"Simulating a Real-World Battle: Dodging all attacks may actually perform worse than dodging only charge moves in some situations."

#PokemonGO: It's been a long-standing debate on whether it's better to dodge all moves or to only dodge charge attacks, but there isn't a lot of real data to back this argument up. While dodging all moves reduces all damage taken by a factor of 75%, the downside is that you lose DPS, EPS, and prolong the time the battle actually takes. Moreover, DPS and EPS figures do not properly capture the discrete nature of battles where actions have cooldowns, especially for the defender - the damage is not dispersed evenly over a period of time, but comes in bursts.Thus, I decided to test this myself by directly simulating a battle. To make this a realistic scenario, I modeled the attacker and defender stats after my own Pokemon. My highest CP Pokemon, Snorlax at 2558 CP with 237 HP, 141 Attack, and 144 Defense became the defender, with a moveset of Zen Headbutt and Hyper Beam (in reality, my Snorlax has Lick, but Zen Headbutt is usually better on Defenders, so I switched it to that). Then, I chose a reasonable attacker to counter Snorlax - I chose my Exeggutor at 2065 CP with 136 HP, 164 Attack, and 117 Defense, with Confusion/Solar Beam. Damage taken and dealt was calculated using the known formulas with these stats. The defender, as known for gym defenders, gets doubled HP and maximum energy.I modeled the battle two ways, first with dodging all moves (including quick moves), and second, with dodging only charged moves (i.e. only Hyper Beam.) I operated under the following assumptions:The attacker can attack as fast as the cooldown on its moves. The defender can attack as fast as the cooldown, plus a static 1.5 seconds. Thus, Snorlax can use a quick attack every 1.05s + 1.5s = 2.55 seconds.Dodges take 0.5s, and attacks cannot be initiated through dodges.The attacker will use their charge bar as soon as possible, except under the constraints below.The attacker is intelligent, and knows what moves are coming up. The attacker will hold onto a full charge bar if it means that they will be hit mid-animation by a Hyper Beam, for instance. Furthermore, in the situation that the attacker is dodging all moves, the attacker will wait if their quick attack means that they will be hit mid-animation by the defender's quick attack. The only exception to this rule is if the defender's is about to knock out the attacker, in that case, the attacker will kamikaze.The defender will use their charge move two quick moves after receiving a full charge. Originally, I had the defender use the charge move right away, but in this simulation, Snorlax will get to use Hyper Beam before Exeggutor can use Solar Beam - something that I have never personally witnessed. I don't actually know how gym AI works, and I suspect there may be a degree of randomness involved. However, I used this rule because it was my best guess in absence of any other evidence for gym AI.I didn't account for how long it takes to charge the move for either the defender or the attacker, since I don't have data on that. I assumed both Pokemon are capable of launching a charge move immediately.I have graphed how the defender Snorlax (orange) and the attacker Exeggutor (blue) lose HP over time below:http://ift.tt/2bTcfe5 summary, if you only dodge charge moves in this situation, you lose in 46 seconds with 10 HP left on the Snorlax's health bar. However, if you dodge all attacks, you lose in 57 seconds, with 84 HP left on the Snorlax's health bar.Explaining the result, part of the reason is because you only can use one Confusion between dodges or else you'll get hit, drastically reducing the amount of DPS and EPS you gain. This may not be the same result for all moves - for instance, with the faster moves, you may be able to deal three hits in between attacks while only losing two during a dodge, which raises the DPS ratio a bit further. Snorlax's Hyper Beam, even if you dodge it, still deals a lot of damage to Exeggutor; the greater number of basic moves that Snorlax gets to pump out in the scenario where you dodge all attacks means that Snorlax accumulates a charge bar three times instead of just twice, taking out a chunk of Exeggutor's HP each time. Finally, by taking chip damage from the quick attacks, Exeggutor gets to charge Solar Beam much faster, allowing more charge moves.tl;dr: Dodging every attack might look impressive, but it's not always certain to yield better results over only dodging charge moves. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2bkvRYZ