Lowest chance to attack

What is the best way to stop your opponent from attacking?
What is the lowest chance to attack due to hax?
Maximum Hax! What is the lowest chance to attack

Welcome - video all about hax. We''l be looking at what is the lowest chance for your opponent to get an attack off due to luck & chance in this game - it's a fairly controversial topic, but this is purely for SCIENCE and I wouldn't expect any of you lovely viewers out there would want to weaponise these deplorable tactics in battle.

So prepare for a fairly mathsy video that you will hopefully enjoy and learn something from. ~EDUTAINMENT~

I'd like to begin with a caveat - I won't be covering 100% chance not to attack (e.g. first turn of sleep, or flinching before a Focus Punch) we're talking about stacking effects that have a chance of stopping the opposing Pokemon from attacking, but does not guarantee that they won't attack.

So what are the factors that we'll be considering?
First off, we'll look at statuses, then we'll look at non-volatile statuses, then move secondary effects, and finally we'll consider ability and item effects.

So statuses, the most obvious one that may come to mind when you think about hax and not attacking is paralysis - easily applied and with a 1/4 chance to stop your opponent from attacking. This is a good start but not the most powerful way to prevent your opponent from attacking (though probably the most viable in battle). We could consider sleep - after the first turn, the opponent only has a 1/3 chance to wake up which is a much lower chance to attack than paralysis. However, the best status to apply (if you can!) is freeze, which gives your opponent only a 1/5 chance to thaw and attack (if you want to find out more about applying the freeze status I already did a video on that - check the description!).

So you've frozen your opponent. What next? Volatile status! WHat does this even mean? Volatile status is any status condition that can appear in battle, but that disappears after a battle - the most obvious one being Confusion. Which is definitely something we want to add here! Confusion gives a 1/3 chance to prevent your opponent from attacking since SuMo (used to be 1/2 but got nerfed which is a GOOD THING!). So that's cool, we'll use that. Any other volatile statuses? Actually yes! Attract! gives a 50% chance of your opponent being immobilized (as long as they are the right gender, bloody heteronormative GameFreak denying beautiful, natural gay Pokemon love LOVE IS LOVE GUYS!)

DOUBLES?

Now we've got normal status and volatile status all covered! We can move onto move effects, and the one we want to look into is none other than Flinch! Can completely stop the opponent from moving depending on the additional effect chance of the move - best case is 30% with a ton of things e.g. Headbutt. So we'll use that too.

The final considerations are abilities and items. There are abilities and items that can directly try to prevent the opponent from moving e.g. King's Rock or Stench ability. King's Rock adds 10% flinch chance to moves that cannot already flinch. This is lower than the 30% for most moves BUT the chance activates for every time you hit the opponent, so a Pokemon with Skill Link using a multi-hit move hits 5 times, which gives a higher chance to flinch than 30%! (It's actually just over 40% pause for proof!) BUT other abilities actually better. Stench is one option, but not as powerful as Serene Grace which doubles 30% effect chance to 60%, and this is the maximum flinch chance to use. In the end, no items (I could think of) were really of any use...

So that's it - let's look at our overall strategy for the best way to prevent your opponent from attacking:
Freeze
Confuse
Attract
Flinch

To work out the chance to attack we need to see in what order the effects take place, so let's get this test going!