Every Tera Damage Calc

Looking for offensive tera options based on the current movepool

In my last post I came up with average effectiveness for each of the types from what we know about the Scarlet/Violet Pokedex so far. While that left me with some vague notion of what tera-types I might want to consider, it wasn’t very satisfying as it did not provide much in the way of creating specific tera combinations. This time we’ll dig a little deeper and maybe you’ll be able to use the data to search for specific ideas.

Damage Calcs en Masse

The traditional approach to damage calcs is to go to a damage calculator and look up a specific build of one mon against a specific build of another. This is great for optimizing a team as you try to survive a Behemoth Blade or a Water Spout. However, for teambuilding there are just too many possibilities to consider. With the help of a special technology called a “computer,” we can actually perform thousands of these calculations very quickly and then aggregate the results so that we know on average how well a move works against other Pokemon. We’re going to have to make some tradeoffs, though. So why don’t we discuss what those are.

1. We calculate “average damage.” This average damage is obtained by getting the average percentage damage that the move does into all of the known Pokemon in the format. Of course we would like to weight this average based on usage statistics in the meta but we cannot do that yet, so we will just use the average damage number.

2. We calculate the average damage that move would do if the Pokemon terastalized into the same type as the move. For Pokemon who are already that type, we adjust the STAB to 2x (this is the best recent intel on tera-boost). For Pokemon who are not the type, well they now have the 1.5x STAB adjustment.

3. We follow the damage formula. We can appropriately assign physical or special attack and defense. We also know the base power of the move and the type effectiveness modifier of the attack. I used 85% for the random component. I do account for whether the move is single or multi-target and assume 31 IV in attacker and defense stats but don’t assume in nature or EV investment. All in all this means you should treat these average numbers as values to compare across Pokemon and rank rather than absolute estimates of some true average.

4. If there’s an exception, I probably didn’t account for it. For example, I didn’t use defender’s attack stat for Foul Play or switching phys/special for other attack, account for Body Press defense, etc. These are all nice thoughts but a lot more time-consuming to code, so if you’re looking at one of those moves you can probably ignore the results. Same goes for abilities that modify damage such as Adaptability.

5. We compare the tera damage to the non-tera damage to see which moves we get the greatest marginal damage boost. Hint: base power is the biggest factor.

How to use the Table

Below I have dumped all the results into a table. I leave it to the users to get the info from it they want, but here are some suggestions:

• Use the search feature to filter to the move, type, or Pokemon you are looking for. For example “earthquake” to to get a list of earthquake users. Or “garchomp” to see Garchomp’s move pool calcs.
  
• Click the column headers to sort and reverse sort on the stat. Example: after filtering earthquake users, sort by Tera Margin to get the users that benefit most by terastalizing into Ground for EQ
• Download the data and explore. I’ve added the option to download into excel if anyone wants to create their own spreadsheets.

Some Observations

I think there’s certainly a lot to ignore in this table. Self-desctruct moves are high due to their high BP, of course. There will probably be some cheese around this in the meta but usually the tactics don’t work that well. Fighting has a few high BP moves to make it an attractive tera option. Gardevoir Moonblast looks pretty strong.