All You Need To Know About Pokemon Moves

In Pokemon world, moves are the collection of actions and skills for Pokemon during battles. During my 7 years of gaming experience, I have learned that moves are super important because they are how your Pokemon connects with other Pokemon both in-game and playing with your friends.

Each move has a unique characteristic like power, type, accuracy and whatnot. Let’s take a closer look at them.d

1. Categories of Moves

Moves are trio buddies, splitting into three categories: Physical, Special and Status. This plays a role in deciding how much damage has been done by a move and if it affects the opponent’s stats or status. Here is what you need to know about them.

Physical Moves

Moves where you are going to make physical contact with opponents’ Pokemon like punching, kicking or scratching. For damage calculations your attack stats and the defensive stats of the opponent. is considered.

Moves where you are going to make physical contact with opponents’ Pokemon like punching, kicking or scratching. For damage calculations your attack stats and the defensive stats of the opponent. is considered.

Special Moves

Energy-based attacks like  Thunderbolt, Special abilities like flamethrower and elemental power are all about special moves. Here damage is calculated by looking at attackers’ special attack stats and opponents’ special defensive stats.

Status Moves

Status moves don’t offer direct damage, instead have various effects on the opponent’s Pokemon like sleep, paralysis, healing, and lowering stats. Recover, Toxic and sword distance are some of the status moves.
Here’s a complete series on moves

Following are a series of video series by Lockstin & Gnonggin,  explained

2. Moves Mechanics

These are the set of rules for all the Pokemons that explain how every move works during battles. These rules cover stuff like how much damage a move can do, how often it makes a hit and what special abilities it has. Understanding mechanics is as important as knowing how to play Pokemon. Let’s dive into some important mechanics.Following is a great series by “Lockstin & Gnoggin” explaining all the pokemon series in detail.

Move Power

Move power as a numerical value represents how strong a move is, showing how much the opponent’s Pokemon is hurt by a move. Moves with higher power hurt the most but sometimes moves with higher power show lower accuracy or power points. 

Move Accuracy

It is about the likelihood of a move hitting a target or doing maximum hurt. This is expressed in percentage. A move with 100% move accuracy will guarantee you hit the target.

Power Points

Power points referred to as PP in the games show how many times a Pokemon can use a move in a battle. Each move comes with a specific number of PP and that varies from move to move. However, PP decreases by 1 every time Pokemon use a move. Once you run out of PP, you can no longer use that move until you restore PP by using items or moves like PP up

Priority

In Pokemon’s world, priority is the order in which the moves are executed during different turns in gameplay. Moves with higher priority levels go first then turns of lower priority levels come.

3. Learning Moves

When a Pokemon acquires a new move or replaces an existing move it is called a learning move. Let’s see how you can learn moves.

By evolving or Leveling up

As a Pokemon gathers experience points or levels up in the game it automatically learns some new moves. These moves are generally related to Pokemon’s evolution line or specific species.

Technical Machine and Hidden Machine moves

There are some hidden moves in Items called TMs and HM. These moves are taught specifically to the Pokemon by the move tutor for some fee or some conditions. Trainers can permanently teach the moves in TMs. HMs are mostly about field moves. It is important to note here that an HM move cannot be forgotten until replaced by another HM move.

Egg Moves

As the name suggests, these are the moves that a Pokemon inherits from its parents during breeding in Pokemon Nursery. It can inherit them from both parents resulting in a unique move that can’t be obtained from leveling up or TMs HMs.

Special Methods

There are these methods that allow the user to teach a Pokemon new moves without any restrictions. These are beneficial in customising a special Pokemon.

4. Move Deleter

Unless you know only one move, move deleter allows you to forget the moves that you currently know and make space for new moves. This is typically used to unlearn an HM move that cannot be overwritten by a new move or by level-up.This service is provided by an NPC which is a non-playable character such as trainers. Sometimes this is for free but sometimes it costs some fee or some conditions must be fulfilled.

5. Best Moves By Type

When used strategically there are some of the best moves by type in Pokemon which can be beneficial. Here is the list of some of them. 

Normal Type:

It includes all the basic Pokemon moves like Hyper beam that can deal with damage and is of high power. Return is another normal type of move that power increases as the Pokemon friendship level increases.

Fire Type

Then there are fire-type moves like flamethrower which is a special type of move that causes burns. Fireblasts cause high damage but it is of low accuracy. Overheat is yet another fire-type move in the gameplay.

Water Type

Moves like surf, scald and hydro pump fall under the category of water type. These all are high-power moves that ensure decent damage to your opponent’s Pokemon. Some of them are used for Pokemon’s reliability.

Electric Type

Thunderwave is used to paralyze the opponent’s Pokemon and many other moves like a thunderbolt for special attack and a volt switch for switching out after attack are examples of the electric type. Following is a detailed video on learning Electric Type of Moves!

Psychic Type

As the name says. It deals with the minds of both the users and opponents. Like with Psychic, you can make an opponent lower on its defense level and with Calm Mind you can boost your attack and defense stats.

Final Words

In a nutshell, different moves come with unique strengths. It is important to choose the right move for success on the battlefield. Understanding moves and how to use them is crucial for a trainer. These are the features that make a trainer stand out.