The Astonishing Mathematics of Pokémon Damage: A 28-Year Retrospective

Have you ever pondered what the maximum damage you have inflicted with a Pokémon attack was? Well, one YouTuber has ascertained the highest conceivable damage of any attack across every generation of the Pokémon franchise.

Unlike many other RPGs, Pokémon games do not explicitly reveal how much damage you inflict. You can theoretically calculate it, as there exists a mathematical formula, but the game may not display these numbers in your interface. Nuzlockers and others who enjoy Pokémon challenges often have tools to calculate damage, but none are designed for inquiries like this.

Meet King The Success, a YouTuber who embarked on a mission to discover the utmost damage possible in each generation. You might think you simply need the highest base power and a Pokémon with superior attack stats to achieve this, but it turns out that various multipliers play a far more significant role than just the base power.

Factors such as Swords Dance, Rain Dance, STAB, and type advantages all factor into the computations. For Generation 1, the most damage you can generate is with a Dodrio using Mimic to learn Swords Dance, followed by using Sky Attack on a Paras. This results in STAB and a 4x weakness to Flying for Paras, amounting to an astonishing 219,048 damage. However, there’s a miscalculation due to a Generation 1 glitch where critical hits disregard all stat modifications, including obvious ones, so the true value would actually be half this, 109,525 — still remarkable.

That may appear to be a substantial amount, but Generation 2 overshadows it. With some setup, a Rhydon using Rollout can inflict 7,621,632 damage on a Yanma. Talk about excessive force. Generation 3 escalates this strategy even more, ultimately achieving 81,865,764 damage. However, this figure is potentially inaccurate because it is predicated on the premise that in Generation 3, Pokémon eggs hatch at level one — a feature that didn’t occur until Generation 4, suggesting the actual damage may be considerably lower.

There appears to be one other slight error where King The Success claims field-altering moves increase their respective type’s attack power by 1.5x, while in Generation 9, it is actually 1.3x.

Apart from these minor inaccuracies, the figures seem fairly credible. I can’t definitively state which generation boasts the highest potential damage or what the true figure is, but it’s substantial, so prepare yourself.

In the meantime, why not check out our ranking of the top Pokémon games? It’s a tough choice between Generation 3 and 4 for me, as I enjoy both, but I can confidently say that Hoenn is the best region.

I’m Issy, a freelancer who you can now regularly find here covering news on GamesRadar. I’ve always had a passion for gaming, but I learned to write about them while pursuing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After graduation, I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news department at Dot Esports. Now you might catch me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many other outlets. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I primarily play on my PS5. I’m currently tackling my backlog and thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2.