HP vs. Defense: How Much Is One Worth in the Other?

Snorlax has a base 160 HP and a base 65 Defense. Skarmory has a base 65 HP and a base 140 Defense. The two Pokémon look like opposites, and the instinct is to say that the bulkier one is simply the one with the bigger numbers. But what does 95 base points of Defense buy you, compared with 95 base points of HP?

Both stats work on the same damage: the Defense stat makes each hit smaller, and the HP stat makes the same hit a smaller share of your health bar. They are not measured in the same units, though, and they are not built in the same way, so a point of one is not worth a point of the other. This guide measures the exchange rate.

A note on vocabulary. This guide says "Defense" throughout, but the logic is strictly the same for Defense against physical attacks and for Sp. Def against special attacks: wherever you read Defense, you can read Sp. Def when the attack is special. The calculator switches from one to the other on its own, depending on the category of the attack you pick.

Why one can replace the other

The damage formula guide shows the whole pipeline. For this comparison, what matters is where the defender's stats sit in it:

That gives you the rule behind everything below: two Pokémon lose (about) the same share of their HP when the product HP × Defense is the same. The attacker sits on the other side of the fraction, so it changes how much is lost but not how the two defenders compare with each other. You can verify this with the calculator: change the attacker and the percentages move a lot (from about 46% to over 100% of Snorlax's HP with the attackers I tried), while the answers stay within two or three points of each other.

The catch is that neither stat is the base stat, and the two are not built in the same way. Above all, they end up with very different final values: for the same base stat, an HP stat is much higher than a Defense stat (a base 100 gives 175 HP but only 120 Defense with no Stat Points). That gap is where the whole difference between a base HP point and a base Defense point comes from:

Three things follow from these two lines:

• A point of Defense is worth more than a point of HP. The flat bonus is 75 for HP and only 20 for Defense, so the same one point is a bigger percentage of a Defense stat than of an HP stat. Take a Pokémon with base 100 HP and base 100 Defense and no Stat Points: HP 175, Defense 120, so HP × Defense = 21,000. One more point in HP gives 176 × 120 = 21,120 (+0.6%), while one more point in Defense gives 175 × 121 = 21,175 (+0.8%). So, starting from equal base stats in HP and Defense, putting a point in Defense raises the product HP × Defense more than putting it in HP, and a higher product means more bulk.
• The rate is local. To match a gain of one point in Defense, you need about (HP stat) ÷ (base + SP + 20) points of HP. That is around 1.5 for a balanced Pokémon with no Stat Points and around 1.4 with 32 in each stat, and it is 2.8 for a Pokémon like Snorlax whose Defense is low compared with its HP. Because the ratio changes as a stat grows, a large swap does not follow the same rate as a small one, which is the reason for a calculator.
• The nature is on the Defense side only. A boosting nature multiplies the Defense stat by 1.1, and it has no HP equivalent. In an exchange it cancels out of the result almost entirely, though (see below).

The equivalence calculator

It works in three steps. First describe a real attacker and its move, which sets the damage to take. Then describe the Pokémon under analysis, the real Pokémon you are building a spread for, and the Stat Points it invests in HP and in the defensive stat the move hits. Finally, choose what the Pokémon to compare is: by default the calculator swaps the base HP and the base Defense of the Pokémon under analysis and solves for the other stat, in both directions. The compared Pokémon always has the same species as the one under analysis, so the same typing, ability and item apply to both.

The calculator is exact. Unlike the simplified HP × Defense line above, it runs PokéSpread's full damage engine, with every rounding step and the +2, and it matches Pokémon on the real share of HP lost.

With the default settings, an Incineroar with 32 Attack SP and an Adamant nature using Flare Blitz deals 145 – 172 damage to a Snorlax with no Stat Points in HP or Defense, which is 61.7% to 73.1% of its health bar. If that Snorlax had a base 160 Defense instead of 65, it would only need a base HP of about 37 to take the same share of damage. That is a base HP + Defense total of 197 instead of 225, 28 points less. Conversely, if it had only 65 base HP (the Defense it really has), it would need a base Defense of about 123, a total of 188, which is 37 points less.

In both cases, the Pokémon needs fewer base points in total to be exactly as bulky as the real one. That is the unequal value of the two stats at work: the profile with the big base stat on Defense is cheaper than the one with the big base stat on HP. The exchange rate is not the same in the two cases either: in the first, 95 extra points of Defense replace 123 points of HP, while in the second, 95 fewer points of HP take only 58 points of Defense to make up for. It depends on where you are on each stat, which is exactly what a fixed rule cannot tell you. Switch the attack to a special move and the calculator moves to Sp. Def on its own, which for Snorlax gives a very different picture.

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 defender: base 100 HP, base 100 Defense, no Stat Points and a neutral nature. Each row changes one thing about the defender and shows the base HP it would need to lose the same share of its HP as the reference when hit by the same attack.

Computed with PokéSpread's engine in Singles, with an Adamant Incineroar with 32 Attack SP using Flare Blitz against a typeless defender. The values move by a point or so with the attacker and with rounding.

From that table, four conversions are easy to remember:

• A point of base Defense is worth roughly 1.2 to 2 points of base HP. Ten points of Defense (100 to 110) are worth 12 points of HP, and 20 points (100 to 120) are worth 23. The rate climbs as the Defense gets lower: losing 20 points (100 to 80) takes 35 points of HP to make up for, and losing 40 (100 to 60) takes 86, a little over 2 per point.
• A positive nature on Defense is worth about 15 base HP points for a Pokémon around base 100 HP, and a negative one costs about 19. The figure follows the HP, not the Defense: the nature multiplies the bulk by 1.1 whatever the Defense is, and matching a +10% takes roughly 9% of the HP stat. It is about 12 base HP points around base 60 HP, 15 around base 100 and 21 around base 160, and it stays at 15 or 16 at base 100 HP whether the Defense is 60, 100 or 150.
• 32 Defense SP are worth about 36 base HP points for a Pokémon around base 100 HP and 100 Defense, and 16 SP are worth about 19. Unlike the nature, this one depends on both stats: with base 100 HP, it is 49 points at base 60 Defense and 28 at base 150 Defense, because 32 SP are a bigger share of a smaller Defense stat.
• The nature almost does not change a swap in the calculator. Giving the Snorlax of the calculator a Bold nature instead of Bashful moves the first answer from 37 to 37 and the second from 123 to 122. The nature multiplies the Defense of both the real and the compared Pokémon by the same amount, so it mostly cancels out. Stat Points do not cancel out as cleanly: with 32 Defense SP, the same swap gives 55 and 146 for Snorlax.

Stat Points: how many in HP equal a given number in Defense?

The base stats of a Pokémon are fixed, but the Stat Points are yours to place, so the exchange rate that matters most when you build a spread is the one between HP SP and Defense SP. The table below uses the same reference defender (base 100/100, neutral nature) and shows how many Defense SP match a given investment in HP, and the other way round.

Same method and same defender as the table above, with the other stat left at 0 SP. The 33 and 46 are above the cap of 32 Stat Points: no real Pokémon can reach them, they only show how much a Defense investment is worth.

For a balanced Pokémon, one Defense SP is worth roughly 1.3 to 1.5 HP SP against a single category of attacks. For a Pokémon whose base HP is much bigger than its base Defense, the gap is wider, since the same Stat Point is a larger percentage of a smaller stat. This is only half of the picture, though, because HP also protects against the other category. That is the subject of the second case below.

If you want to know how many Stat Points your Pokémon needs against a given attack, rather than how Stat Points compare in general, the Defenses tab of the calculator searches for the minimum investment that survives a hit.

Reading the results: two common cases

"Is a Pokémon with a huge HP and a low Defense as bulky as the opposite?"

Not at equal base stat totals. A Pokémon with a base 160 HP and 65 Defense, like Snorlax, has a physical bulk (HP stat × Defense stat) of 19,975 with no Stat Points. A Pokémon with the profile reversed, 65 HP and 160 Defense, has 25,200, which is 26% more, even though the two profiles add up to the same 225 base points. Defense points are simply worth more than HP points, and the table below shows how much Defense a Pokémon with a given base HP needs in order to be exactly as physically bulky as that Snorlax:

Snorlax at 0 SP and a neutral nature (base 160 HP, base 65 Defense), against a typeless defender, in Singles. The target is the share of HP lost with a physical attack, not the real typing.

So a Pokémon with a base 65 HP, like Skarmory, only needs a base Defense of 123 to be as physically bulky as Snorlax, and it has 140. A base 50 HP such as Toxapex needs 142 and has 152. Both end up physically sturdier than Snorlax despite having far less base HP (65 and 50, against 160).

"But HP works against both categories, doesn't it?"

Yes, and that is the point the calculator does not show by itself, because it compares one defensive stat at a time. A point of Defense improves the bulk against physical attacks only, and a point of Sp. Def against special attacks only, while a point of HP improves both. The table below gives the bulk of four Pokémon in each category, with no Stat Points and a neutral nature.

Stats at level 50 with no Stat Points and a neutral nature. The overall figure simply adds the two bulks, which treats physical and special hits as equally likely: it is a quick index, not a prediction. Averaging the damage taken instead of the bulk gives the same ranking for these four Pokémon. Types, abilities and items are not included, and they can change the picture a lot: Skarmory's typing, for example, makes it a very different defender from Snorlax.

Snorlax has the lowest physical bulk of the four and by far the highest special bulk. Skarmory is close to the reverse, with a good physical bulk and the lowest special bulk. The last column adds the two, which gives one number to compare the overall bulk of Pokémon with very different profiles: Snorlax comes first (50,525) despite its physical weakness, ahead of Garganacl (45,500), Toxapex (41,750) and Skarmory (35,000). That is what HP buys you: Snorlax's 160 base HP is the foundation of both of its numbers, and its weak base Defense is what holds the physical one down. Which one you should favour depends on what you expect to be hit by, and the equivalence only tells you how to compare the options for a single category.