An In-Depth Look at Darkrai Subskills

So you're rolling Darkrai subskills, and you are wondering what should be considered "good"?

WARNING: LONG POST. Lots of it is images though. You can scroll through looking at the titles and graphs and get most of the info

Let's look at individual subskills affect Darkrai's personal strength over the course of 24 hours with one 8 1/2 hour sleeping period. That means that in the analysis below, the benefit of gold subskills besides BFS/HB won't be considered, and HB will be undervalued. We'll try to give every specialty their full potential to shine.

Assumptions

We're going to assume that you are trying to make use of all parts of Darkrai's kit regardless of build. That means we don't want to sneaky snack, we will target recipes that use Darkrai's ingredients (and give the recipe boost accordingly), and we will not avoid Darkrai's skill despite it's energy drain effects.

For berries, level 65 will maximize strength. Notably I won't be assuming favored berry since the goal is to make Darkrai the best at everything and not just Snowdrop. I will have a separate analysis with favored berry though.

For ingredients, I'll assume mono corn and and 3x max level Greengrass Salad. Mono corn would take a ton of Eureka seeds by itself, and I think I'll make another analysis just about Darkrai's ingredient slots. After some fiddling around, my hunch is that as long as you can use whatever ingredients in your recipes, the overall strength won't change too much based on spread. I'm going to assume mono here just so it's easier to find a recipe that uses it. I figure Greengrass Salad is consistently achievable in late game while providing the boost ingredients rely on to be competitive at that stage. I also wanted to minimize relying on other mons' build or how GCT would change things. In particular, Tasty Chance buffs are outside the scope of this analysis. Darkrai's ingredient counts are much lower than a full ingredient specialist, but Darkrai has other benefits and one ingredient specialist can never make a whole high-level recipe by themselves anyways. If you're swapping out other ingredient specialists as you meet the threshold for the recipe, then this analysis appropriately values Darkrai's ingredient strength.

For skills, every Darkrai will be considered with max level skills unless noted otherwise. If you're spending all these biscuits, candies, and dream shards to max out Darkrai, you can probably scrape together 5 main seeds for it.

I'll also run max healing which will boost the relative value of inventory by making it more likely to fill up overnight. This was done mostly so I don't have to estimate what a reasonable healer would be, and also because we're shooting for a theoretical maximum. As far as I know, Raenox assumes constant checking during the day and only uses inventory to determine when, if ever, sneaky snacking happens at night. In that sense inventory is usually under-estimated if you check rarely during the day. If I'm wrong please someone correct me.

I'll do some limited analysis away from these assumptions, but that's our baseline. We're trying to make Darkrai the absolute best pokemon currently out there, even though this will be unachievable for months/years for even the most hardcore sleepers out there

Level 65 One-Subskill Boosts

With the assumptions above, below is the strength breakdown for each subskill individually. I might try analyzing the effects of subskills in tandem later, but that sounds like a massive project that experienced players already have intuition about. It should behave like you're used to. For example, HSM + STM would multiply their respective boosts, while HSM + HSS just straight up add. Limited inventory complicates that a bit more, but this post is too long already without getting into that.

Looking at the benefits of each subskill in isolation

We can see that HSM unsurprisingly leads in personal strength. IFM is relying on that max-level recipe to score so highly.

In Favor of Berries (Favored Berry)

Berry mons aren't recommended to run when their berry is not favored, so let's see how that changes things. To Snowdrop!

Look at those green bars grow

Berry substats are unsurprisingly awesome when favored. BFS and HSM smoke everything else

In Favor of Ingredients (Better Recipe)

Greengrass Salads aren't the max dish out there, and there will be even better ones released in the future. What if we did mono coffee (Darkrai's highest ingredient strength choice) with 3x Defiant Salads (largest ingredient boost currently available)? Let's see the ingredient specialty of Darkrai shine!

This assumes consistent pot expansion. A GCT would cover it, but GCT might change other relative weights that I don't want to think about right now. Let's just assume you're running it alongside a good pot mon. You also obviously need to be running it alongside mons capable of producing the rest of the recipe. That would include another coffee producer, since Darkrai's ingredient specialty isn't strong enough to pull that off alone even with IFM + HSM + IUL. You could swap out the other producers when not needed though. How strong that team would need to be is outside the scope of this analysis.

Notably we're still not running alongside a Tasty Chance mon, which would make ingredients even better.

If you add the recipe boosts endgame ingredient metas rely on, ingredients make up the majority of strength. Who would have guessed?

HSM is still the clear winner, but IFM actually beats out BFS

In Favor of Skills (lvl 25 analysis)

Skill mons rely on their skill level much more than they do their actual level. Since we've been running max skill level this whole time, in order to favor them over berries/ingredients it seems fair to look at the comparison at level 25. This is useful anyways because it will be forever til people's Darkrai's even reach level 50. This actually doesn't hurt Darkrai's ingredients as much as I thought it would. He goes from getting 3 corn on average proc to only 2. Most players with a level 25 Darkrai aren't likely to be maxing Greengrass Salads though. I'll address that next

Bye bye berry strength. You rely on higher levels to be significant in the face of a max level charge strength skills

STM still not boosted as much as I thought. Inventory really boosted by that max energy overnight production

Level 25 Analysis (but cooking is hard)

Let's say you're like me, and you're just past having ingredient mons at level 30. High level recipes might happen once every few Sundays, but mostly they're out of reach and definitely not max level. And, like most everyone else, you've ignored changing up Darkrai's starting sausage because 8 ingredients? Who the heck wants to touch that RNG?

Let's do level 50 Ninja Curries this time instead. That's more reasonable at this level, right? We can't be too weak if we want our Darkrai to properly be an all-specialist. The sad thing is that Darkrai can't actually meet the 27 sausage requirement by itself at low levels with just one subskill unless it's IFS/IFM.

Look at all that blue! Blue lovers win hard

Inventory is probably still being overweighted. We'll reexamine the infinite healing assumption eventually

Level 25 Analysis (no really I'm bad at cooking)

Hahahahaha did I imply earlier that I had Ninja Curries at level 50 or that I could consistently cook them? I wish! Let's try again with level 30 Bulk Up Bean Curry. At least Darkrai can handle the sausage for that, so we really just need a decent bean ingredient finder to make it reliably. Lower recipes take more times cooked to grow in level though, so level 30 sounds like a good amateur cooking point. It would rise fairly steadily

If you really dislike seeing the yellow, cook recipes that don't use Darkrai's ingredients. Suboptimal

I'm sorry ingredient finding subskills. You deserve a better owner than I.

Level 25 Analysis (this time without skill levels)

Same assumptions as the last, but this time we'll also assume you're not swimming in main skill seeds. Whether that's because you're f2p or because you're hesitant to invest in Darkrai when it's new and dauntingly costly, that doesn't matter.

Let's go ahead and add in Skill Up S and Skill Up M as well. I think they get a bad rap from min-maxers because they don't just save you main skill seeds, they also skip month(s) of waiting if you don't already have a stock of seeds saved up. Not to mention the time savings when you have other mons you want to seed. On Darkrai in particular they can be used for an early boost and then rerolled later when you have more seeds accumulated.

What's that I see? It's an ALL specialist!!!

Darkrai's skill hugely benefits from levels. We also see that berries matter a lot more when the skill is weak

Reassess Healing Assumption

This whole time inventory has been fully taken advantage of because of max healing. Everything else has benefited too to a lesser degree. However, you probably don't have a triple trigger + HSM Gardevoir who can do that while fighting through Darkrai's energy drain.

Let's look at these comparisons again with no healing whatsoever besides the three meals a day. We'll start at level 25 no skill seeds Bulk Up Bean Curry and then jump back to the first level 65 one with max skill seeds and Greengrass Salads.

Level 25 No-Healing, No-Seeds, 3x Bulk Up Bean Curry

You'll notice that IUS is enough to run the whole night, so IUM and IUL are excessive

Inventory has basically no benefit all by itself with no healing

Level 65 No-Healing, Max-Seeds, 3x Max Level Greengrass Salads

This is a LOT less green than that first comparison. It was because inventory would always cap overnight and sneaky snack

Inventory boosts help a little bit with the increased ingredients but not more than sleep ribbons would

I was surprised to see BFS so low. After thinking about it more, Ingredients/skills usually cap overnight, and their day collection isn't too affected by no healing. No healing really hurts the overnight production which is when sneaky snacking happens here.

Anyways, it's not optimal to run without a healer, so inventory isn't as useless as these last comparisons make it seem. Even though we don't have a dark type healer yet, you should force your healer to suffer through Darkrai procs.

Level 65 Subskill Combination Analysis

Back to initial assumptions, I'm going to play around with subskill combinations and show you ones I find work well for personal strength. I went ahead and did max sleep ribbons for inventory as well this time cause it'll take over a year to get that high anyways.

These are all so much stronger than other Pokemon

• Like we've already seen above, HSM is the single biggest contributor to overall strength. It helps then that you can use a subskill to upgrade HSS to it. Playing around I could replace it with HB but the personal strength dropped by several thousand (team strength would overall probably rise though).
• Any time you see HB, you can replace it with HSS for a little increase in personal strength like from the second to the third box.
• BFS wasn't actually that overwhelming without favored berry, although BFS+HSM+??? were still the highest scorers
• IFM did surprisingly well with the max recipe boost. Like all ingredient mon though, they underperform if your recipe levels aren't good
• With current max of good sleep ribbons, the time it took to cap the inventory ranged from 2:59:43 (BFS+HSM+HSS) to 6:47:37 (HSM+IUL+STM). Those times would decrease if a larger quantity ingredient like apples were rolled instead

Level 65 Favored Berry + 3x Defiant Salads cause why not?

Snowdrop M20 is a walk in the park

Subskills Honorable Mention

1. HB is better than shown here. This analysis was purely on personal strength for Darkrai, but you actually have 4 other mon in play. They could also have HB to boost your Darkrai even further!
2. As mentioned earlier, SUM and SUS are great starting subskills unless you have a surfeit of main skill seeds. Darkrai's skill gives a lot of strength. You can reroll them later if you want
3. For the same reason, Sleep EXP up is a great subskill to start with. Darkrai is extra expensive in candy and shards, so boosted passive exp is great for him, not to mention for the rest of the team too. You can swap that out at higher levels