I know that the chances of people actually hearing me out on this are slim, but I feel like it's about time we get rid of the elephant in the room. UU players tend to get incredibly defensive whenever an outsider talks about how horrible of a tier UU is and how it's nothing but the same bulky offensive team every single game and a couple of broken Pokemon keeping each other in check. Note that, even though I don't necessarily think the tier is as horrible as some people let out (I think it's kind of bad as is, but that's besides the point), I still believe that there are a couple of issues that need to be addressed and I'm not a fan of the lazy path we're taking at all regarding our suspect tests at all.
Please note that this isn't related to the result of the Hydreigon suspect test at all. In fact, I'm not actually bothered with the end result, and blaming it on the lack of game/GXE limit is silly when you consider that many of our most competent players contributed to Hydreigon staying in the tier. I would support introducing a limit or something else to make getting requirements
slightly harder, but I believe that taking the "2 suspect ladders with insane game limits" approach like RU (and even NU at a point IIRC) did is not healthy to a tier's development because it also happens to make suspect tests a lot harder and restrictive than they should be for less experienced players and even for experienced ones who don't have as much time per week to commit to laddering. With that said, Hydreigon
could've been banned, since it's one of the arguably "slightly overpowered" Pokemon that keeps a million things in check with its good defensive typing, but there's no point in pursuing a ban any further after the community decided that they ultimately want it to stay in the tier. Moving on.
What I'm about to say has a lot of subjectivity and maybe even some bias to it, but as someone who builds a lot of teams and has a lot of fun theorizing about new strategies and ways of breaking the metagame, I just get this feeling that the tier has grown so stale that it's actually impossible to get away with making big changes within bulky offensive/slow balance team frameworks. I won't get too practical and I'll try not to make this little rant too long, but before people say "But Pearl, of course you can't use an UU team without a Fairy-type! That means you're being silly for refusing to run checks to Hydreigon and Conkeldurr!", please keep in mind that I'm not questioning the fact that teams need answers to the most threatening Pokemon and playstyles. What I'm trying to say is that the options we have to deal with UU's many threats are incredibly limited, which creates many scenarios in which you either run the same 3/4 defensive Pokemon everyone else does or just accept having a harder time (or even straight up losing) against one of the tier's top dogs. This is why, in the end, every balance team (and even some bulky offensive ones, but those usually resort to faster stuff) that's commonly seen has these Swampert + Forretress + Sylveon, Sylveon + Crobat + Krookodile + Suicune or even Sylveon + Tentacruel + Steel-type + Entei check cores that bore the hell out of everyone who's not really into the tier, leading to the infinite amount of complains about the tier's state that comes from all of the outsiders.
With this in mind, there are two different routes that the people who are in charge of UU can take:
1. Accept the tier's current and centralized state, doing nothing to create a more dynamic metagame where people actually have room for creativity when running teams that aren't stall or full-blown offense. This is what's currently happening and what I'm trying to change. Unfortunately, I don't think things are going to become different anytime soon, but who knows what could happen if a respectable number of people agree with my stance.
2. Try and change stuff within UU. This is a lot harder in practice than it is on paper, considering that, at the moment, there isn't really a Pokemon that's dominant enough to be considered "the absolute best" or "too centralizing to remain in the tier", but instead there's this group of 6 or so Pokemon that are obviously above everything else and create the boring metagame we currently have. Obviously, and especially considering how close we are to the next generation of Pokemon (note that this isn't, in my opinion, an argument to encourage us to remain quiet as we finish ORAS on a bad note), we're not going to be banning 7 different Pokemon, nor do I think that such thing should be done, even if it happened during any other given time of the generation. However, what we can try to do, is to identify which Pokemon of the "arguably broken" bunch is the most restricting to teambuilding, which is what I'm about to get into:
I know that many people think that Celebi is the #1 option as far as "Pokemon we should absolutely get rid of" go, and even though I used to agree with that stance up until very recently, I just don't think it's true anymore. UU has managed to adapt nicely to Celebi's most threatening set (a.k.a. Offensive Nasty Plot and all of its variants), and even though it's still a fearsome cleaner and even a solid lure to some specifically threatening Pokemon (using Shadow Ball, Hidden Power Fire and even Signal Beam according to the team's needs can throw the opponent off nicely), you're never really going to see it straight up winning games on its own. However, what I feel that needs to go in Celebi's place, is
Baton Pass. Celebi is a manageable Pokemon on its own, as I've just said, but when you consider that it also happens to have the ability to give a teammate a free +2 boost to either offensive stat, things become a lot more painful when dealing with this Pokemon. It's true that a Celebi's coverage move can give the Celebi user a massive advantage, but Baton Pass has the ability to single handily turn a game around, and it's honestly not fair to play against for many different reasons that people are tired of hearing out in threads dedicated to banning Baton Pass (those are common in Policy Review, so check them out if you've never done so before).
Most people who talk to me about this tier on a daily basis are probably tired of hearing me rambling and crying about this Pokemon's existence, but I can't help feeling like that at all. Sacred Fire is an unhealthy move and, in my opinion, pushes this Pokemon over the edge as far as centralizing stuff goes. Even though this is obvious for pretty much every person, I'm still going to stress it out because I bet there are people out there who think I'm not aware of this: I obviously think it's a must for a tier to have Pokemon which can punish passive players effectively. However, I just feel like Entei is a little too good at that, while also restricting teambuilding in a way no other Pokemon aside from Hydreigon and (maybe) Conkeldurr can. I'd keep on writing up about Entei, but I feel like this
conversation of mine with user: Tony sums my stance up better than anything I could come up with right now.
Aside from these two, there's also Hydreigon, Krookodile, Conkeldurr and even Sylveon, but I feel like in spite of their status as the tier's most dominant Pokemon, they shouldn't be considered for serious suspect tests, considering a lot of different factors that aren't really important for the point I'm trying to get across. However, if anyone actually feels like any of these Pokemon could use one, then feel free to write about it.
I think this should be enough for me to explain myself, since the post is starting to get pretty long. I know that there's definitely some bias in some parts of my post; that's pretty hard to avoid in discussions like these, but the points I bring up are still completely legit (in my opinion).