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Battle Tower is a challenging functionality where you can test battle skills against optimized teams across 4 competitive tiers. Learn more about how it works!
The Battle Tower is basically the postgame grind in Polished Crystal. It's in Olivine City, and it's where you'll actually get to test whether your team holds up against optimized sets. You fight consecutive trainers with well-built Pokémon across four competitive tiers - win 7 in a row to get rewards and push into harder difficulty.
I put together this guide with all 400+ Pokémon sets you'll face, organized by tier. You can search by species, moves, or items to scout what you might run into.
The Battle Tower sorts Pokémon into 4 tiers based on competitive viability. What you face depends on your current difficulty - higher difficulty means more top-tier threats.
The scary stuff. Legendaries, pseudo-legendaries, and highly optimized sets. Perfect coverage, max power, dangerous strategies. These will punish sloppy play.
Note: Some Pokémon are banned from Battle Tower entirely:
Strong competitive picks with solid stats and good movesets. Not legendary-level, but they can still sweep if you come in unprepared.
Mid-tier Pokémon with more specialized roles or niche strategies. They're dangerous in the right situations or with favorable matchups.
Lower-tier options that show up early in streaks. Less threatening overall, but they still have optimized sets for what they can do.
There's a tier selection table that picks which tiers appear based on your difficulty level (1-8). At difficulty 1, expect mostly C and D tier. By difficulty 8, you're facing primarily A and B tier with only occasional lower-tier stuff mixed in.
Here's the full database of all 400+ sets in the Battle Tower. Use the search and tier filters to find specific Pokémon or browse by difficulty.
Your opponents pull randomized teams from the tier relevant to your streak, which means you can build around that. A few approaches that work well:
The key is having a plan. Random teams struggle here because the AI has optimized sets - you should too.
| Item | Moves | Ability | DVs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feraligatr | D | Modest | HP Electric | ||||
| Pidgeot | D | Adamant | Perfect | ||||
| Fearow | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Raticate | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Raticate(alolan) | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Furret | D | Adamant | Perfect | ||||
| Butterfree | D | Modest | Perfect | ||||
| Ledian | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Ariados | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Golbat | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Togetic | D | Calm | Perfect | ||||
| Togekiss | D | Adamant | Perfect | ||||
| Sandslash | D | Impish | Perfect | ||||
| Arbok(koga) | D | Adamant | Perfect | ||||
| Dunsparce | D | Impish | Perfect | ||||
| Ampharos | D | Bold | Perfect | ||||
| Onix | D | Jolly | Perfect | ||||
| Jumpluff | D | Modest | HP Ground | ||||
| Poliwrath | D | Adamant | Perfect | ||||
| Politoed | D | Bold | Perfect |