literally mandatory.

I do get wanting to preserve the core element of a generation, but this one should be killed with G-Max Wildfire.

 

[MajorBowman]

I meant to post my personal thoughts a while ago but I've had a weird few days so my apologies~

Without going line by line through everything that's been said in this thread so far because that would take far too much time, my thoughts here basically boil down to a couple points:

• Dynamax does not need to be saved because it is this generation's defining mechanic and we do not have to accept it as the status quo
• Blatantly trying to save dynamax is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing from a tiering perspective

The idea that dynamax is somehow above the law here because it's the new shiny toy from gen 8 is really just wrong. We aren't under any obligation to tread lightly around it and it should (in my opinion) be treated as any other facet of the metagame. "Generation defining mechanic" is not and has never been a special label given to things that implies they should be handled a certain way, it's just an easy way to describe megas, Z moves, and dynamax. Megas and Z moves were quite obviously incredibly strong in their respective generations, but as a whole were not game breaking mechanics. Megas were all handled on a case by case basis since they were very easy to deal with individually - if one mega was broken, just ban that mega stone and you're set. The comparison of dynamax to megas is, to me, borderline ridiculous, because the mega was telegraphed on probably 99% of viable teams and tiering megas was absurdly easy from a logistics perspective. Of all the Pokemon that were banned in gen 7, you can't really pin z moves as the sole or even main reason for any of them except *maybe* Marshadow which we all can probably agree would have been just as stupid without S^5.

However, dynamax is an entirely different beast. Literally any pokemon in the tier can dynamax at any given time and immediately have superpowered moves with some really stupid secondary benefits that are easily capable of turning the tide of games. This is true to a much greater extent for some pokemon (Charizard being a great example as Stratos has pointed out), but on any given team there are probably at least 4 pokemon that can effectively dynamax without wasting your one shot, making the mechanic pretty wildly unpredictable. This makes dynamax much more of an issue than megas or z moves ever were.

Tying this all into the discussion surrounding weakness policy, I absolutely agree that the combination of dynamax + WP is stupid. It's absurdly easy to side proc a weakness policy on your dynamax mon and start claiming OHKOs, especially given the near zero opportunity cost involved. I fully agree that something needs to be done here, the first step of which is identifying the problem. There is really only one answer here: dynamax. I fully agree with the latter half of Bughouse's post directly above this one (just not the parts about ally switch, fuck ally switch) in that I see absolutely no reason that weakness policy should be on the block at all. From an objective perspective, weakness policy has never been an issue in any capacity and is only an issue now because of dynamax. I strongly feel that this isn't even speculation, we have no reason to believe that weakness policy would be broken at all without dynamax because it's only ever been viable on like 2 pokemon across the entirety of gens 6 (aegislash) and 7 (diancie).

All this is to say that I firmly believe banning weakness policy is explicitly a blatant attempt to dance around the fact that dynamax is pretty ridiculous and antithetical to what we should be doing when balancing a tier. I've read through all most posts in this thread and pretty much every one of them that opposes a dynamax ban in favor of a WP ban is still dancing around the fact that WP is only problematic when used in conjunction with dynamax. If that's the case, does that not imply that WP is not broken without dynamax? I'm struggling to understand where these kinds of posts are coming from, specifically these two in particular:

It is absolutely true that the meta sucks right now. Laddering for DLT put me in a homicidal rage for two big reasons: Weakness Policy and Charizard, and I'll admit that both of these are probably only broken because of Dynamax.

I think that Dynamax is a perfectly healthy mechanic and that if anything should be banned Weakness Policy is the broken part. Poison and Fighting are both pretty weak, held in check by the devs preemptively giving them a powerful smack with the nerf bat, and boosting your speed or defenses when you are unable to cheese out a +2 boost in your favorite attacking stat is much less game winning than it is right now. Swords Dance/Nasty Plot and then pop max and start going ham is still in the same neighborhood but it offers way more counterplay than Weakness Policy, which makes unrealistic demands of "keep your Togekiss on the field and able to redirect at all points of the game unless you can deal with my +2 max mon".

Stratos buries the lede in his post by saying straight up that dynamax breaks both WP and charizard, and Nails starts out by saying that dynamax is healthy but all of the negativities mentioned in this blurb are still contingent on dynamax being in the picture. Am I crazy or is dynamax a pretty obvious common denominator in all the posts in this thread?

I empathize with people that want dynamax to stick around for whatever reason, I truly do. Honestly I think dynamax is super fun to play with and I don't dislike playing against it from an enjoyment perspective. But "enjoyment" is entirely subjective and it's impossible to argue that there isn't something wrong with the metagame as it stands. As such, we have to take a step back and examine the metagame and its components for what they are. When I do that, there is but one logical conclusion: dynamax is the underlying problem. My job and my personal goal as tier leader is to curate as healthy a metagame as possible, and at this point you sadly and quite simply cannot convince me that dynamax could ever be involved.

 

[Haruno]

You keep beating this drum of "we have to ban dynamax to save one million things" when actually the list of things we have to ban to save dynamax is:

beat up (debatably broken without dmax)
weakness policy
zard
maybe goth line (debatably not broken)

this is a list significantly short of one million items, unless i'm missing a bunch. What am I missing?

Quick question since you didn't really address the whole, "ban dynamax to save a million things." What makes WP/Zard/Goth the end of all the stuff that is enabled/broken by dynamax? These are undoubtedly the current most powerful abusers and are they potentially banworthy/broken due to dynamax? Possibly. What makes these things the only list of abusers of Dynamax though?

The reason why no singles tier took the whole, "ban the most broken abusers of dynamax" approach is because it is blatantly obvious that once one broken stuff goes, some other broken abuser will replace it. What's to stop that from happening in doubles? Let's say WP/Zard gets banned, what guarantee is there that there won't be another broken mon/move/item that becomes the new face of absurdity as a result of this ban that was previously overshadowed? We've already seen a bit of this happen before with the beat up discussion where WP/zard were not even mentioned at all and somehow after beatup's ban this became the hot new topic. Curious on how you view this issue o_o and anyone else in the know. TY!

 

[Stratos]

I meant to post my personal thoughts a while ago but I've had a weird few days so my apologies~

Without going line by line through everything that's been said in this thread so far because that would take far too much time, my thoughts here basically boil down to a couple points:

• Dynamax does not need to be saved because it is this generation's defining mechanic and we do not have to accept it as the status quo
• Blatantly trying to save dynamax is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing from a tiering perspective

The idea that dynamax is somehow above the law here because it's the new shiny toy from gen 8 is really just wrong. We aren't under any obligation to tread lightly around it and it should (in my opinion) be treated as any other facet of the metagame. "Generation defining mechanic" is not and has never been a special label given to things that implies they should be handled a certain way, it's just an easy way to describe megas, Z moves, and dynamax. Megas and Z moves were quite obviously incredibly strong in their respective generations, but as a whole were not game breaking mechanics. Megas were all handled on a case by case basis since they were very easy to deal with individually - if one mega was broken, just ban that mega stone and you're set. The comparison of dynamax to megas is, to me, borderline ridiculous, because the mega was telegraphed on probably 99% of viable teams and tiering megas was absurdly easy from a logistics perspective. Of all the Pokemon that were banned in gen 7, you can't really pin z moves as the sole or even main reason for any of them except *maybe* Marshadow which we all can probably agree would have been just as stupid without S^5.

However, dynamax is an entirely different beast. Literally any pokemon in the tier can dynamax at any given time and immediately have superpowered moves with some really stupid secondary benefits that are easily capable of turning the tide of games. This is true to a much greater extent for some pokemon (Charizard being a great example as Stratos has pointed out), but on any given team there are probably at least 4 pokemon that can effectively dynamax without wasting your one shot, making the mechanic pretty wildly unpredictable. This makes dynamax much more of an issue than megas or z moves ever were.

Tying this all into the discussion surrounding weakness policy, I absolutely agree that the combination of dynamax + WP is stupid. It's absurdly easy to side proc a weakness policy on your dynamax mon and start claiming OHKOs, especially given the near zero opportunity cost involved. I fully agree that something needs to be done here, the first step of which is identifying the problem. There is really only one answer here: dynamax. I fully agree with the latter half of Bughouse's post directly above this one (just not the parts about ally switch, fuck ally switch) in that I see absolutely no reason that weakness policy should be on the block at all. From an objective perspective, weakness policy has never been an issue in any capacity and is only an issue now because of dynamax. I strongly feel that this isn't even speculation, we have no reason to believe that weakness policy would be broken at all without dynamax because it's only ever been viable on like 2 pokemon across the entirety of gens 6 (aegislash) and 7 (diancie).

All this is to say that I firmly believe banning weakness policy is explicitly a blatant attempt to dance around the fact that dynamax is pretty ridiculous and antithetical to what we should be doing when balancing a tier. I've read through all most posts in this thread and pretty much every one of them that opposes a dynamax ban in favor of a WP ban is still dancing around the fact that WP is only problematic when used in conjunction with dynamax. If that's the case, does that not imply that WP is not broken without dynamax? I'm struggling to understand where these kinds of posts are coming from, specifically these two in particular:


Stratos buries the lede in his post by saying straight up that dynamax breaks both WP and charizard, and Nails starts out by saying that dynamax is healthy but all of the negativities mentioned in this blurb are still contingent on dynamax being in the picture. Am I crazy or is dynamax a pretty obvious common denominator in all the posts in this thread?

I empathize with people that want dynamax to stick around for whatever reason, I truly do. Honestly I think dynamax is super fun to play with and I don't dislike playing against it from an enjoyment perspective. But "enjoyment" is entirely subjective and it's impossible to argue that there isn't something wrong with the metagame as it stands. As such, we have to take a step back and examine the metagame and its components for what they are. When I do that, there is but one logical conclusion: dynamax is the underlying problem. My job and my personal goal as tier leader is to curate as healthy a metagame as possible, and at this point you sadly and quite simply cannot convince me that dynamax could ever be involved.

Simply don't agree with this logic in general. Let's look at some tiering analogies:

Swift Swim had existed for two generations without ever being a problem. Drizzle is obviously what made it broken in BW, but banned Swift Swim instead of Politoed. (I could do so many examples from BW OU but I'll stop at this one)
Self Swagger had existed for two generations without ever being a problem. Misty Terrain (and later Marshadow) is obviously what made it broken in SM, but we decided to ban Swagger instead of those.

Smogon policy has always been to favor the smallest ban that fixes the problem. Banning weakness policy is a significantly smaller ban than banning Dynamax. It doesn't matter "which came first." If you think Weakness Policy + Dynamax is broken, but Weakness Policy without Dynamax is not broken, and Dynamax without Weakness Policy is not broken, the obvious solution is to ban WP. And just saying "WP wasn't broken before Dynamax, so Dynamax must be broken even without WP" does not logically follow at all. If we substitute in some words, "self Swagger wasn't broken before Misty Terrain, so Misty Terrain must be broken even without Swagger," and you can see how that argument falls apart.

I do not think that Dynamax without WP is broken, so I would rather do the normal Smogon tiering thing of using the smallest bans that fix the problem.

Quick question since you didn't really address the whole, "ban dynamax to save a million things." What makes WP/Zard/Goth the end of all the stuff that is enabled/broken by dynamax? These are undoubtedly the current most powerful abusers and are they potentially banworthy/broken due to dynamax? Possibly. What makes these things the only list of abusers of Dynamax though?

The reason why no singles tier took the whole, "ban the most broken abusers of dynamax" approach is because it is blatantly obvious that once one broken stuff goes, some other broken abuser will replace it. What's to stop that from happening in doubles? Let's say WP/Zard gets banned, what guarantee is there that there won't be another broken mon/move/item that becomes the new face of absurdity as a result of this ban that was previously overshadowed? We've already seen a bit of this happen before with the beat up discussion where WP/zard were not even mentioned at all and somehow after beatup's ban this became the hot new topic. Curious on how you view this issue o_o and anyone else in the know. TY!

My reasoning for this was posted here

You will always see this slippery slope argument in any suspect thread, but I don't really buy it, particularly with Dynamax. They are primarily offensive Pokemon, primarily checked defensively. So it's pretty rare for one mon's Dynamax to be holding another mon's Dynamax down. What I'm saying is if there were multiple banworthy Pokemon at the moment, we would probably be seeing them all; they wouldn't suddenly appear once we knock down the first domino. (Notable exception being Dragapult, maybe, but that's far more likely to get banned than any of its checks anyway so).

 

[Ezrael]

First things first: the burden of proof is on the side suggesting to change the status quo
I feel like that has been lost in the pro-Dynamax ban discussion.

Second, before I get into any arguments about why we would ban/not ban Dynamax, I feel like this issue is being taken quite lightly, because OU has already banned it. In OU this was a massive policy decision, requiring PR threads and thousands of lines of discussion. I think that if we are even unsure whether Dynamax is broken we should save it because playing pokemon as it is on cart, mechanically, is an important goal of tiering.

An important thing to frame this argument. Bowman says that it is not a tiering goal to try to save Dynamax. This is true: tiering goals should not be to save a particular thing. We should not have, e.g., made it a goal of ours to ban S^5 before Marshadow to save Marshadow.
However, it is not my goal to save Dynamax. My goal is to implement good tiering. I think that in general, we should make tiering policy decisions as small as possible to solve the problem-- banning max is a massive move, and if we don’t need to ban it, we shouldn’t. This is another example of Bowman trying to shift the burden of proof onto the anti-ban side. We are not trying to move everything to save Dynamax, we are trying to prevent a bad tiering decision from taking place.

Why would we want to ban Dynamax?
There are a few possible reasons
1) Uncompetitive
a. Reads on what/when your opponent is going to max (4 a)
B. Weakness policy + Dynamax is uncompetitive, but that’s Dyna’s fault not WP
2) Teambuilding restrictions
a. Opportunity cost in having separate maxers
3) Lack of counterplay
a. Can’t deal with it offensively
b. Can’t deal with it defensively
4) Eliminates skill in playing
a. Dynamax's momentum swings are too great, resulting in a snowball effect and reducing the value of long-term planning
5) Simplicity of banlist
a. We might have to ban a ton of things in order to save Dynamax--is it really worth it? (WP + max broken, but ban max instead)



These are the Smogon policy reasons to ban things. Of course, there can be new reasons and not everything needs to fit within these guidelines, but I think that these are good guidelines to follow when discussing potential bans. I’ve fit Tree’s arguments into these, as well as added some strong arguments that I feel haven’t been made by the pro ban side. Now I'll flesh them out and argue that these do not add up to a sufficient case for a Dynamax ban.

1) Uncompetitive

1. Reads on what your opponent is going to do

This argument is largely derivative of the argument made later in 4 a. The basic point of the argument is that it is too difficult to predict which mon your opponent is going to Dynamax and when, and that not predicting correctly is too punishing. Of course, every move is hard to predict as your opponent has many options on any given turn. What would make this uncompetitive/unhealthy is whether failing to predict/play around your opponent’s max is too punishing. I will go into detail about this later, but I think that by and large, failing to predict your opponent’s max and/or leading incorrectly does not instantly lose the game, and there is sufficient counterplay.

1. WP + Dyna--Dyna is at fault

Yes. Dynamax is definitely the reason why Weakness Policy is busted, I agree. As argued above, WP was perfectly healthy in previous generations, with barely any usage. However, I think that that is a reason to ban WP as opposed to banning Dynamax. I will get more into this in 5a, but the argument is basically: WP is less important to Pokemon than Dynamax, so banning it is not that big of a deal. Dynamax is a huge element of pokemon now, so banning it is a big deal.

2) Teambuilding restrictions

1. No opportunity cost in having separate maxers

First: there is in fact an opportunity cost in having your pokemon be able to max. The cost is that they’re not holding the best items in general, but the best items that they can use when maxed. I might want to use a pokemon with Choice Scarf, or Choice Specs and those items might be better for my team, but I am forced to use an item that allows my pokemon to max. I think that scope lens togekiss would kinda suck if it didn’t have the possibility of maxing. It is in fact--not great. I wouldn’t want to run WP on my Necrozma if it couldn’t max, or on my Dragapult. There is opportunity cost associated with making your pokemon strong when maxed as the sets that pokemon run right now are sub-optimal in other situations.
Think about physical DD Dragapult. I only run this pokemon on my teams because it has the ability to max. No one would run it if it could only use Phantom Force as its main stab. I make the choice of running a pokemon that is distinctly sub-optimal when it doesn’t max, in order to get massive benefits when it does max. Similarly for Lapras, which is absolutely garbage when it doesn’t max.

Basically, the mons are decent at best, but definitely not optimal, especially if Weakness Policy was banned. Without WP, Necrozma wouldn’t be a good max target, nor would Rhyperior, nor Lapras. There would be significantly more opportunity cost in making some pokemon available as maxers. (also Durant has a massive cost if it can’t max.)

3) Lack of counterplay
a.) offensive counterplay
The argument here is that because it is impossible to kill a max mon while it is maxed, there is no offensive counterplay, and that is bad because offensive counterplay is an important part of pokemon. I think this is wrong on both fronts: it is possible to kill a max mon while it is maxed and it is also possible to have offensive counterplay to Dynamax that doesn’t involve killing the maxed mon.
1) Can max mons be killed? Yes. it is not easy, but teams with high damage output pokemon can definitely kill Dynamaxed mons. Max Togekiss can be KO’d by Melmetal in TR. Same for Max Ttar, even though I don’t think ttar can be ohko’d. Max Durant can be KO’d by life orb flamethrower from dragapult, Charizard can be KO’d by rock moves. It’s hard to OHKO max pokemon, but in appropriate positions it is possible. Further, if your opponent has maxed, maxing reactively is an option. Max Ttar definitely kills max Zard, as do the max versions of all of the pokemon that I’ve listed. You can use your max to beat your opponent’s max and that’s not cancerous because everyone has access to it by default in the builder without making too many teambuilding concessions.
Further, I think the most scary thing about max mons is the ones that are hard to kill and even can’t be killed because they always take OKHOs. These are boosted max mons and deserve attention. Max Togekiss is not strong enough to kill its counters, especially through follow me, even with scope lens. The main offenders are, then, +2 rotom-w, +1 dragapult, and any pokemon that has a weakness policy boost. These pokemon are genuinely scary, but are not unkillable if they’ve taken serious damage prior to maxing. For Weakness policy this can be hard, if not impossible to achieve, as the mon often maxes at the same time as it gets its policy activated and is at full health. However, with Rotom and DD pult, these pokemon need to take time to boost their offenses and can take chip during the boosting turn. If they don’t, that is as a result of poor board management from my opponent. If my Rotom-W is +2 but has 60% health when it maxes, it only has 120% health total as opposed to 200%, which is far more manageable. Similarly for Dragapult, which also takes recoil damage from Life Orb. To me, Weakness policy seems like the problem here, not Dynamax inherently.

But even if you don’t believe anything I’ve just said, responding offensively to Dynamax needn’t take the form of killing the Max pokemon. I don’t respond offensively to e.g., Gastrodon by killing Gastrodon (except when I do), I respond to Gastrodon offensively by making it watch its friends die. If my opponent maxes a pokemon and can only get one kill out of it, I can max my pokemon and make sure that the partners to the max pokemon go away and I get a pokemon advantage as a result of this trade. That sounds offensive to me--I’m not wasting their damage, I’m trying to get a pokemon advantage, by dealing more damage than my opponent. Now of course, Max mons deal more damage than Gastrodon on average. But it is possible to leverage the positions to make sure that the partner dies as opposed to focusing on the max mon itself (note: I often do this with my Max mon, and that is a useful way of using max. If you can take a mon advantage as your opponent attempts to kill your max mon, you can get ahead in the game).
b.) Defensive counterplay
The real problem with defensive counterplay in the status quo is that pokemon get too many boosts for free. I agree that defensive counterplay is somewhat lacking (not much snarl, only sleep mon is venusaur, Dragapult has clear body), but I claim that this type of defensive counterplay is only important if the pokemon that is being counterplayed has boosts in the first place. I don’t really need to intimidate Dragapult that much if it’s at + 0 and I can hit it back with a Knock off to remove its life orb. The problem with the amount of defensive counterplay in the status quo is that the mons have too many boosts--a result of Weakness policy, not a result of Dynamax inherently.
Protect and Switches are, I find, actually a really good way to prevent Dynamax pokemon from running through a team. If you are able to waste a Max attack, that is ⅓ of the damage potential of the max mon completely gone. Max moves are an important resource, and wasting their damage is a) possible and b) important.

4 Eliminates skill in playing
Momentum swings too high.
“Games are often decided in 6 or fewer turns -- the three you have to Dynamax and the three the opponent has. If you use your Dynamax turns correctly, you take out foes' Pokemon, boost your stats, set favorable conditions, and put yourself in such a commanding position that the enemy cannot come back. If you don't, then you haven't accomplished enough, and it's going to be an uphill battle. It doesn't matter who Dynamax'es first -- I believe qsns ran the numbers and found that the person who Max'd second won exactly as often as the person who Max'd first in SPL. There definitely are games that will be decided outside of the max turns, but if you can "just win" a game, somewhat routinely, with the same mechanic, then it's broken and needs to go.”
This is, I think, a good statement of the argument. However, if you watch this format, it is just incorrect. https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-482339 (Qsns vs Stax, finals), Qsns didn’t snowball the game off of his +2 +2 Dragapult, and the game was winnable even after Stax Maxed Melmetal (Qsns might have been better served by preserving incineroar).
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-480752 (Tman vs Dawoblefet, semis)
DaWoblefet got a strong Necrozma and started boosting spdef. Tman was able to answer it with a crit in part because it had such low health already. However, Tman then max guarded, got his togekiss up to +2 speed and then lost it immediately after.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-480836 (Qsns vs Marilli, semis)
Marilli burns his max early on lapras, gets up a solid aveil. Qsns stalls out the turns, gets into a good position with his melmetal, sets up a utility misty terrain to prevent melmetal from getting slept and prepares to win with Body Press. Qsns loses eventually due to excessive freezes, but that’s irrelevant to the main point--max seems to not actually snowball games, although weakness policy can be dumb.

I could find more replays if we want, but I think I’ve made myself clear. Dynamax mons, by themselves, have a hard time just picking up 3 kos and boosting stats and winning the game immediately, at least at a relatively high level of play. Weakness policy is what makes these mons broken by giving them access to immediate offensive boosts before they boost their defenses.



5 Simplicity of banlist

1. How much is too much?

When tiering, decisions should have the smallest possible effect on the metagame without being overly complicated. Obviously banning certain combinations of pokemon + moves + items + abilities has the smallest possible effect, but becomes overly complex. This is why Smogon also has the policy of advocating for simple bans, so as to make the ban list understandable. These policies pull in opposite directions. This is why simple has come to mean ‘ban x pokemon’ or ‘ban x move’ or something that can be explained in one line. Ban WP is sufficiently simple to meet this simplicity requirement. So would banning an additional pokemon. Banning Dynamax is also simple, but has a massive impact on the game. In order to ban max, we need to be absolutely sure that Dynamax is at fault and not other elements. In OU, it was quite clear that the reason Dynamax was uncompetitive and unhealthy was not a specific abuser. It was clear that there would always be a broken abuser. I genuinely do not think that, if we remove weakness policy, there will be a broken abuser (except maybe for Charizard). If it turns out that there are too many pokemon that need to be banned and so forth, I will reconsider my argument.

On a bad argument: ‘All this is to say that I firmly believe banning weakness policy is explicitly a blatant attempt to dance around the fact that dynamax is pretty ridiculous and antithetical to what we should be doing when balancing a tier. I've read through all most posts in this thread and pretty much every one of them that opposes a dynamax ban in favor of a WP ban is still dancing around the fact that WP is only problematic when used in conjunction with dynamax. If that's the case, does that not imply that WP is not broken without dynamax?’

We should do good tiering, not bad tiering. Banning the smallest element necessary is important. Staying as close as possible to the actual game is important. I also don’t think that any sufficient argument has been made to show that Dynamax is ‘ridiculous and antithetical to balancing a tier’. That is the only argument Bowman makes in this section for banning Dynamax is that statement, and it is underproven.

 

[Fran]

Alright, since enough good quality have been made I'll just mention the few things that I very much disagree with. Most of what I think is accurate about the place of Dynamax in DOU is mentioned in the post above. So:

a) the framing on the issue - if you want to make a change something about the metagame, it's on you to prove to everyone else that the change you propose deserves to have impact on the game we all play. if the majority of people think wp is the problem not dynamax, then accusing them of manipulation in trying to "save it" is just a failure to see your own bias. im getting flashbacks from the gen7 deo suspect :I
b) maxing "just wins" games and doesnt always reward the better player - i'm sorry, but what is the proof for this? i think the recent SPL you had a perfect example of better players using the new mechanic more skillfully than others and getting a better result because of it. just watch almost any game from smb, ezrael or stax. the vast majority of games took more than 6 turns and the only one I can remember that didn't (ezrael vs bowman) was a clear showcase of why wp is very problematic in gen8 doubles
c) "if dmax makes wp broken, then we can only ban dmax" - we didn't apply this logic when we considered banning certain mega evolutions in gen6 and gen7, so i don't understand why we should do it now. its almost always smarter to ban the smaller thing than try to remove a fundamental game mechanic

I think we all can agree that this format was pretty much fine before the home release, then the metagame swiftly turned into something many of us don't enjoy playing. In my opinion, if we want to look for a fix, we should closely inspect every problematic aspect of it (wp getting better, charizard getting better, melmetal being introduced) rather than mess with the fundamentals and hope something good comes out of it.

 

[talkingtree]

*snip*

I'm not going to respond point-by-point to this whole post because 1) it would take too long and 2) there are some decent points made here, so I'll just focus on what I disagree with / what I think needs to be stated.

I don't feel any loss of the fact that arguing DMax should be banned is arguing for a change in the status quo -- I and others have given reasons that we think it should change, attempting to prove our viewpoints. You're acting as though we're just waiting for people to make good anti-ban arguments, which is (largely) a mischaracterization.


"I think that if we are even unsure whether Dynamax is broken we should save it because playing pokemon as it is on cart, mechanically, is an important goal of tiering."

In my view, an important goal of tiering is to be able to replicate the metagame on cart, which is very doable if both players agree to not max. For something like Sleep Clause / Freeze Clause, this is a huge issue because it is impossible to implement. However, Pokemon bans / item bans are changes to playing Pokemon as it is on cart, as is Dynamax. I see no large enough difference between the two to say that we should put an enormous amount of additional weight on banning Dynamax.


"We are not trying to save Dynamax, we are trying to prevent a bad tiering decision from taking place"

Until this post, I haven't seen many arguments that Dynamax is balanced without WP, but mostly arguments about WP + Dynamax's brokenness. On the flipside, I have made points about how Dynamax is *not* balanced without WP, so it seems to me like the arguments are ignoring some ban sides. I recognize that you care strongly about this, but try not to just point out the worst parts of the other side as if they represent the whole. I've also tried my best to present everything as an opinion as opposed to a statement of fact, and when you make claims like "this is a bad tiering decision" then I think it comes off more as an insult than an opinion. But the latter part isn't really about the discussion, so I digress.


"The real problem with defensive counterplay in the status quo is that pokemon get too many boosts for free. I agree that defensive counterplay is somewhat lacking (not much snarl, only sleep mon is venusaur, Dragapult has clear body), but I claim that this type of defensive counterplay is only important if the pokemon that is being counterplayed has boosts in the first place."

This is only especially true for Pokemon that rely on Weakness Policy. GMax Charizard, Durant, Scope Lens Togekiss, Hatterene, and to a lesser extent Dracozolt are all extremely threatening without needing boosts. All can claim KOes, all require defensive counterplay, and all have ways to circumvent that defensive counterplay by instantly getting OHKOes or setting unduly strong secondary effects.


"This is, I think, a good statement of the argument. However, if you watch this format, it is just incorrect. https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-482339 (Qsns vs Stax, finals), Qsns didn’t snowball the game off of his +2 +2 Dragapult, and the game was winnable even after Stax Maxed Melmetal (Qsns might have been better served by preserving incineroar).
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-480752 (Tman vs Dawoblefet, semis)
DaWoblefet got a strong Necrozma and started boosting spdef. Tman was able to answer it with a crit in part because it had such low health already. However, Tman then max guarded, got his togekiss up to +2 speed and then lost it immediately after.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-480836 (Qsns vs Marilli, semis)
Marilli burns his max early on lapras, gets up a solid aveil. Qsns stalls out the turns, gets into a good position with his melmetal, sets up a utility misty terrain to prevent melmetal from getting slept and prepares to win with Body Press. Qsns loses eventually due to excessive freezes, but that’s irrelevant to the main point--max seems to not actually snowball games, although weakness policy can be dumb."

Anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not disprove the point. I have a few replays of my own that can show the exact opposite, all also from SPL:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-478606 (qsns vs talkingtree, Week 9) -- I lose turn 2. It's a little more complicated than that, but basically I lose turn 2.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-475088 (stax vs Memoric, Week 5) -- Memoric falls too far behind after turn 1 and cannot come back.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-477843 (Ezrael vs stax, Week 8) -- Ezrael breaks through Blastoise and Heal Pulse Gothitelle, thanks to Charizard and GMax Wildfire, two of stax's best ways to respond to sun. Even with Snarl and Parting Shot Incineroar, stax ends up losing to the sun core.

The point of this argument wasn't to say that Dynamax always runs away with games, and is undeniably ruining the metagame. If that was the case, it would've been quickbanned long ago. The point is that Dynamax has the capability to create such large snowballs that the game ends, often from very early on, thanks to its power.


Also, for the record, I had issues with Dynamax even before Home was released, and I know Memoric did too. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were others out there, and speaking for everyone by saying "we can all agree" for *any* reason is assuming too much.

 

[rolandthemaleralts]

I don't think Dynamax should be banned in doubles. It is a huge part of the meta, but there are ways to take down dynamaxed opponents. It isn't that big of a deal to me and it doesn't seem like a game breaking mechanic.

 

[Stratos]

This is only especially true for Pokemon that rely on Weakness Policy. GMax Charizard, Durant, Scope Lens Togekiss, Hatterene, and to a lesser extent Dracozolt are all extremely threatening without needing boosts. All can claim KOes, all require defensive counterplay, and all have ways to circumvent that defensive counterplay by instantly getting OHKOes or setting unduly strong secondary effects.

Really (outside of Zard obviously) I haven't seen these Pokemon be nearly scary enough to consider them unhealthy for the meta.

Durant basically has to call every turn right to be effective. This is basically impossible without Goth, but even with her it's far from guaranteed. After max the boosts are nearly useless on your blind, almost certainly intimidated ant.
Kiss doesn't OHKO bulky Pokemon, even if you get your crits. She also makes pitifully bad use of her speed boosts once Max has worn off.
Hatterene requires TR, which she basically has to set herself to get the full benefit, making her pretty analogous to Jon's Rotom-W scenario. She's liable to be weakened (offensively or defensively) on the TR turn which makes her a lot less scary. GMax Smite is cringe though I'll admit.
Dracozolt... I haven't seen basically at all.

Anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not disprove the point. I have a few replays of my own that can show the exact opposite, all also from SPL:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-478606 (qsns vs talkingtree, Week 9) -- I lose turn 2. It's a little more complicated than that, but basically I lose turn 2.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-475088 (stax vs Memoric, Week 5) -- Memoric falls too far behind after turn 1 and cannot come back.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8doublesou-477843 (Ezrael vs stax, Week 8) -- Ezrael breaks through Blastoise and Heal Pulse Gothitelle, thanks to Charizard and GMax Wildfire, two of stax's best ways to respond to sun. Even with Snarl and Parting Shot Incineroar, stax ends up losing to the sun core.

The point of this argument wasn't to say that Dynamax always runs away with games, and is undeniably ruining the metagame. If that was the case, it would've been quickbanned long ago. The point is that Dynamax has the capability to create such large snowballs that the game ends, often from very early on, thanks to its power.

I'm not saying your argument is wrong just because you provided bad examples. But you've provided examples that solely come from my "Dynamax is not broken except" list, so these haven't really changed my opinion at all.

It's so hard to make suspect posts because—aside from discussing policy—how you feel about a suspect is just so deeply personal. But let me try.

To address one of your points, which is that Dynamax makes it so those are the only turns that matter, I don't think I agree, or rather, I don't think the environment has really changed. Going back previous gens, we have always had teams that blow their load early and coast to a finish, teams that play slow at first and then kick up the aggression, and teams that maintain a pretty even pace all game and basically just try to lose second. In SM some examples are SMB Rain, Stax Sample, and Edu's Metagross respectively. In XY I could point to hard rain, THALKS, and MGengar balances respectively. Dynamax may have highlighted the mechanic present in THALKS games in XY—that everything before Sylveon used Calm Mind was timid foreplay to set up the occasion—but it didn't fundamentally change it. And I think all three of these team styles are preserved into SS. We obviously have the first two, which would be the source of your complaint, but teams of the third variety do still exist. Without digging around for hazily remembered replays of other people, my Lapras and Weezing teams are examples, which I've brought to tournaments with decent success.

When I look at your replay vs qsns, for example, I see a team designed to take the lead early failing to do so and losing very quickly, and I see nothing wrong with that. If I go down 4-5 with SMB rain by turn 4 I expect the game to be over. I don't think this is indicative of how all games in the Dynamax meta go, though. I'll think more about some of the other pro-ban points raised in this thread before I respond to those.

 

[PokePoindexter]

I'm not going to respond to everything that's been said because I'd be here all day if I did, but I've read every anti-ban post end to end and still have yet to see anyone offer up a substantive case as to how Dynamax would become healthy without Weakness Policy. Say what you want about it being a massive mechanic, everyone being able to use it, simplistic bans, or "skill" at using it, and use all the anecdotal evidence you want; all of that sounds nice on paper, but none of it matters if the mechanic itself isn't healthy. I've previously expressed various reasons why I believe Dynamax isn't healthy, and none of those reasons had anything to do with WP.

Try filling out these sentences without using a generic anti-ban argument, an argument that could just as easily be used for keeping Weakness Policy instead, or any of the other on-paper reasons that have been given so far:

• "I believe Dynamax without WP would be a healthier metagame than WP without Dynamax because ____________."
• "I believe Weakness Policy is warping the game more than Dynamax is because ____________."
• "I believe Weakness Policy would continue to be problematic even after Dynamax is gone because ____________."

Yes, I realize Dynamax is the hallmark battle mechanic of Gen 8, it's fun to use, and banning it would be a landscape-altering shift - it was that when OU banned it as well. But regarding the big debate of this thread (Dynamax versus WP), I still haven't seen a convincing reason to believe Dynamax would become healthy if WP were banned, whereas possibly aside from Melmetal or Aegislash, I can't think of anything that would be able to use WP effectively without being able to Dynamax. So I still side firmly on the side of banning Dynamax.

 

[variationonatheme]

So I was very busy for a while because of this pandemic stuff.. and lots happened while I was away. First, the Gen 7 DOU ladder is back up!!! Not sure how it happened (I planned to write an impassioned appeal to the Smogon staff, but got busy and didn't do pokemon at all for more than a week), but thanks to Stratos and others for supporting! However, there's been very little fanfare... you ought to at least let doubles players know it's available.. e.g., with some announcement on the Doubles forum and/or in the chat room. (I see Stratos and Memoric already coming close to the top of the ladder, so don't claim ignorance)

Now to the subject at hand, I think having Gen 7 DOU available provides an alternative to Gen 8 Dynamax focused play, so from my perspective it cuts into the need for a Dynamax ban a bit. Frankly, I'm surprised people are even considering a ban at this point. It's clear from earlier posts (and the likes given) that there's a large majority of players who don't support a ban (like 2 to 1-- though Redpill PUA seems to have done a 180?). Bottom line, this suspect isn't going to achieve anything, except making Dynamax harder to ban later because it failed at this time. If you want to try temporarily banning Dynamax, that would be much better, as it would give people an idea of what a no Dynamax Gen 8 DOU would be like. (Otherwise, it probably seems a bit bleak with no Dynamax, megas or stones.)

I would personally vote to ban Dynamax, but I don't think the suspect, as contemplated, makes sense at this time. Those are my thoughts, but you all can certainly carry on with the debate if you so wish.

 

[Hashtag]

it me hashtag. quick point about weakness policy ive made before in discord but wanna drop here.
weakness policy is toxic game design. it incentivises players to do things that they arent generally supposed to do in this game, and punishes players for doing what they are supposed to do. it punishes you for clicking SE moves, (you should feel good when you hit a SE move) and causes side targetting with weak moves to be a dominant strategy (this is lame and not how the game is meant to be played) i think game elements like weakness policy are ok ONLY as long as they are niche, which it was before gen 8. now that it is commonplace, i hate it. ban it.

edit @ below: suggestion ignored. the word means exactly what i want it to mean. how dare you make suggestions to me who the fuck even are you.

 

[Cuddly]

it me hashtag. quick point about weakness policy ive made before in discord but wanna drop here.
weakness policy is toxic game design. it incentivises players to do things that they arent generally supposed to do in this game, and punish players for doing what they are supposed to do. they punish you for clicking SE moves, (you should feel good when you hit a SE move) and cause side targetting with weak moves to be a dominant strategy (this is lame and not how the game is meant to be played) i think game elements like weakness policy are ok ONLY as long as they are niche, which it was before gen 8. now that it is commonplace, i hate it. ban it.

First of all, I suggest you never use the word “toxic” in that context again.

Secondly, Weakness Policy is a Risk vs Reward mechanic that several games have.
You risk being OHKO’d, chipped to priority range, and losing it in some way for a x2 boost to your offenses (or x3 if you use Simple Swoobat) until you switch out.
Using super effective attacks are still 100% valid, even more so if you are slow and bulky, since they would only use the boost on the next turn.

That changed, however, thanks to Dynamax doubling your HP, making it so you can’t be phased, a whole bunch of other immunities, and giving you attacks with the same BP as Boomburst/Close Combat with guaranteed secondary effects and no accuracy checks.
And that is more of how you described Weakness Policy than what Weakness Policy is.

 

[talkingtree]

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the DOU Council has been discussing Nails's proposal to add another option to the suspect voting, and we've finally come to a decision: There will be instant runoff voting with three options: Ban Dynamax, Ban Weakness Policy, Ban Nothing. Voters who have achieved the ladder requirements will rank these three options in order of preference. If no options get a majority, the option with the fewest first-choice votes will be removed and those votes will be re-distributed based on their second choices.

I want to reiterate that this is not a statement of the suspect being about trying to fix the combination of Dynamax and Weakness Policy. There are many reasons that people may vote to ban Dynamax, not just this specific interaction. However, the majority of the council believes that due to the fairly widespread dissatisfaction with the current metagame and the time pressure of DPL coming up, providing an alternative option is more likely to be productive.

We cannot and will not tell you what to vote, but it is important to note that you aren't necessarily picking between removing Dynamax or Weakness Policy if you are unhappy with their interactions. Read through this thread, especially posts that seem to have a lot of support, and try to understand positions from both sides of this discussion, and vote as you choose.

As a reminder, the laddering period will begin in a little over a day, March 27th at 8:00 PM EST. The laddering requirements and suspect alt specifications will be released then, but as in other recent suspect tests, we are not having a separate suspect ladder.

 

[Red Pill PUA]

WP is not the problem, dynamax is. WP was never used tell this gen. Its abused now because with dynamax you will tank super effective attacks and your partner will get defensive boosts so it can also survive a super effective hit.

Your dynamax mon holding a WP gets WP off 100% of the time, and not even taking in fling, uturn, priority attacks to self activate.

Dynamax ground/steel also allows your partner to get defensive boosts which also allows it to set off WP.

The results are two mons with WP activated and one in dynamax form. You will not survive the both of them. This is most evident with sand cores. Its broken as fuck and brain dead.

And you know what is going to happen if you just ban WP but keep dynamax? mons are just going to run set up moves with misdirection and stem roll that way. That is literally whats going to happen if you guys ban WP but keep dynamax. We will be right back here again with another suspect. One dragon dance/swords dance and dynamax with max fighting yeah good luck not getting one shot after that. The only reason people are not doing this right now is because WP is just a better and quicker option.

And the good mons are not even out yet, Just wait tell we get some max beast boosts mons and max lando t. You think dynamax is op right now you have not seen anything yet.

Oh yeah we could sure use marshadow to steal all these WP boosts and jirachi to tank max turns right about now. Its almost like the game is balanced around all the mons being able to be used. This is the result of premature bans. This is what you get.

This meta is worse than the beat up meta.

 

[MajorBowman]

The laddering period of the suspect test has begun!

All games must be played on the Pokemon Showdown! Doubles OU ladder on a fresh alt with a name of the form "DOUD7 (name)." For example, I might register the name "DOUD7 Bowman" to use during this suspect test.

To qualify to vote in this test, you must fulfill BOTH of the following requirements:

• You must play at least 45 games
• You must have a minimum GXE of 81

Happy laddering!

 

[ArcanePhoenix]

Quick question since you didn't really address the whole, "ban dynamax to save a million things." What makes WP/Zard/Goth the end of all the stuff that is enabled/broken by dynamax? These are undoubtedly the current most powerful abusers and are they potentially banworthy/broken due to dynamax? Possibly. What makes these things the only list of abusers of Dynamax though?

The reason why no singles tier took the whole, "ban the most broken abusers of dynamax" approach is because it is blatantly obvious that once one broken stuff goes, some other broken abuser will replace it. What's to stop that from happening in doubles? Let's say WP/Zard gets banned, what guarantee is there that there won't be another broken mon/move/item that becomes the new face of absurdity as a result of this ban that was previously overshadowed? We've already seen a bit of this happen before with the beat up discussion where WP/zard were not even mentioned at all and somehow after beatup's ban this became the hot new topic. Curious on how you view this issue o_o and anyone else in the know. TY!

That is the most likely result, unfortunately. Whatever can use Dynamax will smack whatever can't use it.
Dynamax is incredibly broken and unhealthy. Its a factor of uncertainty which nobody can nor wants to deal with. As long it is not burned ANY mon on the opposing side can randomly survive an attack it should not be able to. As long it is not used any choice user is not locked for the purpose of prediction. How many games did you have where you just could not kill an enemy because you had no answer to one of his mons getting a "free" switch in and dynamaxing? If your only way to beat a mechanic is using it yourself something is clearly not designed or balanced well. I have seen games where losing two mons just to give a dynamax user that one turn he needed was a valid way to win. Thats how overpowered this mess of a mechanic is. No reason to keep banning things because dynamax breaks them. Just nuke the root of the problem.

 

[West]

...

and use instant runoff voting (pick your favorite options in order, remove losing options until a majority is reached). This won't make the vote take any longer than it will currently, it's easy enough to tally, and it will allow voters to (imo) target the true culprit while preserving gen 8's defining mechanic.

I don't know about the situation of DOU, but Instant Runoff may promote tactical voting which may unfairly change results-especially when the votes are visible. It is impossible to avoid tactical voting for the general case, but I think we can manage to do it in this case. How?

For this vote, two of the options imply the same result (let's call then DB and WPB): Dynamax+Weakness Policy cause an imbalance in the metagame. The other option (NB) says that the metagame is fine as it is. Given that someone thinks a ban should take place, them voting DB > NB > WPB or WPB > NB > DB would be illogical. If we remove these two options from the selection pool, we can then move along with a quite simpler single-vote method that produces the same results as a Cournot Concordet Vote (that is, axiomatically perfect aside from not yielding results sometimes-which won't be the case for this situation). So I'd like to propose the following method of voting:

- Single votes for an option
- No Ban wins if >50%
- If No Ban is <50%, the ban option with more votes wins.

 

[TheFourthChaser]

whats up, I have qualified for this suspect test

Honestly I came in with a preconceived notion that Weakness Policy would be the problem and after laddering, all I'm sure of is that Max isn't broken. I have seen plenty of games in which I felt that Dynamax allowed and encouraged interactive scenarios and the situations in which it denied them were usually the result of WP activating. Maybe there are some particular mons that are broken as a result of being able to max (Charizard?) but for the most part it felt like there were a variety of mons using the mechanic in what I thought was a healthy manner.

Dragapult is an incredibly common max option but part of what makes it so good is that you may have given it +2 attack stats on the same turn it gave you -1 defense. It is much easier to handle Dragapult, and prevent the snowball, in this situation if you don't have to worry about either proccing the item through SE damage or of the possibility that they activate the item themselves. Other than this scenario, I don't think I've seen a max situation that I thought was stupid/unfair/uncompetitive. I appreciate that maxing could be defensive as well as offensive and am not convinced that it is overly powerful outside of WP situations.

The question to me is "should WP be banned?" Banning WP should make max snowball situations much easier to prevent/deal with but I haven't been convinced from laddering or replays itt that these snowballs are that easy to create/are game winning in an unfair way. If there are particular mons that are broken in their max form, deal with them as there can't be more than 2 if even that. If you're unsure between banning WP and Max, Dmax is a core mechanic and WP is an otherwise niche item so I believe Dmax be the preserved choice if you absolutely believe something needs to be banned.

Currently sitting with No Ban > Ban WP > Ban Max but may go Ban WP > No Ban > Ban Max

 

[Shadowmonstr7]

Finished reqs yesterday, and I have decided to make a post explaining my vote.
When I heard about this suspect I was actually surprised. I expected a suspect of wp or maybe Zard soon, but I didn't expect a dmax test until after policy was gone. Lately many users have argued that dynamax is the broken component in doubles and it is what is wrong with current meta, which many players despise. This seems like a very valid and logical view. After all, didn't dynamax take beat up from a meme strategy to a disgusting monster? And I am yet to find a user who enjoys fighting something like wp super luck dmax togekiss. On the surface it seems like dynamax is cancerous mechanic that breaks every meta it touches and has no place in doubles.

But this simply isn't true. Dynamax can function as a balanced mechanic in doubles. And if you don't believe me, I have three months of the pre-home meta to back up my point. The general consensus I gathered during my observations in the pre-home days was that people liked the meta, and generally players (including myself) were surprised that dynamax was not broken. Though dynamax was undoubtedly strong pre-home, it was still part of a quite stable meta that most players enjoyed.

But post-home the meta changed. Doubles OU made a 180 and turned from being a good balanced meta and transformed into the unbalanced, annoying meta we see today. This begs the key question of "what changed." What really changed in the transition from pre to post-home? What is there more of now than there was before? Only six new pokemon were added to the DOU ranking, and of those six only two of them are common dynamaxers- Melmetal and Necrozma. What do these two mons have in common? The answer is obvious- both consistently run weakness policy. Self proccing is incredibly threatening do to priority options like hitmontop (procs for lapra, melm, necro, and pult), pivot options (like incin u-turning on necro), and slow troom options like bulldoze to proc a melmetal or rhyperior. Weakness policy usage has grown exponentially since pre-home, and I strongly believe it is foremost at fault.

With weakness policy a pokemon receives an attack power boost after being attacked by a fast ally (or slow under troom) who procs there policy.
That should sound eerily familiar. I could swap out the words "beat up" for weakness policy change "policy" to "justified" and create an accurate description of beat up. Beat up was banned because it was a ridiculous strat that made it common for a single turn to determine the outcome of a game, and I believe the same logic that was used to ban beat up applies to wp as well. The opportunity cost of banning beat up was inconsequential relative to the opportunity cost of banning dmax, and this also holds true for weakness policy. WP used to be an item that was only ever used on diancie, and is a very small cost to pay for helping maintain a mechanic that was designed by the developer for the meta to be built around. In conclusion, the evidence shows me that we had a good meta with dmax before home dropped, and I have no doubt that it is possible to achieve a healthy dmax meta once again. For these reasons which I have listed I will be voting Ban WP>No ban>ban dynamax

If you would like further evidence for the pro-dmax side I would recommend checking out Ezrael and Stratos' posts on page 1.

 

[MajorBowman]

Just a friendly reminder that in order to be included in the voting you have to post your reqs in the voter ID thread, not this one. Tagging Shadowmonstr4 for a heads up.

 

[Checkmater]

So I'd like to propose the following method of voting:

- Single votes for an option
- No Ban wins if >50%
- If No Ban is <50%, the ban option with more votes wins.

I don't think this is optimal. In the noban<50% case people who voted No Ban don't get a voice in the final meta between the two options. So it would be better actually to hold a secondary vote after this (either chronologically after or simultaneous, as another choice that might not be used in the case that No Ban >50%).

This is better because if I am a hypothetical voter who thinks the current meta is good but don't want Dynamax banned in particular, then I might strategically vote (read: bad) to vote ban and wp, especially if I think it's inevitable that SOMETHING will get banned and it's up in the air as to what gets banned.

I think because of some math (Arrow's Theorem) there's no perfect voting system for multichoice so at some point these discussions are moot but I thought I'd chime in anyways.