What is better? Defense or hit points?

Please base your decision off of facts.

Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.

In actuality, both are very important. Think about the pokemon Drifblim, which has very high HP. Even with that nice HP stat, it still takes a lot of damage from a hit due to its low defenses, same situation with Blissey, even with its HP in the 700’s, it still could easily go down with a physical attack. Pokemon like Slowking however, have high defense and HP. Trying to get damage on him is a difficult task. Pokemon like Shuckle have abysmal HP, but high defenses. While this is useful, he doens’t have much HP for his defenses to cover. HP and defenses go hand in hand, one isn’t very useful without the other, similar to how attack power also needs speed to be useful.

The amount of damage you take from an attack ends up proportional to HP x Def or HP x SpDef for special attacks.

This means that you usually want to improve the lowest stat. Here’s a bit of math: say for example you start with HP=100, Defense=40 and you add 60 points from EVs.

Adding them to HP means you end up with HP=160, Def=40.160x40 = 6,400 defense from physical attacks.

Adding them to Defense means you end up with HP=100, Def=100.100x100 = 10,000 defense: much higher!

Depends on your style of playing

If you like to raise up various pokémon for different purposes, you should definitely EV-train Defense or Sp. Defense. You could use your pokémon to battle exceptionaly physical or special attackers, in that case you don’t need to train another defense stat. This method gives you a small advantage with opponents that use draining moves: their recover depends on how many damage thay’ve made to you. HP points are counted, but not percents. That’s why you better have EVs spent on single usable defense stat than waste it on HP and feed your opponent’s Meganium or something with fresh drained health points.

If you prefer using only one beloved Pokemon throughout the game, as I do, of course the best choice for you is HP EV-training. But even in that case you can also train defenses especially when your pokémons base Defense and/or Sp. Defense are twice smaller than HP. For example Chansey. Even if you train already high spesial defense up to 126 EV, it’s more usable against special damage than 252 HP EV. Training defense stats is also nessesary if one of those stats is significantly smaller compare to another, for example Alakazam with nearly twice much Sp. Defense so as Chansey or Deoxys.

Both voted answers are completely incorrect.This is how damage is calculatedhttps://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Damage

Based on this formula, let’s say that the enemy has 313 attack stat total, has a type advantage and uses a move with 80 power against your defence.Let’s pick a Pokemon that has pretty equal base defence and health like Gardevoir. 68 base HP and 65 base defence.

At level 100 an enemy with 313 attack will deal 351 dmg against Gardevoir’s 246 health. One hit kill. If we add 63 EV just to HP then the damage is 351 against 309 health. Still one this kill.

Let’s spread 63 EV to health and defence so they are equal at 98 (defence is 65 so we add 33, HP is 68 so we add 30). Now the same enemy with attack of 313 deals 277 damage t your 276 health. One hit kill.

So what happens if we add 0 EV to HP and 63 EV to Defence? 232 damage againts 246 health. Wesurvive.

You can’t argue with maths. It isalwaysbetter to increase Defence over HP.Obviously at some point you get diminishing returns. Let’s say your enemy has 100 attack total. Adding 63 EV to Defence will decrease the damage by only 38. That would suggest that adding HP would be more beneficial. But for a Pokemon to have such low attack total at level 100, they would have to have less than 50 base attack stat, 0 EV and 0 IV. In other words nobody will be using such a Pokemon to fight.

TL;DR: Defence > HP

PS.: Defence is a 100% proper spelling used by the entire English speaking world except for Americans.