"Realistic dodge simulation and re-evalulation of top Blissey attackers"

#PokemonGO: TL/DR: Results from the new Pokebattler realistic dodge simulation tool match my own real-world experience with missed dodges that leave otherwise optimal attackers looking a bit too fragile versus high-level Blissey. Despite being slower, Tyranitar, Gyarados and Vaporeon may be better options for taking down high level Blissey (at least if you play alone).ResultsFirst, because some detailed discussion follows, lets cut to the chase: The table below show simulation results using the new version of Pokebattler developed by /u/celandro with monte-carlo simulations on 13 different level 30 attackers versus all 6 variants of a perfect level 34 Blissey (CP 2943). The sims were run in a "dodge all pro" mode using Pokebattler's new "realistic dodging" setting. If you want to try these out for yourself, here is a link to a typical battle (Gyarados):PokemonPower(%)Time(s)% HP RemainingWinsCPPrestigeTyranitar15476.932.363146234Vaporeon13387.924.062706543Dragonite (DB/DC)13065.520.853070202Gyarados11876.215.862812523Rhydon11590.314.152829433Dragonite (DT/O)11761.412.153070202Donphan11182.87.942590379Exeggutor10469.85.042500392Machamp11054.02.442476396Heracross10557.51.742518389Flareon9763.80.042490393Espeon8871.1-10.432572286Ursaring8769.2-13.722366207Jolteon(TS/TB)8472.7-19.712340105Alakazam7768.3-29.9024740In every case, the attacker was a perfect level 30 Pokemon. While few of us have perfection most of us power our best (imperfect) attackers up above level 30, so similar CP levels are readily obtained for many of these types. The defender is a perfect level 34 Blissey and the results are the average from simulations against all 6 movesets. With the defender CP at 2943, this is not necessarily the highest out there, but it is typical of the most difficult Blisseys I encounter when taking on high level gyms. As you can see from the relative CP of each attacker, some (not all) have CP below that of the defending Blissey, so these results are also indicative of what might work for you at lower relative levels to get at least 500 prestige per battle round (e.g. for level 25 attackers versus a level 29 Blissey). The attacker movesets are all based on the optimal sets found in a recent post by /u/dondon151 who presented a chart for optimal (equal level) attackers against Blissey using the "Dodge specials pro" mode and prefect dodging in Pokebattler.Discussion:As the best defender in the current meta, Blissey is a nuisance in most forms, but particularly those residing either at the bottom of a friendly gym (when prestiging) or the powered up types near the top of enemy level 10 mega-towers populated by spoofers and botters. Since most of us have yet to scale the dizzy heights of level 38+ to max out our own best (rarely perfect) attackers, in both of these cases it is either important (for prestige) or necessary to attack using lower-level and/or lower CP Pokemon than the defending Blissey. However the majority of analyses to date, and most (if not all) aggregate sites generating Tier lists are based primarily on simulations using equal level Pokemon (typically level 30 versus level 30), with equal individual values.Moreover, most analyses typically use the "Dodge specials" mode of the older version of the (wonderful) Pokebattler tool developed by u/celandro, which until recently only had the option of assuming perfect dodging technique. Out there in the real world we may need to dodge more than just the specials to survive a battle and its rare to get it 100% right. There is a combination of game lag, poor 3/4G signal and the dodge bug which can all contribute to missed dodges. Then there is imperfect technique. Blissey is a typically long fight, with many special moves to face (particularly versus dazzling gleam). In my excitement, I sometimes accidentally swipe up the pokemon switch tab just when I need to dodge dazzling gleam. Or I somehow choose just the wrong moment to unleash my own special, so that I end up taking a dazzling gleam full on when I should have dodged. Or I just miss the dodge window by a fraction of a second because (unlike a simulator) I might not have been able to exploit the 1/100 of a second between the cool down of my last charge and the end of the dodge window on the next attack. Moreover, some movesets are just harder to dodge even if you give yourself the time to do so. If I play it safe and skip a quick move or two once the animation, I can usually survive a hyperbeam even if the animation commences while your own special is still unfolding - the wind up is just that slow and obvious. But dazzling gleam from a high CP Blissey can still do serious damage and usually catches you unaware at least once during a battle.Sims with the new PokebattlerFirst, kudos to /u/celandro for the most recent update to his fantastic simulator, which now includes two major innovations: (1) The option to select either a fixed ratio of successful dodges (e.g. 90%, 75%) or (even better) a "realistic dodging" option which takes into account, among other things, the relative duration of the moves to provide a more probabilistic approach to determining dodge success. Confusion, for example, while a great fast move in terms of DPS when not dodging at all, is so slow that it can be very difficult to get a dodge in when a dazzling gleam comes out of nowhere, let alone for dodging quick moves. Short duration moves (bite, water gun) make it much more likely that you can respond. (2) The new simulator now offers the option to use a Monte-Carlo simulation technique. Instead of running the same deterministic simulation every time, this method runs 100 trials using a degree of random sampling to report a median value for the typical outcome. This is more like the real world - sometimes we just do better than other times, often through blind luck as much as skill. On the downside, this means that two users running the same simulations may now get slightly different results, but this tool provides a great way to get some idea of how a few missed dodges here and there affect the outcome.Interpetation of Power vs residual Health: How safely can I win a 1:1 battle?The first column in the table shows attacker power. This is one of the most useful measures to answer the above question because it tells us how many defenders the attacker could have taken down. 200% would mean that the attacker could take down exactly 2 identical defenders in a row without fainting. This is a great statistic, because in addition to the remaining HP after defeat of the first defender, this takes account of the energy level in the special move charge bar. But considering the real world, 200% isn't necessarily the same as double the attacking power of 100%. With a score of 200% the fact that PoGo lets you carry any charged energy into the next battle means that you might actually finish the first Blissey with (in some cases significantly) less than half your remaining health. But if you finish the first with a fully charged special ready to immediately unleash at the next defender, you start the next battle at a tactical advantage in terms of weave DPS, allowing you to do more damage than your first battle outcome would have predicted (based on % HP lost). I know I've experienced this many times when prestiging against multiple Rhydons using solar beam Parasects: Sometimes I will have lost 2/3 of my HP on the first battle, but finish with a fully charged solar beam, allowing me to easily defeat the next (higher CP) Rhydon with my remaining 1/3 HP.The corollary of this observation is the fact that the Power statistic can give a slightly false impression of just how comfortable your win in the first battle is. You can see this effect in the table for Tyranitar: It achieves an average power of 154% in this sim, so if it had immediately faced up to a second (identical) Blissey, it would indeed have taken out 54% of its HP before fainting. But at the end of the the first battle, it actually only has an average of 32% of its original HP. This provides an important distinction between Power and residual health that can have a big impact on us when battling in the real world. When the Power score is closer to 100%, one missed dodge of a quick move, or being slightly too slow with using your own quick move earlier in the battle may leave you with a nearly fully charged energy bar, but still run out of HP before you can use it (particularly problematic with single-bar moves). Or worse still, leave you with a fully charged special that you actually do manage to unleash before fainting, but which is so slow to do damage to the opponent that you faint before your move hits. Looking at the table, we can see that the average Power for many of these attackers in the matchup was close to, or below 100! For this reason, I would argue that in 1:1 battles (let alone when you pit only 6 attackers against all 10 in a level 10 gym), particularly where the next defender may have very different typing, the Power needs to be well above 100% before it is a safe choice. I've lost count of the number of times my Machamp has just fainted (or when desperately short on revives, I have been forced to swap it out) before defeating a Blissey only to lose a huge chunk of my HP on my next (sometimes poorly typed) mon to an unexpected dazzling gleam or Psychic....So a second useful statistic to consider is what I call "% HP remaining". This gives us an idea of residual health - the safety margin (in terms of HP) by which you win a battle. The greater that value is above 0%, the less likely you are to lose a battle because you didn't have enough health left to use your charged special to finish a battle. Although closely related to the Power stat, these are not the same thing. Sometimes I look more at my residual HP than my charge bar as the basis for decisions as I approach the end of a battle: Do you persist with your Exeggutor and try and use solar beam against the next attacker, but risk fainting in the process? (costing you an extra revive - an issue for many of us playing in suburban areas). Or do you swap out to the next battler to finish the Blissey off, thus potentially wasting energy? To give an idea of this winning margin, I have included in the chart a statistic giving us the average residual HP. A problem in calculating residual HP in multiple simulations (e.g. against different move sets) is that in losing battles, the attacker HP falls below zero and so the battle ends. It would be unfair to average the residual HP (always zero) in these losing battles with the winning cases because it underestimates how much extra HP it would have taken to win. Pokebattler doesn't directly report how much extra HP it would have taken to win, but it does report a "time to win" statistic. This continues the simulation as if the fainted Pokemon had been healed mid-battle to project the actual time it would have taken to win if it had enough HP. Hence I took the rate of HP lost over the actual battle time and then used this to estimate how much more HP it would have lost (assuming losing HP at this same rate, which will not always be correct). This gives negative residual HP values (just as the power statistic can be <100%), which is why Flareon's average, for example, is only 0.0% even though it wins against 4 out of the 6 Blissey types.Attacker rankingI'll largely let the results speak for themselves, but do want to make a few observations. I have ranked the Pokemon in the table based on the residual health stat, averaged across Blissey's 6 movesets. What this reveals is very interesting: on average very few of the Pokemon simulated have enough HP left at the end of their first Blissey encounter to be useful attackers against a second. Indeed, as you can see from the battles won column (out of 6 possible movesets) there were only 3 Pokemon that consistently won against all 6 Blissey variants. Indeed, if I was short on revives (which I often am), I would probably swap most of the attackers in the list out before ending the battle. This is an important consideration, because swapping out, whether it be following your Pokemon fainting or deliberately before they do, incurs both an extra time penalty in the changeover and because the next attacker starts from zero energy and so will take time to re-charge energy lost in the previous attacker. And meanwhile, the defender may already have fully charged energy... Hence fragility has a significant negative impact on the advantages of using an otherwise high attack Pokemon like Flareon. Flareon (Fire Spin/Overheat) has an average power of just 97% and wins only 4 out of 6 battles (losing to both dazzling gleam variants). Of the 4 battles that it wins on average, it wins 2 of these matchups with typically <5HP remaining. If you opt to switch out instead of fainting to save on precious revives/max revives, it means that you lose some of Flareons 12 second theoretical speed advantage over the much more reliable Gyarados.As numerous other other analyses have shown, Counter/Dynamic Punch Machamp is the most optimal attacker in terms of time taken to win. But interestingly it doesn't win every matchup here either, again losing out to both variants of Dazzling gleam Blissey, and with a very small additional margin for error in terms of residual HP. So while the difference in average winning time is large (34 seconds compared with Vaporeon, for example) it may just be a bit too fragile if you are hoping to defeat all 10 Pokemon in a gym solo with your team of 6. If you are playing with a second team member, then of course your DPS sums with theirs, and then there would be no contest - I would choose Machamp every time. But this result bears out my own real-world experience when battling strong Blissey alone. I'm much more likely to win (albeit at the cost of a few extra seconds) if I put in my CP 3058 bite/hydropump Gyarados than with my similarly levelled Machamp (ok moves but imperfect IVs). And of course while most of us have multiple Vaporeons with decent IVs and Hydropump (and aqua tail is only slightly slower), there is no guarantee that your Machamp will spin the optimal moves. If I ever manage to get enough candy to make a Tyranitar with the right moves then that looks like a beast for this job. However, with its very high CP, it would be of less use as a prestiger. Plus its more likely that I would be tempted to place it in my own level 10 Gym above someone else's CP 3000 Blissey.In other discussions on this sub, many have claimed the same sort of arguments that apply in favour of Vaporeon and Gyarados here as arguments for Blissey as a strong generalist attacker: if you can spare the few extra seconds that they will take to get the job done, they may well be the best option...Edit: For those interested, I've prepared two charts similar to those in a recent post by /u/dondon151 although without the pretty pokemon icons. My charts linked here are also for Power versus win time (left hand side), but show the distribution for % HP versus win time (right hand side). As I've indicated in the left hand plot, the best attacker would be in the upper left of this plot, an area that is rather full of white space! For fun, I added Mewtwo who actually goes off the chart in that area. If it ever makes an appearance, it would be the perfect Blissey counter.Edit 2: By request, I added legacy move Dragonite (Dragon Breath/Dragon Claw) and although a little slower, this moveset actually does much better in terms of Power/safety margin than the Dragon Tail/Outrage version although it still wins only 5/6 matchups. I also added Jolteon (Thunder Shock/Thunderbolt). This is not up to the high level Blissey challenge, doing marginally better than Alakazam. Moveset advantages clearly do count for something (especially dodge compatible quick moves) but note also the overall clear relationship between CP and overall performance... via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2oI3RTy