[X] My Assistant

[Debesh Unnos]

I've been playing in the battle tower quite a bit over the past few days, and my hastily thrown-together team has a 97% win/loose ratio. This is largely due to the number of people playing in the 1-25 bracket who don't know how to play, and I haven't seen a thread such as this anywhere. I figured I'd make one.
Before reading this guide, read the Information tab in the Battle Tower!

Making Your Team
The way to win in the Battle Tower is to have a good team. GPX+ is a lot different than the normal games, and a good team is something quite a bit different than what would be considered good in mainline. Before you even start fighting in the Battle Tower, you need to consider what your team will be.
Use Fully-Evolved Pokemon
Many times have I seen people playing with a starter team; Squirtle/Charmander/Bulbasaur or a later version of it. This is a horribly bad idea, as is using any Pokemon that isn't completely evolved. The Battle Tower info makes this clear; any unevolved Pokemon is half as strong as a fully evolved one. Moreso than good IVs, type advantage, or anything else, you need fully evolved Pokemon on your team. If you don't, you'll lose.
Cover your Weaknesses
This is something I don't see very often in the Battle Tower, but it's still a critical part of making a team. Make sure you can counter any type with at least a neutral defense. Nothing sucks more than loosing your pure-Dragon team to a single Lapras spamming ice moves. Change up the types; if you're dedicated, map out your weaknesses and resistances to make sure you don't have any glaring holes in your defenses.
Set up your Moves
You've got your 'mons now. You don't have any exploitable weaknesses, your team is fully-evolved, you must be ready to go!
Not quite yet. You first need to set up your team's attacks, and using the right ones is important. Each of your Pokemon has access to both physical and special moves, and you need to check each one to see if its Attack or Special Attack is higher. If your 'mon has a higher attack, go with the physical moves (marked by an explosion). If its Special Attack is higher, go with the special attacks (marked by the ripples). I've seen a lot of people randomly using special and physical moves, or worse yet use special moves on a physical attacker; this is a bad idea, and will lower your damage capacity a good deal.
With your attacks set, you should have two slots open. All of these are non-damaging moves, but many of them are worth it. Avoid these attacks like the plague:

CODE

Iron Defense
Amnesia
Charm
Screech
Captivate
Fake Tears
Scary Face
Focus Energy
Lucky Chant
Protect

The defense-boosting moves can easily be circumvented by an attacker of the opposite attack type (Iron Defense will be completely ignored by special attackers), and the debuffs can be easily removed by switching out to another Pokemon. Focus Energy is outclassed by attack buffs, and Lucky Chant is just wasting your time. Protect is for stalling, which is a useless tactic in GPX+. You should be looking at Swords Dance and Nasty Plot; these two moves will boost your attack power considerably, even with a single use. Be sure to pick the right move; Swords Dance won't help a special attacker. Most of your Pokemon should come with one of these two moves.
Recover and Rest are two others to consider. Rest gives you more healing per PP than Recover, but gives your opponent a bit of time to set up. In my opinion Rest is worth it, but if you don't like the turn loss go with Recovery.
Haze and Roar are the final pair of attacks you should consider. They both serve the purpose of negating stat changes; they're to counter enemies that like building up a few Swords Dances before going on a killing spree. Roar will always go last, so I tend to use Haze, but Roar has its uses as well; either one is a decent choice.
A few suggested builds:

CODE

Attack, Attack, Rest/Recover, Swords Dance/Nasty Plot
Attack, Attack, Rest/Recover, Haze/Roar
Attack, Attack, Swords Dance/Nasty Plot, Haze/Roar

Hold Items
Hold items are mostly a novelty in GPX+. You will see a few Quick Claws here and there; you can get them from the easy Top Percentage and Novice Battler achievements, and they'll probably be the only ones you see for a while. Other items include the Leftovers (which heal a 'mon each turn; complete the 'It's a Mystery~' achievement to get it) and the elemental gems (which give 'mons access to the attacks of the gem type; there are a few random achievements that will award these). You can get them from the Prize Shop, should you get prize points from competition, or from rare holiday events.

IVs and Natures
Individual Values are similar to those from the mainline games. Each Pokemon has IVs for each of its stats, ranging from one to thirty-one; IVs are a large part of total stat calculations, described in detail on Bulbapedia. They're completely random, and serious battlers will hunt down Pokemon with high IVs for their teams (93 total IVs is average; the absolute maximum is 186). If you're just starting, don't worry about IVs, but once you get your team down you can start hunting or breeding for 'mons with higher IVs than your current ones.
Natures also work the same way they do in mainline; take away from one stat and add to another. There are good natures and bad natures for each Pokemon, depending on the role you want them to fill; your fast Hazer won't want a nature that drops his Speed, for example. Bulbapedia has an article detailing all the natures; they're exactly the same on GPX+. As with IVs, I suggest not worrying about natures until your team is set; then start hunting for good natures and IVs.

At this point, you should finally have a team worthy of entering the Battle Tower.

Tactics
One of the most straightforward tactics is to get a few fully-evolved Pokemon with a single type and high attack power. The single typing will give them access to more powerful moves, and simply focus on blowing away your opponent. Another tactic is to spam Swords Dance/Nasty Plot until your Attack/Sp. Attack is maxed out; at this point, nothing can stop the buffed 'mon. Type advantages will be overwhelmed and any 'mon without resistances will drop to single hits. Fast Hazers or hard-hitters can stop this before it becomes overwhelming.

NPC Tactics
There are currently five NPC battles; each of them is much more straightforward than a battle against another player.
Joey: Any team should be able to beat him. A single Steel-type can clear him easily.
The current 76-100 strategies have been suggested by Samoo:

CODE

Get a Ferrothorn; give it Metal Claw, Amnesia, Iron Defence and Swords Dance.

Cypress 1: Iron Defence (Until Reuniclus comes out), Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3 and then Metal Claw.

Cypress 2: Amnesia x3 (Must always do this. Otherwise bye bye Ferrothorn), Iron Defence x3, Swords Dance x3, Metal Claw

Cypress 3: Iron Defence x3 (Rhyperior now has Flame Wheel and will take out Ferrothorn. I'd advise having a water type in-case things look bad. Rock and Grass type too.. oh and Dark), Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3.

Basically if Rhyperior looks like it's gonna knock Ferrothorn out, switch to Water, kill Rhyperior and then switch back to Ferrothorn

???: Iron Defence x3, Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3, Metal Claw.

FAQ
This section is here for future reference; any miscellaneous questions that I'm asked will go here.

If you have opinions, questions, or more experience than me, please do comment and help me improve this!

[Pyotr]

I'm not into battling but great guide for battling other people in Battle Tower. I just wanted to ask something..

"Be sure to pick the right move; Swords Dance won't help a physical attacker."

Wouldn't it be "Nasty Plot won't help a physical attacker." or "Swords Dance won't help a special attacker."? Or maybe you're talking about something else and I misunderstood it?

[Debesh Unnos]

Herpaderp. Let me fix that q;

[Yamper]

You can get a Leftovers from the 'It Is A Mystery~' achievement. There's also a few achievements which hands out random elemental gems, however I can't remember which ones they are.

It depends, really. Now, most people don't really bother with matchmaking and just go for the NPC's. Using Swords Dance and Nasty Plot is nice and all, but during matchmaking you don't have time for it at all. The general rule is clear as soon as possible. Aim for single typed fully evolved Pokémon with good attack and special attack power. Equip these Pokémon with Choice Items and you can't go wrong.

I've won over 3500 battles and that's what I've noticed. Your guide is only really useful when battling the NPC's more than other users.

However, as-well, one cannot take into account type weaknesses. It's always possible you're going to have type weaknesses so you can't really account for them.
As a suggestion, perhaps have 2 different teams focusing around different types. Split these 2 teams in half and focus on those. Do that and you have more of a chance to counter types, rather than having 1 of each type in your roster.

Fighting, Electric, Ground, Fire, Grass and Ghost/Dark for example as a team. You can counter a good majority of types with that.

This post has been edited by Samoo: Jun 30 2012, 03:06 PM

[Debesh Unnos]

I suppose I'm not the most qualified person on the site to talk about this, but my experience with the level 1-25 bracket is that sweeps are impossible to stop once they get set up. The whole point is to help new people, though, and I can hardly ignore the more experienced battlers. I'll add your advice to the tactics tab; thanks for lending it!

[Yamper]

I suppose I'm not the most qualified person on the site to talk about this, but my experience with the level 1-25 bracket is that sweeps are impossible to stop once they get set up. The whole point is to help new people, though, and I can hardly ignore the more experienced battlers. I'll add your advice to the tactics tab; thanks for lending it!

To help new people you'd be needing to provide advice and tactics for the most common level brackets; 1-25 and 76-100
You may want to include that a Ferrothorn is incredibly helpful for the NPC's! (Cypress and ???)

Metal Claw, Amnesia, Iron Defence and Swords Dance

Cypress 1: Iron Defence (Until Reuniclus comes out), Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3 and then Metal Claw.

Cypress 2: Amnesia x3 (Must always do this. Otherwise bye bye Ferrothorn), Iron Defence x3, Swords Dance x3, Metal Claw

Cypress 3: Iron Defence x3 (Rhyperior now has Flame Wheel and will take out Ferrothorn. I'd advise having a water type in-case things look bad. Rock and Grass type too.. oh and Dark), Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3.

Basically if Rhyperior looks like it's gonna knock Ferrothorn out, switch to Water, kill Rhyperior and then switch back to Ferrothorn

???: Iron Defence x3, Amnesia x3, Swords Dance x3, Metal Claw.

That should help, and it indeed needs a Leftovers.

[Debesh Unnos]

I'll keep the normal tactics tab as it is until I do some testing with both strategies myself, unless someone can absolutely confirm that one tactic is better than the other for each bracket. I appreciate the NPC tips, though; I'll add those under a new tab.

[pumpkinking0192]

Each Pokemon has IVs for each of its stats, ranging from one to thirty;

0-31, actually, not 1-30.

Otherwise, this is really great; as soon as you said "don't use defensive buffs" I was about to mention the Ferrothorn method, but then I saw that you mentioned it at the end. I've seen some people advise using a Corsola with a similar build as a counter to Cypress 3's Rhyperior, but in my experience a simple switch-out to anything else on your team can deal with it, so there's no need to hunt for a high-IV'd Corsola.

[mech]

For the Cypress battles, instead of using up so much time boosting a Ferrothorn, if you lead with a different pokemon and then when it is KO'd bring out an Excadrill that has swords dance + recover, it is quicker than boosting the Ferrothorn and is incredibly dangerous.