Part 86: Side Note #07: Headbutt, Badge Boosts and Critical Hits

Side Notes 07: Headbutts, Badge Boosts and Critical Hits

There are a number of small trees dotted around the overworld and with the new move Headbutt, there's a chance a Pokemon will fall out of them with either an 80% chance, a 50% chance, or a 10% chance of a wild encounter. Some Pokemon can only be caught in this way, so how exactly does it all work?

Firstly, the Pokemon that can be found differ on the area. While Gold and Silver only had two distinct groups, they were split fairly evenly across the Johto region. With the "Mountain" group covering Routes 29-33 and 42-46 and contained Spearow, Aipom and Heracross, while the "Forest" group covered Azalea Town, Ilex Forest, Lake of Rage, Routes 26 and 27 and 34-39. It contained Caterpie, Metapod, Butterfree, Weedle, Kakuna, Beedrill, Exeggcute and Pineco. The only way to find Pineco and Heracross was on rare trees, but you had no way of telling the tree you had chosen was one of those until you encounter them, since otherwise the encounters are exactly the same.

For Crystal, they changed it up to six different groups, more split across the areas, though there's not much of huge difference between them. The first group is Azalea Town, Route 33 and Route 42, consisting of Pokemon from the Mountain group of Gold and Silver, with the addition of Ekans, so if you know if you've found a rare tree or not. The next group is the one exclusive to Ilex Forest and contains most of the Pokemon from the Forest group, excluding Exeggcute, but including Hoothoot and Noctowl.

The third group is on the Lake of Rage and Route 43 and is only the place to Headbutt for Venonat, while also having Exeggcute, Hoothoot and Pineco. The fourth group is on Route 26, 27 and 32 and is a mash up of a few of the other grous, containing Ekans, Exeggcute and Hoothoot or Pineco depending on the encounter tree. The fifth group is on Routes 29-31 and 34-39 and is the same as the fourth group, except it has Ledyba and Spinarak instead of Ekans. Finally, the sixth group is on Routes 44-46 and is exactly the same as Mountain group from Gold and Silver.

So that's all the Pokemon you can find, how exactly does the game determine if the tree has an 80%, 50% or 10% chance of finding a Pokemon? Firstly, through a formula, the tree is given an index of numbers between 0 and 9. And depending on your trainer ID, half of these indices will correspond to trees with a moderate encounter rate (80% and 50%), while the other half is for rare trees (10%). The formula is as follows:



X and Y refer to the tree's position on the map from its westmost and northmost edge, respectively, allowing for different encounters of different trees. However, due to how a tree's position is always fixed, we can game this by moving only on one specific axis, simplifying the formula to this:



Where Z is the fixed axis, while n is the axis that is traversed. This shows that if you're only moving along one axis, moving from one tree to the next changes the tree index by (z+1)/5, therefore, the closer a row or column is to the edge of the map, the slower the indices of those trees will change as you move from one tree to the next, giving you more consistent results.

The chance of encounter from a Headbutt tree is determined from the trainer ID using a "pivot" index via:



If a trees index matches the pivot index, then the encounter chance is 80%, while for the next four indices, the encounter chance is 50%. And the final five indices have the 10% encounter chance. Hope that made sense, cause it is a bit awkward to understand.

Badge Boosts

In the first three generations, there are four badges in the game that boost a certain stat. In Gens 1 and 2, this boost is applied at the start of battle, multiplying that stat by 9/8, or 1.125%. Unlike in Gen 1, where the boost is reapplied every single time your stats changed (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), it's only applied just the once in Gen 2. However, there's 2 more quirks that apply in the generation. Firstly, if you get a critical hit and your offensive stat used for the attack is less than or equal to the opponent's defensive stat, then all badge boosts are ignored.

And there's also a second, secret badge boost that boosts the power of certain types by 12.5%. This is a similar boost to STAB, which is a 50% boost. The type that's boosted depends on what badges you've obtained, so getting the Zephyr Badge boosts Flying moves and getting the Hive Badge boosts Bug moves. This applies on top of STAB and on top of the four badge boosts, so with lots of badges, you become quite the terror. With 16 badges for 16 types, only Dark is left out of this boost. These boosts are applied after weather modifiers, but before STAB. And of course, badge boosts do not apply in link battles.

Critical Hits

Changing from Gen 1 is the critical hit chance. No longer is it based on your Speed, to the chagrin of a few select Pokemon, but is instead a flat 6.25% for most moves. The damage is also no longer based on your level, instead being a flat x2 multiplier. You can increase crit chance by boosting your critical hit ratio and the improved chances are thus:



There are a number of ways to increase your critical hit ratio and they're divided into classes. Effects do stack if they're part of different classes, otherwise, only one effect will take place. The first class is using a move with a high critical hit ratio, boosting it by +2, meaning these moves have a flat 25% chance to crit. Next class is holding an item. The Scope Lens boosts it by +1, whereas the Stick (for Farfetch'd) and the Lucky Punch (for Chansey) boost it by +2. The final class for Gen 2 is using either a Dire Hit or the move Focus Energy, which is +1. Since those are the same class, they cannot stack, but the maximum way to boost your crit rate, is to use Dire Hit on a Farfetch'd holding a Stick and then use Slash, giving you +5 and a 50% chance to crit. Not that it matters since anything over +4 makes no difference to the chance, but still, it's the best we got.

Finally, there's a weird quirk to critical hits that might be a glitch. If the defender's defensive stats are the more than or equal to the attacker's attacking stats when a critical hit occurs, then all boosts to stats will be ignored, including the attack drop from Burn as well as the defense boost from Reflect and Light Screen. So for an example, if you got a crit while you have +1 to Attack, but the opponent has +2 to Defense, then the crit will do double damage as usual, but a normal attack will only do 3/4 the damage. This is at least a lot better than critical hits rolling over 999 and doing hilariously low damage in the previous generation, but it's still a weird way or doing it that'll change in Gen 3.