Perfect Earthquake Theory

Peers

As a math nerd, I've been working on this for Showdown for a little while. I call it the Perfect Earthquake Theory, and it works something like this:

Earthquake w/gear, currently 4g, 1 unfilled star, level 180

Trainers: String (+4 Red MP), Steele (+4 Green MP), Typhoon (+10% Red Gem Damage)

Basic Red Gem damage: 4,329 (so each 1% bonus is 43 damage, and you have +10% already from trainer)

Average damage for all gems, including that trainer: 2,631 (1% bonus: 26 damage)

Moves: Sitdown Splash (R1, Finisher), Atomic Drop (G1), Canadian Backbreaker (R2)

TURN 1

Unless your opponent has a 'start with less MP' perk, G1 and R2 are fully charged. Hit R2 for 24k damage and a 50% (so, +2150 for red) Gem Damage bonus. Hit G1, do 19k damage and a 3x3 Red Gem block. With your bonuses, you're doing 6.9k/gem, so that's 62k damage, for a total of 105k damage.

Here's where the theory comes into play: You want that block to do two things. One, you want it to touch one other Red Gem (another 6.9k damage, up to 69k). And two, you want the star it generates and the blocks that fall down to not generate another match. Why? Because you just got 9 Red MP, charging your Finisher and R2 (again), and you didn't break enough gems to pin your opponent.

So you fire off R2 again (another 24k) for another +50% gem bonus. Then hit your finisher (35k damage - up to 128k). There's seven types of gems, seven gems in a row, so we can say on average we'll hit three of each gem with the finisher, and we have +100% gem damage bonus, which makes this math easy. That Average Gem Damage up there? Double it, then times 21. That's another 110k damage.

Total damage in one turn: 238k. Before titles, medals, etc. And most importantly: Before your opponent can even act. (Yes, they might dodge a move; I'm pretty sure things like this are why Dodge is in the game to begin with.)

The breakdown for this 238k damage is like this: 102k Moves ( 83k Red, three moves; 19k Green, one move), 136k Gems (69k damage, 10 gems Red; 128k damage, 21 gems Average).

So what happens when we add in titles and medals? My current loadout is a strap with +10% Gem Damage and two pairs of Fury medals (so, +50% gem damage). The medals themselves give +5.26% Red Gem Damage, +3.2% and +421 Green Move Damage, +1600 All Move Damage, +366 All Gem Damage, and some random bonuses that , if I did the math right, adds not quite enough to my Gem Average to matter. We do the math, and I'm currently doing 87k Red Move damage, 22k Green Move damage, 95k Red Gem damage, and 163k average off the finisher. Grand total: 367k. That's in one turn if you're lucky, over 2-3 turns if you're not.

And that's with decent, but not optimized, medals. With all Level 4 Fury medals, should be possible to get +24% Red Gem damage (instead of 5), +30% All Gem damage, and +30% All Move damage. Doing some math (Okay, at this point my brain hurts, so I'm guestimating) that puts the total up to a little over 410k. If I can get that last star filled in, 7-8k on top of that.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the highest possible damage (hint: In three rows, you can have a total of 11 Red gems and 10 Green gems) or how bad this can get at 5-Bronze/Level 210 (Another hint: Your -base- (not bonus) gem damage goes up, like, 46%)

So the next time you see someone in Showdown with ungodly high Red Gem Defense, it's probably because they got hit by someone using Perfect Earthquake Theory and wanted a fighting chance.

TL;DR: At 4-Gold, Earthquake can do over 400k damage in one turn. At 5-Bronze? 570k isn't impossible...