A new version of my famous spreadsheet is there.
As you probably know, it’s a theoretical spreadsheet. If you like exact rankings, I recommend to check the excellent Pokébattler raid rankings because they are based on simulations.
However, simulations are as accurate as their inputs are, and therefore it may be possible that some small parameter changes, e.g. Pokémon level or IVs, yield noticeably (although not completely) different results. A theoretical spreadsheet is sometimes more “robust” to parameter changes because it doesn’t depend on these specific values. That’s basically the main reason why I still maintain this spreadsheet.
Instructions
- Target Input sheet: enter the defender, its moves, how much % of fast and charge moves you will dodge, and the raid boss tier (enter 0 if it’s not a raid boss but a regular gym defender).
- The defender/boss name and its moves can be “None”. In this case, the spreadsheet calculates DPS and TDO assuming a neutral matchup. After the type effectiveness boost, “None” is not recommended. Please take the time to choose/type a Pokémon and both its moves, otherwise you may get wrong results.
- There are two percentages for dodging charge moves, in order to take into account the bug (or feature?) where the “Super Effective!” text delays the charge move announcement and makes dodging much harder.
- Optionally, enter your trainer level (default = 28 assuming you only use attackers level 30 or below) and your reaction time for charge moves (default = 0.7 seconds).
- Attacker Ranking sheet: it can be ranked by TDO% (relative Total Damage Output before fainting), DPS% (relative Damage per Second), Total Effectiveness (a combination of TDO and DPS) and finally by Raid Score, a heuristic I have devised to rank raid attacker effectiveness, which takes TDO into account but heavily punishes non-optimal DPS (because raids are mainly about not timing out).
- Raid Attackers sheet: it ranks relative Raid Score percentages against all Tier 3 and 4 raid bosses (each with a representative moveset) and can be sorted by boss and by overall Attacker Value.
- In the Raid Attackers sheet, you can also tweak the first two rows with different minimum thresholds and weights and then rank by “My Values”.
- Candy Value sheet: I have copied there the average ranking of each relevant attacker and calculated how much is a candy worth and how much is a buddy km worth. The buddy winner is by far Geodude, because at 1 km/candy it generates the very best raid attacker against Charizard, Arcanine, Flareon, Moltres, Zapdos and Entei, a great attacker against Articuno (and Ho-Oh in the future) and a decent option against Lugia, Jolteon and Raikou.
- Hidden Power support: I have added a generic “Hidden Power SE” and a generic “Hidden Power 2xSE”. For Suicune I added “Hidden Power Water” too.
E.g. against Charizard, “Hidden Power 2xSE” means Rock Hidden Power. “Hidden Power SE” may be Water or Electric.
I’m not adding “Hidden Power NVE” etc. because I assume NVE Hidden Power sucks.
You have to figure out the specific type(s) by yourselves (with the help of the “Type Effectiveness” sheet) because I’m not going to add 15 Hidden Power movesets for each of the 20 potential Pokémon/Charge move combinations.
Nuts and (Thunder)bolts
What is taken into account:
- Type Effectiveness multipliers.
- Dodging fast moves (recommended for normal defenders only): if “Dodge fast moves” is greater than 50%, the Attacker Ranking sheet suggests how many fast moves fit between the defender’s fast moves and it compares efficiency with and without dodging.
- Dodging charge moves, including the effect of the attacker’s own fast move duration and the effect of the defender’s forewarning between animation start and “yellow flash”.
- Overcharge for single-bar charge moves: unlike most spreadsheets, this one takes into account that single-bar charge moves effectively waste half a fast move because all energy beyond 100 is not used.
- Overkill and overkill avoidance for all charge moves (slightly buffed in this v9.3 update): unlike most spreadsheets, this one takes into account three issues with charge moves:
- Sometimes a charge move overkills the defender;
- Sometimes, to avoid overkill, the attacker has to delay the charge move and kill the defender with the (less efficient) fast move;
- Sometimes the attacker faints with the charge bar half full before being able to use its last charge move.
- Energy gained by the defender when being hit, in order to calculate the fast/charge damage ratio (important for split-type movesets).
What is NOT taken into account (maybe in one of the next versions…):
- Energy gained by the attacker when being hit (not incredibly relevant for regular gyms but probably more important for raids).
- Rounding bonus that favors quick low-power fast moves (e.g. Fury Cutter) over slow high-power fast moves (e.g. Dragon Tail).
Credits
Credits to /u/vlfph who made the original CP efficiency calculator until v4.0. I just walked his spreadsheet for some more hundred km and then evolved it 🙂
Credits to /u/celandro who made the awesome Pokébattler website and even hosts my articles.
TL;DR:
Golem, Gengar, Alakazam, Zapdos, Lugia, Exeggutor, Vaporeon, Machamp, Dragonite, Rhydon, but above all RAIKOU, TYRANITAR and MEWTWO.
Can you explain how the Min % and Weights fields work on the Raid Attackers tab? Thanks!
Min% is the “minimum usefulness threshold”. It’s different for each raid boss because there are some raid bosses (like Tyranitar) with a very small set of excellent counters but obviously not everyone has them, while some other raid bosses (e.g. Entei) have a lot of good counters but no exceptional one. So to balance things out I use different thresholds so that the mysterious totals on the bottom of the sheets are all in the same order of magnitude and therefore all raid bosses are weighed equally. We should better not touch the minimum %.
The Weights are something that I encourage to customize, e.g. if you don’t care about a raid boss or you already have an excellent team you can set the weight to zero, or if you care a lot about a raid boss you can increase the weight.
At the end, the “My Values” column gets filled according to those Weights. So you can sort “My Values” and get the list of the attackers you need right now.
The Raid Attackers worksheet doesn’t have the Gen 3 Pokemon or their movesets listed on it with their corresponding % in each column for the raid bosses. They are on the Attackers Ranking worksheet though. Are you planning to add them to Raid Attackers? I find that worksheet to be very useful for sorting by % and then looking up the Pokemon and moveset string against the list of Pokemon and movesets that we each have so we can compile our list of best attackers for a given raid. Not to mention, using it to help with figuring out which Pokemon to use a TM on. Just wondering. Thanks for the effort on this; it is really useful when you don’t have times to run simulations.
It takes me one/two hours to re-run all the raid bosses in order to update the Raid Attackers sheet (I haven’t figured out yet a way to do it automatically).
So I plan to do it when Gen3 comes in full. Meanwhile, feel free to do it in your own copy for the bosses you need.
Anyway the only relevant attacker among the new Gen3 ghosts is SC/SB Banette, which is a weaker version of Gengar.
Love the spreadsheet. Thanks for the hard work. I am hoping v10.1 or v11 is released soon.