"How Much Do Move Cut Off Points Matter?"

#PokemonGO: Quick Moves, especially lowered powered moves, don't necessarily increase in damage every power-up. Rather than increasing linearly, Quick Moves are step functions that jump from whole number to whole number (ie 3 damage, then 4 damage but nothing in between). Because of this the Silph Road community has identified what we call "Breakpoints" or "move floors" (u/FuNKyShO's video and article).The reason this happens is because of Niantic's damage formula.DMG=floor(0.5*POWER*ATK/DEF*SE*STAB)+1 So this will always return a whole number, and I made a post with a huge list of breakpoints for the best Raid Boss counters. A couple Travelers pointed out that since Charge Moves will usually continue to increase, the breakpoints are nice to know, but ultimately not necessarily the best place to stop powering up.So I've done a little bit of research to try and determine just how much these breakpoints effect battles.First up, let's look at Machamp with Counter and an attack IV of 15. I calculated that Machamp's highest breakpoint to be at level 37.5 vs a Snorlax Raid Boss (Perfect IVs, Level 40, lotsa health). Here's a simulation with Pokebattler: Level 37.5 Machamp vs Level 37 MachampSummary (for the too lazy to click on the links)AttackerLevelTimes KO'dHP LeftDamage DealtTimePowerOverallMachamp37.55116/1493198429.6s8.1%156.7%Machamp37564/1482982451.2s7.7%149.1%So not that big of a deal... right? There's no way I'm going to solo a Snorlax, so there's no reason to really need a Machamp with a level that high.Well then, let's try and hit a little closer to home. You're trying to solo an Alakazam and you're wondering if you should power up your Scizor a little further. With a perfect attack stat (ATK IV 15) the first breakpoint is level 29.5 (I haven't mentioned this yet, but with a lower attack IV you'll need a higher level to reach the breakpoint) Here's the simulations: Level 29.5 Scizor vs Level 29 ScizorSummaryAttackerLevelTimes KO'dHP LeftDamage DealtTimePowerOverallScizor29.5473/1121894289.9s16.7%158.0%Scizor29585/1111509369.6s10.8%110.5%Okay, so Scizor's obviously better, but who would leave it below level 29 if they could help it? Not I, but if you don't have a perfect Attack IV, you're going to need to power-up past 29.5I came up with my own spreadsheet that measures Cycle DPS. It's not perfect and measures just straight attacking, but I think it's a good comparison tool. It measures how many quick attacks you need to use a charge move, uses the charge move and then divides by the time that would have taken. And then I measured the percent increase in Cycle DPS to see how much of an impact each breakpoint had on the Cycle DPS. Here's a table of Vaporeon's Cycle DPS with WG/HP against a level 30 Arcanine (ie Raid Boss)LevelQuick Move DMGCycle DPSPercent Increase40619.850.38%39.5619.770%39619.770.38%38.5619.700%38619.700.38%37.5619.620%37619.620.38%36.5619.550%36619.550.39%35.5619.470%35619.470.39%34.5619.400%34619.400.38%33.5619.320%33619.320.39%32.5619.250.39%32619.170%31.5619.170.39%31619.100%30.5619.100.40%30619.020.40%29.5618.950.40%29618.879.13%28.5517.290.44%28517.220.44%27.5517.140.88%27516.990.44%26.5516.920.45%26516.840.45%25.5516.770.45%25516.690.91%24.5516.540.46%24516.470.46%23.5516.390.46%23516.320.93%22.5516.170.47%22516.090.47%21.5516.020.95%21515.940.48%20.5515.790.48%20515.710.48%Massive table, but I wanted from levels 20-40, so... anyway. You can see that the breakpoint at level 29 causes a 9.13% increase in Cycle DPS vs around half a percent increase on most other levels.I've also made a graph (in Google Sheets, which is kinda sucky for this) comparing Vaporeon's Cycle DPS (with WG/HP) against all the Raid Bosses that Vaporeon is strong against.Image (Y-Axis is Cycle DPS... not sure why I couldn't get it labeled)When considering breakpoints, you also need to take into account the moves power. Water Gun and Fury Cutter both have low power (5 and 3 respectively). Breakpoints are much more obvious and important with lower powered moves. It becomes less apparent with higher powered moves take Confusion for instance. Confusion has a power of 20. If we go back to the table above, the difference between 5 damage and 6 damage is an increase of 20%, but if we consider Alakazam vs Machamp which has a breakpoint at level 38.5 and increases from 30 damage to 31 damage, damage per hit has only increased 3.33%Here's a graph of Alakazam vs Machamp and you can see that the graph is much smoother than Vaporeon's graph, indicating a more even distribution of move damage rather than the sudden jumps in power we see with Vaporeon.So, in conclusion, it depends on the Power of the move and where the breakpoint falls. If the breakpoint falls at a fairly low level, it's probably a good idea to power-up past that level and reach at least level 30. However, it's often a good idea to power-up into the low 30s, but that depends on IVs, move power, and the defender/Raid Boss via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2vq7ujU