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EV / IV / Ability / Nature Learning!

Junior!

Banned
26
Posts
7
Years
  • Age 30
  • Seen May 16, 2016
I'll be completely honest I don't know about nothing about ev, iv, ability, hidden ability, etc on Pokemon.

I would honestly love to learn. If someone can crunch it down for me or whatever. I seen a few videos and I still can't seem to understand it, yes I'm that stupid! >______<

So for example, let's use VENSAUR!

http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/venusaur/

How would I know which is the BEST STAT for it? Where exactly would I look?
Also how do I know which ability / nature is the best for him?

Like I legit do not know, understand this.

I want to learn and play Pokemon competitive so this has to be my first step!
 

Junior!

Banned
26
Posts
7
Years
  • Age 30
  • Seen May 16, 2016
Also how do I train IV & EV, and how do I get their hidden ability / ability or nature / characteristics!

I'm all open ears!
 

Oblox

Pokemon Breeder
753
Posts
9
Years
  • Age 42
  • UK
  • Seen Jul 9, 2021
Effort Values (EV's) are dictated by the user in X/Y/OR/AS via super training or in these and earlier games by fighting different poekemon to give the best return in the right values. Super training is a far more direct and easier method if a little repetitive and boring.

Individual Values (IV's) are decided in the egg and cannot be changed. Breeding is the only way to eventually get a pokemon with higher IV's and in combination with the Destiny Knot item (and much speeded up by a 6IV Ditto) can lead to easy 5IV pokemon and occasionally a 6IV mon. IV's are random so even through breeding you may take some time to get the right combination.

Hidden Abilities (HA's - and sometimes referred to as dreamworld abilities due to gen 5) are special abilities pokemon can have, sometimes these are good sometimes not so much. They can only be obtained by catching/receiving a pokemon with an HA and breeding it. Females pass on HA's more easily (80% i think) and Males is lower at around 20% (again I think). Ability capsule item cannot be used to switch to or from an HA and an existing pokemon cannot get their hidden ability.

Nature affects different stats in different ways, some neutral ones do nothing, others can raise one (is it by 10%?) and lower another e.g. Adamant nature raises attack and lowers special attack, timid nature raises speed and lowers attack. The best nature for your pokemon is based upon its starting stats and how you will use it, Special attackers generally want Modest (+SpAtk-Atk) or Timid(+Spd-Atk) Physical attackers generally want Adamant (+Atk-SpAtk) or Jolly (+Spd-SpAtk) but there will also be times a defensive nature to improve defence or Sp Defence would be more beneficial or a neutral nature to make the overall stats more balanced perhaps in a mixed attacker. Read up on each pokemon and decide how you will play them before deciding the nature. When breeding nature is random, if you put an everstone on a pokemon with the nature you want that will 100% pass on to the child).

With your Venusaur example you could go for Physical or special based (generally Venusaur is more special) or beef up his defences depending on how you are looking to play them especially with its mega. If you're trying for a sun team then venusaur with its HA Chlorophyll boosts its speed in the sun so you wouldnt want any EV's or nature that boosts speed generally.

Whilst i don't condone hacking i use the program PKHex to plan out my pokemon as you can easily see the natures and EV's/IV's affecting the final stats and plan things before you breed them.
 

RawrMonkey

bloop
35
Posts
13
Years
I went ahead and added on a little more in-depth than what the above poster wrote.

I'll go through each subject you mentioned and provide an example with Venusaur, specifically it's mega.
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Stats

Every Pokemon has base stats, these give you a general idea of what a Pokemon "should" be focusing around.

For example, Mega Venusaur has pretty decent special attack and overall defenses. This means we should probably be focusing Venusaur on being a bulky special attacker.

Note that this is before we consider Venusaur's typing, movepool, and abilities while comparing to how it will fare in the meta you're playing. A lot of this is learned through experience and practice, so I wouldn't worry about anything complicated yet, just focus on the basics for now.
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Natures

The above poster pretty much explained it and it's really straightforward. You can simply google "Pokemon natures" to get a list of what each does. And yes, each stat is boosted/hindered by 10%.

With Venusaur and it's stats, we want to mainly consider calm, modest, or bold natures. Reason being? Simple math, a 10% boost in a base 120 stat will give you more stat points than a 10% boost in a base 80 stat and will provide you a more efficient allocation of stat points once you get into EVs.

A little side note, never settle for neutral natures. Every Pokemon has a stat they can live without, even a mixed attacker can forego a little special defense since you don't want it taking hits anyways.
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Abilities

Ah abilities, they provide the possibility of unpredictability depending on the Pokemon.

Most Pokemon have an ability superior to others, some have two or three good ones to choose from (Conkeldurr). When deciding on abilities you should really read up on the Pokemon using Smogon's Strategy Dex or Serebii's "Pokemon of the Week" as a beginner, it'll eventually become common knowledge with more experience.

With Venusaur we have two to choose from, Overgrow and Chlorophyll. They're both situational abilities and really don't matter much if you decide to go the mega Venusaur route (which imo is better than non-mega, whatever suits your fancy). That doesn't mean you should just ignore them though, when team building you need to consider most, if not all, scenarios you can be put in.

For Venusaur, we're going to choose Chlorophyll. Why not Overgrow? It's a less preferable situational ability that you shouldn't be getting yourself into, plus it only applies to Grass type moves. I'll get into moves in a second but you really shouldn't be running more than one of the same type moves in general.
Chlorophyll doubles your speed in the sun -> Venusaur is lacking in the speed department -> random Sun team appears -> Venusaur has double the speed pre-mega -> Proceed to sleep powder or KO.
Still situational but very handy in these small scenarios.
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Moves

A Pokemon's move pool ties directly into it's viability and stats. Some Pokemon suffer from a lack of viable move choices, or at least lack decent STAB (same type attack bonus) moves.

With Venusaur we see it's a Grass/Poison type Pokemon and we're going a Bulky Special Attacker route in our examples. We see that Venusaur can learn Sludge Bomb, Giga Drain, Leaf Storm, and Energy Ball. These are all decent to amazing moves to choose from but we'll go with the more common route and use Sludge Bomb and Giga Drain as our STAB moves for Venusaur.

Now that we have our stab moves, what do we choose as the other two? It really depends on the meta you're playing in. VGC15 we see a lot of Leech Seed, Protect and Sleep Powder, supportive moves. In something like OU you'll probably see Synthesis, Hidden Power Fire or Ground, and Leech Seed, a mix of supportive and/or coverage moves.

We'll touch on coverage moves for Venusaur as it's completely walled by many common steel types. For these situations you may want to run a Hidden Power Fire or Ground variant to overcome this.

Stick to the Smogon Strategy Dex for now (if you plan on playing OU) since you're just starting out. Most of the sets that are available are known to be viable and perfect for learning purposes, you'll grow out of these in higher tier play.

Another side-ish note, you'll notice that Venusaur actually has an average attack stat with a decent physical move pool (Seed Bomb, Power Whip, Petal Blizzard, Earthquake, knock off) and is able to run a physical set. ;p
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IVs and EVs

There are multiple guides on this and I would take way too long and in-depth to explain this. If you have trouble understanding it, just keep trying until you do. IVs and EVs are extremely important.

The above poster already gave you the general idea of IVs and EVs so I'll just mention small tips.

- Never settle for any IV less than 31, or 30 for Hidden Powers (Nothing more than 0 or 1 for Trick Room). You can disregard the stat you're not using, such as the Attack stat can be anything if you're breeding a special attacker. If you ever get to the point of messing with a stat calculator, you'll learn that every stat point counts in competitive play. Pokemon is technically a terrible competitive game mainly due to all the RNG. Even though we have a set base power and set offensive and defensive stats, all moves still have damage rolls. For example, an Ice Beam could do 70%-75% damage. If anyone disagrees with this then they're an idiot and I'm not sorry and you cannot argue that I'm wrong because this is 99.99% + .01% true, give or take .0000000001%.

- Make certain that your EVs are appropriately allocated, especially for the meta you're playing. VGC15 auto levels to 50 and it's every 8 EVs that give you a stat point, OU uses level 100s and every 4 EVs give you a stat point. Each IV also gives you the equivalent of 4 stat points.

- Best way to check your IVs is the IV checker in the Battle Resort Pokemon Center in ORAS.

- Best way to check EVs is to always have a Reset Bag. Save your game, use reset bag, quickly note down EVs or take a picture whatever works, then reset your game.

- Hidden Power IV spreads may be a little hard to breed but so worth learning how to. Stick to trades if you don't want to bother with it or don't fully understand how to get them.

Now for our example on Venusaur, I said that we want a bulky Special Attacker. A simple EV spread would be max HP and max Special Attack. As a beginner, I would stick with what is recommended on Smogon and using basic spreads. Once you start understanding more about EVs and stat calculators you may want to try a different EV spread. This requires a little more work and only if you want to get super complicated.

Here's a link to a breeding guide I just quickly googled that looked decent and simple enough. There are many guides out there for literally everything you want to know and it's extremely helpful if you learn how to breed and train.
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Venusaur

So if you read all that we'll end up with a Venusaur like this:

Venusaur
Item: Venusaurite
Ability: Chlorophyll -> Thick Fat
Nature: Modest
IVs: 31/Even/31/30/31/30 (Hidden Power Fire IV spread)
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpA / 4 Def
Moves:
-Giga Drain
-Sludge Bomb
-Hidden Power Fire
-Synthesis


If you're still confused on anything feel free to ask questions. It's currently 5 AM so I may have randomly rambled on somewhere..
 
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