Effort Values and Natures: A Mathematical Approach
The Advanced generation added a new dimension of strategy to Pokémon battling by forcing the player to pick and choose which stats to raise and which to lower. No longer do all fully trained perfect-IV Pokémon of the same species invariably have the exact same stats, making for more interesting battling than ever.
I am of course here referring to effort values and natures. At first sight, they appear to be similar things in practice, but here I will discuss a very important difference between them. I will also discuss the fundamental difference between the two types of stats.
Note that I am by no means an expert at competitive battling. This article is not about competitive strategy. It is simply a purely mathematical approach to these concepts.
Note: You do not need to know any advanced mathematics to understand this article. All that is necessary is that you understand the fundamental difference between adding/subtracting on one hand and multiplying/dividing on the other hand, and that you know some basic algebra for the formulas.
In this article, I will speak of "Attack" and "Defense", but of course they will always be interchangeable with Special Attack and Special Defense, respectively. Just assume "Attack" to mean "the offensive stats" and "Defense" to mean "the defensive stats".
Natures
Let's recount on how natures work. A nature has a stat it lowers and a stat it raises. (There are, of course, also neutral natures, but we will not be discussing them here as they are, for obvious reasons, not of any mathematical significance when it comes to stats.) To be more precise, a nature will multiply the value of one stat by 1.1, and the value of another stat by 0.9. This basically adds or subtracts 10% to or from the stat.
Now, what does this mean? It means that, because the value which is added or subtracted changes depending on the original value of the stat, a nature will have a more drastic effect on the actual number if the stat is already high. For example, if you have a Deoxys in normal form, which has 50 base Defense and 150 base Attack, its maximum Defense and Attack at level 100 with maximized effort points and neutral natures will be 199 and 399, respectively. If it had a nature that raises Defense, it would have 218 Defense (since the Pokémon games always round down). However, if it had a nature that raises Attack, it would have a whopping 438 Attack. In the first case, the Defense rises by 19, but in the latter case, the Attack rises by 39 - quite a significant difference when you just look at it.
However, although the difference looks more significant with an Attack-boosting nature, it really isn't. This is because in the damage formula, Attack and Defense are applied as a multiplication and a division - it multiplies by the attacker's Attack stat and then divides by the defender's Defense stat. If you have one Deoxys with a nature that raises Attack attack another Deoxys with a nature that raises Defense, it will do the same amount of damage as it would if both of them had neutral natures - the beneficial natures cancel one another out. The reason for this is simple. Look at the following:
(A * 1.1) / (D * 1.1)
A stands for Attack and D for Defense, obviously, but that does not especially matter; what matters is the fact that we can multiply or divide both the numerator and the denominator by the same number if we want without changing the final result, as you should learn in basic algebra. Thus we only need to divide by 1.1 again to see that (A * 1.1) / (D * 1.1) = A / D. Admittedly, the rounding (because again, the Pokémon games always round down) will change it a little bit, but the difference is too small to matter. The point here is that there is no mathematical reason to give your Pokémon a nature that boosts its higher Attack/Defense stats rather than the lower ones, even though the point difference is greater.
But we've only been discussing Attack and Defense (along with their special counterparts) so far. The thing is that while they are applied through multiplication and division during battle, Speed and HP are not - Speed comes into play through direct comparison with the other Pokémon's Speed, and HP gets subtracted from throughout the course of the battle. Natures never affect HP, so that's out of the discussion for now, but indeed, Speed is the one stat where you actually do benefit more from giving a +Speed nature if the Pokémon already has high Speed than if it has low Speed - a Pokémon with 100 base Speed and a +Speed nature will outspeed neutral-natured Pokémon with base 114 or less Speed (14 base points higher than itself), but a Pokémon with 50 base Speed and a +Speed nature will only outspeed neutral-natured Pokémon with 59 or less base Speed (9 base points higher than itself). A high-Speed Pokémon gets much more out of a +Speed nature than a low-Speed one.
Effort Values
Let's recount on how those work too, shall we? One Pokémon can have at most 510 effort points in total, and at most 255 in any given stat. For every four effort points in a particular stat, the final stat that your Pokémon will end up with at level 100 is raised by one.
What does this mean? It means that once you have 252 effort points in one stat, that stat will be 63 points (252 / 4) higher than it would have been if you had had no effort points, irrelevant of what the original value of the stat was. The thing is that unlike the natures, effort points factor in through addition, not through multiplication - which makes them an entirely different thing to work with mathematically.
Imagine those two normal form Deoxys again. Both of them have maximum IVs, so their maximum Attack and Defense at level 100 are 399 and 199, respectively, and the minimums (with no effort points put into them) are 336 and 136.
Now let's imagine that one of the trainers of those Deoxys effort trains it in Attack, while the other effort trains his in Defense. For the sake of the example, we'll assume that the other effort points went into irrelevant stats or don't exist at all. At first glance one could think that this will even out and not matter in the end just like with the natures earlier, but look what happens if we calculate the A / D factor of each Deoxys attacking the other...
Defense effort trained Deoxys attacks: 336 / 136 = 2.47
Attack effort trained Deoxys attacks: 399 / 199 = 2.0
The result is obvious: the Defense effort trained Deoxys' attack is nearly a quarter more powerful than the Attack effort trained Deoxys'. But why? The reason is simple. The effort points are factored in through addition rather than multiplication, and this means that the 63 stat points are a much greater portion of 199 than they are of 399 - the Defense effort trained Deoxys had its defensive abilities boosted by 46%, but the Attack effort trained one only had its offensive capabilities boosted by 19%. While the Attack effort trained Deoxys would get a greater boost to its attacking power even through simply holding a Plate of the right type (at least in D/P) than it gets out of all those effort points, the Defense effort trained one nearly gets a free Harden every time it comes into battle - and this is simply because Deoxys started out with low Defense but high Attack. In other words, effort training a Pokémon in an offensive/defensive stat gives you a greater advantage the lower the stat originally was. This obviously works for Pokémon with high Defense stats and low Attack stats too: effort training your Pokémon for the low attacking stats will yield a far greater increase in the damage you deal than effort training it in the already-high defensive stats will decrease the damage dealt to you.
Speed and HP, again, however, are an entirely different matter thanks to factoring in through comparison and subtraction rather than multiplication and division. Speed and HP will benefit exactly as much from effort training if they're already low as if they're already high. To twist things even more, you have to consider that since Speed is a comparison, a greater advantage doesn't help you. If your Speed is higher than the opponent's, you go first, no matter whether it's one or a hundred points higher. This means that you only really need to decide which Pokémon you are capable of outrunning and want to be able to, and put your own Speed just above the Speed that those Pokémon will generally have. Any extra Speed points beyond that are wasted.
Nonetheless, the Attack/Defense thing sounds pretty revolutionizing, doesn't it? Don't people always tell you to effort train your Alakazam in Special Attack and would laugh at you if you started giving it defenses instead? This may make you want to try this sort of EV spread. But...
Why This Does Not Work in Practice
Why indeed would they tell you to give your Alakazam Special Attack effort points? Because of three fundamental problems, which lie not in the method itself, but in the other mechanics of Pokémon.
The Problem of Overkill
It happens that Pokémon battles are pretty fast. You execute an attack and often deal one heck of a lot of damage, even knocking out the other Pokémon in one hit (called an OHKO in competitive battling lingo) or two (2HKO). It is also quite frequent to experience overkill, namely to deal, say, technically 500 damage, but the opponent only has 300 HP. A player is not in any way rewarded for overkill; for all the game cares, you may as well only have dealt exactly 300 damage. This means that there are many Pokémon which can knock out our Defense effort trained normal form Deoxys just as easily with the Defense as without it - many Pokémon are designed to hit fast and hard but have little hope of lasting out for any length of time, and boosting their defenses will often allow all sorts of Pokémon to knock them out in one or two hits just like before.
If all Pokémon had, say, twenty times the HP they actually do, this kind of EV spread would be a great deal more plausible, because the difference that the defensive boost would make in that case could be a matter of being able to take multiple extra hits. In the real Pokémon games, the problem of overkill will render much of the possible advantages of this kind of EV spread void, at least for sweepers.
The Problem of Speed
Pokémon such as Alakazam are sweepers with an extremely high attacking stat but very poor defenses, which would seem to make them ideal candidates for this kind of EV spread in practice - but these are the Pokémon that have a very dire need to be fast, and thus it is absolutely necessary to give them full Speed EVs. Then 252 of your possible 510 effort points are gone, and if you were to use the mathematical EV spread for the remaining 258, which defensive stat would you put them in? If you put them in one, how do you know you're not going to be facing Pokémon that use the other type of attack and be wishing you had only put those effort points into Special Attack, which you knew beforehand you would have a use for, instead? And if you spread them between both defensive stats, the advantage of each defensive stat will only be just over half of what they would have been otherwise - probably not much or even not at all greater than the offensive advantage you would have gotten had you put those effort points into Special Attack.
Interestingly enough, if all Pokémon had twenty times their normal HP, the problem of Speed would also largely be eliminated, as this would almost trivialize Speed. (Instead of the opponent being able to dish out one hit while you get in none if you're slower, a faster opponent will merely get twenty hits in and you nineteen.)
The Problem of Strategy
Pokémon battles are mostly about strategy, and a player's strategy genereally relies on making each of his Pokémon do its particular job well enough. Sweepers are there to sweep, to deal a lot of damage in one stroke, not to survive multiple hits. When you bring out a sweeper like Alakazam, you usually just want it to hit fast and hard. Sacrificing attack power may give the opponent a chance to strike that it otherwise wouldn't have had, and if it's powerful enough, your increased defenses won't even matter (see problem of overkill).
However, despite these fundamental flaws to the practical use of EV training in the lower offensive/defensive stats, the mathematical approach to EVs and natures is worth keeping in mind, or at the very least a fun thing to think about if you have a geeky mind like me.
Page last modified July 11 2008 at 01:59 GMT
