Why did Torterra get banned from PU?

Question

I know this happened a while ago, but a while back in gen 7 Torterra used to be in the PU tier. When I returned to competitive battling I found out I could no longer use Torterra in this tier, and was never able to get an answer why he got banned.
As you could suggest from my name, Torterra is my favorite Pokémon, so i’m interested to know why he got the ban hammer. Was he too strong? Was there one specific set that was too good?

In short:
Why was Torterra deemed too good for PU and moved to NU?

Comments

Torterra is NU by usage, but I have heard from some "good" NU players that Torterra isn't really viable in NU. If you want to know why Torterra is used so much in NU despite not being that good, then I think asking here ( https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ask-a-simple-question-get-a-simple-answer-nu-edition.3606079/ ) would be much easier than asking on Pokebase.

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Torterra is now in the PU tier.

Answer 1

Torterra is now NU by usage and consequently banned in PU. According to 2 people from Smogon, this is why Torterra is kind of popular in NU.

spdef tort checks heliolisk better than rhydon and lix, thats the main reason i'd use it at least, its kind of a **** rocker tho

"So many" players don't use Torterra over Rhydon and Steelix. It's still an uncommon pick, and unlike what Kiyo cites, its most notable niche is no longer specially defensive sets. Most people use Torterra now for its offensive capabilities. It's a decent breaker with Swords Dance, and you can either run Stealth Rock / Rock Polish / Synthesis in the last slot depending on what your team calls for. I'm not a Torterra expert, though, and that's for the fact that I wouldn't use it anyway, there are much better breakers (Rhydon itself can even run Swords Dance). I guess it's the fact that it can safely run a z-move that is most appealing, although I've seen Grondinium-Z Rhydon as well (but that's only effective on certain teams).

source

Comments

Reshowing this because it was still the correct and most relevant answer at the date of the question being posted.

If someone wants to look back at Torterra and ask why it ever moved up at all, then it's still useful to have questions and answers like these around.

If you want to hide this question for other reasons then feel free, but I'm assuming you hit it because Torterra isn't NU anymore, which is besides the point of the question.