What is the most damage you can do in SwSh?

Question

+6 252+ SpA Choice Specs Heat ran Helping Hand Eruption (150 BP) vs. -6 Lvl 1 0 HP / 0- SpD Fluffy (Skill Swapped) Snom in Sun on a critical hit: 1992 - 64608 (18109 - 587345.4%) -- guaranteed OHKO

What is the damage with Forest Curse?

Answer 1

The maximum damage has remained unchanged at 65535 for a long time, and no amount of playing around with Forest's Curse or Tar Shot will let you go beyond that.

For a simple way to hit that absolute maximum on turn 1, you could have a level 1 Tirtouga with minimum SpD (4 points) lead off the battle with a Quick Claw Shell Smash, reducing that stat to 2. Then its opponent, a level 100 Sniper Octillery with Scope Lens and 335 in the Special Attack column (note this is NOT the maximum stat it can have, which is 339) uses Water Spout and gets a critical hit. The damage rolls for that are all over the place, but one of the figures right in the middle hits the unbreakable summit.

Yes, Tirtouga is neutral to Water. Yes, there are possible Shell Smash users like Shuckle or Torkoal who would be weak to water. No, switching the defender to one of those would not be an improvement, nor would giving Octillery a boost item like Choice Specs. Such are the things you have to take into consideration when overflow avoidance shows up on the scene.

Comments

Just out of curiosity, why is 65535 the maximum damage the game can register? Nintendo Switch is most likely 64-bit and the maximum integer value in such a system is around 9.22 Quintillion [(2^64) -1)]. These damage calculations definitely dont seem to break that limit.

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No matter what the processor might be capable of, we know that the variables they use during intermediate steps of damage calculation are only 32-bit. Furthermore, because HP and other stats comfortably fit in 16 bits, we also know that they truncate the final result down to 16 bits so they don't try to perform a subtraction that bleeds over and affects the wrong variable.

If you try to go beyond that, you get silly results like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhjwUJksXv8 , which is a setup I gave to those players so they could demonstrate it on video.

Answer 2

If you could ignore the inherent 16-bit limitation of the damage formula, the most damage that could be done is the following scenario:

+6 613 Atk (achieved by repeated Power Trick + Power Split from 252+ Def Shuckle) @Thick Club Huge Power (Skill Swapped) Alolan Marowak 3x Helping Hand (2 of those are from the opposing pokémon using Instruct) Heat Crash (200 BP) under the effect of Flower Gift
vs. Lvl 1 -6 0- Def @Float Stone Fluffy (Skill Swapped) Wigglytuff (Ice/Bug (from Reflect Type called via Copycat) +Grass (from Forest's Curse)) hidden behind a Substitute (to avoid making contact (because Fluffy)) and under the effects of Tar Shot and Minimize, landing a critical hit in the Sun.

This would have a maximum damage roll of 1,081,085,184.

Answer 3

I gave both of them Rash natures, (+Sp.Atk, -Sp.Def) so my answers will be different than yours.

In order to find what the damage would be with Forest's Curse, all you have to do is multiply the damage by 2.

+6 252+ SpA Choice Specs Heatran Helping Hand Eruption (150 BP) vs. -6 Lvl 1 0 HP / 0- SpD Fluffy Snom in Sun on a critical hit: 752-59912 (6836.3 - 544654.5%) -- guaranteed OHKO

544654.5 x 2 = 1,089,309%. Which for a Level 1 Snom with 11 HP is 119,823.99 damage.

Of course the maximum amount of damage the game can understand is 65535, and after that you will reach an overflow.

Comments

544654.5 is a percentage, not a damage total.