What affects how many quick attacks are needed to fill a charged attack? [duplicate]

Question

I recently had a Porygon 2 which was awesome for battles. I had to attack very few times before the charged attack was filled and the charged attack was really powerful.

I evolved it to a Porygon Z and after that I had to attack several more times before the charged attack was filled. The evolved pokemon was considerably worse than the lower evolution.

I have also noticed that when battling other trainers, some of their Pokemon can send of several charged attacks, while I get almost no charge to my charged attacks.

So my question is: What affects how much/how fast a charged attack is charged?

Answer 1

You need to consider that each quick move generates a different amount of energy, and each charged move requires a different amount of energy to be used.

Porygon2 and Porygon-Z have the same quick moves, and this image sums up their damage power and energy generation:

_{(The moves highlighted in green benefit from the Same Type Attack Bonus, and deal 20% more damage.)}

These are the charged moves Porygon2 can learn:

• Solar Beam
• Hyper Beam
• Zap Cannon
• Tri-attack

Porygon-Z can learn the same charged moves, with the addition of Blizzard.
(Not counting Return and Frustration, if your Pokemon is shadow or purified.)

Charged moves have a base power and a certain amount of energy they need to consume:

Move	Base Power	Charge Energy
Solar Beam	150	80
Hyper Beam	150	80
Zap Cannon	150	80
Blizzard	140	75
Tri-attack	65	50

So Porygon-Z is not slower than Porygon2 by default, what really matters is what charged move you are actually using, since they do have different requirements.

Answer 2

Every move in the game has an energyDelta. This figure represents how much energy you gain (or lose) from using the move. Fast moves has a positive delta, meaning that using them gives you energy. Charge moves have a negative delta, meaning that using them consumes this energy.

In other words, if you have a fast move that had a high energy delta (like Lock-On) and a charge move that didn't cost much energy to use (like Tri Attack) then you could use charge moves in very rapid succession. On the other hand, if your Pokémon had, for example, Hidden Power as its fast move and Hyper Beam as its charge move, it would take much longer to get enough energy to actually use your charge move.

As evolving a Pokémon will give it an entirely new set of moves, your Porygon likely went from having two very energy-efficient moves to having two fairly demanding ones. This isn't necessarily always a bad thing, as those moves typically deal a lot more damage than the faster ones, but there's a lot of factors at play when deciding what moves you want on a specific Pokémon.