Pokemon: The Math of Dragonite and Dragon Dance

Pokemon Violet is the first pokemon game that I’ve actually played on launch, partly because I found a group of friends to play end game content with.

One of the things we did was attempt a 6* Tera raid with a dragon tera Dragonite, and we wiped within 3 turns, despite using a fairy typed pokemon (which is strong against Dragon types). The sequence of moves used was Dragon Dance x2, which caused its attack to become maxed out, then Dragon Rush.

In pokemon, any stat can be raised by a maximum of 6 stages, and Dragon Dance only raises attack by 1 stage. Why then did its attack cap out at 6 stages after just 2 moves?

After digging around, we found out the following:

• The base power of a pokemon’s move is multiplied by 1.5x if the move’s type is the same as a pokemon’s type. (This means dragon moves used by Dragon type pokemon will be 1.5x more effective)
• If a pokemon’s tera type is the same as one of its original types, moves of that type gets multiplied by 2x instead of the usual 1.5x

This means that using Dragon Dance 2 times resulted in the following calculation: 1 stage x 1.5 (dragon type) x 2 (tera type) x 2 (2 times) = 6 stages.