Attack Stat vs. Move Power: How Much Is One Worth in the Other?

Is a Pokémon with a huge Attack stat and an ordinary move better than one with a modest Attack stat and a powerful move? Is a 90 power move with STAB really that much better than a 120 power move without it? Is a boosting nature worth more than ten extra base points?

These questions all have the same answer, because the damage formula treats the attacker's stat and the move's power as two factors of a single product. Whatever lets one factor go up by 10% is worth exactly as much as whatever lets the other go up by 10%. The only thing that makes the comparison hard is that the two are measured in different units. This guide converts between them.

Why one can replace the other

The damage formula guide shows the whole pipeline. For this comparison, only the first step matters:

That gives you the rule behind everything below: two attackers deal the same damage when the product Power × Attack × STAB is the same. The target's defense sits on the other side of the fraction, so it affects how much damage is dealt but not how two attackers compare with each other. You can verify this with the calculator: changing the target's stats barely moves the result.

The catch is that the Attack stat is not the base stat. It is built from the base stat, your Stat Points, a flat 20 and the nature (see the guide on Extra Points and natures), so a gain of 10 in base stat is a smaller percentage than a gain of 10 in move power. That is the conversion the calculator takes care of.

The equivalence calculator

It works in three steps. First describe a real attacker and its move, which sets the damage to match. Then describe the target (a fictional Pokémon with no type, so type effectiveness never interferes). Finally describe the Pokémon to compare and choose what to solve for: the move power it needs, or the base stat it needs.

With the default settings, a Talonflame with 32 Attack SP and an Adamant nature using Flare Blitz deals 100 – 118 damage to a target with 80 base HP and 80 base Defense. A Pokémon with a base 100 Attack, 32 SP and a neutral nature needs a move of about 116 power to match it, even with STAB. Switch to "Find the base stat" and try any physical move to see the reverse.

Rules of thumb you can use without the calculator

The calculator gives exact answers, but a few conversion rates are worth remembering. The table below starts from a reference attacker: base 100 Attack, 32 Attack SP, a neutral nature, STAB, and a move of 100 power. Each row changes one thing about the attacker and shows the move power it would need to deal the same damage as the reference.

Computed with PokéSpread's engine against a typeless 80/80/80 target in Singles. The values move by a point or so with the target and with rounding; for instance, without STAB 149 and 150 are equally close to the reference, and 150 is the exact ratio of 1.5.

From that table, four conversions are easy to remember:

• STAB is worth 50% of the power. A move without STAB needs one and a half times the power to match one with it: 150 power instead of 100. Put the other way round, a 70 power move with STAB is roughly as strong as a 105 power move without it.
• A positive nature is worth about 10% of the power. That is the 90 in the table. The same nature on a Pokémon with a lower base Attack is worth the same percentage, though a smaller number of stat points.
• 32 Stat Points are worth roughly a quarter of the damage for a base stat around 100, and the figure depends on the base stat. Going from 0 to 32 SP at base 100 raises the stat from 120 to 152, which is +27%, or about 25 extra power on a 100 power move. The lower the base stat, the larger the percentage (the same 32 points are added to a smaller number), and the higher the base stat, the smaller it is.
• 10 points of base stat are worth roughly 6 to 7% of the damage for a base stat around 100 with 32 SP, and again the figure depends on the base stat. At that level the stat goes from 152 to 162, which is about 7 power on a 100 power move. Because the same 10 points are added to a smaller or larger total, the percentage is bigger for low stats and smaller for high ones.

Reading the results: two common cases

"Is a strong move worth a weak attacker?"

It is a trade. A base 60 Attack with 32 SP needs 134 power to match a base 100 Attack using a 100 power move: more than any common move has. That is what a bad Attack stat costs you. Going the other way, a base 100 attacker with a 100 power STAB move deals as much as a base 136 attacker with an 80 power STAB move. Without STAB, an 80 power move would need a base stat of about 230 to keep up, which no Pokémon has.

"What should I look at first: the base stat or the move power?"

When people size up an offensive Pokémon, they usually look at its base Attack or Special Attack first and its movepool second. The opposite order is just as legitimate, and the equivalence above shows why: a stat and a move are two factors of the same product, so neither deserves to be read first.

Tinkaton is the classic case of an offensive Pokémon that is underestimated because of the first habit. Its base Attack is only 75, which looks poor next to the many Pokémon above 130. But its STAB move Gigaton Hammer has a power of 160. Take an Adamant Tinkaton with 32 Attack SP using it, and ask what another Adamant attacker with 32 Attack SP and a STAB move needs in order to deal the same damage:

Same method as the calculator above, against a typeless 80/80/80 target in Singles. Without STAB, a 100 power move would need a base Attack of about 250.

In other words, a Pokémon with a base 130 Attack and a 100 power STAB move deals less than Tinkaton, and it takes a base Attack around 150 to catch up with a move of that power. Tinkaton's move more than makes up for the missing 55 base points.

That does not mean the stat should be ignored, only that it is half of the picture. A very powerful move often comes with a drawback (Gigaton Hammer cannot be used on two turns in a row in the main series games, for instance), and a big stat works with every move the Pokémon learns. What the equivalence gives you is a fair way to weigh them: do not rule out a Pokémon because of one of the two numbers, and put the other one into the calculator before you decide.