I want to post about Stealth Rock in depth.
As I more or less stated in the OP, Stealth Rock is very obviously broken. You are at a disadvantage if you don't use it. If you wish to dispute this point, I would say that a common argument against a Stealth Rock ban--keeping certain threats in check--is one point that makes it evident that Stealth Rock is necessary on any serious competitive team. Talonflame, Charizard, Mega Pinsir, Dragonite, and even Thundurus become a lot better with Stealth Rock gone. More broadly, offense teams get a ton of extra KOs from residual Stealth Rock damage that can easily swing games, while stall absolutely needs it to rack up damage or else it becomes even more of a sitting duck playstyle. Both archetypes become objectively worse without running Stealth Rock, and other teams on the defense-offense spectrum (like balance, Rain offense, or whatever) also benefit so greatly from Stealth Rock that it's essentially a requirement. Think about it this way: if you took two random teams of equal viability and stripped Stealth Rock from one, the latter team would instantly be at a huge disadvantage because the act of switching would incur a far greater cost over the course of the match.
And I think that's a crucial point about the metagame balance argument: while I think the concern is valid, Pokemon become
easier to handle when they don't get to rack up damage with Stealth Rock on top of their attacks. Seriously, how often do you see "*offensive threat* will 2HKO *defensive threat* with Stealth Rock down" on a Smogon analysis? Walls will be better at walling when they aren't getting free damage racked up on them. And that's not even posing the obvious "is countering broken things with other broken things really ideal?" but that's outside the scope of what I hope to address in this post.
If Stealth Rock is in fact a necessity, isn't that a very obvious limitation on metagame variety? If you
have to run a Pokemon with Stealth Rock, you're forced to run a Pokemon with Stealth Rock and then run it on that Pokemon, which is a moderate limitation on Pokemon selection and on 1 of your 24 available moveslots. This might seem so minuscule as to be irrelevant, and I don't really think that's wrong, but ideally we wouldn't have to be required to run Stealth Rock. And really, most good teams need hazard control too, which means running the momentum killing Defog (go find me a Defog user that isn't a total momentum killer besides
[email protected]) or Excadrill. That's now two team slots (one if you cram hazards AND hazard control on the same mon) and two moveslots you're running because you have to. It's to your advantage…but you have to. I don't believe this is ideal for the metagame. I don't want to pretend like this is some huge burden, because Stealth Rock has an extremely wide distribution. (I do find hazard control to be much more cumbersome, however.) That doesn't mean that it's health for the metagame, whether it's ideal or not.
More obviously, it limits variety in hampering the viability of certain Pokemon and biasing the game toward or against certain types. Yeah, it helps with Charizard and Talonflame, but Charizard is broken anyway and I sometimes wonder what makes a 120 base power priority attack much less broken than Prankster Thunder Wave. In other words, I think it skews the balance of the metagame as much as it enforces it. Of course, this is difficult to quantify or prove, but this is true of any claim about metagame balance. (This is also true in the case of Aegislash, where a similar discourse is taking place.) The speculation is factually based, but it is still speculation. Wouldn't it be healthier for the "invisible hand" of the metagame to determine what is and isn't good or broken without the external intrusion of Stealth Rock?
And as Karpman said, it punishes switching. I realize that setting and keeping your Rocks on the field and prevent your opponent from doing the same adds an extra layer of skill and intrigue to the game. But so do trappers, do they not? Both trappers and Stealth Rock can diversity or enhance the actual gameplay experience while limiting team building and increasing the match-up based nature of OU. And that's really the last point I want to touch on. I believe that variety is especially important to the metagame in the team building phase. While trapping and hazards mind games are intriguing, I'd rather have a more variable and competitive metagame. And we'll always have Spikes, which aren't nearly as restrictive as Stealth Rock. In any case, if we accept that Pokemon has become a checks game instead of a counters game and it will only get more and more difficult to cover every relevant threat as more threats are introduced (OR/AS aren't even out yet…), then isn't free damage something that exacerbates this issue? Pokemon is won by damaging opponents, and free damage for throwing up SR early game at little cost is an easy cost/benefit call. If removing Stealth Rock makes offensive threats
on average easier to cover, maybe its ban would be beneficial. Maybe. Yay speculation! But I wanted to throw it out there.
And just as a fun little postscript, Didn't Deoxys-D get banned because it was too good at setting hazards? Isn't this sort of a tacit admission that hazards are at the very least really really good? And Maybe Deoxys-D doesn't get banned if it set two Spikes layers instead of one layer plus Stealth Rock.
So many jumbled thoughts because super tired, but going to throw out these ideas now for people to chew on. I can always clarify later.