I didn’t really get into pokémon beyond Silver and Yellow (yay for Gameboy Colour), and so didn’t really get into the whole breeding, natures, IVs, etc.
How important is it to have a pokémon with good IVs, and how important is it to train them with a good set of EVs?
ie if I catch a pokémon with unremarkable/bad IVs, and then level it up solely through the level trainer (and thus only get HP EVs), would that pokémon be incredibly underpowered compared to a pokémon with decent/good IVs that was trained to get the proper EVs? Or would the difference be relatively minor and unimportant if you’re not planning on being competitive (but actually be acceptable for normal gameplay)?
They are extremely powerful with the right spreads. If I recall correctly, at level 100 1 IV roughly equates to a single stat point. Since there are 6 stats with 31 IVs maximum for each, there can be a 186 point difference when comparing a fully IV trained pokemon to one that has no IVs at all. And if my memory doesn’t fail me once again, every 4 EVs can give your pokemon a single stat point at level 100, so taking in account the cap of 510 EVs (ignoring the 255 cap for a single stat as that doesn’t matter in this case), that’s 127 stat points. Adding both up, we get a grand total of:
313 whole stat points at level 100.
Pretty hefty boost, but of course you’re always gonna have these so the difference could be a lot lower, but remember that regarding EVs, wasting them in fields your pokemon doesn’t use is simply wasting the potential of other stats. Keep in mind I’m going off memory though, so I may not be completely correct.
That’s… a pretty high number. Should I be concerned that my pokémon will be underpowered, then, if I’m not careful? And should I be careful about using the level trainer too much?
Eh, not really. Most opponents don’t have EV or IV trained mons. You’ll only really need to min-max them in competitive online. If you use the level trainer too much, you can always reset your evs using berries or the EV resetter and allocate them more accordingly.
Thank goodness for that. And you. 