Gym attackers, flareon

The turn has come to flareon, one of five possible evolves to eevee.

For the purpose of getting this attacker it helps that randomly evolving an eevee can only result in flareon, vaporeon and jolteon.

This specific, fire type, pokemon lived in the shadows of arcanine. Before the November rehash it was a no-brainer, but even after arcanine got nerfed, and flareon buffed, arcanine remained the preferred fire type attacker.

Flareon has 246 base attack, one of the highest in the game, compared to arcanines 227. This barely 10 percent advantage, when taking flareons poor stamina into account, made players look at flareon with disdain. However, the real dealbreaker was the attacks.

A legacy flareon came with Ember as primary attack and Fire Blast or Heat Wave as charge attacks.

Compare with a legacy arcanine's Fire Fang and arcanine still did more damage with its primary attack. Arcanine shared Fire Blast with flareon, so in the long run the two had access to pretty much the same Effective DPS.


A legacy flareon is still a poor attacker. You want one evolved after the introduction of generation 2.

A new flareon with Fire Spin and Overheat is a totally different kind of beast. 20% better dps for the primary attack combined with almost 20% better dps for the charge attack really make flareon shine.


In the end the utility value of flareon took a dive. You use it to burn down exeggutor and any other grass type defender, and those got nerfed during the November patch.

Should a decent bug, ice or steel type defender, without a secondary typing cancelling out the weakness, arrive on the scene, then flareon is the way to go.

While flareon now comes with the DPS to work as a general damage dealer, alakazam and dragonite still remain better options.


Still, flareon is easy to come by. Pushing one to level 30 is well worth it just in case it's neded.


As usual there are a few big no-nos. Stay away from gyarados, vaporeon, rhydon, golem, tyranitar and dragonite.