What is the point of Future Sight?

You could just attack the same turn. Are there any benefits at all to using Future Sight, which deals damage on a later turn?

Any scenarios where it is useful? In my opinion, using moves that damage the opponent immediately instead of using Future Sight are more effective. Am I missing something?

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7 Answers

Well Future Sight does damage your opponent, just two turns later. In fact, unlike many status-inflicting attacks, Future Sight isn't quite "wasting" an attack either; two turns later Future Sight will inflict damage in addition to whatever move you make, so it's still possible to attack 3 times inside 3 turns with Future Sight, provided the battle lasts until Future Sight activates.

One of the benefits of Future Sight (from Bulbapedia) is:

Future Sight can hit through Wonder Guard, Protect, and Detect. It can knock out a target that used Endure, but not one wearing a Focus Sash that has full HP. Protect and Detect does not stop from using this move.

A potential setup against a defensive pokemon is to use Future Sight when you expect them to use Protect/etc to save up your attack for later or to hit through a future Protect status attack.

But it's still not that great, since it requires your opponent to be defending either when the move hits or when you cast it. When it's a move with an unusual use that Smogon can't find a use for it's often not all that great of a move (if there's some amazing, broken use for a move, Smogon will find it. Then they will ban it).

An additional use was that prior to Gen 5 it did not take type into account, always dealing a 1x type based multiplier. As of Gen 5 it's a proper Psychic move though, so it's useless as a type-ignoring move. It does however have 100 power in Gen 5 (it used to be 80), making it one of the stronger Psychic attacks (albeit with an annoying handicap). Psychic is only 10% weaker but has zero set up required.

There are a number of good reasons to use Future Sight, especially in Gen II-IV.

The most important aspect of Future Sight is that it will hit a replacement monster. This means that you can cast it against a monster you can defeat easily in the first round of combat, and use the damage on a later, more dangerous monster.

In Gen II-IV, the damage dealt was typeless, and based on targeted pokemon's Special Defense, NOT the hit monster's.

And, as Ben says, it can strike through a number of defensive moves.

This is a move that's only really useful in trainer battles, but it has a little niche that might be hard to otherwise fill.

Source:

I'm hardly a pro in pokemon, but say you expect the opponent to use protect, dig, fly, or any other move that basically ignores any attacks of yours. Using future sight would allow you to not waste a turn. Especially if the opponent uses protect, Future Sight ignores that move and deals damage anyway. But that's my experience. I'm sure it has other uses.

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The first thing I see on the usefulness of Future Sight is that it can hit through Protect, Detect, other defensive moves (you just have to be patient), ignores Endure.

Because psychic is NOT super-effective against either Ghost or Bug types, Future Sight can be used to break through Shedinja's "Wonder Guard" ability (instead of using other psychic attacks and have the damage reduced to zero). Another thing is: because the damage dealt is "type-less", Future Sight is able to deal damage to Dark type pokemon (as they should be immune to psychic type attacks).

Not sure if its been mentioned already, but another thing is if the defending pokemon uses Bide (or some similar move), you can use Future Sight (if not a supportive move like Calm Mind or status inflicting attacks) to prevent from receiving damage after the turns the defending pokemon prepares to return 2x the damage you deal it.

And, the moves description says that "Future Sight can hit activate even if the user and/or the (original) target switch out".

Well, future sight has a power of 120, and when moves are 110, they have low accuracy (ex: hurricane, hydropump, blizzard, etc) and when they are 120, they have recoil of some sort because they are so powerful (ex: flare blitz, overheat, hyperbeam, etc). I would assume the recoil is having to lose a turn giving your opponent a chance to use powerful attacks to complete end the battle or switch to a Pokémon not affected by physic type moves. The reason protect and detect probably don't work is because if you know an attack is coming, you could just use protect or detect to stop it.

Future sight is a good move because: 1) 120 power is a very powerful psychic move

2) more powerful moves (like hyper beam or giga impact) have lower accuracy (like 90%) but future sight is 100%

3) future sight has double the PP of moves like giga impact and hyper beam

4) pick a psy pokemon and with STAB, you will have a 180 power move

5) look at it this way: if you survive the first turns after using it; you suddenly have two attacks.

6) Give your pokemon a metronome and sweep

Well there is a niche for it. Say ur alakazam is active and then opponent switches to something that resists phycic,u use future sight.Most probably now u will have to switch alakazam because the opponent has an advantage,then the opponent switches and so forth. Now what happens is future sight hits a pkmn that doesnt resist phycic. Switching is common thing in competitive battling and future sight eases prediction.But most ppl will decide to predict a switch and use some non phycic move(or any effective move like Will o wisp or say calm mind to set up). future sight is kinda of useful in some situations.