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Black/Smugsnake

5 (18.5%)

Black/Sadotter

5 (18.5%)

Black/Firepig

3 (11.1%)

White/Smugsnake

5 (18.5%)

White/Sadotter

3 (11.1%)

White/Firepig

6 (22.2%)

Total Members Voted: 27

[JDigital]

Dicking around with natures is what breeding is for, son.

But if I breed I can't get Slowpoke in a Fast Ball.

[JDigital]

I grumbled about the Heavy Ball on Sunday. Now I'm going to say something about the Fast Ball.

62 Pokémon have 100 Speed or higher and qualify for the 4x catch rate with a Fast Ball. Only 22 of those can be caught with a Pokéball in HG/SS. Seven are legendaries with a low catch rate that really benefit: Latios, Latias, Lugia, Mewtwo, Raikou, Entei and Zapdos (of which Lugia significantly prefers Heavy Ball). Eight can be caught in slower pre-evolutions, which evolve by level: Dugtrio, Kadabra, Persian, Rapidash, Fearow, Tentacruel, and Linoone. The Fast Ball can be used to catch these as a 4x rate and breed off the pre-evolved form, which is easier than catching the pre-evolved form and levelling it up.

Seven Pokémon benefit from the Fast Ball but don't have an easily accessible pre-evolved form which is too slow to benefit: Scyther, Sneasel, Tauros, Miltank, Voltorb, Electrode (evolves from already-fast Voltorb) and Electabuzz (pre-evolution cannot be caught).

[Lady Duke]

The pokeballs are free so there's really no reason not to just use them if you feel like it.  Who cares if you get the bonus or not?  The best ball is basically a dark ball because of the dark/cave multiplier but I still use a ton of different pokeballs just 'cause they look neat.

[teg]

I caught the red gyrados in a premier ball

because red

[Crouton]

cherish ball is more red, but also cheating.

[JDigital]

Sup red Gyarados in a Premier Ball buddy

I decided to catch the three Lake Guardians in Premier Balls. This worked fine until I discovered the third one is roaming. If you quit and re-load (after killing it or wasting too many Premier Balls) you have to go find it again. You can't False Swipe without switching out from your Mean Look Pokemon, the only thing stopping it from fleeing.

[Bongo Bill]

There are several mons that can learn both Mean Look and False Swipe, such as Gallade, who is conveniently also able to learn Hypnosis.

[jsnlxndrlv]

There are several mons that can learn both Mean Look and False Swipe, such as Gallade, who is conveniently also able to learn Hypnosis.

I put a lot of effort into making one of those. By the time I finally made a Gallade that had all these skills, I'd lost all interest in playing pokemon, so I put it down for a while. I've never been able to find that cartridge since.

[JDigital]

There are several mons that can learn both Mean Look and False Swipe, such as Gallade, who is conveniently also able to learn Hypnosis.

Only two, aside from Smeargle: Absol, by breeding with Umbreon, and Gallade, by breeding with Gengar. To give Gallade Hypnosis too, you have to level a male Ralts to 43, since it can't re-learn it after evolving to Gallade. Absol can learn Thunder Wave by a TM you can only buy at the Battle Frontier.

I'm told Umbreon is popular, but it sounds even more work than Gallade. Breed an Eevee with Double Team (Pikachu father perhaps), train Eevee to level 36 for Baton Pass, evolve to Umbreon and it learns Mean Look at level 57. You can then trap any Pokemon, Double Team to max and baton pass out to a separate False Swiper like Scyther, who in turn can baton pass out to a sleeper. Double Team gives you plenty of time to be patient and throw a hundred Pokeballs, more than enough to catch anything that moves.

[Bongo Bill]

I made such a Gallade on one occasion, but I forgot how much work it was. He is a mighty hunter.

[JDigital]

I took apart the HeartGold ROM to see if Joey's Rattata is really as "top percentage" as he keeps telling me on the phone.

Conclusion: Joey is a lying liar.

Joey's Rattata has a Gentle nature and IVs of all zero. Even when you rematch and it's a Level 54 Raticate, it still has IVs of zero.

Stuff I learned while working this out:
1) It's quite common for trainers to have all-zero IVs on their Pokémon, since for trainers the Pokémon IVs are set as a measure of the trainer's difficulty. Elite Four members and the Champion have straight-30 IVs. Your rival's start low and increase. The Kimono Girls have 18 in all IVs, and the Kanto Gym leaders have 25, give or take a point due to rounding.

2) The "personality value" of trainer Pokémon, which determines gender, nature and shinyness, is always the same for a given Pokemon. It isn't stored anywhere, but is calculated somehow based on variables like trainer class and such.

3) Trainers will always have Pokémon of the same gender as themself, unless the Pokemon is more commonly found as the other gender. This is why all Cynthia's Pokémon are female except Lucario and Togekiss, species which are 87.5% male. You will never see an in-game trainer with a male Clefairy or female Lucario, and your rival's starter will always be male.

4) The reason for this: Unlike caught Pokemon, whose personality values are a four-byte random number, a trainer Pokemon's last byte is either 120 (if the trainer's class is male) or 136 (if the trainer's class is female). The last byte happens to determine the Pokémon's gender, in most cases female if equal to or below 127 and male if above 127. Pokémon found more commonly in one gender have a higher or lower gender threshold than 127.

5) A few trainers register as opposite gender: Bugsy, Saturn and Will are treated as female trainer classes and have predominantly female teams. In Japanese, all three have female or unisex names (Tsukushi, Saturn, and Itsuki).

[McDohl]

>:|

I WISH I COULD DELETE HIS FUCKING NUMBER IN THE PHONE, THEN.

[Lottel]

Well, as I understood it, in the original games, it WAS a top level Ratata.  Read the numbers somewhere.
Things changed, right? So maybe this did as well?

[yyler]

I remember someone looking at Joey's Ratata and finding it had an Adamant nature and 31 attack IVs, actually

Also you coulda learned all that shit just reading Smogon. They've got it all hashed out, bro.

[Lady Duke]

LAWLS.

Luvdisc evolution likely, possibly confirmed.  How silly and cute :3

[JDigital]

Well, as I understood it, in the original games, it WAS a top level Ratata.  Read the numbers somewhere.
Things changed, right? So maybe this did as well?

I thought so too, so I checked the original Gold. Joey's Rattata's IVs there are 9-8-8-8-8, where Gold/Silver uses a scale of 0-15 for IVs. Joey's Rattata's stats are average in Gold. I'm not certain he makes the "top percentage" claim in the original Gold/Silver.

I remember someone looking at Joey's Ratata and finding it had an Adamant nature and 31 attack IVs, actually

I also heard the claim that Joey's Rattata had all-31 or similarly high IVs and Adamant nature, but became suspicious when I couldn't trace it to a reliable source. Reports also clashed on his exact stats. One said all-31, one gave stats varying from 26 to 31, another "all 3 or under", and another "all zero". That's why I decided to see for myself.

I used a "snag trainer's Pokémon" Action Replay code to catch Joey's Rattata several times. Each time I made a copy of the save and edited it in Pokésav to verify that any given trainer's stats are always the same. I had previously confirmed this in Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Red by examining memory in the Visual Boy Advance emulator, but couldn't use this approach with HGSS. The DS has too much memory and the Pokémon data format is encrypted from Diamond/Pearl onward, making it more difficult to read the digits off manually.

Joey's Rattata always had the same PID and IVs of zero. My first concern was that a glitch of the game had simply failed to generate any IVs, so I decided to determine if the game always gave trainers zero IVs, or only Joey. I decompiled the game ROM using a Pokémon ROM editor called PPRE, after trying several generic DS ROM-unpackers and parsing about half the numbers in the Trainer data structures by hand. Using PPRE I experimented with changing Joey's stats around, and concluded that a mystery byte in each Pokémon's data, which PPRE calls "u0", determines the IVs of that Pokémon.

My initial hypothesis was that IVs were determined by trainer class, having heard that Cynthia's IVs were all 30 or 31, but changing Joey to Cynthia's class only changed his Pokémon to female, leading to the other discoveries about trainer class and Pokémon gender. I did notice that the u0 value correlated with trainer difficulty, with Cynthia having a u0 score of 250. Dividing the u0 score by eight (rounded down) gave a u0-250 trainer the IV of 31, and when I increased Joey's Rattata to a u0 of 250, its scores increased to 30 or 31.

Since Youngster Joey's Rattata's u0 value was zero, even in re-matches, Joey's Rattata always has zero IVs.

Also you coulda learned all that shit just reading Smogon. They've got it all hashed out, bro.

I didn't find Smogon very useful for this research. Smogon's focus is on competetive multiplayer, not in-game trainers.

[R^2]

I've not heard of a Luvdisc evolution and can't see if LD posted a picture, but I'm imagining a Water/Dark that looks mostly like Luvdisc, with a zigzagged lateral line and either the top or bottom half colored black.

[JDigital]

Sadly not:



There's a new Wi-Fi July 31st. Unlocks Latios or Latias, whichever doesn't roam on your game.

[R^2]

Oh. A generic pink sunfish. My idea's much better.

[Lady Duke]

Newest legendary to join the cutie 100-for-every-stat is Victini: