Gym attackers, exeggutor

This time we'll have a look at exeggutor.

This grass / psychic comes with a 233 base attack stat, which is perfectly sufficient for the job it's supposed to do. Poor defence and decent stamina means you should at least have your dodging basics covered when attacking into targets with good HP bulk.


Offensively exeggutor has an almost identical base capacity as jolteon when it comes to cutting down water type defenders. More on that later.


Exeggutor can also be used as a psychic type attacker, but both alakazam and espeon are better in that role with their 271 and 261 base attack stat respectively. Add that they also feature better psychic charge attacks, and that you need a legacy exeggutor to get access to Confusion as a primary attack.

The only reason to use exeggutor for this role is if you're unable to dodge and thus can't survive with alakazam's and espeon's atrocious base stamina stats.


Hence I'll only care about exeggutor in its role as a grass type attacker.


As primary attack exeggutor should have Bullet Seed, and the charge attack of choise is Solar Beam.

Bullet Seed does 9.1 DPS including STAB bonus, compared to jolteon's Volt Switch that does 10.9. However, Bullet Seed i almost 20% faster at powering up your charge attack.

Solar Beam does 45.9 DPS compared to the 52.1 for Thunder. All together it means exeggutor and jolteon are just about equal when it comes to dishing out the hurt.

But, and this is an important but, Bullet Seed has a 1.1 second cooldown compared to the 2.3 for Volt Switch, which translates into a much easier job dodging. You're likely to be forced to hang on the trigger more often if you're attacking with Volt Switch, which in turn lowers your DPS.

There's a reason I recommend Thunder Shock for jolteon.

Given Thunder Shock and Thunder, jolteon is probably better at attacking water type pokemon than exeggutor, but that advantage comes at the price of awful stamina on top of increased damage taken, since water type attacks are neutral against electricity type pokemon but suffer a penalty against grass type pokemon.


The choise between jolteon and exeggutor boils down to survivability versus damage output. Exggutor wins the first one hands down, but jolteon does more damage.


So why bother with exeggutor if you've got your dodging covered? Well, it's also a perfectly good attacker against rhydon, tyranitar and golem?

The 233 base attack stat gives exeggutor an almost 15% advantage over vaporeon's 205, which makes up for a lot of the difference between the 9.1 DPS for Bullet Seed versus 12.5 for Water Gun.

Add an almost 40% higher speed for powering up the big gun in favour of Bullet Seed.

Solar Beams' 45.9 DPS versus Hydro Pump's 49.2 means that exeggutor does substantially more damage with its charge attack when you take that 15% higher base attack stat into consideration. And as seen above, it fires off that gun more often to boot, or at least faster since it's unlikely your ground / rock type target is going to do much more than barely stand up after you slammed it with a 180 power plus STAB bonus plus target weakness bonus attack.


How much damage is that? Well, all else equal, a tyranitar is going to take 156 damage. Standing in a gym the perfect tyranitar starts with 340 hp. So while the tyranitar is still standing up, it's not much left of it. You're shaving off well over 50% including the primary attacks needed to fire off that Solar Beam.


A rhydon isn't even funny. The 191 damage done leaves 65 to the 356 HP a perfect rhydon starts the fight with. In order to fire off your Solar Beam you'll need to attack with six or seven Bullet Seed for 8 (closer to 9) points of damage each. Say 50 points of damage done. Almost every rhydon found in a gym will simply go down after that Solar Beam.


This is the reason you want to invest in that exeggutor.


Targets to avoid are flareon, arcanine, lapras, and, to a certain degree, dragonite.

Stay the hell away from heracross or any other bug type defender. Exeggutor suffers from double weakness against bug type attacks, and you simply don't have the HP bulk to suffer that abuse.