My Pikachu Keeps Dying! (Volt Tackle Problems) Please Help!

So, I recently trained my Volt Tackle Pikachu to level 100. Everytime I use Volt Tackle, however, it seems the more damage it does, the more damage it does to my Pikachu. Now, this might be because I solely based it only Speed and Attack, but why it is it that Red’s Pikachu before the Battle Tree in Sun and Moon will cause so much damage but not even do a quarter of recoil damage back? This is what I’m not understanding. Please, help if you can. Explanations of the situation and how to resolve it will help a lot as well. Thank you!

Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.

Essentially,it comes down to the amount of damage your Pikachu is doing, relative to the amount of HP it has. As mentioned in the comments, Volt Tackle will always take away health equivalent to a third of the total damage inflicted by the attack. If your Pikachu does a large amount of damage – especially if it is attacking opponents with a large amount of HP – then it will feel like Volt Tackle does a lot of recoil damage. Similarly, if your Pikachu has a low HP stat, then it will feel like it is losing more HP, when in fact it is not – that amount it loses is just a greater percentage of its total health than it would be if its HP was higher.

I’ll try to show what this looks like in battle. For argument’s sake, we’ll assume your Pikachu has its maximum possible Attack stat and is facing a competitively-built Lapras. If it used Volt Tackle, this would happen:

Long story short,Pikachu’s HP stat is really bad, which makes it difficult for it to go throwing around Volt Tackle without paying massive dividends on its own HP stat. As for why Red’s Pikachu does not take as much damage, there’s a strong possibility that its own HP stat and that of the Pokemon you were using against it aren’t as polarised as they were in the example I gave above. Since Red is encountered late in the game and I’d say is intended to be a challenge, there’s a good chance his Pikachu has good IVs and maybe even some EVs invested in its HP stat, which would help decrease the relative percentage of its health that Volt Tackle takes away. What Pokemon were you using against his Pikachu, and what was its HP stat? Remember that his Pikachu loses one third of the damage it dealt to your Pokemon with each Volt Tackle, and that at level 70, its HP stat could be as high as 194 with maximum IVs and EVs. Basically, it’s a bunch of numbers and how good Pikachu’s HP stat is compared to the Pokemon it used the recoil move on.

I hope this helped you with your problem. Unfortunately Pikachu isn’t a very good user of recoil moves due to its bad HP stat in general, so your problem is pretty much faced by every Pikachu user there is, with varying severity as determined by its IVs and EVs. If you want to play around with damage calculations like I did in this post,check out this damage calculator. I used it to get the exact numbers and stats in this post.