>>57913138In general, it centralizes defensive roles around the few pokemon who make best use of uncommonly used items, while not having nearly as much of an impact on offensive pokemon, which together causes metas to shift hard towards HO/hazard stack.
Pokemon like Gliscor, who is already incredible, are even better because they don't use one of your very limited defensive items. Pokemon already has far more offensive items than defensive, and lots of the defensive items are also very valuable on offensive mons. This in turn makes checks and breakers that beat those empowered defensive pokemon even stronger. Meanwhile, the difference between needing to use LO vs expert belt is far less impactful.
Singles is also a far more suitable environment for hazard stack teams, which are also improved by the significant nerf to hazard removal in gen 9.
To be clear, I don't like the boots spam, but it feel like a consequence of hazards somehow becoming even stronger in gen 9 while also gutting removal options, and an item clause would make it even worse.
