'Sup.As one of the lucky people who had access to the alpha for its entire life cycle, I was able to get my hands on the game for an extended period of time and try a lot of things. One of those things I got to try was Nidrasil. The ol' Noodle is a popular Tem, and I can see why. He's a hydra with the classic 3-headed design, but with a fun twist. He also has a cool trait in Tri-Apothecary. It's only natural that a lot of people want to try him out. In testing him out for myself, I made some discoveries that sadly mean he doesn't work the way many players seem to think he does, and I'm here to explain that now. Before that, a bit about me.I come from a competitive Pokemon background. I played VGC at a high level for 4 years and had some high tournament finishes, online and offline. I never qualified for worlds, but I was able to hold my own against players who qualified every year and was often a scrimming partner for them. Team building and theorycrafting were my strongest assets, and I was often the go-to guy for testing when these top players I did practice with had ideas. It's from this experience that I've learned how to, and as a very similar style of thinking is applied to Temtem, I am able to understand how a particular Tem works as well. Basically, it's one of the few skills that is transferable between games. With that out of the way, it's time for Nidrasil.First, we start with his base stats. According to the wiki, his stats are the following:HP: 77STA: 52SPE: 61ATK:DEF: 80SPA:SPD: 51The only two that matter for the purpose of this analysis are his two attacking stats. As you can see, Nidrasil has significantly higher attack than special attack. Heck, it's MORE THAN DOUBLE. This sets out Nidrasil clearly as a physical attacker. That is to say, he's far, far better at attacking physically than specially. More than twice as good at it. Why does that matter? Well, because of Tri-Apothecary.Tri-Apothecary's description reads as follows:"When attacking with atechnique, enemies are poisoned for 3 turns, and allies are Regenerated for 3 turns."I rewrote it a little there so it came out in better English than the original. Notice the condition? It requires that Nidrasil be using special attacks. As established earlier, special attack is Nidrasil's weakest stat by far. He does not perform well with special attacks. But I'm here an analyse this properly. I'm not going to leave you with base stats and be done with it. There's more to this than just base stats. We need to look at Nidrasil's special attacks. He gets two of them.- Allergic Spread: 1 hold, nature type technique. Deals a little nature damage to both targets. 58 base power, 18 stamina.- Hallucination: 0 hold STATUS technique. Deals no damage normally. Costs 22 stamina. Applies the Trapped and Exhausted status effects on the (single) target. SYNERGY: Deals special damage with a base power of 50.Neither of these are attractive options. Allergic Spread has a low base power already. Then, coming off of a low SpA stat, you're only doing chip damage at best. Against certain matchups, I wouldn't be surprised if the poison damage from Tri-A was more than the direct damage from A-Spread itself. The poison damage will always be more after two or three turns of it ticking away. Even then, it's not much. The poison ticks are 1/8th HP per turn, so we're looking at 4/8 damage in most cases, over 3 turns. 50% damage in 3 turns. I'll come back to that later.Hallucination is very inconsistent. It will always deal less than A-Spread, an almost negligible amount of damage. At least A-Spread is always special and gains the benefit of STAB for that 50% base power boost. Hallucination will only be able to hit one target. And for very little damage, 22 is a lot of stamina to pay for that. Beta Burst costs a similar amount of STA, at 23. That doesn't even take into thethat Tri-A has with Hallucination. But I'll come to that closer towards the end. First, I want to go back to A-Spread for a moment.Allergic Spread has a problem. When you target the opposing team it works - you apply the poison you were hoping for. Great. I'll show you why it's not good soon enough, but at least, mechanically, it works. Tri-A has another half though. You apply Regenerationto allies for three turns. This is where 'Spread's problem lies. It requires you ATTACK an ally to apply the buff. Furthermore, Nidrasil CANNOT target itself with its own spread technique. This means that even though 'Spread hits both enemies, it will only target your partner if used on allies. This is due to the way spread techniques are coded. They can't target the user. So now you can't even buff yourself AND you damage an ally. Meaning you waste some of that Regen healing off the damage you did to yourself. The healing, also 1/8 per turn, so too little, too slow, and doesn't even help your ally survive in the long run. Definitely not in a competitive battle. At minimum, one of those three turns are spent healing off the damage you did to yourself. It's totally pointless.Now I want to get into Tri-A's anti-synergy with Hallucination. This is again, a result of the game mechanics. I'll start with the most important piece of information.Hallucination's effect applies two statuses - Exhausted and Trapped - in that order, for two turns each. These two are actually a really good combo. Exhaust raises the stamina cost of techniques by 50%, greatly increasing the risk of overexertion and, in the cases of carefully min-maxed stamina management in competitive (which is a thing, trying to get out as many attacks as possible before resting or switching), it can completely ruin a gameplan. Trapped adds to this, as the opponent can no longer switch out the afflicted Tem and wait out the duration of Exhausted. They have to either give up a turn and rest or accept the higher cost and continue attacking. These two make a great combo together as a means of disruption. In order for Nidrasil to benefit from Tri-Apothecary when using Hallucination, it needs to be paired with a mental type. Only then, with the synergy effect, does it become special damage that meets the condition to apply Tri-A in the first place. That alone makes it inconsistent. Let's assume, however, that you have met that condition. Most people seem to think that you apply all three statuses. That isAs stated earlier, the third status replaces the first. So in this case, poison replaces Exhausted. This is not good because, generally, Exhaust is the reason you're using Hallucination in the first place. That's what makes it good. You're now replacing that with a weaker status. At that point, you could have just used Toxic Ink and applied one less turn of poison to do WAY MORE damage than the 1/8th health difference you get between the poison applications of Toxic Ink and Tri-A boosted Hallucination. So in all, that would have been a wasted turn.Basically, NEVER use Hallucination with Tri-Apothecary. It's objectively worse than using it without Tri-AConvinced yet? Some might not be, so let's do some damage calculations. Thankfully, we have a place to do these. All of my calculations are going to be done here:For the sake of simplicity, I'm doing my calculations at level 48, which is the max level of the current EA build, the day after EA release. Functionally, it is the same build as my in-game tests were conducted during the alpha period. I am going to be using Tateru as my target. I chose Tateru because it's a neutral type with decently high HP. That means there are no type weaknesses to take into consideration with the calculations. Also, all calcuations will be done at 0TV's in any stats. This is so that there's no sneaky magic trickery going in between the special damage dealt by A-Spread and the % health of poison. If I TV into HP, then the % health will eke forward because it's % based, while the special damage dealt would be unchanged. The opposite applies if I were to put TV's into special defense. In the interest of fairness, both Tems will be completely blank with the automatically generated SV's of 50.With that out of the way, let us begin:Here, we can see 'Spread dealt a flat 25 damage, which is 15% of Tateru's max HP. Poison then dealt 21, which is 1/8 or 12.5%. We can then add these together.12.5% x 3 turns for poison damage = 37.5%15% x 1 turn for A-Spread = 15%The two add together to deal 52.5% of Tateru's max HP worth in damage. That sounds good, right? Remember, it took THREE WHOLE TURNS to deal that much damage.Now, I'm going to start over and use Toxic Ink. This is an 80 BP physical technique (120 with Nid gaining STAB) that applies 2 turns of poison. Nidrasil would normally be invested in ATK TV's Heavily, in fact. But in the interest of keeping my calculations fair and honest, I won't put a single one in. Just understand that the direct damage dealt below would likely be much higher.What we see here is that Nid deals 45 flat damage to Tateru with Toxic Ink alone, before the poison damage is applied. The image shows this to be 27% of Tateru's max HP. That's almost double what was dealt by A-Spread. It's 12% ahead. Which, considering poison procs are 12.5% max HP, that's a whole turn's worth of poison ahead in damage of A-Spread this attack was, at this point in the turn. At the end of the turn, both would have applied their poison damage. At the end of turn, in the Toxic Ink scenario, the calculations would be as follows:27% + 12.5% = 39.5%A-S would be:15% + 12.5% = 27.5%Note that this is after only one turn. Let's advance by one turn. If Nidrasil uses Toxic Ink on Tateru one more time, it deals more damage than A-Spread would have done over the full tree-turn duration - and then some. If we assume the same turn plays out (which it wouldn't but the calculator only does 1v1 calcs at the moment so I don't have a choice) we shall double the numbers above.39.5% x 2 = 79%27.5% x 2 = 55%This puts us at a whole 24% max health ahead in damage on the second turn. That's basically 1/4 max HP more damage than Allergic spread over two turns. No matter how you look at it, it is objectively, mathematically better to always use Toxic Ink over Tri-Apothecary boosted Allergic Spread if your intent is to spread poison.In closing...If you're a player that's not interested in competitive and just want to use Tri-A nid for the memes... go for it! Nobody is going to stop you or tell you that you're stupid. I hope... What you use in the story is your decision alone. Have fun with it.My analysis is over, but I'm not done yet. I've spent this very lengthy post basically complaining about how bad Nidrasil is, but haven't offered any solutions. On the off chance someone from Crema reads this, I do have a solution. Here goes -Change the condition fromtechniques totechniques. This way, Allergic Spread can be used to spread poison, which can then be used as a way to drop positive status from a team, like trying to remove Vigor from a Show-Off buffed up Baboong. Right now, your only options of applying Regen to your own Tems is to damage them, which means there's no point applying it in the first place. That's made even worse by Nid not being able to apply it to himself. If you change the condition to spread techniques, then he can use Bark Shield to buff the DEF of himself and his ally, while also applying Regenerated to both. This gives him a niche as a disruptor/support.Another option is to change the effect to increase the damage of poisons applied by Nidrasil, though that's much less interesting, and I think a part of the reason why Tri-Apothecary is so popular on Nidrasil is because its current effect has a lot of potential to be very interesting. Doing this is an option, but I think it would make him less appealing as a fun design, rather than as a competitive consideration.With that, I'm finally done. Peace out, I guess?