All About Effort Values (EV's)
EVs, Effort Values, or Effort Points, are a little like Experience Points: they are obtained by fainting opposing Pokemon. The main difference between Experience Points and EVs is that no matter what level of Pokemon you battle, you’ll always get the same number of EVs. What the EVs depend on is the species of Pokemon.
For example:
Battling a level 5 Zubat may get you 30 Exp. Points while battling a level 20 Zubat would give you a few hundred. But, though the levels and Exp. Points gained are different, the Pokemon that battled either Zubat would still get 1 Speed EV.
EVs come from battling any Pokemon and are gained by any Pokemon that gets Experience Points in a battle. Different Pokemon have different numbers of EVs for different stats. Like that Zubat which had 1 Speed EV or say, an Empoleon which gives 3 Special Attack EVs.
EV training is simply battling the right Pokemon that gives the right EVs. So now, onto the numbers side of things:
So, what do these E-Vs do, you ask? Well there is a limit to how many you can get on one Pokemon, 510. Once a Pokemon has 510 EVs, they can gain no more. Having 4 EVs for one stat will mean 1 more stat point that Pokemon has at level 100. That bit took a few times to make sense to me so I’ll throw in another example here:
If you have a Pokemon with zero EVs at level 100, its Speed might be 200. But if that same Pokemon got 4 Speed EVs before it reached level 100, then it’s speed would be 201.
So for every 4 EVs you get in a stat, that stat gets 1 extra point at level 100. Make sense? Excellent.
Those more maths-able of you reading this might by now have realized that 510, the number of EVs each Pokemon can get, is not cleanly divisible by 4. That is why we generally just discredit the remaining two EVs in an EV spread.
So 508 EVs to distribute around a Pokemon’s stats for a potential overall stat gain of 127 points at level 100. So, can’t you just dump all of those EVs into making something super-duper-fast or defensive? The answer is no, you can’t. There is a limit to how many EVs each stat can get which is 255.
Again, those more maths-able in the audience may have realized that we have another number not cleanly divisible by four. 255 / 4 = 63.75. So, what we do is just say that the maximum for a stat is 252, discrediting, though not completely, those other three EVs.
If you have the EVs spread out with two stats getting the maximum bonus, then you end up with 508 – 252 – 252 which equals 4, one stat point worth, which is where those extra EVs from the 255 went to. You may be saying, “But 2 * (255-252) leaves us with 6 EVs!”. Well, you’d be right but two of those 6 are the 2 we discredit to get 508 from 510 because 6 isn’t divisible by 4.
Wow, it really doesn’t feel like that would be too easy to understand for anyone completely new to this so I’ll put in as simple terms as possible:
We only put 252 of the possible 255 EVs into a stat because 255 isn’t divisible by 4. Because we don’t use the maximum, we have 4 EVs left over to go to a third stat. But remember, this is only when the EVs are spread over 2 stats getting the maximum.
Hopefully that kind of cleared up the numbers in EVs without being overly-complicated. It is very simple really.
