Post by Shinku no Yami on Feb 4, 2012 20:23:36 GMT -5
This is a new series I'm gonna try out where I post a different Pokemon set per day/hour/week/whatever. Some will be original, some will be fun, some will be competitive, some not so original, and some a mixed bag. I'm pretty good at coming up with effective strategies, or at least fairly good ones. If you play the Pokemon games and/or if you also have access to action replay and Pokegen, you can try these out for yourself too. If not, well you can still try.
I'm gonna start this off with one of the most famous Black/White Pokemon. This one worked especially well for me.
<Specially-Based Mixed Sweeper> / <Special Sweeper>
Lv100 - Illusion
Timid
@ Life Orb
IVs: 0 Atk
EVs: 24 HP / 252 SpA / 232 Spe
----
HP: 267
Atk: 193
Def: 156
SpA: 339
SpD: 156
Spe: 334
----
~Nasty Plot
~Foul Play / Dark Pulse / Night Daze
~Flamethrower
~Extresensory
The goal is to send Zoroark out, disguised as a Ghost type, because then your opponent likely will not hit it with any Fighting or Bug moves, which Zoroark is weak to. His Illusion should let him get off at least 1 Nasty Plot and boost Special Attack up to 678. If you can fit another one in there for 1017 Special Attack, then do it. Flamethrower and Extrasensory take care of Zoroark's weaknesses to Bug and Fighting, respectively, as they hit each type for 2x damage, while allowing you to hit Steel types, plus Extrasensory can flinch.
Finally, even though Foul Play is a physical attack and Zoroark, as you can see, has very little Attack power (thanks to no EV investment, an Atk- Nature, and 0 Atk IVs), Foul Play can be used because it uses the opponent's Atk stat during damage calculation, instead of your own, so it can let you function as a mixed sweeper against Pokemon with high Special Defense, high Attack, but low Defense, or Pokemon who boost their Atk through Swords Dance.
If that isn't reliable enough for you, Zoroark can use a STAB Dark Pulse, getting the STAB boost to make its power 120, and it's a special attack to feed off of its high Special Attack stat. You could also go with Night Daze, which is Zororark's signature move and is really cool. It looks like Dark Pulse, only a bit cooler, and it has 85 base power instead of 80, which gets a bigger STAB boost, making it 127. The downside is that it has a 5% chance to miss with 95% accuracy, as opposed to Dark Pulse's 100% accuracy. One miss will most likely be the end for your Zoroark and its very frail defenses. Also a 40% chance to drop the opponent's accuracy is nice, but Zoroark is a sweeper. It wants to take the opponent out ASAP while getting hit as little as possible, so dropping stats doesn't help it much. Dark Pulse's 20% flinch chance is much nicer. Though Night Daze does have 7 more base power after STAB, the difference is negligible, and the greater accuracy of Dark Pulse is much more favorable, but Night Daze is still a practical option that can come with many rewards when successful. And to be fair, dropping the opponent's accuracy even once brings them down to a 0.6x chance to hit, meaning that moves that normally have 100% accuracy will only have 60% accuracy, and moves that normally have 80% accuracy will only have 48% accuracy, but may still hit.
And though it may seem nice to use a physical Zoroark, its Atk still isn't as high as its Sp.Atk. And the move it gets to boost its Atk is Hone Claws. Hone Claws is a cool move which boosts your Pokemon's Atk by 50% of its original stat, and it increases the accuracy of your moves by 100% with each use, but boosting Special Attack by 100% with each Nasty Plot, on its already greater Special Attack, beats Hone Claws boosting its lower Attack by just 50%. The accuracy boost isn't worth it.
As for the EVs. Max Special Attack is needed to maximize the damage output. 0 IVs into Atk as well as an Atk- Nature means that, should Zoroark become confused, it'll do very little damage to itself if it attacks itself. Zoroark needs no investment into its bulk really, because it dies fast anyway, but since Zoroark only needs 232 Speed EVs to outspeed Garchomp, it wasn't necessary to give it the max 252 EVs for Speed, so that the rest could somewhat go towards bulk. Finally, the item of choice is the Life Orb, which increases the damage Zoroark does by 30%, at the cost of 10% of Zoroark's max HP each time it hits with an attack. This is a good item on a frail sweeper who needs extra power, since Zoroark can't take any hits anyway, so the recoil isn't going to matter much. Leftovers would be a waste on it because it can't take a hit to begin with. Since its HP isn't perfectly divisible by 10, though, it can actually use 10 attacks without Life Orb killing it, because the recoil rounds down to 26, meaning that it'll have 7 HP left after using it 10 times.
/Poke'nerd
I'm gonna start this off with one of the most famous Black/White Pokemon. This one worked especially well for me.
Zoroark
<Specially-Based Mixed Sweeper> / <Special Sweeper>
Lv100 - Illusion
Timid
@ Life Orb
IVs: 0 Atk
EVs: 24 HP / 252 SpA / 232 Spe
----
HP: 267
Atk: 193
Def: 156
SpA: 339
SpD: 156
Spe: 334
----
~Nasty Plot
~Foul Play / Dark Pulse / Night Daze
~Flamethrower
~Extresensory
The goal is to send Zoroark out, disguised as a Ghost type, because then your opponent likely will not hit it with any Fighting or Bug moves, which Zoroark is weak to. His Illusion should let him get off at least 1 Nasty Plot and boost Special Attack up to 678. If you can fit another one in there for 1017 Special Attack, then do it. Flamethrower and Extrasensory take care of Zoroark's weaknesses to Bug and Fighting, respectively, as they hit each type for 2x damage, while allowing you to hit Steel types, plus Extrasensory can flinch.
Finally, even though Foul Play is a physical attack and Zoroark, as you can see, has very little Attack power (thanks to no EV investment, an Atk- Nature, and 0 Atk IVs), Foul Play can be used because it uses the opponent's Atk stat during damage calculation, instead of your own, so it can let you function as a mixed sweeper against Pokemon with high Special Defense, high Attack, but low Defense, or Pokemon who boost their Atk through Swords Dance.
If that isn't reliable enough for you, Zoroark can use a STAB Dark Pulse, getting the STAB boost to make its power 120, and it's a special attack to feed off of its high Special Attack stat. You could also go with Night Daze, which is Zororark's signature move and is really cool. It looks like Dark Pulse, only a bit cooler, and it has 85 base power instead of 80, which gets a bigger STAB boost, making it 127. The downside is that it has a 5% chance to miss with 95% accuracy, as opposed to Dark Pulse's 100% accuracy. One miss will most likely be the end for your Zoroark and its very frail defenses. Also a 40% chance to drop the opponent's accuracy is nice, but Zoroark is a sweeper. It wants to take the opponent out ASAP while getting hit as little as possible, so dropping stats doesn't help it much. Dark Pulse's 20% flinch chance is much nicer. Though Night Daze does have 7 more base power after STAB, the difference is negligible, and the greater accuracy of Dark Pulse is much more favorable, but Night Daze is still a practical option that can come with many rewards when successful. And to be fair, dropping the opponent's accuracy even once brings them down to a 0.6x chance to hit, meaning that moves that normally have 100% accuracy will only have 60% accuracy, and moves that normally have 80% accuracy will only have 48% accuracy, but may still hit.
And though it may seem nice to use a physical Zoroark, its Atk still isn't as high as its Sp.Atk. And the move it gets to boost its Atk is Hone Claws. Hone Claws is a cool move which boosts your Pokemon's Atk by 50% of its original stat, and it increases the accuracy of your moves by 100% with each use, but boosting Special Attack by 100% with each Nasty Plot, on its already greater Special Attack, beats Hone Claws boosting its lower Attack by just 50%. The accuracy boost isn't worth it.
As for the EVs. Max Special Attack is needed to maximize the damage output. 0 IVs into Atk as well as an Atk- Nature means that, should Zoroark become confused, it'll do very little damage to itself if it attacks itself. Zoroark needs no investment into its bulk really, because it dies fast anyway, but since Zoroark only needs 232 Speed EVs to outspeed Garchomp, it wasn't necessary to give it the max 252 EVs for Speed, so that the rest could somewhat go towards bulk. Finally, the item of choice is the Life Orb, which increases the damage Zoroark does by 30%, at the cost of 10% of Zoroark's max HP each time it hits with an attack. This is a good item on a frail sweeper who needs extra power, since Zoroark can't take any hits anyway, so the recoil isn't going to matter much. Leftovers would be a waste on it because it can't take a hit to begin with. Since its HP isn't perfectly divisible by 10, though, it can actually use 10 attacks without Life Orb killing it, because the recoil rounds down to 26, meaning that it'll have 7 HP left after using it 10 times.
/Poke'nerd
