Just caught my first Lapras!
Lv.21 Lapras CP 1712 Frost Breath/Ice Beam 65% IVs
Is Ice Beam as good as Blizzard?
Will it be worth powering up?
I am level 23.
Nice catch!
-No, IVs do not matter very much (especially in the case of elite pokemon like Lapras, Snorlax, and Dragonite).
-Yes, Ice Beam is pretty good (especially for defending), though really there are no bad Lapras movesets.
- I wouldn't hesitate to make this guy your buddy and power it up. It might be several months before you find another one!
Okay, so firstly, congrats on catching a Lapras :)
Personally for attacking I don't mind sacrificing the raw dps of Blizzard for Ice Beam, since if I'm using Blizzard/Fire Blast/Hydro Pump/ Thunder then I want to wait until the enemy defender uses their charge move so that I can safely use them. Problem with this, is that I am wasting energy build up I could have potentially gotten if I had gone all out.
Whereas with Ice Beam/Flamethrower/Thunderbolt, they're quicker so I can sometimes fit them inbetween slow quick moves, and also if I have 1 charged up, then I am not wasting any energy whilst dodging until the enemy Pokemon uses their charge move.
IV-wise, 65% is not great, and since it's only Lv21, you can (if you're lucky) hatch a stronger lapras. However it is certainly usable.
As for powering it up, well how available are Shellder and Cloyster in your area, because if they're common then I'd say make at that as your primary Ice type attacker (assuming you haven't) simply because you'll be able to keep on powering it up without running out of candy
Blizzard is 3.9s compared to Ice Beam's 3.65s, it's not significant enough to warrant losing a third of your charge move damage in Lapras' case.
Sure for other Pokemon it applies, for example Body Slam vs Hyper Beam, Solar Beam vs Petal Blizzard or Leaf Blade because there is a significant difference in move cooldown and the lower cooldown move is short enough to allow dodging, but Ice Beam is on the longer side of 50 energy moves that I just see it as a weak 100 energy move.
Yeah, it's true that the time savings that come from using IB are minimal. OTOH, I think there are some other benefits to using 2 bar special attacks (e.g., you're less likely to cap out your energy bar and thus "waste" some energy you would have otherwise gained from your primary attack), and at the very least it's a different playstyle feel that might appeal to some people. That all said, I think IB is definitely a more defensive-oriented move than Blizz.
Fuck the IV circlejerk. Even ones with Dragon Pulse, the weakest charge move would still be worth powering up, because Laprases are rare enough that you don't koow when you'll find a better one. That could be months, years, maybe even never, who knows if you're still playing Pokemon Go later on down the line.
Dragon Pulse isn't as good as the other two moves, but it's not Twister / Bulldoze levels of bad. A Lapras is still a Lapras at the end of the day. It's a bit like Hyper Beam on Dragonite. Technically the worst move but still a decent move.
IVs are already the least important factor in determining a Pokemon's effectiveness - moveset and species are more important - and make even less of a difference the higher the base stats of a Pokemon, because IVs are simply additions to base stats, which means that having Pokemon with high base stats is far more important than having a Pokemon with good IVs. A Lapras with 0 IVs will still outperform many Pokemon that have the maximum 45 IVs.
Ice Beam isn't as good as Blizzard, but Blizzard has the 4th highest DPS of charge moves and high damage, which is important on charge moves for increasing your overall DPS. Cross Chop technically has the highest DPS but it won't increase overall DPS as much because it's damage is lower, but that's another topic.
There are lots of good moves that would be worse in comparison to Blizzard. That doesn't make them bad though.
There are so many more Lapras that could have been worse than yours. People who think that Pokemon require 36/45 IVs to be usable are deluded. Pokemon with IVs lower than those are not unusable, they're a couple percentage points less in effectiveness.
Yes if you hatch a Lapras from an egg it will have at least 10 in all IVs but who knows how long that'll take, and even if you're fortunate to have that happen, it still has to have a good moveset, and even if it does, the first Lapras that is weaker is not unusable at all. It's not like you can't bring both to gym battles, or hold more gyms. If that does happen, then you simply stop powering up your current Lapras until the hatched one reaches level 30.
However the most likely scenario is that you don't get a better Lapras and by the time you do, the first one would have probably recouped it's stardust cost. It "only" takes 62 candies and 70k dust to get it to 30, and by the time you reach 30 you'll probably have at least 100 candies from walking it as a buddy, so if you do hatch a Lapras from an egg, which will also give a bunch of candies, you'll still probably have enough to power up the new one up to 30 too.
It's because I'm getting really jaded reading all these typical circlejerk responses about IVs that I know are going to appear, especially on Snorlax, Dragonite or Lapras.
If someone wants the best Pokemon possible - with good moveset and IVs, more power to them, that's their choice. But trying to force their ideals onto other people, saying that sub-80 is unusable and that sort of thing just rubs me the wrong way.
Now newer players are coming in thinking that not having 15 def means that your Pokemon's taking like 5 extra damage per hit and not having 15 attack means you're doing no damage and that sort of thing.
I specifically remember one question where a guy had a bunch of Growlithes, and one of them that he caught was level 30, and had 500 or so Growlithe candies, and some dumbass was telling him not to power it up because it had low IVs, despite having more than enough candies to take a level 1 Growlithe to 40 if he wanted.
Yup. After getting to level 33 I've got all the top tier mons and zero for the criteria of perfect moveset and 93% that many go for, and many people stop powering at diminishing returns. Why not just settle for a 70ish and level it a few more times to make up the difference if cp is that important to them.
Telling someone to wait for a 1 in a million(almost literally) chance is crazy. You seem good at math, you should figure the chance of getting a 10 egg, hatching a 93+ perfect moveset of the Pokemon desired Pokemon. It would be good future reference for posts.
Well getting a 10k egg depends on how fast you can get rid of 2k/5ks. If you only have the infinite incubator then you have to walk 2 or 5 km to have one chance, while if you have 9 incubators up, you've got 9 chances, so the chance to not get a 10k would be the chance to not get a 10k, to the power of 9, and then you just subtract that percentage or decimal from 100 or 1.
e.g. lets say the chance for a 10k is 5% or 0.05. Therefore chance to not get a 10k is 95% or 0.95, so the chance to not get a 10k after getting 9 eggs is 0.95^9 = 0.63, so the chance to get a 10k would be 1 - 0.63 = 0.37 or 37%, but the difference is that having 9 incubators to get rid of 9 eggs means that you only need to walk 5 km most of the time, while having the infinite means you could walk anywhere from 18 to 45km to get rid of 9 eggs.
I would probably have to work out the average distance that you'd have to walk from getting a combination of 2s and 5s to figure out how long you'd need to walk to expect a 10, and that's only for a single 10, still need to work out the probability of getting a Lapras, which depends on distributions of egg outcomes, since I'm pretty sure they're weighted.
The IV part, is figuring out how many permutations of IVs equal 42/45 or more.
Eggs have 10-15 IVs, each stat has 6 outcomes, so 3 different stats means there's 6^3 (216) different IV outcomes from an egg, although I wouldn't know how to go about finding out how many of those equal 42 or more without doing it manually.
You can rule out 11 IVs or below in any stat since 11/15/15 = 41, so it becomes 12-15 which is 4^3 (64) outcomes that we might care about, but I still wouldn't know where to go from there.
Perfect moveset is 1/6 in most cases, 2 quick moves and 3 charge moves = 6 possibilities, and most of the time there's only one moveset considered perfect.
Seems like IV's became overblown when Niantic released the "appraisal" feature. That made it so easy to put too much focus on them. But yeah, it's only a percentage of the overall stat, and im perfectly fine with my 66% snorlax because when you really calculate his numbers, his percentage is 730/745=98%
(700 base stats + 30 iv) = 730 out of a possible 745.
Not too shabby. After all, it's a snorlax.
thank you! you seem to be one of few here that realize this. IVs really do not matter- or not to the extent people believe. yes its a nice way to gage the potential of a pokemon but taking a step back for a moment- a rare pokemon like snorlax/lapras/dragonite is good pretty much always. from the attacking side - as an example. i have dragonites over 3000 some one with ivs as high as 96% one with Ivs as low as 74%...when attacking i hardly notice a difference. Now lets move to the defensive side. guys like lapras snorlax or dragonite are great defenders regardless of moveset or IV. people seem to not realize that a critical metric to think about is the CP that pokemon will get you. what slot in a level10 gym will it get you. will you be able to hop into a top3 spot? with guys like dragonite/gyarados/snorlax even with bad IVs you can take those top spots which is what you want.
Put an even better way. If you throw a lapras in a gym - say its only level6. a level30 lapras even at 65% is still a high cp..its still tough to beat. if somebody is able to kill it along with the rest of that gym..that gym would have collapsed regardless....people just dont get that. if a guy just ripped down a high level gym whether your lapras is 50% or 100% isnt going to change his success. when you get to level35 and everybody you join gyms with are level35 and you need a pokemon that can still hit the top slots or if you have 15 lapras and cant decide which is worth powering up then we can revisit IVs...but thank you for your post. moveset is more important and just understanding the context. lapras is a beast attacker regardless...guy should be happy he has one
IVs matter, but a lot less when it comes to the super-rare pokemon. 65% is above average anyway, so it's by no means bad.
What could be a problem with this Lapras is its moveset. It's sub-par for both offense and defense. You generally want Ice Shard and Ice Beam for defense, while you want Frost Breath and Blizzard for offense. Still, Ice Beam isn't a big downgrade for offense, so you've got a decent offensive Lapras.
Be happy you didn't get a Lapras with Dragon Pulse. I would never spend candy on one with Dragon Pulse.
IVs matter more for pokemon that have lower base stats. Lapras' base stats are already really good, so adding up to 15 to them doesn't change as much as it could for other pokemon. For example, an Alakazam with 15 Stm IV would a bigger relative change than Lapras with 15 Stm IV. Comparing Lapras's base stats, a higher Atk IV or Def IV would generally be better than a higher Stm IV.
Just to add to everyone's excellent points about ivs not being the most important factor, I wanna share my story with my two dragonites. I have two mates who started playing pogo at the same time as me and they've been more committed than me during the early days when dratinis used to spawn at a lake near our in large numbers. They managed to hoard a huge amount of dratini candies (like 500-600ish) whereas I managed about 260. They've been picking out only the highest iv dratinis to evolve, many of which were really low CP. But after evolution they ended up with the worst movesets and decided not to waste their candies powering them up. Thus they waste like 200+ dratini candies evolving dragonites that they don't end up using. I on the other hand decided to evolve a lvl 28 dratini with 71 iv and a lvl 29 dragonnaire with 73 iv, giving me two high level dragonites and both with the best offensive/defensive moveset respectively. So at the end of the day they have 4 dragonites each but only 2 that they actually power up and use, which is the same as me.
Luckily just the other day I caught a lvl 30 dratini at 91 iv. I am now saving up candies to evolve him into a 3000+ dragonite :)
