Comment by s_trumpet
11 hours ago
Great article but I’d say you’re optimizing for the wrong metric here. For in game playthroughs, offense > defense and especially speedy offense beats anything else.
I’d state it as, Given any type, we should be able to hit it for super-effective damage with at least 1 move. And instead of taking raw BST, I’d take Max(SPD+ATK, SPD+SPA) to favour speedy offense.
Of course this does not take into question the thorny question of availability. Metagross is a top tier but only available post game in its debut. On the other hand Crobat and Gyarados are readily available in many of the games early on and evolve fairly quickly.
Please look into the competitive Nuzlocke community, there are a lot of damage calculations and viability spreadsheets all around, you’ll find it interesting.
If we're really trying to optimize for everything, I'd argue two of the biggest factors are move sets and (in generations after 2) abilities. There are Pokemon with great stats but abilities that quite literally are intended to be drawbacks (e.g. Slaking and Regigigas).
Thank you for your suggestion, I agree with you (and another commenter) that base stat is not that useful, and availability is actually what I would prioritise on in a next iteration. I tried to keep it simple here, mostly because it was interesting enough as an analysis. But if I were to redo this to get _the best_ team in a generation, I'd definitely go with what you suggested!