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Smogon Tier Discussion

DCM

DCM

Man Skilled In All Ways of Contending
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Smogon Tiers have been a source of much turmoil among the Pokemon Fandom. The tier various pokemon reside in is often in question, particulary Garchomp, and various UU/NU pokemon.
I would like to hear some members of this sites thoughts on the subject of Tiers. Are they needed at all? Are there pokemon that should be in a different tier?

Please keep in mind all tiers except for Uber and BorderLine are based on Usages.

Smogon Tier Lists. Click for list of Pokemon.
Honestly, i think the tiers are fine the way that they are. I have played on both the Smogon Server and the Official Server( when i t was up), and preferred Smogon's tier over the Garchomp on every team that was the Official Server.

Thoughts on the Tiers?
 
Magmortar said:
Magmortar and Swellow are both over used.
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thank you for posting in this thread ^^

this is the problem most have with the Tiers. There favorite pokemon, or pokemon they do not consider good, are farther down on the tier than they would like.

can you give a good reason why they should be higher?
 
Magmortar said:
Magmortar and Swellow are both over used.
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lol, just because they are common in UU doesn't make them OU.

They have changed around a lot of stuff lately, should be interesting. Froslass to UU is something I am very happy about, it was useless in BL. Rhyperior in UU is also very tempting.

The tier system is not always perfect, but it is certainly necessary.
 
Troggy said:
lol, just because they are common in UU doesn't make them OU.

They have changed around a lot of stuff lately, should be interesting. Froslass to UU is something I am very happy about, it was useless in BL. Rhyperior in UU is also very tempting.

The tier system is not always perfect, but it is certainly necessary.
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I could see Frosslass being bumped back up to BL soon. Throughout my battles recently with it as the opposing lead, it almost always gets a kill or lays down a layer of spikes. it has the typing to avoid fake out, and outspeeds the majority of the metagame (including all but four taunters).

Rhyperior i have not seen, but he seems like another Dugtrio reaction. people assume he is going to Rape, but he is countered to easily/ has no niche in UU
 
alakazam's gonna shoot right back up, i bet. also, Roserade's run will be as short as umbreon's.
 
Are these tier lists even updated with the new HGSS move tutor moves? I would think that things like a Heal Bell Jynx or a Magic Coar Gardevoir would cause some shifts.

I don't really see the problem with tier-list myself. I don't really use it, but it's a good guideline to at least consider when making a team.
 
I don't understand the NU tier. I know it's supposed to stand for 'never used,' but it easily has the largest number of pokemon on it, and several that are NOT weak. Lapras? Leafeon? PORYGON 2? Really? And how the F*CK is Alakazam in UU? The thing is a monster!
 
Smogon hierarchy system is based and modified upon the 1-on-1 metagame so I don't have anything to say about it, seeing as I play doubles. It seems solid and pretty balanced, although the only thing I don't like is Garchomp, Mew, Manaphy and Latios (even when he's holding a Soul Dew) being in the "Über" tier. I know there are statistical usage data and solid research about why they're in that classification, but I still think they're a little overrated and don't fit the role of what you can expect from a true Über in battle. But that's my humble subjective opinion.

And speaking of clauses and rules, I don't endorse any of them but sleep clause, and in rare ocassions item clause. Sleep clause is active by default (as well as "suicide moves use by the last Pokémon clause") in the set of rules I use on PBR friend matches, thus I don't have to worry too much if my opponent decides to break it. OHKO moves strategies aren't that threatening or useful, and Evasion moves are scarcely included in most teams so I don't have problems handling them.

I would be pleased if Smogon began to gather data and working on a tier exclusively for the 2-on-2 metagame.
 
The thing about tiers is that they're based on usage (with the obvious exceptions of course.) This means that any Pokemon can be OU if enough people used it. This means that, in theory, Magikarp has as much a chance to be in OU as Tyranitar.

And that's the thing. It's, for all intents and purposes, a popularity contest.

Personally, I think that, when it comes to fully evolved Pokemon at least (although I've seen someone use an Eevee competitively, usually to good results) all Pokemon have can be useful. In my modest opinion, there should only be two tiers: Uber and "other." Anything that doesn't qualify for the former, falls into the latter. Plain and simple.

I personally play the standard tier on Shoddy with a combination of OU and UU Pokemon and I win my fair share of battles. I defeat entire OU teams all the time with Pokemon like Houndoom, Venusaur, Feraligatr and Meganium. I also get defeated all the time and not always by OU teams.

This leads me to rely on tiers very little. I think it all depends on the player, his/her strategy and how well they can pull it off. Different strategies will require different Pokemon, and some pretty successful ones work better with Pokemon that aren't OU.

That's just my opinion though. If tiers are necessary, at least don't make them about popularity (yes, I know that popularity tends to stem from usefulness in battle, but I just think that, if they must give us a tier list, they should completely skip the "usage" part and concentrate on their statistics, strategy and general usefulness alone.)

Smogon's been frustrating me lately for this particular usage reason. One moment Umbreon's OU, the next he's not. But Roserade has become OU now, and Alakazam got demoted. Charizard's suddenly an NU and Rhyperior's a UU. But next week, it all might change again and Alakazam might get promoted again but Roserade might get demoted. With all this up and down travelling for the Pokemon, who's to say which one is really useful in the standard tier anymore. Then there's Pokemon like Shedinja, Ninetales and Primape, who don't make it to the current standard tier because they can't "handle themselves in it," but are actually pretty solid in the Uber tier, where all the legends roam...it's confusing, frustrating and annoying in my opinion.

Yes, I know I'm probably going to get bashed for saying all of this, but it's my honest opinion and I'm just throwing it out there, so I have no problems with whatever backlash may come from this post.
 
roserade in ou is just stupid, it should be a BL if it's too powerful for UU, in OU it'll come in, people will laugh, send in a dragon and dragon dance till the cows come home. garchomp, i, personally, think is okay in OU, it's speed lets it down. yes, it's bulky, but so are loooads of other legendary pokemon, and it's typing's good, but ice and dragon are two of the most used attack types in OU. if you dont have a fast ice/dragon user in your team, then your a rubbish trainer and you'd die against salamence anyway. all you have to do is predict well. bringing in a gengar with hidden power ice on an earthquake is a very very easy prediction, and once you know that they have a garchomp, you can predict it coming in very easily, and bring in your starmie/jolteon with hidden power ice.

oh, alakazam, completely agreed with UU, it's movepool is AWFUL ah ha, and it's just ridiculously frail, any priority move will kill it.
 
Personally, I don't like how Smogon is "standardizing" the tiers. If I want to play in the metagame, I'll look at stats and movepool and not how often a Pokémon is used. And if I end up facing a team full of OUs, I'll know that person probably uses Smogon.
 
A higher tier Pokémon is not automatically "better" than a lower tier one (though often it is). The tiers are not solely based off of how good a Pokémon is, but also its role and counters. A Pokémon that does something really well, but not quite as well as something else (like Espeon) is going to be dropped lower than you would expect, but it's still a very strong Pokémon. Likewise, a Pokémon that's not that great but is an important counter to something that's super common (like Magneton was for a while) will be used more than one would expect, causing a higher tier. Outside of competitive battling, the tier list can be all but ignored. If you're playing competitively but not fighting the typical metagame distribution of Pokémon and moves, you should simply choose your Pokémon based on their stats, potential movesets, unpredictability and combos.

I use the tiers as a guideline just to see which Pokémon have solid stats, so I don't have to go through all of them, but I don't feel like I need to stay with them exactly. In Diamond, I fight with a Ninetales and I'm proud of it!

As for the top tier, in my mind I define it as Pokémon who almost everyone would use in every team if they could. This would include Soul Dew Latias but not Garchomp. Garchomp is my only complaint in that tier.

I also dislike the tier names, "uber," "overused," "borderline," "underused," and "neverused." I would rather use more standard terms like "top," "high," "middle," "low," "bottom" or A, B, C, D and E (or F).
 
Troggy said:
Froslass to UU is something I am very happy about, it was useless in BL.
The tier system is not always perfect, but it is certainly necessary.
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Why are you happy that it got downgraded? It is not useless... Let me point out why.
1.Resistance/Immunity to most Priority Moves (In that Regard immunity to Fake Out, a common move on some anti-leads)
2.Immunity to Fighting and Normal Attacks (Cancels out a common weakness)
3.Blocking Rapid Spin (Rotom-A and Dusknoir may be more bulky but Froslass can set-up an entry hazard at the same time)
4.Spikes (entry hazard)
5.Destiny Bond (To take out the foe's lead too)
6.Ice STAB (I will acknowledge that it has only modest Sp. Atk, but Ice makes a good Offensive Type)
7.Speed (Just Enough to outspeed some things and Taunt them)

Smogon's tier system could use a revamp. And naming the Tiers differently would be nice. Also why was Raikou downgraded?
 
I really dislike how the tiers are based on how much people use them. I really only think the people who come up with these tiers monitor the battlers on their own community, and since their own community is made up of people who all think the same way (at least from my experience), there's only shifts on the 'fringes' of each tier. Like someone said before -- it's a popularity contest, and that's really not how pokemon should be played.

Now to be fair, yeah, there are pokemon who just do some things better than others. But that doesn't mean that the 'others' are automatically useless, and that's the kind of conclusion that people over at Smogon tend to come up with.

I propose new names for the Overused and Underused tiers: Overrated and Underappreciated.
 
I see nothing wrong with the tier system. Any pokemon that isn't uber can be used in an OU battle, so what's the problem? If you don't like the tiers then just ignore them and play your own way. Most people do OU battles anyway.

I disagree completely with changing the names of the tiers. As it was said many times before, a tier is not necessarily a measure of how good a pokemon is, but how often it is used.

A pokemon that is not that good can be much better in certain situations. For example, in my opinion Froslass is definitely OU level during a hail storm, and Walrein is at the very least brought up to UU level. I don't know where I stand on Garchomp's uber status in normal situations, but during a sandstorm you can forget about it.
 
I can understand where Alakazam falls. As a stubborn psychic user I can say Alakazam may have okay speed and power in spatk.. But even in game if you dont have it overleveled or raised well it takes serious damage fast..And Bulbagarden should totally set up its own teirs.
 
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