PTU - Negative Stages and You

Negative Stages and You: The Case for Struggle Attack

Let's begin with a pretty standard target, we'll say a level 10 Growlithe with 12 HP (56 hit points) and 10 Defense, reasonable stats for its level.

In order to KO it in 3 neutral hits, each hit must deal (56 / 3) + 10 DEF damage, or 28 raw damage per hit. (ASIDE: At level 10, this is a little higher than you're likely to deal in a single neutral hit.)

You decide that rather than deal damage, you use Leer, dropping Growlithe's Defense by 1 stage, to a new value of 9.

Your friends 28 damage attacks now instead deal 29 damage each, a net gain of +2 damage!

Except, YOU didn't attack, so after three actions, they are still (28 missing - 2 gained) 26 damage shy of KO'ing Growlithe. A third damaging attack is still needed to down the target, so you have INCREASED turns to kill from 3 to 4. Oops!

This is the critical failure of negative stages in PTU - individual stage drops augment incoming damage basically not at all. This is particularly true at low levels, where a single stage is often 1 or 2 points of damage per incoming attack, but remains true even at high levels.

Are there specific circumstances in which negative stages might be good? After all, positive stages have things like Belly Drum/Encore Performance. The short answer is 'no'.

The long answer is that negative stages do not have a good way to dump all -6 stages on a target at once. Even if they did, Growlithe having 4 DEF is a net gain of +6 per neutral hit, still 16 whole damage shy of a 3HKO, and still requiring a third damaging attack. The only scenario in which negative stages become efficient is applying -6 in a single attack (preferably as a Swift and not as a Standard), against a target with unusually high defensive investment, and then following that with 2, doubly super effective attacks (which capitalize on each point of lost Defense counting as +2 instead of +1 damage). This requires at least one point of homebrew (the -6 stage Move), deep investment in Trickster or Grass Ace, and a relatively narrow band of targets with double weaknesses - it's not realistic.

If you know that you can't deal 1/3rd of a target's HP or more in a single attack, that's okay!!! In this low level example, dealing literally 3 damage on your own action is more effective damage than using Leer for your two allies, which most Pokemon could do with a neutral, Normal Struggle if they really have no other options. Remember, any time you could use your action to deal damage, you probably should be.