u/Revverb

I'm running into situations, particularly regarding the Elite Four, where I swear that my Pokemon are numerically disadvantaged somehow. Enemy Pokemon keep surviving things they shouldn't, and my Pokemon keep going down to things they should be tanking no problem.

From what I understand, and from what I've heard before, enemy trainer Pokemon in this game have no EV's or IV's. My difficulty is set on Standard, with the exception of EV gains being disabled for my Pokemon, because I prefer both sides to be on even ground.

But just in my current battle, my Iron Hands (Adamant, Quark Drive +Atk) hit Melony's Articuno with a Thunderpunch, and it did just under a quarter of it's HP. I'd been raising my eyebrows at some of the hits beforehand in this battle, but that Thunderpunch not instantly sending Articuno to the shadow realm really surprised me. I went ahead and whipped out a damage calculator, and it looks like a single boosted Thunderpunch from my Pokemon, even at 1 Atk IV, should be doing 150%~ of its HP.

What gives? Do EV/IV's get re-enabled for the Elite Four? Are they present in all the trainers? Should I have my EV's enabled? I kind of figured that EV's being enabled would give me an unfair advantage but I don't wanna be without them if the enemy is getting (obviously perfectly optimized) EV's themselves.

Edit: It happened a second time. Iron Hands Close Combat vs a Rotom-Freeze, and it lived with 15% HP. And yes, I'm calculating with Snow. Absolutely unreal. There's no way enemy trainers don't have min/maxed EV's and IV's.

I'm getting kind of sick of being at an absurd disadvantage from turn 0 during boss battles if I'm not lucky enough to just happen to run into a Cloud Nine mon during my run, or having to waste a setup turn to clear their weather effects.

The game being hard I like, but bosses getting straight up cheats is really frustrating and I'd really like to tailor my experience in order to not have to deal with that. There's a bunch of difficulty settings in the config, but as far as I can tell none of them disable this.

Title. You go to a game show, get Voltorb Flip, you get an unlucky flip that you can't avoid, you lose, you move on. I'm already cheating via a puzzle solver in my browser, and even then, you need multiple consecutive successful RNG rolls in order to pass stages 2 & 3, and the prize is... garbage???

The sooner Game Show is reworked, the better. Good Lord. I hate using save states but at this point I might have to start cheating more, just to avoid getting cheated out of whatever meager reward is on offer.