What are IVs?
Why should I care? How do I actually see them?
In the past, training up competitive Pokémon was honestly a miserable chore. Growing up, every little thing I learned about it pretty much made me never want to touch it as long as I lived. You’re telling me those little guys I caught on my journey, whom I painstakingly leveled up from battle to battle, who carried me all the way through the champion themselves, actually sucked?
Yeah kind of. Building a competitive Pokémon back in the day was a brutal business requiring in-depth knowledge of hardware RNG or having a friend who would run it for you. One of the biggest reasons for this by far was due to the difficulty in acquiring Pokémon with good IVs.
This is a term most Pokémon fans likely know already, even if they aren’t in the competitive scene. Many can even tell you what it stands for, individual values. That said, even if you know what it means, do you know what it actually does? Today, I’m going to break down what IVs look like in-game between Pokémon that have good and bad ones, and I’m also going to talk about the different ways one can go about acquiring Pokémon with good IVs. Thankfully, if you’re someone who, like me, gets attached to the team you build as you play through the game, it is also possible to retrain Pokémon you’ve played through with as opposed to catching entirely new ones. I’ll talk about that more later, first…
The very, very basics. Each stat a Pokemon has is assigned its own IV when the Pokemon is caught or hatched. These IVs determine the overall power of the stat relative to the Pokemon, with an IV of 0 being the worst, and 31 the best. While you can’t see these exact numbers in-game, Scarlet does give you access to a Judge function once you clear the main story. With this, you can look at any of your Pokemons’ IVs in your PC box by cycling through their different summary screens until you find something that looks like this (picture below).
While some of stats aren’t 100% identifiable, take a look at the Sp. Def stat. If you see “No Good” on any of your Pokemon’s stats, that means it has an IV of 0, the absolute lowest it can be. On the opposite side, if a Pokemon has an IV rating of “Best,” that means it’s a perfect 31. Frankly, these are the two most important ones to know, but if you’re interested in seeing a proper table of all the values, please check here.
Having good IVs on a Pokémon is a big deal, especially as this gen doesn’t just have a robust competitive community, but also some fairly challenging raid battles for people who aren’t used to regularly training their Pokemon to perfection. If a change in IVs only represented a slight change to a Pokémon’s stats, it probably wouldn’t matter. However, depending on the Pokémon and its base stat, a different IV value can drastically change the Pokémon’s power. Case in point, let’s compare two Goodra that I have down below. For reference, Goodra’s base stats are:
HP: 90 // Attack: 100 // Defense: 70 // Sp. Attack: 110 // Sp. Defense: 150 // Speed: 80
There are several differences between the two, but for now, take a look at their Sp. Attack stats. The two Goodra I have here are the same level. Neither has any EV points1 in any of their stats or other things that might alter them aside from their natures, which are identical. However, one Goodra’s Sp. Attack is ‘Best’ while the other’s is ‘No Good.’ Despite the only difference between the two being the IV, there is a 21-point difference. In a stronger base stat, most Pokemon gain on average 2 to 3 points per level, maybe 4 for especially high stats (such as the 150 Sp. Defense). In other words, for the Goodra with the ‘No Good’ stat to catch up, it would need to gain roughly 7 levels to catch up to the other. Kind of useless if all Pokemon are level 50, no? Those points make a huge difference to either dragon’s damage output, so having a ‘Best’ IV in all stats automatically gives one Pokemon a huge advantage over another.
Now that we hopefully have a better understanding of what the IV does for a Pokemon, some people might be curious: How do you even get those ‘Best’ stats? Are all of my hard-trained Pokemon useless?
Luckily, it’s a lot easier this gen. Secondly, no, even Pokemon with poor IVs can be retrained. Remember that Volcarona I showed you earlier? It had decent stats, but nothing competitive worthy, and certainly not something I’d bring to a 6-star raid. It’s shiny though, and I just like Volcarona. So that’s why I brought him to this unassuming Pokemon Center in Montenevera, where you might notice a suspicious figure standing next to an Abomasnow. Talk to him, and he’ll hyper train any Pokemon at level 50 or above, meaning he’ll make any number of their IVs perfect.
Keep in mind that, to do this, you’ll need to pay him in Bottle Caps or Gold Bottle Caps, whichever you have. There are several ways to get them, so they aren’t too difficult to find, particularly the normal ones. They can be dropped in raid battles starting at 4-stars, purchased at the auction in Porto Marinada, won in the Ace Academy tournament, found by Pokemon with the ‘Pickup’ ability, and even purchased outright at Delibird Presents once you’ve collected a certain number of badges in the game’s main story. If you’ve got access to the DLC, then you can also get them from the wonderful Item Printer at the Blueberry Academy.
Still, collecting a bunch of Bottle Caps to retrain an entire team of 6 Pokémon may be too tedious a task for some people. If you don’t have all the Bottle Caps or necessary funds right away to get them, going from raid to raid to get money and hope for a lucky Bottle Cap drop is pretty time consuming. What if you just want to catch Pokémon with good IVs and not have to worry about the Bottle Caps?
This is where the raid battles come in, one of the best features Pokémon’s probably ever added to their games (thank you, Sword and Shield!). Depending on the number of stars a raid battle has, the Pokémon inside the raid den has a guaranteed number of perfect IVs, topping out at 5 for 6-star raids. Not quite perfect, but very, very close. Given that the last IV is random for 6-star raids, that still gives you a small chance of netting a Pokémon with completely ‘Perfect’ IVs from one (1/32 to be specific). More importantly, you may even find Ditto in a 6-star den.
Finally, we come to Ditto, the king of competitive team building in Pokémon. It can breed with every single other Pokémon in the game aside from special Pokémon (legendaries). Furthermore, thanks to a handy item called the Destiny Knot, players have much better odds of passing down good IVs when breeding with a Ditto holding it. This item guarantees that a baby Pokémon, which normally receives 3 IVs from its parents and 3 at random, instead receives 5 IVs from its parents and one at random. Thus, you can breed Ditto with any Pokémon, even one with poor IVs, and the baby is likely to pull at least one of its own IVs from said Ditto (it can pull from both parents). Switch the slightly better baby with its parent, breed with Ditto again, and repeat. If you don’t want to keep going for something with perfect IVs, just breed until you’ve got 4 or 5, then hyper train the remaining ones. It’ll save you Bottle Caps in the long run, and you can often get several competitive-worthy Pokémon out of the process.
That about covers it for today. Getting Pokémon with good IVs is still a bit of a hassle, but the process is far less ridiculous than it was in the early days of this series. To be honest, I actually think it’s kind of fun. It’s always nice to take on raid battles and see what’s hiding in the den, and beyond just catching strong Pokémon, you get a lot of good items and rewards that can be used elsewhere in the game as well. I hope anyone reading this finds it helpful, and if you have any questions, let me know!
1These will be explained further in a future article, but it stands for ‘Effort Values.’