Pokemon Database Battling Basics - Issue #2 How To Build A Pokemon Part 1

Building Pokemon - Moves and Coverage

Building Pokemon sounds a little...cold? Well, I guess it's what we do here. Anyway.

Pokemon have different stats. Some have high attack, some have high speed, some have both. What stats a Pokemon has can affect what job the Pokemon can do. Giving loads of attacks to a pokemon with low offence isn't a great idea when it has many better options. This is what I'm here to explain. What do stats mean in terms of what a Pokemon is built around.

---Stats relating to moves---
Well, lets take a Pokemon at random. Let's say...Gengar. Y'know, that shadow Ghost thing? Yeah you know. Here is it's page: http://pokemondb.net/pokedex/gengar. If you scroll down to it's base stats, you'll see it's HP, Attack, Defence, Special Attack, Special defence and Speed. I'm going to at least assume that you know what stats are, if nothing else. Gengar has a base special attack of 130 and base speed of 110. These 'base' stats are the average stats used to benchmark it in comparison to other Pokemon. Generally, stats over 100 are considered good, stats around or over 120 are great, and stats higher than 135 or so are awesome. using that as the benchmark, Gengar has very good speed and great special attack. However, his defence, special defence and HP is pitiful, so he won't be taking many attacks. So what does this mean? It means Gengar should focus on being faster than other Pokemon and hitting them with special attacking moves.

Sound like gibberish? Don't worry, I'll clear it up. Because Gengar has low bulk, it will only take an attack or two to defeat it. However, because it has very high special attack, it can deal a lot of damage. So that's what you focus on. You deal damage before you can take damage. Simple enough, right?

In practice, you only use Gengar against enemies you know it is faster than. Like I said before, it doesn't take much to beat Gengar, so using it against faster Pokemon that attack first isn't a good idea since Gengar could get knocked out before it even does anything! Luckily, Gengar is very fast, meaning a lot of things are slower than it. Only use Gengar against slower Pokemon or Pokemon that can't hurt it (like normal types).

You should also know the difference between special and physical attacks. Physical attacks use the attack stat, and special use the special attack stat. Gengar should then use special attacks like Shadow Ball and Sludge Bomb, as these are special moves, and avoid physical ones like Fire Punch. You may be tempted with the large amount of powerful moves that are physical, but I promise you it's never worth it. S

Is this basic enough for now? I hope so. Let's give another example, just in case. A defensive pokemon. Chansey. Chansey has very high Special Defence and HP, but very low Physical Defence. Thusly Chansey can take a lot of special attacks but very few physical ones. But what does this mean for you using Chansey? Well, you should avoid facing off against Pokemon that use physical attacks, but actually try to take special ones. This is a little confusing, and I'll explain why in more detail in a later article, but the basic reason is if you have a Pokemon like Gengar who can't take attacks, you partner it with a Pokemon that can. But what moves should you use? On a defensive Pokemon, you should use moves that help Chansey defend against and weaken stronger Pokemon. These include healing moves like Wish and Soft-boiled to restore HP, and status moves like Toxic and Thunder Wave to hurt opposing Pokemon to beat later on.

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Coverage
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Now you have an idea of what moves types to use on your Pokemon, we can go into coverage. Coverage refers to the amount of Pokemon you can beat or severely damage with the limited 4 moves you have. 4 moves really isn't enough to beat every single Pokemon, so we should try and beat the most that we can with the moves we're given.

First of all, it's normally not advisable to use the same type of attack more than once without a good reason. Garchomp shouldn't have both Dragon Claw AND Outrage, just one or the other. Having two moves of the same type doesn't add to your coverage, and usually doesn't help you beat any more Pokemon than before anyway. There are exceptions, but stick to this general rule for now.

So what would you pick? Lets imagine an Alakazam. Alakazam's main move would be Psyshock, but we want more moves than that. Well, we know they should be special, since Alakazam's Special Attack is higher than it's Attack. And since it's fast and offensive, and not defensive, they should be powerful, direct attacks. First of all let's see what Moves Alakazam can learn. http://pokemondb.net/pokedex/alakazam#dex-moves This is the list of moves Alakazam can learn. From this list, we should pick out the special attacking moves. But there are a lot of those, so what do we choose? To answer that question (from myself, apparently) we first look at Alakazam's weaknesses. Just bare with me here. Alakazam is weak to Dark, Ghost and Bug types, and Steel and Psychic types resist Psychic attacks. So we should probably use moves to beat these types, since they give Alakazam trouble. We can use Focus Blast to beat both Dark Types and Steel types. We can also use Shadow Ball to beat Ghost types. Unfortunately Alakazam doesn't learn any good moves to beat Bug types, so the last move is just down to preference. You can use Grass Knot/Energy Ball to do damage to bulky water types like Suicune, or use Substitute to escape attacks. It's your choice. But the point is the main move are used to beat types that Alakazam normally can't. This is usually how coverage works.