| All Expert Belt Locations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Location | Type | |
| 1 | Driftveil City Market: show the man in black any Pokémon over level 30 | Once-only |
| 2 | Held Item (1% chance) from these wild Pokémon:
|
Repeatable |
The Expert Belt can be acquired two different ways in Pokémon Black & White. The first and easiest method is to show a Level 30 Pokémon from your party to the clerk at Driftveil City’s Market.
Then if you want additional Expert Belts, they can also be stolen from wild Sawk and Throh using the move Thief. These two are the only Pokémon that can hold an Expert Belt in the wild, and both of them have a 1% chance of holding the item.
Because their encounter rate is fairly low (15% at most), this acquisition method can be time consuming. Pokémon that know the abilities Frisk or Compoundeyes can help speed up the process considerably.
Method 1: Driftveil City Market
Step 1: Starting at the Driftveil City Pokémon Center, head south on the road.
Step 2: South of the Pokémon Center is the Market, a large building with a gray roof.
Enter the door to your left.
Step 3: Upon entering the Market, speak to the clerk with the sunglasses (he’ll be dressed like an MIB agent).
If you have a Level 30 Pokémon in your party, he’ll give you the Expert Belt.
Method 2: Stealing from wild Sawk or Throh
If you’d like to have more than one Pokémon in your party holding an Expert Belt, then you can get this item from wild Sawk and Throh.
But finding Sawk and Throh in the wild isn’t easy.
They’re found a bit more frequently on Route 15, but this area is only accessible after beating the Elite Four.
So the easiest place to find Sawk and Throh is in the tall grass outside of Pinwheel Forest. By grinding at this location, you can actually find an Expert Belt before arriving at Driftveil City.
Below is a full breakdown of the locations where Sawk and Throh can be found, along with their respective encounter rate.
Both Pokémon can be found in each version of the game, but Sawk is more common in Black, while Throh is easier to find in White.
| Location | Encounter Rates | |
|---|---|---|
| Black | White | |
| Outside of Pinwheel Forest | Sawk 10%, Throh 5% | Throh 10%, Sawk 5% |
| Route 10 | Sawk 10%, Throh 5% | Throh 10%, Sawk 5% |
| Route 15 | Sawk 15%, Throh 5% | Throh 15%, Sawk 5% |
| Route 18 | Sawk 10%, Throh 5% | Throh 10%, Sawk 5% |
In addition to their low encounter rates, Sawk and Throh both only have a 1% chance of holding an Expert Belt.
This makes finding an additional Expert Belt incredibly rare.
To save some time, it’s recommended to use a Pokémon that knows both the move Thief and the ability Frisk.
- Thief will allow you to steal a wild Pokémon’s held item directly from them in battle
- Frisk will reveal which item (if any) the target is holding
The ability Compoundeyes can also be very useful here. If the lead Pokémon in your party knows this ability, it increases the rate of finding a held item on wild Pokémon.
This increases your rates of a wild Sawk/Throh holding an expert belt up quite a bit – increasing from 1% to 5%.
Pokémon that can know Compoundeyes in Black and White are:
- Butterfree
- Venonat
- Yanma
- Joltik
What Does the Expert Belt Do?
The Expert Belt is a held item that increases the damage of Super-effective moves by 20%.
This can be helpful in your goal to take down all the Gym Leaders and the Elite Four, because most of the main storyline trainers will rely on one type of Pokémon.
With this in mind, you can equip the Expert Belt on whatever Pokémon in your party has type effectiveness against each opponent.
Note: The Expert Belt is rarely used competitively because it’s more difficult to anticipate the typing of your opponent’s Pokémon. Many players opt to use the item Life Orb instead, which boosts the power of all user moves by 30%, but comes with the drawback of losing 10% HP each time a damaging move is used.
You might find that the best approach is to give the Expert Belt to a Pokémon that can learn a wide variety of move types.
Pokémon like Blissey, Nidoking, and Gallade can learn over 100 different moves, so any of them would have the capability to learn a very diverse moveset with a lot of variety to help them land super effective attacks.
Guide Navigation
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Pokémon BW
- How To Get Expert Belts in Pokémon Black & White
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