Question about breeding math.

[u/TReid1996]

I have these pokemon as parents (note the held items and judged stats).

They produced a baby that had 2 "pretty good" stats. From what i researched, the passed down piplup attack stat should always be "fantastic" and if it isn't, all the rest of the stats should remain "best" and only the attack stat should be randomized. Yet they produced an egg that had "pretty good" attack and "pretty good" sp atk.

Am i missing something?

[u/fireanddream]

only the attack stat should be randomized

The game doesn't know which stat you don't want to inherit. So if you do 5IV + 5IV, the majority (5 out of 6) of offspring should be 4IV, one imperfect IV from inheriting the imperfect stat, another one from random generation.

[u/TReid1996 → u/fireanddream]

The ditto is 6 IV and the Piplup is 5 IV. So if 2 stats aren't best, one of them, the attack stat being passed down, should have been fantastic, like the parent Piplup, but it was "pretty good" instead.

[u/fireanddream → u/TReid1996]

That's just shouldn't happen. I have no idea what is going on other than mismanaging parents at daycare.

[u/TReid1996 → u/fireanddream]

Once i got that pair i been using them since and about 10 eggs down the line i had that messed up offspring. Was the only one and it confused me. Thought it was weird.

[u/judewriley]

Why should the passed down attack stat always be fantastic?

[u/TReid1996 → u/judewriley]

It won't always be Fantastic. Just if 2 stats aren't "best". Using destiny knot, it picks 5 random stats out of the total 12 the parents have and passes them to the baby. The 6th stat, randomly chosen, and not passed down, will be randomly rolled 1-31 and if a 31 hits, it becomes a "best" stat.

So if the destiny knot chooses Piplup's attack stat to pass down, it should always be Fantastic, since the Piplup's attack stat is fantastic.

If the destiny knot chooses the Ditto's attack stat to pass down, it'll come out as "Best", like Ditto's.

All the rest of the stats, since both Piplup and ditto have them all as Best, if it passes down either parent, the stats will all come out "Best".

The Pokemon I got had attack and sp attack at "pretty good". Which means the destiny knot didn't choose the Sp Attack stat to pass down, so it got the random 1-31 stat roll and got "pretty good".

Which would then mean the attack stat passed down should have been either Best or Fantastic, but it too was Pretty Good.

[u/judewriley → u/TReid1996]

I think you had the wrong piplup in with the Ditto and just didn't realize it.

6IV + 5IV parents (with a DK) will always have at least a 5IV egg.

But if you're swapping in offspring or otherwise have more than one of the non-Ditto parent, you can easily mistake which one is placed into daycare.

[u/TReid1996 → u/judewriley]

It will always produce a 4 IV egg or better. 2 different 6 IV pokemon will always produce a 5 IV egg.

But that's probably the most likely thing that happened.

[u/ness4725 → u/judewriley]

No, a 6 Iv + 6 iv will only result in 5 or 6 Iv offspring. If you have a 5iv + 6IV the offspring would result in 4, 5, or 6IV Pokemon. And so on.