Why do people put Evs in Defense and Special Defense if you can just put them in HP?
Attack/Special Attack+Move damage-opponent’s Defense/Special Defense=Damage dealt, right?If so, then Defense/Special Defense are equal to HP, right?So why add Defense/Special Defense Evs If you can just put them on HP?Also, isn’t HP better? You can survive Seismic Toss/Night shade better.
Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.
No this is 100% wrong. Here’s the real damage formula:
The value of “Modifier” is determined by:
The result of the above equation is how much HP the opponent loses. I’m not sure how you got the impression Defence and Special Defence are equal to HP, even with the equation you thought was correct. Defence and Special Defence are the stats you put where it says “Defense”, and HP is how much more damage you can take before fainting. They are entirely different stats.
Details on this formula and what numbers should be entered
For many reasons, the most notable of which being:
As ƒιzz’s answer points out, you’ve got the wrong idea about how the damage formula works. You’re assuming the offensive and defensive stats factor inadditively, but actually they factor inmultiplicatively. If they did work like you assume, one point of HP would indeed be exactly equivalent to one point of Defense and Special Defense, and there would be little reason to bother with the latter unless you’ve already maxed out HP, but that’s not actually the case.
Specifically, though, I’m writing my own answer to explain a bit better when you want to invest effort in HP and when you want to invest it in Defense/Special Defense.
Basically, you canroughlysimplify the damage formula as follows:
bunch of stuff / Defense
That’s for the number of hit points of damage dealt, but actually what really matters is thefractionof your total HP that you lose. So divide by the whole to get
(bunch of stuff / Defense) / HP
which is equivalent to
bunch of stuff / (Defense * HP)
This means you basically want to try toraise whichever is lower, which is usually Defense/Special Defense since HP uses a different formula that makes it higher than other stats.
However, do note that there are two defensive stats but only one HP. If you invest all your effort in Defense, then it won’t help you at all against a special attack, while effort invested in HP will reduce the proportional damage from any kind of attack. Maybe you intend to use this Pokémon as a physical wall and will switch it out against a special attacker anyway, or something like that, and then the “raise the lower one” rule holds, but otherwise you’ll probably want to be well-equipped in both defensive stats, which complicates things a bit since your effort points will be more spread out if invested in your defenses than in your HP. Overall, if you weigh Defense and Special Defense equally, you’ll want to minimize1 / (Defense * HP) + 1 / (Special Defense * HP), which works out to preferring HP being a bit higher (exactly how much higher depends on the precise numbers involved).
For example, shuckle has amazing defense/ SpDefence stats but terrible HP, would it not make more sense to take advantage of this stat? By giving him more EV’s in Defense and SpDefence shuckle could take hits like a sponge.
On the other hand Pokemon like Blissey have amazing HP (and special defense) so it would make more sense to take advantage of this by investing EV’s in those stats
Hope this makes sense!
