A little question :)

[Fustyv]

Hello friends!

I'm been following the forums for quite a while, staying in the shadows most of the time :O

But as I started to figure out, pokemon Isn't really just a catch your fav pokemons and use them for battles (atleast not for some people)
Well to get to the point, I started seening the interesting part of pokemon.
The "strategic" side, and I was wondering where you guys keep a track of all the pokemons? How did you learn what was the best moves for a pokemon?
Or what kind of pokemon is the best in the meta at the moment? or the nature for that matter?

I don't know if it's just me who's overthinking it too much, but I like to find out before it drives me crazy

[Yume Tsuki]

Not sure if you either mean the actual game or our MMORPG.

Anyways to explain it:

First of all in the actual official game pokémon are not at the same level of viability, mostly caused by base stats and how they have been distributed or how certain movepools are working for them. Therefore, people divide these Pokémon over tiers, based on their viability. Ubers being the most powerful pokémon (Usually legendary pokémon, or pokémon with just too powerful stats), OU (Over used) being the strongest 'legal' pokémon one can use in battles, and other tiers. You can find info about which pokémon belongs on which tier on a website like Smogon. Mind that in gen 6, people are still speculating which pokémon belongs where with the changes they made in the new generation.

Best moveset depends what kind of strategy you want to roll with and find a pokémon with the right stats to fit the moveset. For example, running a strategy involving toxic on a very fragile pokémon like butterfree isn't the most efficient thing to do, while Venusaur is tanky enough to actually pull it off, and stay alive with help of synthesis.

As for natures, let's go back to the example I gave with venusaur. Natures, are certain boosts and nerfs in stats on a pokémon. It gives your Venusaur a boost in a stat, depending on the nature increasing it with 10%. In this case, your strategy would be surviving the opponent as long as you can. So you want your venusaur to be tanky. (Mind there is no HP boost) Venusaur has quite an edge in Sp. Defense so you can choose to only send him in against Sp. Attackers. In that case you want to benefit more into it. So your choice would be Calm, Sassy, Gentle or Careful nature, 'cause those natures boost Sp. Defense. However, taking a boost also means that you will also get a backslash. In any case, you want venusaur to be able to take hits, so lowering defense is not the best option, so Gentle will be dropped. So it'd either be lowering the speed of your venusaur by 10%, or lower one of your offensive powers. Venusaur is a sp. attacker by nature according to stats, so you'd rather lower Attack since you won't be doing anything with it or lower your speed and risk always being last in turns.


And since you're quite interested in going "strategic" we can go even further, because there are more things to boost the stats of your pokémon. One of them being IV breeding.
IV breeding as it says, you breed a pokémon until it has the perfect stats you want on it. With a maximum of 31 per stat. A perfect IV breed having all stats maxed out. For this you need parents with good stats to get better ones. Unless you of course want to use the move Hidden Power in any way. Hidden power is affected by how many points are distributed in IV stats. But if you don't use them, perfect IV's would be your best bet to go for.

On the other half, we have EV training. Previous generations made it quite a tedious job. Because every pokémon you beat with yours, gives you an EV point in a specific stat, based on which species of pokémon you defeat. Example: You have a Shinx you want to train into the attack stat. A pokémon that gives attack points is Bidoof which gives 1+ attack stat for each bidoof you defeat. To gain maximum attack points you need to defeat 252 bidoofs to achieve that. For this, there were items ingame which would help you increase the amount of points you recieve per defeated bidoof. Macho Brace for example doubles the points you get, granting you two attack points instead of one for each defeated bidoof. However, ev points have a limit to distribution, so you need to be really careful with what you defeat.
However, with gen 6 they made the decision to make minigame EV training systems, while still keeping in the previous system. So you can EV train your pokémon without having to hunt down a certain species making ev training a lot faster and easier.

[Roloc]

Hello friends!

I'm been the forums for quite a while, staying in the shadows most of the time :O

But as I started to figure out, pokemon Isn't really just a catch your fav pokemons and use them for battles (atleast not for some people)
Well to get to the point, I started seening the interesting part of pokemon.
The "strategic" side, and I was wondering where you guys keep a track of all the pokemons? How did you learn what was the best moves for a pokemon?
Or what kind of pokemon is the best in the meta at the moment? or the nature for that matter?

I don't know if it's just me who's overthinking it too much, but I like to find out before it drives me crazy

There is no one "best" Pokemon in any meta. There will ALWAYS be some other Pokemon that can beat it.  There are so many factors that make a Pokemon great Either good or bad. Base stats, stat spread, move pool, typing etc. For example, you could have the best stats ever but a terrible move pool and still won't be that great of a poke.

I learned sets by experimenting with Pokemon, make lots of Different sets.  And there really is no "this sets is better then this set" simply because a set that's good on one team could be terrible on another team.

I use bulbapedia if I need any info on a Pokemon. I don't use smogon because its better to make your own set instead of copying someone else's for the reason in my last statement. One set won't work for every team.

As for the best moves for a Pokemon, you can't really define that either, I mean you can to a certain point. Like you wouldn't use ember on a Pokemon that can learn flamethrower. But at the same time just because our Pokemon can learn head smash which is very powerful, that does not mean you should automatically use it. But some Pokemon have such huge varid move pools that there is no way to choose which moves are best on it. You can only choose which moves on it are best on your team.

And lastly for natures, flamelass explained it good enough.

[Fustyv]

Thanks for the replys! Helped a ton, I started to figure out how it works.

I guess I try to find some in-depth guides on the wide internet, else I guess it's just about praticing creating a diffrence form of pokemon, see how it goes with eachother