While we are @ it... here are MY list of demands!
1. ban sandstream and exadrill because it makes him a bamf
2. ban the move pursuit because it deters me from using my favorite psychic / ghosts
3. ban magnet pull b/c it deters me from using my favorite steels
Doesnt that sound silly? Granted... NONE of these examples are as profound as the use of stealth rock. Quite frankly I dont like the move that much. But even though its not my favorite move in the world, that doesnt mean we should ban it.
SS + drizzle/manaphy, Evasion and ohkos are completely different than sr. Though sr drastically changes the game and pokemon usage, these are a bit different in the sense that the former demands that you have pokemon that are able to benefit from rain, or u are doomed. The ladder has so many reasons why they are banned and i dont want to go into them, but basically it makes the game broken to the point that its not a game worth playing competitively.
Who here hasnt played a team that had sr, without u having sr up and won? REALLY? So.... basically as long as someone else has an advantage over you based on the the that YOU picked... that automatically makes u lose? USE SOME SKILL! when @ a disadvantage, use ur prediction skills or force a switch to gain the upper hand... do something other than just pew pewing.
If u like charizard... pick charizard... just SUPPORT him. have a game plan for if u have to switch into sr... but try to remove it or prevent it in the 1st place.
So what you have to "waste" 2 moveslots for sr and rs. 2 moveslots out of 24 moves on a 6 poke team = win vs lose? C'mon... stop complaining... it gets really annoying... its a GAME of strategy.
Game Freak already Dumbed it down for you... YOU CAN SEE UR OPPONETS FREAKING TEAM FFS!!! You guys complaining about something like SR seems a little trivial when you take that into consideration.
Stop saying that SR should be nerfed... because just like EVERY competitive game... once you do that, people will still complain and say that it is overpowered...
And to those saying that rapid spin is a bad move.... lets do a little math shall we?
1 move for sr
3 moves for spikes
2 moves for toxic spikes
All negated by 1 move... rapid spin.... now please tell me how ur 6 turns of set up (assuming that ONE pokemon had all those moves... most likely it would be 7 turns because u would have to switch to diff pokemon who know each move) being negated by one turn of rapid spin sucks? I mean come on...
The bottom line is... dont just slap together ur favorite pokemon and give all of them the strong 4 attacks they can haveand start spamming attacks... the game was meant to take some thought into how you create ur team.
It wouldn't be such an issue if Rapid Spin didn't have such a small list of users (and SR distribution has also dropped since it's no longer a TM).
As of Gen 5, Rapid Spin is learnable by a whopping 18 or so fully evolved pokemon. A few of those are completely useless outside of Rapid Spin (Delibird and Spinda won't ever be useful). It's not just 1 moveslot out of 24, it's an entire pokemon on the set used solely for one person. Personally, I wouldn't be running Claydol on my Hail team if I didn't feel like I needed Rapid Spin (not that he's bad per se, I'd just like to use other pokemon that I just can't stick on my team due to needing Rapin Spin).
And then there's Stealth Rock. There's around 20 fully evolved pokemon that learn that (since the TM was removed, although it seems like on PO, we still have a lot of guys using it that technically can't use it in Gen. V, so I don't know what's up with that).
So now a lot of those pokemon only get use because of Stealth Rock.
But wait, there's more! Now that you have a SR inducer and a Rapid Spinner, you need someone who can prevent Rapid Spin. That's right, a Ghost-type Spin Blocker. Now, Ghosts happen to be the least common type, at only 15 fully evolved Ghost types.
You're still not set, though. What can you do to prevent the other guy from setting up in the first place? Taunt/Magic Coat/Magic Guard. Now, this one isn't nearly as big a deal, since Taunt has a pretty large distribution.
So that's 4 entire roles based solely on inducing and countering one specific move. Not only is that way more than "2 slots out of 24", it also puts a pretty tight limit on pokemon that use those moves.
Whether or not it should be banned, you just can't argue that it's not way overcentralizing. A huge part of the game now revolves around this single move, and in my opinion, it's just way too limiting. Now, you don't necessarily HAVE to run all 4 roles. You can win without setting up SR or using Rapid Spin. But it's harder. SR completely cripples certain pokemon and its only useful counter is 20 BP (it actually does 0% damage on certain guys when I use it).