"All your dreams of millions of damage are dead. The damage cap is really only 65535."

As long as the game's combinatorial explosion has been expanding, people have looked to things like Shuckle with Rollout or even Ice Ball, Pikachu with Power Trip, Victini with V-create, or whatever they may be planning to do with Rollout storage these days. Many claims have been professed over time, saying that if you have a collaborative setup where all the pieces are put together just right, you could get some ridiculous number in the millions, or even the billions.As part of my ongoing investigation into this kind of thing, I've been assembling tests (such as this to explore potential boundary conditions in the formula, which have ended up reducing the perceived maximum output a couple times already. But there was always one nagging result from my very first test with it that didn't make sense.Or rather, after a thorough look at what the numbers were supposed to be, there was one way they could make sense: if the damage cap, even in Alola, was all the way down at 65,535--a notion that had a hint of lunacy to itself. But it turns out to be true.The definitive test to home in on that result, for those of you with access to USUM and the Battle Video computer in Festival Plaza's castle, is UJ8W-WWWW-WWWS-9YPA . This involves a Mega Lucario that's not even trying to get into the millions: a +1 Aura Sphere, against an unadjusted Aron, is only an attempt to deal up to 65,536 damage (one past the maximum that we now know). That's only on the max roll, too: lower random rolls will result in damage from the 55K-64K range. Of course, Aron has Sturdy, so those thousands of damage are really only good for 11, and a Leech Seed takes it right back to full to perform another test the following turn.Aron takes twelve of these hits into Sturdy range all in a row, as expected, but then on the 13th try, they finally hit the max roll. That's what this whole test was looking for: instead of 65536 damage, this "super-effective" hit wraps around to deal exactly ZERO. So not only does it prove the new, much lower wraparound point, it also proves that it's still possible to hit for 0 damage after all (not even considering type immunities, False Swipe vs. someone who's already at 1 HP, or a hit that breaks Mimikyu's disguise or Shedinja's Focus Sash). And I bet Game Freak thought they had closed that vector up with the release of XY, where the "check for minimum 1" was properly moved to take place after things like Reflect.Having the cap this low is in serious danger of coming into play in battles where both players aren't cooperatively choreographing: a +1 attacker vs. an unadjusted FEAR mon is something that can quite readily come up by accident. And when it does...The moral of the story is that you can mess with Shuckle (or indeed Mega Lucario) after all. Just as long as your defense stat is just the right number to go with their attack, to create a final damage figure that wraps around and lands in the damage range that you'll actually survive! Just be sure to do your math homework to figure out what that number might actually be. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/2wqX5au