Pokémon GO has a few basic statistics, such as CP and HP, that define, at least on the surface, how good a Pokémon is at battling in the gyms; however, there are a significant amount of factors that can take identical Pokémon and determine which one has more potential. One is the Individual Values (or IV), which are hidden attack, defense and stamina stats that each Pokémon possesses. The other is move set, which is defined not just by damage per attack, but by damage per second, or DPS. Read on for full guides and calculators for moves and IVs in Pokémon GO!
As stated previously, each Pokémon has three individual values, or IVs; attack, defense, and stamina. Attack determines the base damage that is dealt, and it combines with the attack power of a move to determine the base damage of said move (before taking Pokémon level and type match ups into account).
In the same way, defense determines how much or little damage you take when you get attacked. Stamina determines how quickly you’ll charge special moves when you attack a rival. The higher a stamina rating, the faster the special move will charge up. All three of these stats can vary widely from Pokémon to Pokémon (including between identical Pokémon with the same CP) and, combined with the widely-varying move sets that each Pokémon can have, can majorly affect the way that you do battle.
It has been figured out that specific visible statistics give you a tell as to what your Pokémon’s secret stats, or IVs (individual values) are. Take a Pokémon’s species, CP, HP, Stardust cost for one power-up, position of the marker on the CP arc in your Pokémon’s profile, and your trainer level, and you can figure out what the individual values are. Each of the three IVs will be a number in between 0 and 15, with 15 being the highest and 0 being the worst. So when you see a 15/15/15 Pokémon, keep it around as it has an EXTREMELY high battle potential.
The math is complicated to figure out the individual values, but luckily, many users from The Silph Road have done the data-mining and math to figure out the calculations and make automatic IV calculators. You can find various automatic IV calculators here, here, and here. Use these to figure out the IVs of every new Pokémon that you catch.
With the knowledge of the individual values, the science of figuring out which Pokémon to keep and which ones to transfer becomes far more complicated than just keeping the highest-CP examples and tossing the lowest-CP examples. The moves of a Pokémon play just as much of a determining factor (if not more of one) into how effective your Pokémon is in battle, and each move has two hidden statistics. While the damage is visible, the speed and DPS of a move are invisible.
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