Implemented DPP Snow Cloak

[DeepBlueC]

Citing ladder play by one player as the only evidence for this brokenness is also not enough imo. Excal is clearly a way better player than most other ladder-players so a lot of those wins could just be down to him outplaying.
Not to mention that after watching most of those replays the issue usually wasnt froslass snow cloak Ability but rather its combination with some sort of paraflinch.

The ladder play is evidence that something can go wrong, and we want to stop the damage there before it bleeds into an SPL game. We've seen firsthand in SPL that players have abused evasion abilities to their benefit.

I also want to correct a few misunderstandings from your post:

1) The Froslass user in that replay was not Excal, but instead was Shing.
2) The purpose of the replays was not to show who the better player was, but instead to highlight the problematic aspects of Froslass irrespective of who the user was.
3) You haven't watched those above replays that I linked, because if you did, then you'd see in those replays there was no parafusion that was abused by the Froslass user. Please watch those replays. I intentionally selected these replays so that the issues with Snow Cloak would not be masked by parafusion.

Without multiple high level tournament games decided by hail-lass i just don't see any reason to prematurely ban this mon. Banning for what it "potential could do" is a slippery slope and if we do that then we might as well ban the elephant in the room in Jirachi because that Mon has been doing "Froslass"-level of bullshit for years and is basically top 3 in usage. That should be way higher in priority than a lowly BL mon with almost bo usage. (Not that i think that Jirachi deserves to be banned right now.)
Maybe the crux of the matter is also not Froslass itself but paraflinch? Atleast going through the replays Excal provided a large amount of them were lost due to paras rather than misses.
And using SPL teams that autolose vs those froslass teams is also arguing in bad faith because those teams
a) dont always are the most solid but sometimes just finetuned for a specific weeks opponent (bo1 mu fishing!)
b) froslass was on noones radar so ofc teams wouldn't be prepared for it (thats like saying oh no u lose vs this specific uu-mol w this set thats never seen in ou - unviable team!)

I don't think there has been a requirement that we need multiple high level tournament games in order to ban something, but do correct me if I am wrong. Snow Cloak's evil twin, Sand Veil, was banned completely after it saw usage in two SPL games. One game was won by the Sand Veil user, but the other game wasn't. "Swagger" was also banned with just one game usage in SPL. The "potential could do" is a good enough argument for me when there are sufficient odds for it to luck its way through and there isn't reasonable counterplay. It isn't a slippery slope and the tiering rules ensure that this won't be the case.

Jirachi and paraflinch/parafusion are its own beasts, and while this isn't the topic in which to discuss this, you're more than welcome to suggest what changes you would like to propose within the tiering framework instead of simply saying "do something." I genuinely would like to hear how you think these issues can be resolved, and we can discuss this in the DPP discord server (https://discord.gg/C4NPYZ65Tp).

Regarding points 'a' and 'b' in your post:

a) A team being solid has no bearing on whether it will miss its moves vs Froslass. It just comes down to luck.

b) No one is saying that you can't prepare for Froslass. It's possible, by using a sand-setter like Tyranitar or Hippo, or having a weather-changing move (like Sandstorm, Rain dance, or Sunny day) as a 4th move slot, but players shouldn't feel forced to resort to these measures to address Snow Cloak abuse.

Tackling Froslass first just to adhere to a streamlined tiering policy framework is nothing short of lazy and makes 0 sense. Doing so by council decision without a proper suspect test turns a bad decision into a very bad one.
Especially when the pro-ban outcries wherw mostly contained to just Excal and seemed to have little public support otherwise.
It is a shame to lose a cool mon such as Froslass that has other neat sets (spike support as lead for example) just like this.

If Froslass really is DPP's issue #1 rn (its not lets be real) then atleast hold a suspect test for it. Dont use SPL being soon as a cop iut - with sign-ups etc. there is more then enough time still til the start of SPL w1 (3-4 weeks!).

I urge the council to please rethink this decision.

Again, correct me if I am wrong, but we haven't used a suspect test for banning uncompetitive moves/abilities (see Sand Veil / Swagger).

If you wish that moving forward that any ban occurs only after a suspect test, then you can advocate for that separately.

 

[Conflict]

The ladder play is evidence that something can go wrong, and we want to stop the damage there before it bleeds into an SPL game. We've seen firsthand in SPL that players have abused evasion abilities to their benefit.

I also want to correct a few misunderstandings from your post:

1) The Froslass user in that replay was not Excal, but instead was Shing.
2) The purpose of the replays was not to show who the better player was, but instead to highlight the problematic aspects of Froslass irrespective of who the user was.
3) You haven't watched those above replays that I linked, because if you did, then you'd see in those replays there was no parafusion that was abused by the Froslass user. Please watch those replays. I intentionally selected these replays so that the issues with Snow Cloak would not be masked by parafusion.

Ok I obviously wasnt talking about the replays you provided in your own post but Excal's.
The 2 you provided had 1 game where Froslass did stuff which it also only did after Meta got knocked. If that Knock doesn't happen its pretty likely gg. One game where Lass looked decent and managed to close a game out isn't enough to prove its brokenness especially when it needed pretty much 0 misses to win that endgame (thx to hail and sub+tect shenanigans).
The 2nd game includes PZ and Togekiss by the opponent. Please don't use low ladder play as evidence for Lass brokenness. Might as well ban Elective, Dusknoir and PZ then.

Jirachi and paraflinch/parafusion are its own beasts, and while this isn't the topic in which to discuss this, you're more than welcome to suggest what changes you would like to propose within the tiering framework instead of simply saying "do something." I genuinely would like to hear how you think these issues can be resolved, and we can discuss this in the DPP discord server (https://discord.gg/C4NPYZ65Tp).

You wanted to hear disagreements in the PR thread and then once you got them you now want to move them to the discord and ralk specifics there. Sounds a lot like you didn't expect pushback and now you dont wanna deal with it to me.
Personally I think the current DPP meta is fine and feels balanced. The only possible suspect I would entertain right now is maybe Clefable?

a) A team being solid has no bearing on whether it will miss its moves vs Froslass. It just comes down to luck.

That is true but the Froslass user also has to have Hail on the team AND keep it up while also finding an opportunity for Froslass to enter. That is not easy. Froslass isn't a behemoth its a fucking BL mon that needs Cloak to even be worthy of consideration in the lategame. That's a lot of shit one needs just to make Lass work and limits ones teambuilding quite a bit.

b) No one is saying that you can't prepare for Froslass. It's possible, by using a sand-setter like Tyranitar or Hippo, or having a weather-changing move (like Sandstorm, Rain dance, or Sunny day) as a 4th move slot, but players shouldn't feel forced to resort to these measures to address Snow Cloak abuse.

"Snow Cloak abuse". Snow Cloak is a fringe ability that sees almost no use. Its fine to ban it if possible but preserving Lass just feels correct to me.
This thread went up in early 2023 when Excal deemed this an issue. Since then Noone has really abused Froslass and the first attempt to ban Lass was shutdown. Now suddenly after 9 months Excal put this back on the radar and has kept pushing for its ban again. If we use that same procedure for anything over time it is possible to ban almost anything. Just try it until it works.
This just feels like a ban pushed by an agenda spearheaded by one particular user.
How come Noone else has spoken up about Froslass since the first time this thread was made? Why is it only Excal fueling the fire? And why is the council enabling this? Might as well just give Excal the power to do whatever he wants.
This is not the way to go about banning Froslass at all.

The ban is bullshit and Lass is barely an issue or even used right now. We should strive to keep as many elements unbanned as possible while having a healthy metagame.
Lets not ban it without doing our due diligence in making sure it is that outright broken/uncompetitive that we need to remove it entirely from OU.

Ive seen many outcries for bans/changes to DPP OU on discord/anywhere but outside of Excal Noone has advocated for a Froslass ban of all things. The problematic mons mentioned are usually in the top 5 VR....

Way to miss the target.

 

[DeepBlueC]

Ok I obviously wasnt talking about the replays you provided in your own post but Excal's.
The 2 you provided had 1 game where Froslass did stuff which it also only did after Meta got knocked. If that Knock doesn't happen its pretty likely gg. One game where Lass looked decent and managed to close a game out isn't enough to prove its brokenness especially when it needed pretty much 0 misses to win that endgame (thx to hail and sub+tect shenanigans).
The 2nd game includes PZ and Togekiss by the opponent. Please don't use low ladder play as evidence for Lass brokenness. Might as well ban Elective, Dusknoir and PZ then.

You're again missing the point.

1) In that replay, yes because Metagross lost its lefties, it was in a worse spot against Froslass, but not every Metagross carries lefties.
2) Should a lefties-less Metagross ever have to lose 1v1 to a Froslass because of Froslass' ability to dodge moves under hail?

You're also mischaracterizing the second replay where you're dismissing it completely simply because there was a PorygonZ and a Togekiss. PorygonZ was hardly featured vs Froslass, where Froslass was mostly handling Jirachi, Swampert, Gyara, and Breloom. If you find replays of Electivire, Dusknoir, and PorygonZ dodging 100% accuracy moves, then yeah bring them to my attention and I will propose for something to be done.

Otherwise, these are just bad-faith arguments.

You wanted to hear disagreements in the PR thread and then once you got them you now want to move them to the discord and ralk specifics there. Sounds a lot like you didn't expect pushback and now you dont wanna deal with it to me.
Personally I think the current DPP meta is fine and feels balanced. The only possible suspect I would entertain right now is maybe Clefable?

Man, you're painfully unaware of things so you just presume the worst. The reason I suggested taking things to discord is because 1) the Snow Cloak thread isn't the thread for voicing out your issues with Jirachi; and 2) there is already discussion happening in the DPP discord about Jirachi/parafusion and about what steps can be done.

So if you wanted to contribute or have your voice heard, then discord is a better platform for that because mentioning it here is futile (just like your thoughts on what needs to be changed in DPP). If you think we're "missing the forest for the trees" by not doing something about Jirachi/paraflinch, then do so by creating a separate PR thread for this. If you want Clefable to be suspected, then create a thread in the DPP discussion forum about the issues you have with it and why you think it should be suspected because this isn't the thread for it.

That is true but the Froslass user also has to have Hail on the team AND keep it up while also finding an opportunity for Froslass to enter. That is not easy. Froslass isn't a behemoth its a fucking BL mon that needs Cloak to even be worthy of consideration in the lategame. That's a lot of shit one needs just to make Lass work and limits ones teambuilding quite a bit.

Froslass doesn't have to do anything to keep hail up. All it takes is Abomasnow to show up on field, and if the opponent does not use Tyranitar or Hippowdon, then hail continues to remain active. There isn't any skill to this.

The rest of the quoted portion addresses Froslass' traits, but I don't know why this is so difficult for you to comprehend this: Snow Cloak is being banned because it is uncompetitive. Therefore, it makes no difference as to the ease with which Froslass can come in, Froslass' traits, or the difficulty with which this strategy needs to work.

"Snow Cloak abuse". Snow Cloak is a fringe ability that sees almost no use. Its fine to ban it if possible but preserving Lass just feels correct to me.
This thread went up in early 2023 when Excal deemed this an issue. Since then Noone has really abused Froslass and the first attempt to ban Lass was shutdown. Now suddenly after 9 months Excal put this back on the radar and has kept pushing for its ban again. If we use that same procedure for anything over time it is possible to ban almost anything. Just try it until it works.
This just feels like a ban pushed by an agenda spearheaded by one particular user.
How come Noone else has spoken up about Froslass since the first time this thread was made? Why is it only Excal fueling the fire? And why is the council enabling this? Might as well just give Excal the power to do whatever he wants.
This is not the way to go about banning Froslass at all.

I don't want to make this a "facts don't care about your feelings" situation, but I have to: the tiering framework doesn't care about your feelings. I'm once again reiterating, if your feelings are hurt by not preserving Froslass, then advocate for a change in the rules.

Are you really this oblivious that you don't know why an action was taken now instead of when it was first proposed? It's because we have now have evidence (replays) that Snow Cloak is an issue. We didn't take any action then because we didn't feel like it was necessary, but now we do.

The ban is bullshit and Lass is barely an issue or even used right now. We should strive to keep as many elements unbanned as possible while having a healthy metagame.
Lets not ban it without doing our due diligence in making sure it is that outright broken/uncompetitive that we need to remove it entirely from OU.

Ive seen many outcries for bans/changes to DPP OU on discord/anywhere but outside of Excal Noone has advocated for a Froslass ban of all things. The problematic mons mentioned are usually in the top 5 VR....

Way to miss the target.

Okay.

 

[Laurel]

While I think Conflict’s tone is a little abrasive, I think he makes some very good points.

Last year, when this was brought up the community spoke up and Froslass wasn’t banned. Fast forward a year later, nothing has changed besides a few replays and Mael stepping down and Froslass gets banned.

Proposal:
There needs to be a rule in place on bans like how you can’t trial someone twice in court for the same crime. Froslass already went through it and we kept it in, not enough has changed to make us think otherwise.

If Froslass was truly problematic, wouldn’t it be wrecking havoc in a 15+ year old tier?

Yes, Froslass gets access to a bunch of toxic moves, eg. Thunder Wave, Confuse Ray, Evasion.

However, Froslass has the worst or second worst defensive-typing in all of DPP. ICE. In order to abuse, Froslass you need to run ANOTHER Ice-type mon.

Of course, Abomasnow is quite viable but I’ve built enough teams with Walrein and Abomasnow to know how limiting double ice is in the builder if you don’t want to get smoked by Infernape, Specs Latias, DD Ttar, Machamp, CB Scizor, etc.

Basically, you’re giving up so much defensive profiling just to attempt to cheese.

It’s not like this is Gen 6 Webs where cheese has little to no drawbacks. You’re stuck with 2 ice-types….

With that said, can we please unban Froslass and run a proper suspect test. If the community then decides to ban it let’s do it the proper way. Would anyone actually complain about more activity on the DPP ladder? Right before SPL mind you, I think this would make a lot of people happy.

 

[peng]

Its a bit silly that implementation of a Snow Warning + Snow Snow Cloak complex ban was blocked higher up.

I can understand tiering council's hesitance to apply new complex bans, out of fear of increasingly complicated ban lists, but this would not have been a new complex ban. The existing ban was already incredibly complex ("Snow Cloak is banned unless it is a Pokemon's only ability" effectively only banning Snow Cloak on Mamoswine), and we had a clear option to de-complex this with a smarter implementation - to ban Snow Cloak with Snow Warning, which is far more concise and consistent with how weather abilities have been tackled in BW. It preserves Froslass, which was the intention of the original ban to begin with, but effectively removes Evasion from the tier outside of the 1 in a 1000 situations where Aboma faces lead Froslass, an interaction that cannot intentionally be abused.

There is no risk of slippery slope here, considering the context - when a complex ban is already in place, it should be an option to revise that ban rather than forced to keep it or delete it altogether. Especially relevant considering a revised baton pass complex ban was just introduced like a week ago

 

[fatty]

this is ridiculous lmao. op complains about explaining the complex tiering to newer players, and yet we’re ok with explaining why a “pretty bad” Pokémon is banned due to somebody getting cheesed a couple of times. Froslass has a real niche, one that is completely unique to it (fast spiker + ghost). It’s clearly not the best mon in the world, but this type of tiering goes against everything I’ve grown accustomed to on this site. What is the downside of banning snow warning + snow cloak? The reasoning of this discussion is to apparently cater to the most “competitive” players in dpp, yet we’re throwing out the ideal solution to cater to newer players? Pick a fucking side lol.

 

[The Grand Babido]

None of those replays sufficiently demonstrate the unique and invincible powers of a 400 base stat hazards weak pokemon hiding behind a substitute necessitating weather conditions contrary to the weather conditions automatically imposed by the most ubiquitous pokemon in the tier.

The replays are just the standard result of a pokemon supported by an incapacitating move sitting behind a substitute running through offense.

Jirachi and machamp do this every week, and at the highest level. It is not too dissimilar to the behaviours of subpunch breloom before people adapted to it. A substitute thunder wave rock slide fire punch regirock in sand would produce similar outcomes.

I support the views of conflict et al. Froslass has a very cool niche, and leveraging its spiking/spike protection abilities and mitigating its shortcomings can create some very interesting and unique patterns of play. It definitely brings net benefits to the tier.

 

[verbatim]

b) No one is saying that you can't prepare for Froslass. It's possible, by using a sand-setter like Tyranitar or Hippo, or having a weather-changing move (like Sandstorm, Rain dance, or Sunny day) as a 4th move slot, but players shouldn't feel forced to resort to these measures to address Snow Cloak abuse.

Other people have mentioned Jirachi, but I want to go a little bit further and explicitly state that I think the difference between being expected to have an answer on your team for Jirachi flinchhax and Froslass "restricting teambuilding options" by requiring you to bring counterplay is basically just vibes/popularity. That doesn't mean it's explicitly wrong to touch one but not the other, that being said. There's a lot of parallel discourse going on about the 29th most common pokemon on the 1760+ elo ADV OU ladder that boils down to the fact that the vast community consensus is that Ninjask is the most annoying elephant in the tier and "it will cause you to autolose if you didn't bring roar/perish song/etc" is qualitatively rather than quantitatively unpalatable to the majority of players.

 

[Cdijk16]

I agree with what Peng said above. Given that a complex ban was already in place, why didn't the council just revise it to be a Snow Cloak + Snow Warning/Hail ban? The main reason for no-complex bans is an overly complex ban-list, but in this case a complex ban would make the ban-list less complex.
It would've been better for the meta to preserve non-cheese variants of Froslass. I agree that Snow Cloak cheese shouldnt be allowed, but it would be better for the meta to implement this through a complex ban.

 

[Drifting]

Just wanted to echo what everyone else is saying about the absolute waste that is banning a Pokemon which is 99% of the time a positive/healthy contributor to DPP's lead metagame, especially when the evidence provided is literal 1200s ladder replays. Perhaps the DPP Council should consider taking action against GyaraVire next due to its extreme over-representation in the same level of play. All-around very strange.

 

[pulsar512b]

Not a DPP player but was discussing this with a friend of mine and in summary my view on this is that while the proper tiering action may or may not be a good action (my personal guess is its not a good move but I'm not the one to say), the real issue is how this was handled.

Quickbans/non-suspect tiering action are for cases where a suspect would be a mere formality, and only in those cases. As is clear from this thread, that is very far from the real case, and a suspect should have been run for this.

Going forward, this tiering action should be reversed and a suspect done instead. Do this right.

 

[Kristyl]

I think a lot of the criticisms of the DPP council are a bit unfair, they left this thread/discussion up for just over a week, got little to no pushback on it, then quick banned it before the biggest tournament. I'm not saying they handled it perfectly but I think some sympathy for them is deserved. I imagine from their point of view a lot of the discussion about why it shouldn't be banned happening AFTER rather then before is frustrating. Keep Snow Cloak banned for this SPL then re-evaluate/discuss it after, this isn't as big of a deal as it's being made out to be.

Personally I would vote ban on Snow Cloak if it's our only option, and I think many top players likely to play this SPL agreed that's why there wasn't posts about keeping it. That being said I, and literally every other DPP player have a preference for improving the old complex ban which effectively just bans Snow Cloak on Mamoswine and changing it to something cleaner like Snow Warning + Snow Cloak. I know complex bans are a bit of a taboo fsr but I seriously urge it to be considered in this unique instance @ tiering admins or whoever (it isn't up to the DPP council btw so please don't blame them for not doing it). Give the player base that unanimously agrees on this what they want!