

You may have noticed that the same messages you get for normal stat stages will also pop up when a Pokémon's accuracy or evasion changes, such as when Sand-Attack or Double Team are used. The later games don't have this limitation. Thus, although if that Scyther had an Attack stat stage of 6 it should have an Attack of 1000, it will actually only be 999 in the pre-Advance games. In the first two generations, the maximum value a calculated stat could have was 999, so any time a stat would go over that due to stat stages, it would be made 999 instead. If its opponent subsequently used Growl, this would bring its Attack stat stage down by one, to 1, and its effective Attack would become 375 (250 * 3/2). This means that if you have, for instance, a Scyther whose Attack is shown as 250 on the stat screen, and you make it use Swords Dance (which raises its Attack stat stage by two), its Attack will in fact be regarded as being 500 (250 * 4/2). (In the first generation, the multipliers used are technically approximations of these ideal multipliers.) If math confuses you, this amounts to the following table: Stat stage In battle, the effective stats of each Pokémon are multiplied by a fraction corresponding to the current stat stage for that stat: if the value of the stat stage is s, the multiplier is max(2, 2 + s)/max(2, 2 - s), where max(x, y) stands for taking the higher out of x or y. (If it is a secondary effect of a move, it will simply fail silently.)

If the stat stage is already at -6 or 6, moves or effects that should lower or raise the stat stage respectively as a primary effect will bring up a "Nothing happened!"/"'s won't go higher/lower!" message. With only a couple of exceptions, you can tell when a stat stage is being modified by the familiar messages the game uses to notify you: Message See the R/B/Y Stat Modification section for more information. In Red, Blue and Yellow, the implementation of stat stages was quite buggy and resulted in bizarre side-effects when stat stages were modified and other counterintuitive results. (In rotation battles, being rotated out does not count as switching.) If not using Baton Pass, all accumulated stat stages are therefore lost when you switch out a Pokémon. Whenever a Pokémon is switched in, its stat stages are all reset to zero, unless it is replacing a Pokémon that just used Baton Pass, in which case it will start out with the same stat stages as the Baton Passer. Moves and other effects in battle can change a Pokémon's stat stages, usually raising or lowering them by one or two but occasionally more when people say something raises or lowers a stat "by one stage" or "by two stages", it is the stat stage for that stat that is rising or falling by one or two. Each Pokémon in battle has a separate stat stage for each of its stats.

In particular, whenever you use a move that raises your stats or lowers your opponent's, it's stat stages that are being modified behind the scenes.Ī stat stage is an integer value that starts out at zero but can range from -6 to 6. The values actually used for calculations in battle can be modified in various ways from their out-of-battle values, and out of these ways, the most familiar and common type of modifier is stat stages. While the stat mechanics page on this site explains how the values you see when you look up your Pokémon's stats on its summary screen are calculated, this isn't the whole story for the non-HP stats.
