From the archive
Present fascinated White Phoenix (Rod Lockwood), who spent 2008 and 2009 trying to fit it into his Moves Evaluation tables. This page puts his notes on the Gold and Silver version of the move into plain English.
Present is Delibird’s signature move, a Normal-type attack that wraps up a random surprise. Each time it’s used it either attacks with a power of 40, 80 or 120, or heals the target instead. In Gold and Silver, though, the move’s damage calculation is broken, and the damage it does has very little to do with the two Pokémon’s levels or stats.
What Present does
| Result | Chance |
|---|---|
| Attacks with a power of 40 | 40% |
| Attacks with a power of 80 | 30% |
| Attacks with a power of 120 | 10% |
| Heals the target by a quarter of its maximum HP | 20% |
The Game Boy games roll a number out of 256, which makes the exact chances 40.23%, 30.08%, 9.77% and 19.92%.
The glitch
Every attack in the second generation uses the same damage formula:
Damage = ((((2 × Level ÷ 5 + 2) × Attack × Power ÷ Defense) ÷ 50) + 2) × Modifiers
When Gold and Silver calculate Present, three of those numbers are swapped for the wrong values:
- Level becomes the index number of the target’s second type (or its only type).
- Attack becomes a flat 10 (5 if the target is Rock or Steel type).
- Defense becomes the index number of the user’s second type (or its only type). A Normal type’s index of 0 is treated as 1.
Power and the usual modifiers (STAB, type effectiveness, critical hits and the random factor) still apply.
Type index numbers
Physical types are numbered from 0 and special types from 20, with a gap in between.
| Type | Index | Type | Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normal | 0 | Fire | 20 |
| Fighting | 1 | Water | 21 |
| Flying | 2 | Grass | 22 |
| Poison | 3 | Electric | 23 |
| Ground | 4 | Psychic | 24 |
| Rock | 5 | Ice | 25 |
| Bug | 7 | Dragon | 26 |
| Ghost | 8 | Dark | 27 |
| Steel | 9 |
Who benefits?
Because a low Defense value means more damage and a high Level value means more damage, Present in Gold and Silver hits hardest when a Normal- or Fighting-type user (index 0 or 1) targets a Dark, Dragon or Ice type (27, 26 and 25). It does least when a Dark, Dragon or Ice type uses it on a Normal, Fighting or Flying type. Delibird itself does rather well: as an Ice/Flying Pokémon its second type is Flying, so its target’s “Defense” is just 2.
White Phoenix’s own notes, written while evaluating the move with level 50 Pokémon of equal stats, found that the fixed Attack of 10 and the low effective level count against Present, while the tiny Defense value counts strongly in its favour, so the matchup decides everything.
The fix
Crystal and Pokémon Stadium 2 corrected the formula, so Present uses real levels and stats. Crystal keeps the old behaviour in link battles, so a Crystal player still gets the glitched damage when battling a Gold or Silver game.
See the Gold, Silver & Crystal attacks list for every other move.
Based on White Phoenix’s (Rod Lockwood’s) Present calculator and evaluation notes, 2008–2009. More of his work is on Pokémon Dungeon Projects.