Common defenders, Dragonite

I'll run what's basically the gym defender of the day for some time.

The first out is dragonite.

This dragon/flying pokemon comes with the second highest possible CP in the game, and in most locations still the highest since players are unlikely to have maxed out their tyranitar, if they have even got one at all.

Most sites rank dragonite as one of the best gym defenders out there. They are all wrong. It's a middling defender.

Dragonite runs with the pack at around 150 HP, making it too squishy to hold its own against good attackers of the ice type. In this case lapras. Even after the gen2 nerf lapras still eats dragonites for breakfast, and by now every high level player has access to at least one or two lapras with ice attacks.

To mitigate that huge weakness dragonite packs quite a punch.

Gen1 dragonites have Dragon Breath and Steel Wing as primary moves. As a defender you want Steel Wing despite the lack of STAB. Too bad steel type attacks are poor against water type pokemon, which means vaporeon and gyarados can also happily attack into gen 1 dragonites, counter to what's written out there.

Gen 1 dragonites have Hyperbeam, Dragon Claw and Dragon Pulse as charge attacks. Hyper Beam lacks STAB and will be dodged by any attacker who isn't too drunk to play the game.

While Dragon Pulse has the benefit of STAB and does quite a lot of damage it's almost as slow as Hyperbeam, and will be dodged by most players.

Hence a gen 1 dragonite should come with Steel Wing and Dragon Claw if you plan to put it inside a gym. As usual Steel Wing is more important than the charge attack.


While I have the utmost respect for players who want to avoid building yet another dragonite, myself belonging to that camp, the gen 2 dragonite is a totally different kind of beast.

While still killed at will by lapras, at least these dragonites do a lot of damage before going down.

Steel Wing and Dragon Tail as primary attacks. This is a no-brainer. While Steel Wing was good, Dragon Tail does even more damage and comes with STAB.

For charge attacks we have Hurricane, Hyper Beam and Outrage. At first look Outrage looks like the best alternative, but it's even slower than Hyper Beam, and fires at 50% bar-charge. Your dragonite is going to spend an absurd percentage of the fight powering up that attack while receiving damage.

Hurricane is faster than both Hyper Beam and Outrage, and like Outrage comes with STAB. It also carries the added benefit of mixing attack types.

I recommend a Dragon Tail and Hurricane combo for mixing dragon type attacks with flying type attacks and enjoying the STAB benefit of both.


All that said, I still don't recommend a dragonite as a defender in the first place. It's a good pick for a remote gym that doesn't see much action, and if you have a near perfect one maxed out there's a certain WOW factor when placed in the middle of a city, but it'll still go down like a ton of bricks.