Revealed: the secret Pokemon Go battle stats that help to decide fights
Pokemon! More than meets the eye! That's the wrong cartoon theme, I know, but really: there's more to Pokemon Go battles than we all thought.
A lot about Pokemon Go remains undiscovered, and even basics like type strengths and weaknesses or prizes for levelling up had to be uncovered and documented directly by players. One such mystery is in the process of being solved: how battles are won and lost.
There's of course Pokemon types and how they interact with each other, but the dedicated fans on the Silph Road reddit have put in significant work pulling parts of Pokemon Go apart in order to better understand it – and in doing so they've discovered that the game's battle mechanics hide a major secret in the form of three hidden statistics that help determine just how successful a particular Pokemon will be in battle.
All about Attack, Defence and Stamina – Pokemon Go's hidden battle stats
While Pokemon Type, their Combat Points level and their move set are all vital parts of Pokemon Go's streamlined battles, they're not all there is to it. While it was previously thought that CP, Type and Move were the dominating factors in deciding battle winners, they're actually only part of the larger puzzle – and as Silph Road has discovered, the Attack, Defence and Stamina stats are equally as vital.
No matter how much you power up a favourite Pokemon, its base attack, defence and stamina will remain identical across the entire species, making it a pretty significant factor when you're considering who to catch and use in your gym-battling team.
Silph Road contributors Dronpes and Moots explain their findings in an 8-minute video uploaded to YouTube which you can check out yourself (though we'll also summarise their findings for those unable to watch, so keep reading):
A Pokemon's Base Attack helps to determine just how much damage it can dish out in battle. A Pokemon's Base Defence does the opposite, pitching in to the task of determining just how much damage a Pokemon takes when it's hit with an attack.
Pokemon Stamina is the most interesting stat of all. Stamina is required to perform your secondary special move and is represented in battle by a blue bar under your Pokemon's health bar that slowly fills during battle. A higher Stamina stat means that Pokemon will be able to power up and fire off the slower but more powerful special moves more quickly during and throughout battle, which makes it a pretty significant statistic.
As mentioned earlier, these three statistics aren't determined on a per-Pokemon basis but actually a per-species basis. That means that every single Charmander will have the same attack, defence and stamina stats regardless of their CP and other adjusting statistics, for instance.
The stats of each type of Pokemon can be found on The Silph Road's impressive website.
The Silph Road are continuing with their research, and the group hints that there's also subsets of information for moves such as power, duration and damage window on top of type, and all these things determine a move's battle effectiveness. Given that Pokemon moves are distributed in a semi-random fashion, this could render an otherwise-good catch not all that useful for battling.
Beyond the move, type and species stats, individual Pokemon appear to also have more granular individual stats than those surfaced such as CP and HP, though the Silph Road are yet to fully detail that yet – when we do, we'll be sure to bring you an update.
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