>>56338059Hazards have always been a kind of crutch. But by being the most broken thing in the game, they ""balanced"" everything else.
There was a saying about gen 5 Ubers: "Hazards check all."
Hazards used to provide consistency, but they were broken in their own right.
The post-boots world is certainly a different one. I really hated boots in the past, but I became more accepting of them over time.
My instinct says that item clause would absolutely ruin stall and balance and the metas would devolve to pure unpunishable hyper offense.
Gen 9 smogon as a whole is a mess. The power creep is retarded. I like to think that banning tera would go a long way to balancing things. In hindsight, gen 8 was slow, but at least it was balanced. Older gens are getting a bit more love now at least.
>>56337675>>56340988Fwiw, in the recent OLT (peak ladder tryhardism, in contrast to when these RMTs were posted), no one using stall is making the cut. The top person in the first week was using fucking tinkaton. This seems to be an age old point of disconnect in the community. The top players don't have trouble beating stall, but casual fans get filtered.
This isn't to downplay the effectiveness of gen 9 stall. It's the ultimate "safe" playstyle, and it farms the shit out of unprepared ladder players. I can also empathize with it being lame and uncreative, and I wouldn't be against an item clause in gen 9, I just don't think that's going to happen.
Look at these wcop usage stats, hard stall usage in tournaments is low. In this sense, complaints about stall can easily be dismissed as skill issue.
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-world-cup-of-pokémon-2024-usage-statistics.3744071/There are plenty of ways to beat stall and stall is far from the most broken thing in gen 9 OU to me. Still, I can empathize with anti-boots sentiment, because the issue transcends OU, it changed the entire game. I wouldn't not support an item clause in gen 9, but I don't see it happening.
