Just a quick note, "old gen" tiers are locked once it stops being the current generation. This is mainly because there isn't a large enough sample size to move things up or down between tiers, a lot less games happen for old generation ladders. RBY doesn't care because rby uu was itself created when rby wasnt a current generation, rby uu tiers depends on the viability ranking, not usage also these pokemon wouldn't be BL (banlist, because theyre not banned from UU)
Altough in practice they're the same as "UUBL", literally unusable in UU, figuratively unusable in OU for the most part, but for entirely different reasons... for the most part. Also, both Chansey and Blissey fell out of favour due to Spike stacking ferrothorn, Secret sword Keldeo and Specs Latios; maybe Chansey is better but better than underwhelming isn't necesarily good.
@@usernametaken017 They can still ban. They banned Arceus in Gen 4 Ubers once they found it to be too strong, and as covered in the previous analysis on this channel, they banned Quagsire from Gen 7 UU. Though most of the time, it's pretty obvious well before a generation is over which Pokemon are way too good for a tier
@@hangfire5944 is shit compared to the Ubers that have the same stats, but compared to Haxorus, Kyurem-B is just better at everything. In Gen-8 Kyurem-B finally returned to Ubers though
really thats just haxorus being bad. kyruem b has a terrible physical movepool in gen 5, basically forcing it to use a special set. Kyruem b has 120 base special attack. Haxorus has 146 base attack. If haxorus cant deal with that then its just not good.
Garchomp generally outclasses them since they are in a better speed tier, sword dance and eq stab. Gen 7 Kyurem b with z Freeze shock is funny though, but that didn't exist in previous gens.
@@SantosOverlord You wouldn’t really need to mega evolve it for anything else since its base form is already good at doing anything else you’d use mega ttar for either.
@@glumreaper8885 I think the point is that it is competitive, but not to the extent it should be in the tier. Think of stuff like rotom-w and excadrill in SS OU, not actually "in" the tier but _very_ much viable options.
This concept is strange to me. I get ones like Mega Garchomp (doesn't make sense when regular Garchomp is OU) and Ninjask (viability changes after a ban), but the ones like Blissey seem so arbitrary, since people just seemed to later figure that Chansey was better. The difference made there is a whole lot smaller than the other two categories
blissey ultimately just gets outclassed by chansey in gen 5 ou, so in the situation where you'd use blissey, most of the time chansey is more favorable anyways. that's why blissey gets low usage, and is ou by technicality
You may think we were crazy or dumb back them, but the issue most of us saw with chansey was the lack of passive recovery made it too prone to be worn down to entry hazards (and look, what blissey uses nowadays? We werent that dumb, huh?). Team preview, powercreep making the even higher spdef necessary and after that defog made chansey clearly better, and in the end having to softboiled a bit more wasnt the end of the world.
Honestly I think the Blissey/Chansey distinction didn’t really go in depth enough. In context of the gen, in a vacuum Chansey was better and the only real reason to use Blissey was on sand stall, in fairness one of the most popular team styles. However it wasn’t the realization that Eviolite Chansey was absurdly bulky that killed Blissey’s viability on everything that wasn’t a sand stall team; it was the release of Keldeo that killed BOTH of their viabilities. People moved on to other walls that could better slow it down, like Tentacruel (which was already annoyingly difficult to bring down before Keldeo with rain up), Jellicent, a slow twin, bulky Starmie, physically defensive Gastrodon, etc. No point in having a special wall that was threatened by the two most prominent special attackers in the meta, as Keldeo would just secret sword them to death and Latios could trick its specs on them.
Old gen tiers being locked is such a silly thing, given that people play retro metagames all the time. The irony is that even though they get locked, there are zero resources on the history of metagames, such as the days of DP before platinum (aka bullet punch scizor) and when garchomp got promoted to Uber in DP.
People playing retro metagames is a big reason to keep them locked, actually. If you really enjoy casually playing BW UU, it might be a bit of a shock to your system if suddenly Lucario, Haxorus, and Jolteon become legal in it, with no mass audience to experiment and test if they're broken or to properly evolve the meta around them. Locking tiers is a way to keep the metagame as-is so that you can continue enjoying it for years to come without worry that it'll suddenly get screwed over because of a decision by the OU council.
@@Celia_Dawn oh, do you mean like what happened when the OU council of Gen 4 decided that latias should be legal again? Years after the tier should have been locked? Or when they made excadrill legal again in gen 5? This kind of meddling continually takes place even when there is not a sufficient player pool to test it. Now the Gen 4 meta is more centralized than ever around jirachi, thanks to latias being reintroduced. And no one is going to fix it. Wonderful. I agree with you, by the way. The above examples are exactly why you are correct.
trust me, you would not want to play early gen-4 before garchomp was banned. Swords dance Yache chomp everywhere, games coming down to garchomp mirrors, people running choice band weavile or ice shard mamoswine for the soul purpose of not immediately losing to garchomp... believe it or not it was controversial at the time to even propose banning a non-legendary, but in retrospect that was the correct thing to do.
Nice video, I would maybe explain what you mean by "at the time" as it might not be obvious that tiers don't change for older generations after enough time
Quick thing to note: many of the Pokemon that are "OU by technicality" have viability in OU. Many of them have been phased out of high usage rates due to meta shifts, such as counters to existing threats rising up from a lower tier invalidating certain Pokemon. This does not mean they are "bad" OU Pokemon (although some end up being so), it means theyre often higher maintenance and require a more adept hand in both teambuilder and gameplay to use them affectively. You occasionally see some of this kind of Pokemon doing well in past gen OU tournaments on Showdown.
yeah i mean its the same for many pokemon that aren't in ou. you can still get value from say an ru pokemon because the other player may not know how to play against it, and these pokemon can sometimes bring things to the table that aren't present in ou pokemon
@@IanMalcolm99 I always like it when there are Pokemon who are in a low tier but have a niche almost everywhere. Things like Tangrowth and Kabutops had a niche in pretty much every tier they could be used in.
mega garchomp has a legitimate place on sand teams due to sand force letting it wallbreak better than regular chomp (sand force boosted eq 2khoes unaware quagsire and +2 sand force eq okhoes every non-resist/immunity)
It hurts that Haxorus is OU by technicality. It's my favorite Pokemon and I started competitive in Gen 5 so Haxorus was my main. I won some many games by just starting with Haxorus and using Dragon Dance and then sweeping cause Haxorus' Attack stat is stupid high but it's just slightly too slow to outspeed most threats and not bulky enough to survive a hit
Didn't it basically just get outshone by Kyurem Black? Also, it would probably get banned from UU if it ever dropped by usage. After all, you aren't gonna be seeing any ferrothorn or skarmory in UU.
I don't think I've missed one of your recent videos, and I'm not even huge into competitive. I just like how you explain these obscure facts. You're doing a great job.
hippowdon as ou by technicality is exceedingly harsh and hippowdon is actually a pretty good pokemon but hippowdon teams are very specific, any bw player can tell you that.
It's not harsh. It's representative of its usage. It's not a bad mon, but it's got low enough usage it would fall out of OU if the tier wasn't locked. That's pretty much all of what OU by technicality means on pre-Mega metas
@@emmetstanevich2121 That doesn't really matter, it never became proper UU in order to be banned to UUBL. If they did suspect test it after the gen was over, it's news to me.
Dusknoir has a good movepool but his stats are awfull. The hp is to low to become a defensive mon and his attack ir horrendous to be offensive treatening. Gengar and Rotom-Forms are better Ghost type in gen IV
@@troublewakingup I think he disagrees with the premise that dusknoir has a good movepool (no good physical ghost moves, no reliable recovery, no good setup moves)
so does smeargle doesn't make a great mon overall. dusknoir movepool on something like kyurem-b would be excellent but the movepool doesn't really matter because its on an almost unviable mon
The thing I learned from this video was that tiers are actually listed as they say: usage of the Pokemon. I legit thought they were tiered by viability.
Which means that the Tiers don't necessarily mean if a Pokemon is good or not, but rather if a pokemon is used or not. Mhh, explains why I found many people not expecting my "Eviolite Rhydon with Defense Split Shuckle" duo in the last tournament.
That really doesn't make any sense how they say "we don't have enough games for a good sample size, so we aren't going to update the tiers after a new gen comes out" but they are still confident enough to say "we have enough of a sample size to be confident that Blissey is bad in gen 5 and therefore is only OU by technicality"? That is contradictory. You can't logically justify both of those positions.
I don't think Blissey being bad in gen 5 is based on sample size at all though, nor do I believe that they claim it as such. It's OU by technicality because an objectively better option exists (Chansey), not based on usage. You can define whether a Pokémon is good or not beyond it's usage statistics, and Chansey is better than Blissey in almost every scenario. They make the distinction so that people understand that for one reason or another that particular Pokémon is not as good as the alternatives. I think the system is a little confusing, but it serves it's purpose and it's not like you can't still bring Blissey into OU anyway. The main reason that they don't update old tiers is so that older players can come back to a meta that at least somewhat resembles what was there when they left it, not because they don't have a large enough sample size. If their only excuse was lack of a large enough sample size I'd be agreeing with you but that isn't the only reason.
@@jacobesterson ok, the point isn't Blissey in particular... Blissey is only one of dozens of mons that are "OU by technicality" and that reasoning isn't true for most of them. Mega Garchomp, ok, I can see why "OU by technicality" makes sense for the reasons stated in the video. That's one of the few where it seems justified. But, to list just one example, Gen 6 Volcanion? It's just because someone decided "it's not good enough"; it's not a Blissey-Chansey situation. And even if they DID still re-do Gen 6 OU tiering by usage, I'm sure Volcanion would be close to OU if not over the line; it's not like it's an NU mon. So my reasoning stands.
@@jacobesterson also, if Smogon mods really are claiming that "they don't want to update old tiers so people can come back to a meta that resembles what they left", uhhh, doing things like banning Sun + Chlorophyll years after gen 5 ended, or banning Baton Pass years later, or banning Arena Trap, is going to do far more to change the tier than any tiering updates would. They also literally unbanned Excadrill from gen 5 OU years after it ended... So that justification also falls totally flat.
@@drunyon214 Yep. 100% I've wondered what they're on because of things like this. Old Gen councils, man. It took them years to unban Froslass, and that after banning her by consequence of collateral years after dpp had concluded too. There are so many shenanigans. No common sense reigns there.
As a player of gen 5, I was always shocked by how few people thought Blissey was better than Chansey. Bulk can generally be estimated as HP * Defense, since Pokemon damage calculations are dominated by multiplication and division. This gives Defensive Chansey a bulk of 125664 physical, 260832 Special. And Blissey a bulk of 92820 physical, 219198 Special. For Chansey, that's +35% physical, +19% special. Leftovers recovers 1/16th total HP per turn, or 6.25%. So it takes Blissey about 3 turns of leftovers recovery to catch up to Chansey on the special side, 6 on the physical side. That's quite a while. And even then, you can expect both to be using Softboiled or Wish regularly, which is 35/19% more potent for Chansey than for Blissey. So, in terms of raw Bulk, Blissey is superior in scenarios where it needs to actively recover less than once every 3 turns to deal with special attackers, or less than once every 6 turns for physical attackers. Assuming it can take advantage of leftovers every turn. Super, super situational. That being said, Blissey had superior speed and special attack. Blissey had the option of carrying Flamethrower to outspeed and KO Scizor, while Chansey did not. Or do some other similar shenanigans. But in any case, Blissey was almost always outclassed by Chansey, and the community was juts in denial for some reason.
permanent sand and hail chipping into chansey’s bulk (chansey has to hold eviolite otherwise it’s worse blissey) was a major factor in blissey’s usage, leftovers negating that was just too useful at the time
@@TheDunsparceGames That's what people said. But as stated above, even with sand/hail, Blissey really can't compete. 3 turns of leftovers for Blissey to catch up to Chansey's special bulk, 6 on physical. And the bulk advantage resets after a softboiled/wish. They permanent sandstorm argument is fundamentally wrong. Chansey has superior bulk, physically and specially in almost all situations. Including sand/hail. Find a situation where Blissey is sitting around for 3 consecutive turns against a special attacker recovering with leftovers every turn. Leftovers Blissey is better then. Or after a knockoff (which was uncommon in gen 5 since it was base 20 power.) The reality is that most people were playing dumb.
One problem with both pink blobs in BW is that nowadays a lot of Sanx and Rain teams are content to throw down Spikes and Stealth Rocks, and since it's annoying to heal that off (giving an opposing attacker a free turn in the high-powered BW OU metagame is scary), eventually strategies moved away from both Chansey and Blissey. In Gens 6 and 7 Chansey is in OU and Blissey isn't because, as you said, Chansey's pure bulk is just better, and in Gen 8, Boots gave Blissey an item that was worth as much as Eviolite.
I don’t really like how static past generation tiers are I don’t think they should be based off of usage but I think they should be allowed to change if a pokemon is realized be worse or better than it is
@@Math.Bandit I think it's also due to the lower tiers of old gens being created well after the fact, so they literally CAN'T take a usage-based approach due to it already being an "old gen".
"Electivire is not a good pokemon" first off this is a hilarious quote on it's own, but also as far as I know he's only OU because of usage because he looks cool and a lot of people use him even though he sucks
Why on earth do they lock the tiers. I never considered that they would ever do that. If you're going to ban abilities and stuff after the fact you can't also lock the tiers. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, pick full lock or leave it fully dynamic.
OU is not affected by tiering at all. You can still use UU mons in it, and OU by technicality status is only a suggestion for newbies. On the other hand, rising-dropping mons would impact the lower tiers a lot, radically changing the viability of entire teams. The idea is: your community (ex. gen5 OU) can make decision for themselves (as listing blissey as OU by technicality), but can't make decision that would intefere with other communities (like sending blissey to UU, or taking pokèmon away from UU)
Im not surprised about Donphan in Gen 5, but I did expect Fortrest to join the Ranks. In my Time in Gen 5 I played a lot, and both where very rare, and not very threathening. My Team had a decent Number of Counters, but I felt they just unable to pull out there weight, due to mediocre Stats. Donpgan in Gen 6 UU thought, Chefs Kiss.
There are BL tiers, and they're actually almost the exact opposite thing, where the pokemon is banned from the lower tier but not used enough to be in the higher tier.
Mostly because you can't jump from OU to UUBL, you need to jump to UU first, then be banned from UU. The only exceptions are when mons have already been banned from UU before, then they end up in UUBL instantly when they drop.
I don't think the reason for Garchomp Mega not being UU because regular Garchomp is OU is "Because it doesn't make sense" I think it's because if you were to bring a Mega Garchomp into UU you could hypothetically not Mega evolve it and then you'd be using a OU Pokémon (Garchomp) in UU, ehich is obviously a problem Great video!
Exactly. If a pokemon is in a certain tier, its mega evolution has to be at least that high pretty much by definition, although I could see an argument to tier it separately as an "itemless" mon, but that sounds WAY too much like a complex ban, and I don't think holding an item (or lack thereof) is enough for it to be allowed in a lower tier. It would basically be like if your pokemon got their item knocked off immediately (without taking damage), and at the end of the day, an itemless garchomp in UU is still a garchomp in UU.
Can you explain the reasoning behind the Terrain nerf in gen 8? Why did Electric Grassy and Psychic Terrain boosts get nerfed to 30% when Sun and Rain's boosts are still 50% with no problem?
The one nerfing terrain was Gamefreak, maybe because they wanted to add expanding force etc and also item such as seed that activate at the battle cant be mitigated by changing terrain.
It might be because of how much more common it was getting. Rillaboom, Indeedee, and Pincurchin can set terrain now, meaning more Pokémon than just the Tapus have access to such abilities. Certain Dynamax moves also trigger terrain instantly. Maybe they were trying to prevent something like the Gen 5 weather wars, which I believe largely happened due to drought and drizzle being not locked to Groudon and Kyogre anymore
in the case of mega garchomp, let's not forget a mechanic of mega-evolution that changed from generation 6 to 7, making the mega-evolution's speed stat not count on the turn it mega-evolved. It allowed Mega-garchomp to rely on it's pre-evo 102 base speed during the turn it mega-evolve, so it could run 2 coverage moves on top of it's stabs instead of protect+3 other moves like mega-gengar, mega-absol, mega-beedrill or Mega-diancie were pretty much forced to use for their moveset, just to mega-evolve safely. I don't mean that this handicap made these megas any less good, but the fact generation 7's shift removed that mechanic nerfed mega-garchomp while allowing these other megas to be more efficient.
Let's think about the process that happens for both tiering placements: For OU by technicality, the Pokemon had usage in OU significant enough to rise it into OU/keep it in the tier during when that was current-gen OU. However, the metagame doesn't stop evolving after that gen's OU ends, and if a Pokemon that was in OU is shown to not be good anymore, it will be designated to be OU by technicality; "sure, it's an OU Pokemon, but we wouldn't recommend using it." For a UUBL Pokemon, they failed to get sufficient usage during the current gen to drop from OU to UU, but while they were in UU, they were found to be too much for the tier, and were banned from UU. They can still move up from UUBL to OU during the current-gen if they find a good niche in OU. The main difference is that Pokemon in UUBL are too much for the UU tier, but Pokemon that are OU by Technicality are not good in OU despite being tiered there, irrespective of whether they may or may note be good in UU. One case study that is interesting is Gen 5 Hippowdon. Hippowdon in BW was initially not favored in the initially unbalanced BW OU metagame, and so it fell to UU. In UU, Hippowdon was an unbreakable wall and eventually banned to UUBL (just called BL at the time). However, later in BW, Hippowdon became a great OU Pokemon because it was a Sand Stream Pokemon with access to instant recovery, and rose into OU as a result. However, the rise of Sand teams that stacked Psychic types in addition to Spikes made a lot of Sand teams really need Tyranitar, who can Pursuit trap the Psychics, and so Hippo became a lot less popular and became an OU by Technicality Pokemon.
The main issue with competitive Pokémon is the rather large barrier to entry so good luck. You have hundreds of fully evolved Pokémon to choose from, dozens of metagames to pick, and billions of potential team combinations to theorycraft. 18 different types and hundreds of different duo type combinations, and roughly 800 moves to learn. Needless to say it can be a bit much for those who want to simply jump into it, but it's also far less daunting than it sounds because you only really need to learn how to build and play around OU Pokémon if you're boring like that. It's a good place to start though.
A very early strategy on DP meta that made Electivire viable was the combo with Gyarados. Bait electric attack with Gyarados, switch to Electivire and get speed boost with Motor Drive. However this strategy was so predictable that only last in the first year of meta. Until BW came on 2011, Electivire was basically forgotten on OU.
Oh lol, being OU for technicality, is basically like being BL, but without being properly banned, this are Pokémon that simply never had the opportunity to drop to their proper tier, and because for Smogon only really OU is relevant for older generations, it doesn't make sense to make Tier changes even though many of this Pokémon should be UU. Though, I find kind of hilarious, that there could be a few cases where the technicality could still be needed for Garchomp and Tyranitar, thanks to the super awkward existence of their Megas.
that's the main problem about it though, in order to use it you'd have to use a regular Garchomp first, which you could just choose to not evolve until you need the extra power.
The only way to even somewhat allow that would be to have a complex ban wherein garchomp has to hold the mega stone, and cannot be used in multi-mega teams. Else, it's just OU garchomp after being hit with knock off. Besides that fact, it would likely end up in BL, not UU anyway.
While watching this video I saw you specify BW2 OU when talking about blissey, I know there's only 1 gen 5 OU tier on showdown so I'm assuming BW1 OU isn't really played/playable at all on showdown, I'd like to see a video explaining the differences between the two tiers if that's info you could gather.
BW2 OU refers to the gen 5 metagame that developed after the release of Black 2/White 2. There were some Pokemon made available then (namely Genesect, Keldeo, the Therians and the Kyurem forms) and some hidden abilities (namely Technician Breloom and Sheer Force Landorus).
Can you elaborate more on Blissey? I use to play gen 5 OU all the time with it and from my perception it worked a lot better on sand teams than Chansey. I get that it shouldn't be OU, but I at least thought it had a niche.
the main reason Blissey dropped isn't quite that though, it's that Blissey couldn't be trapped with Shed Shell, the leftovers on sand are an added bonus but would still leave it vulnerable to trapping. Since trapping in both Arena Trap and Shadow Tag forms are now completely banned Blissey has a very small niche that isn't particularly worth over the added defences
@@Baasudei that was actually only Blissey's Uber reasoning in Gen6 and Gen7 (Shed Shell so Mega Gengar can't trap it). Dugtrio actually struggles more with beating Chansey than with beating Blissey (Chansey has the physical bulk of Swampert after all and could take moves like HJK from Mega-Lopunny or LO CC from Infernape, an EQ from Dugtrio is doing laughable damage and it needs Screech or Reversal to even trap a damaged Chansey if there are no hazards out). It really came down to sand and hazards, and the belief that a potential base 18% hp loss on every switch alongside the move damage taken wasn't worth the added physical bulk on a primarily special wall. In the end it was though.
@@nicolaistuhlmuller8718 Well, there's also the fact that knock off got buffed in gen 6, and it's completely reasonable to expect that your wall won't be able to dodge every knock off while still doing its job, and an itemless blissey is strictly better than an itemless chansey.
@@emmetstanevich2121 that is a pro Blissey argument though. This here is why in gen 5-7 Blissey was always considered weaker than Chansey except for the Gen 6-7 Ubers tier, where Blissey had a better matchup against Mega Gengar thanks to Shed Shell.
@@Math.Bandit Yes, but the tiers are in effect before the generation is solidified? I don't know what's going on in this mess. Smoggon Strangeness is not kind to outsiders.
@@nullpoint3346 The tiers are in constant flux throughout the generations based on usage. It is only once a generation becomes obsolete that the tiers become locked.
I still don't quite understand. Why can't Mega Garchomp be UU? That's like saying regular Calyrex must be Uber because its other two forms are. Smogon often put different forms of the same Pokémon into different tiers, why is this a problem?
Base Garchomp is faster so any set where you could run a Mega you'd often be better off just choosing not to transform and make the most of the faster speed (especially with the lower average speed tier of UU compared to OU)
I play nat dex ou and use mega ttar and it is an absolute monster, what exactly made him ou by technicality in gen 6 but in gen 7 he's a legit ou threat that is more viable than regular ttar? Is it the speed change mechanic in gen 7 that made him better or is it just players discovering his full potential?
Simply put it's usually just not worth the mega slot. Regular TTar is both the better sand supporter and the better Pursuit trapper, which leaves Mega-TTar to utility and DD. And while Mega-TTar is both a better utility mon and a better DD user than TTar, consider the abundance of strong DD users. Gyarados, Charizard-X and Dragonite all exist and are all faster and have less weaknesses, in Charizard's case more power and in Gyarados' and Dragonite's case a safer setup and the latter even lets you run an additional mega in your team. What it essentially boils down to is the following two questions: is the utility of the mega or the raw power or sand supporting capabilities of the regular form more important, and do you need to run another mega in your team. In Gen7 megas became less mandatory and sand got a lot weaker now that rain was a legit threat, so it ultimately came down to the utility of the mega vs. the raw power of the base form. Ultimately though Tyranitar is still used almost twice as much in its base form because of its synergy with special mega wallbreakers, mostly Charizard Y. However thanks to the Tapus you can now have a powerful special wallbreaker in your team without giving up your mega slot, so Mega Tyranitar can at least be used in similar strategies.
Not enough people play them. Tier shifts are based on usage, but if not enough games are being played then it just starts to look more like a popularity contest. They also cannot do tournament usage since old gen tiers that are not OU don't get played often in tournaments ether.
I lost a lot of respect for smogon from this video. Their rules seem so arbitrary now. "We don't change the meta game after a generation is over." Proceeds to ban Arena trap...
Ah yes, "OU by technicality," a title ascribed to my favorite shitty blue dog, Lucario. How you teeter so close to the border of greatness, but can never cross 😢
Electivire not good in gen 4? Nah the amount with no team preview in gen 4 the amount of times i got baited into thunderbolting a electivire switching in only for it to sweep with LO after a moter drive boost is super dumb and why i stop playing gen 4
will some of these mons be dropped to a lower tier eventually once enough time passes? like dugtrio after arena trap was banned edit: oh. nevermind, they will never get dropped because the rankings are static for older generations, i think..
When the game is no longer "The main" format, I believe theirs ate frozen to preserve the metagame. Exceptions occur if things like dugtrios areba trap get banned after the tiers are frozen
I think the only way to move for a pokemon in an old metagame is from the bl status to the tier above it and vice versa, like how Moltres raised from uubl to OU in Gen 3 well over a decade after it was no longer the current gen
I don't get it , why are older gens tiers locked ? Shouldn't usage still matters despite having less players ? I'm pretty sure metas can still change when new strategies are developed
It's probably to reduce discussion threads about meta changes/potential bans for a tier hardly anyone plays anymore when they want to devote time towards the current ones. I don't see why they can't do updates maybe on a less often scale (like reviewing the meta every 3-6 months instead of a more constant rate for the current gens which have way more match data to pull from)
Usage is not valuable data if the sample size is to low, which is true for these old gen lower tiers. It just would not make sense to keep making usage based tiering decisions for tier like BW NU that has less then 1000 games played a year.
Seeing Metagross only OU by technicality in gen5 hurts my soul man I'm still not over the betrayal that was its HA, like every other pseudo is getting broken stuff like Multiscale while my boy gets freaking LIGHT METAL
UUBL is for mons that arent in OU because they arent used enough but arent in UU because they are too good. (OU) is for mons that would fall into UU but cant because of either locked tiers or their base form being in OU
UUBL is usually a result of the Pokémon itself being too strong for UU but not really being that viable in OU based on its own merits. OU by technicality is for examples like Mega-Garchomp where it's base form is actually the reason it is OU, but it is impossible to run Mega-Garchomp in a lower tier as it always starts off the match as base Garchomp until transformed anyway. So you can't really play it in something like UU because base Garchomp is too strong before it is transformed and you have no way of enforcing players to use Mega's only as they always need a turn to change. Often you could still get value from the base form as it is switched in before transforming because of differences in stats/typing. Some Pokémon it is the opposite. Charizard and Kangaskhan were consistently pretty low tier for several generstions until they got Mega's that skyrocketted their viability, but because their base forms aren't as strong you can still run them in low tiers with Megastones.
@@Azure1013 if you're referring to Blissey in this example, the generation simply ended before Blissey had the chance to move down, so the tiers cannot update to reflect the Pokémon's subsequent usage.
Mostly the fact that Thundurus-Therian outclasses it in Gen 5, and in Gen 4, Baton Pass is banned, so it can't replicate the pivoting power that Zapdos can, which is important when walls switch into Jolteon.
If arena trap was banned in gen 5 so dugtrio became OU by technicality How come dugtrio was also OU by technicality if arena trap was also banned in gen 6 Was arena trap unbanned at some point in between or was it just not changed?
I mean, modern generations absolutely have the same thing- OUBL, for pokemon not good enough to cut it in OU, but banned in UU for one reason or another.
Nah, I'd argue the real OUBLs are Pokemon like Deoxys-Normal, Cinderace, Spectrier, Necrozma Dawn Wings, and Lugia, AKA the guys who would never fly in OU, but are garbage in Ubers. Of course, OUBL is not actually a thing, since Ubers is not a usage based tier, else Pokemon like Weavile, Slurpuff, and Ferrothorn would all reside there
Say what you will but GEN 5 Blissey is much more of a threat then Chansey. Sure Chansey is more bulky but with Blissey you have to account for the fact that it can also run Thunder, Blizzard, Fireblast and Mud bomb or Charge Beam for some mix up. This gives Blissey a lot of type coverage and not to mention with Serene Grace it makes Thunder a semi reliable Status Move. And on top of all of that Blissey is free to run a Chople Berry which halfes fighting type damage once allowing blissey to tank a super effective hit. Throw in Counter and you have a recipe that destroys Half the OU cast.
Welp I completely lost a lot of respect for smogon's system here. It's completely arbitrary to me now. "We don't change a gen after it's over!" Oh but hey let's also ban arena trap and baton pass after the fact. Also let's let half the gens remain frozen and The others can stay doing whatever they want. Lmao okay then. Glad I got out of playing in gen 6 tbh
Why would smogon keep following the rules exactly as they set up in gen 3 though? Many of them are now just outdated and so they decided to just start ignoring some of them, like the rule of not changing a gen once it ended. You can call it arbitrary, but thats only a result of decades passing, to ask smogon to be exactly the same in over 15 years is just unrealistic. The reason some tiers stay frozen is that theres not enough lower tier games being played to make reasonable tier shifts, so the tiers are locked unless they are unlocked on purpose (right now its just gen 1 lower tiers that are unlocked, since those are considered "new" as people did not play them competitively in the past)
@@kingwailord4143 these people think smogon is a business building full of thousands ready to balance hundreds of tiers at all time, you cant use logic like that
![เปิดบ้าน โคตรสวย ป๋องกพล รู้จักตั้งนาน เพิ่งรู้ว่ารวย!!! l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tmgCF_2HfYI/mqdefault.jpg)
Just a quick note, "old gen" tiers are locked once it stops being the current generation. This is mainly because there isn't a large enough sample size to move things up or down between tiers, a lot less games happen for old generation ladders.
RBY doesn't care because rby uu was itself created when rby wasnt a current generation, rby uu tiers depends on the viability ranking, not usage
also these pokemon wouldn't be BL (banlist, because theyre not banned from UU)
So they can't ban pokemons in older gens, even if they make the meta cancer?
Altough in practice they're the same as "UUBL", literally unusable in UU, figuratively unusable in OU for the most part, but for entirely different reasons... for the most part. Also, both Chansey and Blissey fell out of favour due to Spike stacking ferrothorn, Secret sword Keldeo and Specs Latios; maybe Chansey is better but better than underwhelming isn't necesarily good.
@@usernametaken017 They can still ban. They banned Arceus in Gen 4 Ubers once they found it to be too strong, and as covered in the previous analysis on this channel, they banned Quagsire from Gen 7 UU. Though most of the time, it's pretty obvious well before a generation is over which Pokemon are way too good for a tier
Not to mention the Baton Pass hits...
@@usernametaken017 they can and they will
Haxorus falling off in Gen 5 OU because a legendary came into the tier that strictly outclassed it makes me genuinely sad.
Which pokemon are you talking about, and in which gen?
kyruem black is shit lmao
@@hangfire5944 is shit compared to the Ubers that have the same stats, but compared to Haxorus, Kyurem-B is just better at everything. In Gen-8 Kyurem-B finally returned to Ubers though
really thats just haxorus being bad. kyruem b has a terrible physical movepool in gen 5, basically forcing it to use a special set. Kyruem b has 120 base special attack. Haxorus has 146 base attack. If haxorus cant deal with that then its just not good.
Garchomp generally outclasses them since they are in a better speed tier, sword dance and eq stab. Gen 7 Kyurem b with z Freeze shock is funny though, but that didn't exist in previous gens.
You're giving me false swipe gaming vibes. Keep up the great pokemon videos, I'll keep watching them. 👍
"Mega Garchomp isn't very usable in OU, but UNFORTUNATELY normal Garchomp IS OU tier, and thus Mega Chomp is locked in OU by technicality limbo"
@@hmalba7864 I actually read this with Kellen's voice.
@@ArceusX300 FSG doesn’t chase watch time. He is just very detailed in his videos as he should be
@@jayisdecent bloated
@@Lathburn not really bloated, fsg goes really in-depth about the metas they cover
Just wanna make sure we all know the mega ttar isn’t BAD in OU, just generally not favored over its regular form.
only used for dragon dance sets, which is a lot more then mega garchomp
@@SantosOverlord You wouldn’t really need to mega evolve it for anything else since its base form is already good at doing anything else you’d use mega ttar for either.
It's not BAD, but losing an item and a more viable mega stone on the team is not ideal.
@@glumreaper8885 Yeah and other than ddance regular Ttar does everything you’d want out of a Ttar just fine
@@glumreaper8885 I think the point is that it is competitive, but not to the extent it should be in the tier. Think of stuff like rotom-w and excadrill in SS OU, not actually "in" the tier but _very_ much viable options.
This series is awesome, as a veteran Pokemon fan - whose just not that into competitive - I always learn new stuff
I am in pokemon since gen 4, is it still veteran?
@@Jpmako0 Sure, whatever you want to consider yourself as.
same other competitive videos are too long for me
This concept is strange to me. I get ones like Mega Garchomp (doesn't make sense when regular Garchomp is OU) and Ninjask (viability changes after a ban), but the ones like Blissey seem so arbitrary, since people just seemed to later figure that Chansey was better. The difference made there is a whole lot smaller than the other two categories
blissey ultimately just gets outclassed by chansey in gen 5 ou, so in the situation where you'd use blissey, most of the time chansey is more favorable anyways. that's why blissey gets low usage, and is ou by technicality
Usage. It's saying "This pokemon would probably drop into UU if we let it but the tiers are locked so it's stuck in OU"
You may think we were crazy or dumb back them, but the issue most of us saw with chansey was the lack of passive recovery made it too prone to be worn down to entry hazards (and look, what blissey uses nowadays? We werent that dumb, huh?). Team preview, powercreep making the even higher spdef necessary and after that defog made chansey clearly better, and in the end having to softboiled a bit more wasnt the end of the world.
Honestly I think the Blissey/Chansey distinction didn’t really go in depth enough. In context of the gen, in a vacuum Chansey was better and the only real reason to use Blissey was on sand stall, in fairness one of the most popular team styles. However it wasn’t the realization that Eviolite Chansey was absurdly bulky that killed Blissey’s viability on everything that wasn’t a sand stall team; it was the release of Keldeo that killed BOTH of their viabilities. People moved on to other walls that could better slow it down, like Tentacruel (which was already annoyingly difficult to bring down before Keldeo with rain up), Jellicent, a slow twin, bulky Starmie, physically defensive Gastrodon, etc.
No point in having a special wall that was threatened by the two most prominent special attackers in the meta, as Keldeo would just secret sword them to death and Latios could trick its specs on them.
Ou by tech is basically either "This Mon got nerfed late/after the fact" or "Lmao. This thing is bad, why did people play it?"
And in the case of Electivire, everyone knew it was bad at the time but it was still OU by usage anyway
@@catandfishfc too many lower ladder noobs kept spamming him on the ladder
Old gen tiers being locked is such a silly thing, given that people play retro metagames all the time. The irony is that even though they get locked, there are zero resources on the history of metagames, such as the days of DP before platinum (aka bullet punch scizor) and when garchomp got promoted to Uber in DP.
the smogon flying press has some articles on old metagames
Not enough people play the old tiers to get accurate usage stats
People playing retro metagames is a big reason to keep them locked, actually.
If you really enjoy casually playing BW UU, it might be a bit of a shock to your system if suddenly Lucario, Haxorus, and Jolteon become legal in it, with no mass audience to experiment and test if they're broken or to properly evolve the meta around them.
Locking tiers is a way to keep the metagame as-is so that you can continue enjoying it for years to come without worry that it'll suddenly get screwed over because of a decision by the OU council.
@@Celia_Dawn oh, do you mean like what happened when the OU council of Gen 4 decided that latias should be legal again? Years after the tier should have been locked? Or when they made excadrill legal again in gen 5? This kind of meddling continually takes place even when there is not a sufficient player pool to test it. Now the Gen 4 meta is more centralized than ever around jirachi, thanks to latias being reintroduced. And no one is going to fix it. Wonderful.
I agree with you, by the way. The above examples are exactly why you are correct.
trust me, you would not want to play early gen-4 before garchomp was banned. Swords dance Yache chomp everywhere, games coming down to garchomp mirrors, people running choice band weavile or ice shard mamoswine for the soul purpose of not immediately losing to garchomp... believe it or not it was controversial at the time to even propose banning a non-legendary, but in retrospect that was the correct thing to do.
Nice video, I would maybe explain what you mean by "at the time" as it might not be obvious that tiers don't change for older generations after enough time
Why don't they change though?
Aren't older generations just mean a different format?
@@raeryuko Not enough people play them to get accurate usage data
@@mr.potato but there is still some developments on competitive even after years of releasing the next gen, it's curious really
Quick thing to note: many of the Pokemon that are "OU by technicality" have viability in OU. Many of them have been phased out of high usage rates due to meta shifts, such as counters to existing threats rising up from a lower tier invalidating certain Pokemon. This does not mean they are "bad" OU Pokemon (although some end up being so), it means theyre often higher maintenance and require a more adept hand in both teambuilder and gameplay to use them affectively. You occasionally see some of this kind of Pokemon doing well in past gen OU tournaments on Showdown.
yeah i mean its the same for many pokemon that aren't in ou. you can still get value from say an ru pokemon because the other player may not know how to play against it, and these pokemon can sometimes bring things to the table that aren't present in ou pokemon
Yes, many UU and other lower tier mons also find a legitimate OU niche, even if not one large enough to rise. It's a similar story.
@@IanMalcolm99 I always like it when there are Pokemon who are in a low tier but have a niche almost everywhere. Things like Tangrowth and Kabutops had a niche in pretty much every tier they could be used in.
mega garchomp has a legitimate place on sand teams due to sand force letting it wallbreak better than regular chomp
(sand force boosted eq 2khoes unaware quagsire and +2 sand force eq okhoes every non-resist/immunity)
It hurts that Haxorus is OU by technicality. It's my favorite Pokemon and I started competitive in Gen 5 so Haxorus was my main. I won some many games by just starting with Haxorus and using Dragon Dance and then sweeping cause Haxorus' Attack stat is stupid high but it's just slightly too slow to outspeed most threats and not bulky enough to survive a hit
Didn't it basically just get outshone by Kyurem Black? Also, it would probably get banned from UU if it ever dropped by usage. After all, you aren't gonna be seeing any ferrothorn or skarmory in UU.
Dugtrio really should drop to lower tiers tbh. It's essentially entirely different with Arena Trap banned.
I don't think I've missed one of your recent videos, and I'm not even huge into competitive. I just like how you explain these obscure facts. You're doing a great job.
hippowdon as ou by technicality is exceedingly harsh and hippowdon is actually a pretty good pokemon but hippowdon teams are very specific, any bw player can tell you that.
It's not harsh. It's representative of its usage. It's not a bad mon, but it's got low enough usage it would fall out of OU if the tier wasn't locked. That's pretty much all of what OU by technicality means on pre-Mega metas
@@henriquepacheco7473 Even if the tiers weren't locked, Hippowdon got banned from UU on account of it basically sitting on the entire metagame.
@@emmetstanevich2121 That doesn't really matter, it never became proper UU in order to be banned to UUBL. If they did suspect test it after the gen was over, it's news to me.
Gonna have to disagree with you.
On Dusknoir having a good movepool that is.
2:47 "dusknoir is too slow and has too weak of an hp stat, it's good movepool does not help it very much"
Dusknoir has a good movepool but his stats are awfull. The hp is to low to become a defensive mon and his attack ir horrendous to be offensive treatening. Gengar and Rotom-Forms are better Ghost type in gen IV
Dusknoirs movepool is pretty solid other than not having a real physical ghost STAB other than shadow sneak until gen 8
@@troublewakingup I think he disagrees with the premise that dusknoir has a good movepool (no good physical ghost moves, no reliable recovery, no good setup moves)
so does smeargle doesn't make a great mon overall. dusknoir movepool on something like kyurem-b would be excellent but the movepool doesn't really matter because its on an almost unviable mon
i think a video on gen 3 UUBL would be interesting. there are enough mons there to make its own tier
The thing I learned from this video was that tiers are actually listed as they say: usage of the Pokemon.
I legit thought they were tiered by viability.
Yeah I helped to accidently get hitmontop into ou
Which means that the Tiers don't necessarily mean if a Pokemon is good or not, but rather if a pokemon is used or not. Mhh, explains why I found many people not expecting my "Eviolite Rhydon with Defense Split Shuckle" duo in the last tournament.
That really doesn't make any sense how they say "we don't have enough games for a good sample size, so we aren't going to update the tiers after a new gen comes out" but they are still confident enough to say "we have enough of a sample size to be confident that Blissey is bad in gen 5 and therefore is only OU by technicality"? That is contradictory. You can't logically justify both of those positions.
Yeah, it's really straddling the line in a wishful way. Especially with bans often significantly altering the meta in similar ways.
I don't think Blissey being bad in gen 5 is based on sample size at all though, nor do I believe that they claim it as such. It's OU by technicality because an objectively better option exists (Chansey), not based on usage. You can define whether a Pokémon is good or not beyond it's usage statistics, and Chansey is better than Blissey in almost every scenario. They make the distinction so that people understand that for one reason or another that particular Pokémon is not as good as the alternatives. I think the system is a little confusing, but it serves it's purpose and it's not like you can't still bring Blissey into OU anyway.
The main reason that they don't update old tiers is so that older players can come back to a meta that at least somewhat resembles what was there when they left it, not because they don't have a large enough sample size. If their only excuse was lack of a large enough sample size I'd be agreeing with you but that isn't the only reason.
@@jacobesterson ok, the point isn't Blissey in particular... Blissey is only one of dozens of mons that are "OU by technicality" and that reasoning isn't true for most of them. Mega Garchomp, ok, I can see why "OU by technicality" makes sense for the reasons stated in the video. That's one of the few where it seems justified.
But, to list just one example, Gen 6 Volcanion? It's just because someone decided "it's not good enough"; it's not a Blissey-Chansey situation. And even if they DID still re-do Gen 6 OU tiering by usage, I'm sure Volcanion would be close to OU if not over the line; it's not like it's an NU mon. So my reasoning stands.
@@jacobesterson also, if Smogon mods really are claiming that "they don't want to update old tiers so people can come back to a meta that resembles what they left", uhhh, doing things like banning Sun + Chlorophyll years after gen 5 ended, or banning Baton Pass years later, or banning Arena Trap, is going to do far more to change the tier than any tiering updates would. They also literally unbanned Excadrill from gen 5 OU years after it ended... So that justification also falls totally flat.
@@drunyon214 Yep. 100% I've wondered what they're on because of things like this. Old Gen councils, man. It took them years to unban Froslass, and that after banning her by consequence of collateral years after dpp had concluded too. There are so many shenanigans. No common sense reigns there.
Neat analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
As a player of gen 5, I was always shocked by how few people thought Blissey was better than Chansey.
Bulk can generally be estimated as HP * Defense, since Pokemon damage calculations are dominated by multiplication and division.
This gives Defensive Chansey a bulk of 125664 physical, 260832 Special.
And Blissey a bulk of 92820 physical, 219198 Special.
For Chansey, that's +35% physical, +19% special.
Leftovers recovers 1/16th total HP per turn, or 6.25%.
So it takes Blissey about 3 turns of leftovers recovery to catch up to Chansey on the special side, 6 on the physical side.
That's quite a while. And even then, you can expect both to be using Softboiled or Wish regularly, which is 35/19% more potent for Chansey than for Blissey.
So, in terms of raw Bulk, Blissey is superior in scenarios where it needs to actively recover less than once every 3 turns to deal with special attackers, or less than once every 6 turns for physical attackers. Assuming it can take advantage of leftovers every turn. Super, super situational.
That being said, Blissey had superior speed and special attack. Blissey had the option of carrying Flamethrower to outspeed and KO Scizor, while Chansey did not. Or do some other similar shenanigans.
But in any case, Blissey was almost always outclassed by Chansey, and the community was juts in denial for some reason.
permanent sand and hail chipping into chansey’s bulk (chansey has to hold eviolite otherwise it’s worse blissey) was a major factor in blissey’s usage, leftovers negating that was just too useful at the time
@@TheDunsparceGames That's what people said. But as stated above, even with sand/hail, Blissey really can't compete.
3 turns of leftovers for Blissey to catch up to Chansey's special bulk, 6 on physical.
And the bulk advantage resets after a softboiled/wish.
They permanent sandstorm argument is fundamentally wrong. Chansey has superior bulk, physically and specially in almost all situations. Including sand/hail.
Find a situation where Blissey is sitting around for 3 consecutive turns against a special attacker recovering with leftovers every turn. Leftovers Blissey is better then. Or after a knockoff (which was uncommon in gen 5 since it was base 20 power.)
The reality is that most people were playing dumb.
One problem with both pink blobs in BW is that nowadays a lot of Sanx and Rain teams are content to throw down Spikes and Stealth Rocks, and since it's annoying to heal that off (giving an opposing attacker a free turn in the high-powered BW OU metagame is scary), eventually strategies moved away from both Chansey and Blissey.
In Gens 6 and 7 Chansey is in OU and Blissey isn't because, as you said, Chansey's pure bulk is just better, and in Gen 8, Boots gave Blissey an item that was worth as much as Eviolite.
I don’t really like how static past generation tiers are I don’t think they should be based off of usage but I think they should be allowed to change if a pokemon is realized be worse or better than it is
The "U" in "OU" and "UU" and so on stands for "used", it wouldn't make sense to then tier based off of viability and not usage
@@asepsisaficionado7376 When the tiers were created it was based on viability. Changing to usage-based came a long time later.
@@Math.Bandit I think it's also due to the lower tiers of old gens being created well after the fact, so they literally CAN'T take a usage-based approach due to it already being an "old gen".
"Electivire is not a good pokemon" first off this is a hilarious quote on it's own, but also as far as I know he's only OU because of usage because he looks cool and a lot of people use him even though he sucks
Ambipom has the same issue. Its Smogon analysis in XY is literally titled DON'T USE AMBIPOM lmao
I love this niche trivia content. Keep up the great work!
I started playing on Showdown in Gen 5 and seeing the OU list again got me a bit nostalgic. Jolteon was on there lol
Why on earth do they lock the tiers. I never considered that they would ever do that. If you're going to ban abilities and stuff after the fact you can't also lock the tiers. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, pick full lock or leave it fully dynamic.
Not enough people play the old tier to get usage that represent accurately how good the Pokemons are
OU is not affected by tiering at all. You can still use UU mons in it, and OU by technicality status is only a suggestion for newbies.
On the other hand, rising-dropping mons would impact the lower tiers a lot, radically changing the viability of entire teams.
The idea is: your community (ex. gen5 OU) can make decision for themselves (as listing blissey as OU by technicality), but can't make decision that would intefere with other communities (like sending blissey to UU, or taking pokèmon away from UU)
Im not surprised about Donphan in Gen 5, but I did expect Fortrest to join the Ranks.
In my Time in Gen 5 I played a lot, and both where very rare, and not very threathening.
My Team had a decent Number of Counters, but I felt they just unable to pull out there weight, due to mediocre Stats.
Donpgan in Gen 6 UU thought, Chefs Kiss.
I had a sick vaporeon team back in gen 5. I think it peaked somewhere on the top 30s or something.
But that was a long time ago. :)
Helping new players with the distinction is a great argument for having bl tiers.
There are BL tiers, and they're actually almost the exact opposite thing, where the pokemon is banned from the lower tier but not used enough to be in the higher tier.
I really like this format of videos! Competitive Pokemon videos are usually at least 25 minutes, so it's nice to also have lighter content :)
Fire content keep it up freezai
Obvious question: why not drop the "was OU but was found to not be worthwhile/it's niche was banned at the tail-end of the gen" Pokémon to UUBL?
Mostly because you can't jump from OU to UUBL, you need to jump to UU first, then be banned from UU. The only exceptions are when mons have already been banned from UU before, then they end up in UUBL instantly when they drop.
Because gen5 is broken and the Council wont do anything about it.
Boom end of video
The fact they refer to themselves as "the council" as so laughable and cringey
Got to see my boy donphan in the thumbnail, you should talk about the conversation between it and hippowdon in gen 5
Please do some live competitive matches breakdowns or breakdowns of matches. Your thoughts on things are super fun to listen too
I don't think the reason for Garchomp Mega not being UU because regular Garchomp is OU is "Because it doesn't make sense" I think it's because if you were to bring a Mega Garchomp into UU you could hypothetically not Mega evolve it and then you'd be using a OU Pokémon (Garchomp) in UU, ehich is obviously a problem
Great video!
Exactly. If a pokemon is in a certain tier, its mega evolution has to be at least that high pretty much by definition, although I could see an argument to tier it separately as an "itemless" mon, but that sounds WAY too much like a complex ban, and I don't think holding an item (or lack thereof) is enough for it to be allowed in a lower tier. It would basically be like if your pokemon got their item knocked off immediately (without taking damage), and at the end of the day, an itemless garchomp in UU is still a garchomp in UU.
that's why it doesn't make sense though
I love how smogon basically said “fuck these guys, there noob traps, y’all get ur own tier”
There was not really anything new for me in this video, but i really really enjoy this type of content :)
Can you explain the reasoning behind the Terrain nerf in gen 8? Why did Electric Grassy and Psychic Terrain boosts get nerfed to 30% when Sun and Rain's boosts are still 50% with no problem?
The one nerfing terrain was Gamefreak, maybe because they wanted to add expanding force etc and also item such as seed that activate at the battle cant be mitigated by changing terrain.
It might be because of how much more common it was getting. Rillaboom, Indeedee, and Pincurchin can set terrain now, meaning more Pokémon than just the Tapus have access to such abilities. Certain Dynamax moves also trigger terrain instantly. Maybe they were trying to prevent something like the Gen 5 weather wars, which I believe largely happened due to drought and drizzle being not locked to Groudon and Kyogre anymore
Terrain was nerfed because the Tapus dominated a lot of gen 7 VGC due to the sheer power of their terrain deployment abilities.
because the terrains have additional extremely powerful effects
in the case of mega garchomp, let's not forget a mechanic of mega-evolution that changed from generation 6 to 7, making the mega-evolution's speed stat not count on the turn it mega-evolved.
It allowed Mega-garchomp to rely on it's pre-evo 102 base speed during the turn it mega-evolve, so it could run 2 coverage moves on top of it's stabs instead of protect+3 other moves like mega-gengar, mega-absol, mega-beedrill or Mega-diancie were pretty much forced to use for their moveset, just to mega-evolve safely.
I don't mean that this handicap made these megas any less good, but the fact generation 7's shift removed that mechanic nerfed mega-garchomp while allowing these other megas to be more efficient.
"We kept it around to laugh at it"
I’m kinda surprised to see slowbro-mega in gen 6 ou by technicality. I know it loses regen but I remember seeing it spammed a lot for a while
I was getting scared we wouldn’t get an upload
can you make a video on every pokemon banned from OU like Blaziken from Gen 5-7, Cinderace Gen 8 SWSH, Gengar Bdsp, etc
also dracovish in swsh
im planning on it
I always thought mega garchomp was not UU because you could just not mega evolve it and use regular garchomp in UU if you wanted. Same for Ttar.
that is why they dont drop to uu
Uh oh looks like I have to binge watch all your videos now
What I'm wondering is what is the difference between OU by Technicality and UUBL?
Let's think about the process that happens for both tiering placements:
For OU by technicality, the Pokemon had usage in OU significant enough to rise it into OU/keep it in the tier during when that was current-gen OU. However, the metagame doesn't stop evolving after that gen's OU ends, and if a Pokemon that was in OU is shown to not be good anymore, it will be designated to be OU by technicality; "sure, it's an OU Pokemon, but we wouldn't recommend using it."
For a UUBL Pokemon, they failed to get sufficient usage during the current gen to drop from OU to UU, but while they were in UU, they were found to be too much for the tier, and were banned from UU. They can still move up from UUBL to OU during the current-gen if they find a good niche in OU.
The main difference is that Pokemon in UUBL are too much for the UU tier, but Pokemon that are OU by Technicality are not good in OU despite being tiered there, irrespective of whether they may or may note be good in UU.
One case study that is interesting is Gen 5 Hippowdon. Hippowdon in BW was initially not favored in the initially unbalanced BW OU metagame, and so it fell to UU. In UU, Hippowdon was an unbreakable wall and eventually banned to UUBL (just called BL at the time). However, later in BW, Hippowdon became a great OU Pokemon because it was a Sand Stream Pokemon with access to instant recovery, and rose into OU as a result. However, the rise of Sand teams that stacked Psychic types in addition to Spikes made a lot of Sand teams really need Tyranitar, who can Pursuit trap the Psychics, and so Hippo became a lot less popular and became an OU by Technicality Pokemon.
I never got into pvp Pokemon because I've never had an enyclopedic knowledge of the games. These are really interesting!
The main issue with competitive Pokémon is the rather large barrier to entry so good luck. You have hundreds of fully evolved Pokémon to choose from, dozens of metagames to pick, and billions of potential team combinations to theorycraft. 18 different types and hundreds of different duo type combinations, and roughly 800 moves to learn. Needless to say it can be a bit much for those who want to simply jump into it, but it's also far less daunting than it sounds because you only really need to learn how to build and play around OU Pokémon if you're boring like that. It's a good place to start though.
Blissey: "Technicality, the two sweetest words in the English language!"
Man I love these videos
A very early strategy on DP meta that made Electivire viable was the combo with Gyarados. Bait electric attack with Gyarados, switch to Electivire and get speed boost with Motor Drive.
However this strategy was so predictable that only last in the first year of meta. Until BW came on 2011, Electivire was basically forgotten on OU.
Oh lol, being OU for technicality, is basically like being BL, but without being properly banned, this are Pokémon that simply never had the opportunity to drop to their proper tier, and because for Smogon only really OU is relevant for older generations, it doesn't make sense to make Tier changes even though many of this Pokémon should be UU.
Though, I find kind of hilarious, that there could be a few cases where the technicality could still be needed for Garchomp and Tyranitar, thanks to the super awkward existence of their Megas.
I kinda want to see Mega Garchomp in UU, just to see if how well it fares in that tier and if it can (maybe) tear a hole through it
just dont mega evolve :tf:
that's the main problem about it though, in order to use it you'd have to use a regular Garchomp first, which you could just choose to not evolve until you need the extra power.
The only way to even somewhat allow that would be to have a complex ban wherein garchomp has to hold the mega stone, and cannot be used in multi-mega teams. Else, it's just OU garchomp after being hit with knock off.
Besides that fact, it would likely end up in BL, not UU anyway.
While watching this video I saw you specify BW2 OU when talking about blissey, I know there's only 1 gen 5 OU tier on showdown so I'm assuming BW1 OU isn't really played/playable at all on showdown, I'd like to see a video explaining the differences between the two tiers if that's info you could gather.
BW2 OU refers to the gen 5 metagame that developed after the release of Black 2/White 2. There were some Pokemon made available then (namely Genesect, Keldeo, the Therians and the Kyurem forms) and some hidden abilities (namely Technician Breloom and Sheer Force Landorus).
Can you elaborate more on Blissey? I use to play gen 5 OU all the time with it and from my perception it worked a lot better on sand teams than Chansey. I get that it shouldn't be OU, but I at least thought it had a niche.
the main reason Blissey dropped isn't quite that though, it's that Blissey couldn't be trapped with Shed Shell, the leftovers on sand are an added bonus but would still leave it vulnerable to trapping. Since trapping in both Arena Trap and Shadow Tag forms are now completely banned Blissey has a very small niche that isn't particularly worth over the added defences
@@Baasudei that was actually only Blissey's Uber reasoning in Gen6 and Gen7 (Shed Shell so Mega Gengar can't trap it). Dugtrio actually struggles more with beating Chansey than with beating Blissey (Chansey has the physical bulk of Swampert after all and could take moves like HJK from Mega-Lopunny or LO CC from Infernape, an EQ from Dugtrio is doing laughable damage and it needs Screech or Reversal to even trap a damaged Chansey if there are no hazards out). It really came down to sand and hazards, and the belief that a potential base 18% hp loss on every switch alongside the move damage taken wasn't worth the added physical bulk on a primarily special wall. In the end it was though.
@@nicolaistuhlmuller8718 Well, there's also the fact that knock off got buffed in gen 6, and it's completely reasonable to expect that your wall won't be able to dodge every knock off while still doing its job, and an itemless blissey is strictly better than an itemless chansey.
@@emmetstanevich2121 that is a pro Blissey argument though. This here is why in gen 5-7 Blissey was always considered weaker than Chansey except for the Gen 6-7 Ubers tier, where Blissey had a better matchup against Mega Gengar thanks to Shed Shell.
Just noticed that hippowdon is now ou by technicality
The names of these tiers bug me.
They're named for usage, but usage doesn't determine the placement?
Usage does determine the placement now (ever since maybe Gen 5?)
@@Math.Bandit Yes, but the tiers are in effect before the generation is solidified?
I don't know what's going on in this mess. Smoggon Strangeness is not kind to outsiders.
usage does determine placement
@@nullpoint3346 The tiers are in constant flux throughout the generations based on usage. It is only once a generation becomes obsolete that the tiers become locked.
@@Math.Bandit So at least part of it makes sense.
Pokénerd guy know's everything!
I still don't quite understand. Why can't Mega Garchomp be UU? That's like saying regular Calyrex must be Uber because its other two forms are. Smogon often put different forms of the same Pokémon into different tiers, why is this a problem?
Because you could just not mega evolve and basically be using a itemless garchomp in uu
Base Garchomp is faster so any set where you could run a Mega you'd often be better off just choosing not to transform and make the most of the faster speed (especially with the lower average speed tier of UU compared to OU)
@@saltynope4819 Forgot you can do that. That makes sense now!
Says a lot when an itemless Garchomp can dominate a tier where his Mega is decent ain't it XD.
I play nat dex ou and use mega ttar and it is an absolute monster, what exactly made him ou by technicality in gen 6 but in gen 7 he's a legit ou threat that is more viable than regular ttar?
Is it the speed change mechanic in gen 7 that made him better or is it just players discovering his full potential?
Simply put it's usually just not worth the mega slot. Regular TTar is both the better sand supporter and the better Pursuit trapper, which leaves Mega-TTar to utility and DD. And while Mega-TTar is both a better utility mon and a better DD user than TTar, consider the abundance of strong DD users. Gyarados, Charizard-X and Dragonite all exist and are all faster and have less weaknesses, in Charizard's case more power and in Gyarados' and Dragonite's case a safer setup and the latter even lets you run an additional mega in your team.
What it essentially boils down to is the following two questions: is the utility of the mega or the raw power or sand supporting capabilities of the regular form more important, and do you need to run another mega in your team. In Gen7 megas became less mandatory and sand got a lot weaker now that rain was a legit threat, so it ultimately came down to the utility of the mega vs. the raw power of the base form.
Ultimately though Tyranitar is still used almost twice as much in its base form because of its synergy with special mega wallbreakers, mostly Charizard Y. However thanks to the Tapus you can now have a powerful special wallbreaker in your team without giving up your mega slot, so Mega Tyranitar can at least be used in similar strategies.
I don't really understand why they don't move tiers once the generation is over.
From what i know, when a comp generation "ends", the tiers are locked.
Which is really dumb since they are only applying it to half the gens
Not enough people play them. Tier shifts are based on usage, but if not enough games are being played then it just starts to look more like a popularity contest. They also cannot do tournament usage since old gen tiers that are not OU don't get played often in tournaments ether.
Hello, what more complete team to play in gen 5 over used without legendaries, if possible do you have any with good victory rates to indicate?
It seems kinda silly to not just update dugtrio to lower tiers when they banned arena trap. Your changing something anyway.
Yeah this video made me lose a lot of respect for smogon because their shit seems so arbitrary
Dugtrio is broken with Arena Trap but useless without it? Clearly OU with Arena Trap banned
-Some moron at Smogon
@@TunaBear64 did you, watch the video?
@@Kingolimar354 go on the site and go post about it then, smogon isnt some company, its just a bunch of dudes playing pokemon
why would you ever use dugtrio in any tier
Just subbed. I like your content especially "Here's Why"
You missed out on Venusaur being OU thanks to chlorophyll being legal. Very cool video though
0:07
I never understood why PU is below NU
Like NU means never used
But PU means Partially used
PU doesn't mean anything. Its literally the sound you make when something stinks and you cover your nose.
@@HowlingOneify google says it means Partially used
@@Ultra289 Yeah but that's not the actual name. The smogon post where they actually introduce it says that.
@@Kafstelle wow so Google useless once again ((
OU by technicality is worse than being BL. At least BL is honest in placement.
I lost a lot of respect for smogon from this video. Their rules seem so arbitrary now. "We don't change the meta game after a generation is over." Proceeds to ban Arena trap...
Ah yes, "OU by technicality," a title ascribed to my favorite shitty blue dog, Lucario. How you teeter so close to the border of greatness, but can never cross 😢
So it's not as much OU by technicality, as much as it is OU by the strict definition of the term.(Which is actually funny conceptually)
Electivire not good in gen 4? Nah the amount with no team preview in gen 4 the amount of times i got baited into thunderbolting a electivire switching in only for it to sweep with LO after a moter drive boost is super dumb and why i stop playing gen 4
why not just put the pokemon in uubl which accomplishes the same purpose?
Funny but true: until the Pokemon HOME update issues are resolved, Articuno is "Uber By Technicality" in BDSP
will some of these mons be dropped to a lower tier eventually once enough time passes? like dugtrio after arena trap was banned
edit: oh. nevermind, they will never get dropped because the rankings are static for older generations, i think..
When the game is no longer "The main" format, I believe theirs ate frozen to preserve the metagame. Exceptions occur if things like dugtrios areba trap get banned after the tiers are frozen
I think the only way to move for a pokemon in an old metagame is from the bl status to the tier above it and vice versa, like how Moltres raised from uubl to OU in Gen 3 well over a decade after it was no longer the current gen
Oran Berry Blissey is secretly uber.
Pretty sure donfan was used as an excadrill replacement untill it got unban yet some ppl still keep using it
Ohhhh so that's what OU technicality is
Your pyramid is missing the unofficial ZU for Zero Used lol
I don't get it , why are older gens tiers locked ? Shouldn't usage still matters despite having less players ? I'm pretty sure metas can still change when new strategies are developed
It's probably to reduce discussion threads about meta changes/potential bans for a tier hardly anyone plays anymore when they want to devote time towards the current ones. I don't see why they can't do updates maybe on a less often scale (like reviewing the meta every 3-6 months instead of a more constant rate for the current gens which have way more match data to pull from)
It's like preserving a history I think
Usage is not valuable data if the sample size is to low, which is true for these old gen lower tiers. It just would not make sense to keep making usage based tiering decisions for tier like BW NU that has less then 1000 games played a year.
Seeing Metagross only OU by technicality in gen5 hurts my soul man
I'm still not over the betrayal that was its HA, like every other pseudo is getting broken stuff like Multiscale while my boy gets freaking LIGHT METAL
Can you do a video of why Greninja is banned in X and Y
"Dusknoir is not good in DPP OU" *mtgxerxes has entered the chat*
So what would be the difference between OU by technicality and UUBL?
UUBL is for mons that arent in OU because they arent used enough but arent in UU because they are too good. (OU) is for mons that would fall into UU but cant because of either locked tiers or their base form being in OU
@@rithakc Ah I see. Thank you for explaining.
UUBL is usually a result of the Pokémon itself being too strong for UU but not really being that viable in OU based on its own merits.
OU by technicality is for examples like Mega-Garchomp where it's base form is actually the reason it is OU, but it is impossible to run Mega-Garchomp in a lower tier as it always starts off the match as base Garchomp until transformed anyway. So you can't really play it in something like UU because base Garchomp is too strong before it is transformed and you have no way of enforcing players to use Mega's only as they always need a turn to change. Often you could still get value from the base form as it is switched in before transforming because of differences in stats/typing.
Some Pokémon it is the opposite. Charizard and Kangaskhan were consistently pretty low tier for several generstions until they got Mega's that skyrocketted their viability, but because their base forms aren't as strong you can still run them in low tiers with Megastones.
@@caldw615 But what about mons that don’t have megas or are higher forms of other Pokémon?
@@Azure1013 if you're referring to Blissey in this example, the generation simply ended before Blissey had the chance to move down, so the tiers cannot update to reflect the Pokémon's subsequent usage.
can u do a video on dracovish?
What about in bdsp with articuno being uber by technicality
All hail the Best Pokémon of all time!!!
if gen 1 Lapras drops its going straight to uubl
I don't get it, aren't there tier shifts?
Why isnt jolteon used in gen 4 and 5 anymore? He used to be a staple
Mostly the fact that Thundurus-Therian outclasses it in Gen 5, and in Gen 4, Baton Pass is banned, so it can't replicate the pivoting power that Zapdos can, which is important when walls switch into Jolteon.
If arena trap was banned in gen 5 so dugtrio became OU by technicality
How come dugtrio was also OU by technicality if arena trap was also banned in gen 6
Was arena trap unbanned at some point in between or was it just not changed?
Yeah they unbanned it at start to see its effect on meta and nothing rly changed so it got rebanned
Actually, Arena trap was first banned in SM, then people began to abuse it in ORAS, where it got banned, and then in BW, where it also got banned.
I mean, modern generations absolutely have the same thing- OUBL, for pokemon not good enough to cut it in OU, but banned in UU for one reason or another.
Nah, I'd argue the real OUBLs are Pokemon like Deoxys-Normal, Cinderace, Spectrier, Necrozma Dawn Wings, and Lugia, AKA the guys who would never fly in OU, but are garbage in Ubers. Of course, OUBL is not actually a thing, since Ubers is not a usage based tier, else Pokemon like Weavile, Slurpuff, and Ferrothorn would all reside there
@@grunkleg.2934 uh what are you talking about lugia is one of the best walls of all time
I always preferred Blissey to Chansey. It has always worked better for me.
...but wouldn't that mean they should go in their own OU BL tier?
ou bl isnt a thing, thats just ubers, they wouldnt be uubl either because they didnt get banned from uu
Say what you will but GEN 5 Blissey is much more of a threat then Chansey. Sure Chansey is more bulky but with Blissey you have to account for the fact that it can also run Thunder, Blizzard, Fireblast and Mud bomb or Charge Beam for some mix up. This gives Blissey a lot of type coverage and not to mention with Serene Grace it makes Thunder a semi reliable Status Move. And on top of all of that Blissey is free to run a Chople Berry which halfes fighting type damage once allowing blissey to tank a super effective hit. Throw in Counter and you have a recipe that destroys Half the OU cast.
Welp I completely lost a lot of respect for smogon's system here. It's completely arbitrary to me now. "We don't change a gen after it's over!" Oh but hey let's also ban arena trap and baton pass after the fact. Also let's let half the gens remain frozen and The others can stay doing whatever they want. Lmao okay then. Glad I got out of playing in gen 6 tbh
Why would smogon keep following the rules exactly as they set up in gen 3 though? Many of them are now just outdated and so they decided to just start ignoring some of them, like the rule of not changing a gen once it ended. You can call it arbitrary, but thats only a result of decades passing, to ask smogon to be exactly the same in over 15 years is just unrealistic.
The reason some tiers stay frozen is that theres not enough lower tier games being played to make reasonable tier shifts, so the tiers are locked unless they are unlocked on purpose (right now its just gen 1 lower tiers that are unlocked, since those are considered "new" as people did not play them competitively in the past)
I tried to q into gen6 RU, 0 games and i waited hours
@@kingwailord4143 these people think smogon is a business building full of thousands ready to balance hundreds of tiers at all time, you cant use logic like that
Someone didn't pay attention to the video.
Do generational tiers become “static” after the new meta game begins?
yes, i probably shouldve mentioned that
@@FreezaiPokemon sometimes minor tiering changes are made, such as regice/raikou dropping to uubl and moltres/breloom rising to ou in adv
@@julianbragg4123 I think that only applies to gens 1-3 since they're not run by usage, unlike gen 4 onwards.
Still waiting for a tier between OU and UU. Call it CU (Commonly Used).
Hey great video but a small nitpick is that you kept saying "ElectRivire" instead of "Electivire". It doesn't have an r there.
A constructive critism, add some visual
Why was donphan ever OU
4 minute gang were you at?