>>52976348>They don't punish the opponent, they protect you.Yeah, too much. It makes switching with such bulky Pokemon too easy and makes pivoting too oppressive. If you actually played the Gen 8 Meta, you'd know how oppressive Teleport+Future Sight was, and that was enabled with the help of HDB. Even without that, slow turning into an extremely threatening Pokemon held back by its frailty is oppressive. It's why you saw a bunch of Slowbro+Weavile pairings, aside from the previously mentioned FuturePort tech, but you still also say Blissey+Weavile, Fini+Weavile, and DragaZera+Weavile, and then also saw tons of Melmetal as that shit was the only thing that could reliably beat Pivot+Weavile.
And also keep in mind, tons of things lost Knock Off in Gen 9 due to transfers replacing your moveset with level up moves. So if Gholdengo were to be banned, HDBs would make any attempts to hazard stack pointless in a game where without Gholdengo it's really hard to keep hazards up.
>Gho actively punishes you for merely existing.How exactly does Gholdengo do this? And even if your exaggerated claims were true, Gholdengo's presence is still definitely a positive one because it's the only respite against the anti-hazards creep. It's much more welcoming than pivots being completely immune to their main form of counterplay and biggest limiter.
>A defensive item is never oppressive by definition.Not only is this just straight up false, as defensive teams can absolutely be oppressive, but it also implies that only defensive teams or even defensive Pokemon use HDBs.Again, if you actually played the game, you'd know that NEARLY EVERYTHING uses fucking HDBs. Obviously lots of slow walls used this item, as well as Stealth Rock weak Pokemon, but anything that was going to switch around often used it. Tapu Koko, Dragapult, Zeraora, ect. It was so common that between all the Pokemon that use HDBs, Leftovers only beats it by 1 Pokemon, and this also includes CAPmons and NatDex meta too.
