Heal Locking
Jul 18, 2011 19:07:04 GMT -8
Post by t3h Icy on Jul 18, 2011 19:07:04 GMT -8
Heal Locking (that's what I call it anyway) is when a recovery move fails. This includes Recover, Rest and Softboiled. This glitch occurs when a Pokemon is at exactly 255 HP or 511 HP below its maximum, and since RBY checks the HP using modulo instead of the actual values, the game will misread your Pokemon being at full health. This can easily change matches if it happens at an untimely moment.
So let's abuse it! How can we take off 255 or 511 HP off a Pokemon exactly? First off, 511 is a huge amount of damage and only Snorlax and Chansey have both HP amounts where they can have recovery moves fail. Doing 511 damage though, you may as well be KOing, so let's focus on 255.
The way to do this is to use set-damage moves, but unfortunately, none of these help too much. 255 can be reached using 3 Seismic Tosses or Night Shades with a L85 Pokemon, but when the opponent notices the HP lost if they hadn't already, they should pick up on your plan immediately. This works wonders on noobs though, but you have to be careful using a much more fragile, slow and weaker Pokemon. Even if you could pull this off regularly, it may not be worth it, as you're still going one for one.
Another alternative way is using a L95 with Seismic Toss/Night Shade and then 4 Dragon Rages, but lol.
One easy way however is against Alakazam. With 313 HP, Poison will do 19 damage per turn, and across 3 turns (2 with Toxic), that does 57 damage. With two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades from a L99, this will lock Alakazam, but Alakazam may be inclined to heal, and the additional Poison damage will break the lock, only working for one turn overall.
So there is no easy way to cause Heal Locks, but how about just general damage with set damage moves?
Two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades will do 200 damage, leaving only 55 more damage to deal. To get 55 damage in, your following attack has to do anywhere from 55 to 55.9999... damage, making 55.5 the middle value. Let's also assume the random number from 217 to 255 does exactly 55.5 damage when it lands on 236 (the middle random value). This means that your max damage (255 random value) is 59.96822034... and this can be the value for ANY attack against ANY Pokemon. The value doesn't have to be that accurate though and 60ish is fine. So let's assume 60 is our max damage for our experimental attack.
This allows random values 234, 235, 236 and 237 to do 55 damage. Unfortunately 238 would give exactly 56 (which won't heal lock), so instead, we would want slightly less than 60. This gives 5 out of 39 (12.8%) possible values locking the opponent, which is pretty decent for completely disabling the opponent's healing abilities.
Now this example was just for making 55 damage around the 236 random value area work, and we could definitely be doing 55 damage with 217 or 255 too. So here's a chart:
The horizontal axis represents the 39 random values, and the vertical axis represents the maximum damage your attack can do. The red line is the maximum your attack can do at that point to do 55 damage and the blue line is the minimum that attack can do to do 55 damage. Basically at the far left, you can see at 1, the red line at a little over 65.75 and blue line at about 64.67. That means anything between these two values that get the random value 217 will do 55 damage.
To use this, just make a horizontal line, representing the maximum damage your attack does. Between the blue and red lines, each vertical one it crosses means that's a random value that will allow you to do 55 damage, thus giving you the lock. And as you can see (unless you got confused), the most 55 damage values you can get from any attack is 5. So at best, after two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades, you have a 5/39 chance to do 55 more damage to lock them. All this, while you could be doing tons of other things, the opponent can heal, switch, etc. And even if you do lock the opponent, if they switch into damage later without dying (common with Chansey), they can heal again.
So not only is finding attacks to do the right amount of damage a job of its own, it's not really worth it.
How about one Seismic Toss/Night Shade with 155 damage? Here's the chart for that:
This one is even more strict as with larger numbers, the random values will make the damage spread a lot more. With 155, you have maximum two random values to give you that damage. Not great, and you still have to get that first 100 in.
How about a lock in 1 turn? Here's 255:
This is even more strict and still at a maximum of two random values, but good luck finding max damage values to that accuracy.
To cut short on the next bit, I've checked several Poison and Self-Confusion damages and nothing seems to come up for a nice setup.
So with everything said, heal locking is a fantastic bonus if you can get it, but it's luck-based to get and there is no known, viable way in getting it in a planned manner. On top, it's very easy to work around, but if you have a dangerous Pokemon out and the opponent can't switch, it could potentially cost them the game.
So let's abuse it! How can we take off 255 or 511 HP off a Pokemon exactly? First off, 511 is a huge amount of damage and only Snorlax and Chansey have both HP amounts where they can have recovery moves fail. Doing 511 damage though, you may as well be KOing, so let's focus on 255.
The way to do this is to use set-damage moves, but unfortunately, none of these help too much. 255 can be reached using 3 Seismic Tosses or Night Shades with a L85 Pokemon, but when the opponent notices the HP lost if they hadn't already, they should pick up on your plan immediately. This works wonders on noobs though, but you have to be careful using a much more fragile, slow and weaker Pokemon. Even if you could pull this off regularly, it may not be worth it, as you're still going one for one.
Another alternative way is using a L95 with Seismic Toss/Night Shade and then 4 Dragon Rages, but lol.
One easy way however is against Alakazam. With 313 HP, Poison will do 19 damage per turn, and across 3 turns (2 with Toxic), that does 57 damage. With two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades from a L99, this will lock Alakazam, but Alakazam may be inclined to heal, and the additional Poison damage will break the lock, only working for one turn overall.
So there is no easy way to cause Heal Locks, but how about just general damage with set damage moves?
Two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades will do 200 damage, leaving only 55 more damage to deal. To get 55 damage in, your following attack has to do anywhere from 55 to 55.9999... damage, making 55.5 the middle value. Let's also assume the random number from 217 to 255 does exactly 55.5 damage when it lands on 236 (the middle random value). This means that your max damage (255 random value) is 59.96822034... and this can be the value for ANY attack against ANY Pokemon. The value doesn't have to be that accurate though and 60ish is fine. So let's assume 60 is our max damage for our experimental attack.
This allows random values 234, 235, 236 and 237 to do 55 damage. Unfortunately 238 would give exactly 56 (which won't heal lock), so instead, we would want slightly less than 60. This gives 5 out of 39 (12.8%) possible values locking the opponent, which is pretty decent for completely disabling the opponent's healing abilities.
Now this example was just for making 55 damage around the 236 random value area work, and we could definitely be doing 55 damage with 217 or 255 too. So here's a chart:
The horizontal axis represents the 39 random values, and the vertical axis represents the maximum damage your attack can do. The red line is the maximum your attack can do at that point to do 55 damage and the blue line is the minimum that attack can do to do 55 damage. Basically at the far left, you can see at 1, the red line at a little over 65.75 and blue line at about 64.67. That means anything between these two values that get the random value 217 will do 55 damage.
To use this, just make a horizontal line, representing the maximum damage your attack does. Between the blue and red lines, each vertical one it crosses means that's a random value that will allow you to do 55 damage, thus giving you the lock. And as you can see (unless you got confused), the most 55 damage values you can get from any attack is 5. So at best, after two Seismic Tosses/Night Shades, you have a 5/39 chance to do 55 more damage to lock them. All this, while you could be doing tons of other things, the opponent can heal, switch, etc. And even if you do lock the opponent, if they switch into damage later without dying (common with Chansey), they can heal again.
So not only is finding attacks to do the right amount of damage a job of its own, it's not really worth it.
How about one Seismic Toss/Night Shade with 155 damage? Here's the chart for that:
This one is even more strict as with larger numbers, the random values will make the damage spread a lot more. With 155, you have maximum two random values to give you that damage. Not great, and you still have to get that first 100 in.
How about a lock in 1 turn? Here's 255:
This is even more strict and still at a maximum of two random values, but good luck finding max damage values to that accuracy.
To cut short on the next bit, I've checked several Poison and Self-Confusion damages and nothing seems to come up for a nice setup.
So with everything said, heal locking is a fantastic bonus if you can get it, but it's luck-based to get and there is no known, viable way in getting it in a planned manner. On top, it's very easy to work around, but if you have a dangerous Pokemon out and the opponent can't switch, it could potentially cost them the game.
