Subjective Info

The following content contains subjective advice or recommendations. Please take it into consideration and make your own decisions based on your playstyle and goals.

Strength Skillmon Basics

What Are They

Strength skillmon are Skill specialists with Charge Strength S/M, Berry Burst, Disguise, Extra Helpful, or Helper Boost* as their skills.

They are alternatives to berrymon on the map their berry is favored. Early on, they can also be used as generalist strengthmon while you hunt for a favorite berrymon for that map.

*Legendary beasts are currently the only Pokemon with Helper Boost. They are in a bit of a unique situation so their build priorities are slightly different despite being strength skillmon.

How To Build Them

The goal is to produce as much strength as possible, whether it be from skill procs or berries.

Build Option 1: Trigger

• STM+HSM or any combination of three triggers and/or speeds loosely match BFS. Given this, BFS is not mandatory for strength skillmon and a traditional trigger+speed skillmon build can work.
• However, the existence of BFS, with the fact that it is an incredibly efficient skill for its subskill slot, and that it comes easier at FL10+, does raise the minimum standard for these builds.
• A trigger-based build will get the most mileage out of being used early game, when your dream shard gain is poor and it's tough to level up your mons. Berry mons only start competing with max seeded strength skillmons around level 50.

Build Option 2: BFS

• BFS doubles berry production for non-berrymon, making it a massive strength boost in just one subskill.
• Strength skillmon with BFS benefit most from having speed subskills, as more helps means both more berries and more opportunities to proc your skill. Triggers are still useful, just not as useful as speed.
• You will still want to max the main skill of your mon, it still counts as a significant chunk of strength.

"Is This Enough?"

Two ways to approach this:

1. Strength skillmons compete with favored bfs berry mons so use that as a reference of comparison. Use one of the many calculators available to you.

• Due to main seed costs, your minimum build needs to be comparable to or better than the berrymon alternative.

• A good benchmark is BFS+HSM for each of the best common berry mon per island

2. Use Snackson5's rating guide, found in Pokémon Sleep Discord server's Route 01 FAQ.

Important Notes About Berry Strength and Pokemon Levels

1. Berry strength increases with each level. As a result, trigger builds slowly lose ground to a previously equivalent BFS build at higher levels.

• For example, a max seeded Espeon may beat a BFS Meganium at lvl 25 on Lapis, but Meganium will start surpassing it once they're both around level 50.

• Charge Strength skillmon are more impacted by this because their skill has no berry scaling attached to it like other strength skills. It is a flat boost in strength per main skill level. This is good in early game when leveling your mons is much tougher.

2. Berry Burst uses each teammate's level when determining the berry strength of each berry drop. This means that to best utilize a Berry Burst mon, it's imperative that the mon itself is high level, but also teammates are also high level. Having low level teammates will bring the strength down. As a result, Berry Burst shines more in the lategame.

• Make sure to evaluate Berry Burst users in a team setting (Use Neroli's Lab or Team Analysis on Raenonx). Raenonx uses 4 other copies of the mon you're calculating as it's teammates, which leads to overinflated and inaccurate scores. You will want to do the same when calculating the Helping Bonus subskill

Quick Maths

Basics:

• For Strength Skillmons only:
  • BFS > HB > HSM >= STM > Help Up nature >= Exp Up nature >= Skill Up nature > HSS >= STS
• Triggers are _almost _ equal to speeds without BFS, with speed winning out as level increases. This may change if the main skill level cap increases for that particular skill
• STM+HSM or any combination of triple trigger/speed should match BFS with some variance.
  • HB about matches 2 speeds or triggers, meaning it is around 2/3s the value of BFS
• WITH BFS, speeds win no contest but triggers are still appreciated.
• In regards to Exp natures: They are about equivalent to Help natures due to the exp adjustment on them affecting berry strength.
• In regards to negative natures: Help down cancels out with HSS, and Skill down cancels out with STS

What This Means

• Strength Skillmons are not "BFS or Bust" Mons, find what your personal standards are and see if any collection of speeds/triggers/bfs/hb can match/beat it.
• For example: If your minimum viable bar is BFS+HSM, that means HB+STM+HSM will match it as well. So will STM+(SOHn/MSn)+(HSS/STS)+HSM
• These are loose associations with each other but I am pointing them out so that you know the overall hierarchy of how subskills/natures interact with each other.
• Because these are relative associations and not absolute calcs, there may be differences upwards of 40k strength for the entire week. If that matters to you, feel free to calculate the minute differences yourself.

Notes:

• Funnily enough, both Calm (MS+, SOH-) AND Naughty (SOH+, MS-) are both net positives since SOH- has been buffed. Despite this, they are closer to neutral natures than good natures